Samuel N. Mitchell

Samuel N. Mitchell (1846–1905) was an American song lyricist and newspaperman who wrote lyrics for a number of popular songs in the 1870s.

Mitchell wrote lyrics for many hundreds of songs, and collaborated with a number of composers. One of his most popular songs during his life was Just Touch the Harp Gently, My Pretty Louise, first published in 1870. An 1890 profile of Mitchell in the Boston Globe reported that an astounding (and surely exaggerated) four million copies of the song had been sold. Mitchell claimed to never have received any payment for the song, however, as the lyrics were "stolen bodily" from him and brought to London, where Charles Blamphin set them to music. It became popular in England, and eventually theatrical producer Lydia Thompson brought it back to America in the play Bluebeard, and it became popular in the United States as well. Not making a living on his creations, Mitchell was toiling in a newspaper mailroom despite his lyrical successes.

Perhaps Mitchell's most enduring song is Put My Little Shoes Away, which he wrote with Charles E. Pratt in 1873. A mournful ballad where a dying child tells her mother to put her shoes away to save for her infant brother, it reportedly sold over 100,000 sheet music copies. But its popularity long survived in rural America and became a staple among bluegrass performers. It was first recorded by Riley Puckett in 1926, and later by the "Father of Bluegrass" Bill Monroe (1956),the Everly Brothers (1958),Girls of the Golden West,Woody Guthrie, Dolly Parton, and others.

Mitchell was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1846, and served during the Civil War in a Rhode Island regiment. He died in Providence on November 7, 1905.

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