Tango Tangle
Carrie Bruggeman Stark
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Browse piano sheets by Carrie Bruggeman Stark on Zen Virtual Piano. Carrie Bruggeman Stark wrote a song with the Iowa-born newspaper printer and editor Webster Mil “Webb” Oungst: “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Aroun’.” Artie Matthews, John Stark’s staff arranger, arranged it, and her father-in-law published it. It was in use at a rally in December 1911, before Stark officially published it, but soon afterward the campaign of Clark, then Speaker of the House, against Woodrow Wilson collapsed, and so did the song’s apparent short-term viability. A song caught up in a political campaign, and then in disputes over its authorship, passed through many hands. Contentions from other camps over its true authorship led to protracted court battles. A song already in use at a rally before it was officially published shows a tune moving ahead of its paperwork. Caroline May Bruggeman was born in Alton, Illinois, just north of Saint Louis, on 1 May 1881, the only child of the tailor Adolph Bruggeman and Mary “Mattie” Carter. She claimed she had very little musical training and mostly played by ear, but she could read music well enough to get a job in the late 1890s as a sheet music demonstrator at the Boston Department Store in St. Louis, and in her own words she “began pounding it out at work as often as I dared.” There she met William Paris Stark, the son of the music store owner and publisher John Stillwell Stark, in 1899 or 1900, around the time the elder Stark took on Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, and the couple married in December 1904. A shop-floor job playing other people’s sheet music led, by a short route, to a place inside a publishing family. One of her first instrumentals published under the Stark imprint was Dainty Foot, followed the next year by the almost-rag Comus, probably the last one issued under her own name. In 1914 she published two more songs as Cal, the pseudo-tango Tango Tangle and a waltz, and in 1917, again as Cal, the fox-trot and blues Baby Blues, which was also released as a song with lyrics by Margie Brandon. Tango, waltz and fox-trot in quick succession show a range of dance forms in her work. She admitted that she had allegedly written more songs than she could remember, although very few of them actually made it into print. Songs that mostly never reached print can be read as a body of work known only through the small part that was published. After she faded from public view and lost her husband in the 1940s, the 1950 book They All Played Ragtime acknowledged her role in the song, which helped make her somewhat of a local celebrity again. A name restored to public notice by a book’s acknowledgement shows how a claim can be repaired by being written down.
Browse piano sheets by Carrie Bruggeman Stark on Zen Virtual Piano.
Carrie Bruggeman Stark wrote a song with the Iowa-born newspaper printer and editor Webster Mil “Webb” Oungst: “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Aroun’.” Artie Matthews, John Stark’s staff arranger, arranged it, and her father-in-law published it. It was in use at a rally in December 1911, before Stark officially published it, but soon afterward the campaign of Clark, then Speaker of the House, against Woodrow Wilson collapsed, and so did the song’s apparent short-term viability. A song caught up in a political campaign, and then in disputes over its authorship, passed through many hands. Contentions from other camps over its true authorship led to protracted court battles. A song already in use at a rally before it was officially published shows a tune moving ahead of its paperwork.
Caroline May Bruggeman was born in Alton, Illinois, just north of Saint Louis, on 1 May 1881, the only child of the tailor Adolph Bruggeman and Mary “Mattie” Carter. She claimed she had very little musical training and mostly played by ear, but she could read music well enough to get a job in the late 1890s as a sheet music demonstrator at the Boston Department Store in St. Louis, and in her own words she “began pounding it out at work as often as I dared.” There she met William Paris Stark, the son of the music store owner and publisher John Stillwell Stark, in 1899 or 1900, around the time the elder Stark took on Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, and the couple married in December 1904. A shop-floor job playing other people’s sheet music led, by a short route, to a place inside a publishing family.
One of her first instrumentals published under the Stark imprint was Dainty Foot, followed the next year by the almost-rag Comus, probably the last one issued under her own name. In 1914 she published two more songs as Cal, the pseudo-tango Tango Tangle and a waltz, and in 1917, again as Cal, the fox-trot and blues Baby Blues, which was also released as a song with lyrics by Margie Brandon. Tango, waltz and fox-trot in quick succession show a range of dance forms in her work. She admitted that she had allegedly written more songs than she could remember, although very few of them actually made it into print. Songs that mostly never reached print can be read as a body of work known only through the small part that was published.
After she faded from public view and lost her husband in the 1940s, the 1950 book They All Played Ragtime acknowledged her role in the song, which helped make her somewhat of a local celebrity again. A name restored to public notice by a book’s acknowledgement shows how a claim can be repaired by being written down.
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The song “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Aroun’,” which she wrote with Webb Oungst and which her father-in-law John Stark published. It was used at a rally in December 1911, and contentions over its true authorship later led to protracted court battles.
She also used the names Cal Stark and Cy Perkins, and several of her songs, such as Tango Tangle and Baby Blues, appeared under the name Cal.
She was born Caroline May Bruggeman on 1 May 1881 in Alton, Illinois, and died on 29 June 1972.