Joseph E. Howard

Joseph E. Howard, born Joseph Edgar Howard on February 12, 1870, in New York City, was an American composer, lyricist, librettist, and Broadway performer whose career spanned from 1906 to 1942. He is best known as a member of Tin Pan Alley and for his songwriting partnership with his second wife, Ida Emerson, under the billing Howard and Emerson.

Howard's early life was marked by hardship. His mother died when he was eight years old, and he fled an abusive home situation by taking refuge in a Catholic orphanage, where he served as an altar boy and sang in the choir. When his father located him there, Howard boarded a freight train to Kansas City, Missouri, where he sold newspapers and sang in a saloon. It was in Kansas City that George Walker of the duo Williams and Walker discovered him and arranged for Howard to receive formal voice training. Howard subsequently traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had his first exposure to theatrical performance.

He toured in a stock company production of Little Eva and performed in vaudeville as a boy soprano at age eleven. At seventeen, he met singer Ida Emerson, who became his second wife. Together they worked the Midwestern vaudeville circuit and built enough of a reputation in Chicago to secure an engagement at Tony Pastor's Music Hall on 14th Street in New York, where they achieved notable success in 1898. Howard was also married to singer and actress Mabel Barrison from 1906 until her death in 1912.

The songwriting team of Howard and Emerson produced one of the defining popular songs of their era when they wrote "Hello! Ma Baby" in 1899. The song sold over a million copies of sheet music within months of its release. The pair continued writing at Tin Pan Alley and followed that success with another hit, "Goodbye, My Lady Love," in 1904. They eventually relocated to Chicago, where Howard composed and performed while producing some of the city's most successful musical stage shows between 1905 and 1915. Among his other well-known songs are "What's the Use of Dreaming?," "I Don't Like Your Family," and "A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother."

Howard's Broadway career included starring in The Flower of the Ranch and appearing in The District Leader, A Stubborn Cinderella, and The Goddess of Liberty. He also wrote the stage scores for several productions, among them The Land of Nod, The Time, the Place and the Girl, The Girl Question, The Prince of Tonight, and The Goddess of Liberty, collaborating with songwriters including Frank R. Adams, Will Hough, and Harold Orlob.

One of Howard's most enduring compositions, "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now," made its debut in the 1909 musical The Prince of To-Night. Years later, Harold Orlob, a former employee who had written additional songs for that production, sued Howard, claiming primary authorship of the tune. Orlob won the suit, which sought no monetary compensation but resulted in Howard's name being removed as the lead composer and Orlob's name being placed on the credits instead. The legal dispute gained renewed attention after a 1947 motion picture based on Howard's life, I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, starring Mark Stevens with Buddy Clark performing the vocals, brought the song back into public prominence.

Howard's output slowed between 1915 and 1939 but resumed thereafter. In 1939, he collaborated with performer Beatrice Kay on a radio program called The Gay Nineties Revue, which revisited his songs from the turn of the century and the teens as nostalgic entertainment for audiences during the Big Band Era. He later hosted an early live television series of the same name on ABC from 1948 to 1949. He made recordings for the Decca and Vocalion labels in the late 1940s, and in the late 1950s he published an autobiography titled Gay Nineties Troubadour. In 1970, Howard was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame by the ASCAP Hall of Fame Committee.

Howard died on May 19, 1961, in Chicago, collapsing on stage during a curtain call while singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."