John Stromberg

John Stromberg, born Stramborg on 9 November 1858 in Milton, Prince Edward Island, Canada, was a Broadway composer, book writer, songwriter, and conductor of Swedish ancestry. He died on 5 July 1902. Known professionally as "Honey" Stromberg, he was also a Freemason.

Stromberg's career began in Tin Pan Alley, where he worked as an arranger for the Witmark musical publishing house. Before transitioning to the Broadway stage, he had already established himself as a popular songwriter, authoring the hit "My Girl's a Corker, She's a New Yorker." In 1896 he became the principal composer and orchestra conductor for the comedy team of Weber and Fields, who had built their reputation first in ethnic German humor as a funny man and straight man duo before expanding into vaudeville-style burlesque — musical stage shows that broadly parodied well-known contemporary Broadway productions. Working alongside principal lyricist Edgar Smith, Stromberg composed scores for ten Weber and Fields productions and conducted nine of them, beginning with "The Art of Maryland," with which Weber and Fields opened their Broadway Music Hall.

His Broadway credits include the musical Fiddle-dee-dee, the burlesque Hoity Toity, the musical Twirly Whirly, the burlesque Whirl-i-gig, and Hokey-pokey, among other productions. His most celebrated composition was "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star," from Twirly Whirly, written for the prominent performer Lillian Russell, with lyrics credited to Robert B. Smith. It remains the only song Russell is known to have recorded. The piece gained additional renown from the circumstances surrounding its discovery: the manuscript was reportedly found in the pocket of Stromberg's coat after his death. He also composed "Ma Blushin' Rosie," sometimes titled "Rosie You Are My Posie," a song that later entered the repertoire of Al Jolson, served as the theme of Rosemary Clooney's television variety program in the 1950s, and was performed in the Abbott and Costello film The Naughty Nineties.

Stromberg died by suicide on 5 July 1902, having ingested Paris Green insecticide. In the years preceding his death he had suffered severely from debilitating arthritis, likely rheumatoid in nature. His financial difficulties were compounded by the failure of a real-estate venture called Stromberg Park in Freeport, Long Island, a development whose streets had been named after various Weber and Fields performers. At his funeral, the band performed his composition "Come Back Ma Honey Boy to Me." Stromberg was regarded as one of the outstanding composers of the ragtime era, though much of his work has faded from public awareness, in part because a significant portion of his best-known songs belonged to the genre of so-called coon songs — a category whose name contains a racial slur and whose lyrics, written by Smith rather than Stromberg, employed racial stereotypes and dialect that render them deeply offensive to contemporary audiences.