H. S. Thompson

Henry S. Thompson (born 1824 or 1825) was an American songwriter of the mid-nineteenth century.

Little is known of Thompson other than his works, mainly ballads used in blackface minstrel shows; 48 works were published under the name H. S. Thompson between 1849 and 1885.

Birth and Family

Based on U.S. Census records, musicologist Ralph Richey estimated that Thompson was born in 1824 or 1825 in northern Essex County, Massachusetts; however, Thompson was known to alter his information to promote himself, for example listing his birthplace as Circassia in the 1870 and 1880 Censuses, after showman P. T. Barnum had popularized the Circassian beauty stereotype. The Massachusetts Birth Records listing the birth of his daughter, Sarah Oliver Thompson in 1848 in Ipswich, indicate that his own place of birth was Manchester, New Hampshire, as do the birth records for his son, Frank Waldo Thompson in 1851, and daughter Ida May Thompson in 1853. In 1845, he had married Sarah E. Oliver in Boston.

Career

Thompson began his career in an era when the American public was beginning to seek out its own melodies, rather than those from European composers, while sheet music could receive national distribution thanks to improved transportation and communications networks.

He published his first song, "Willie's on the Dark Blue Sea," a ballad sung by a woman about her lover lost at sea, with Oliver Ditson & Co. of Boston in 1849. The 1850 census records him in Georgetown, Massachusetts, but by 1851 he had moved to Newburyport where he was a teacher, performer, and impresario, first advertising his Singing School in January of 1851. By April of that year, he was offering a "Musical Entertainment," including a quartet singing his own composition, "Willie's on the dark blue sea."

He took a room in Boston in 1858, but would split from his family before the close of the American Civil War; his wife and two younger children relocated to Washington County, Minnesota, while Thompson went west.