Charles Harris

Biography

Charles K. Harris traded banjo licks for a fountain pen, parlaying his vaudeville strums into a cottage industry of tears-in-the-beer ballads. Milwaukee-born but Chicago-based, he opened a publishing house in the Loop and watched the world hum his tunes: “After the Ball” swept parlors in 1892, “Hello Central, Give Me Heaven” had switchboard girls weeping by 1901, and “Break the News to Mother” marched off with the Spanish-American War. Between hits he moonlighted as a scenarist, feeding plotlines to the nickelodeons, and penned stage sketches that toured the Orpheum circuit. A 1914 co-founder of ASCAP, he kept the copyrights—and the royalties—flowing with “I’m Trying So Hard to Forget You,” “There’ll Come a Time,” “Better than Gold,” and a shelf of others that mapped heartbreak from Virginia meadows (“Mid the Green Fields of Virginia”) to city rooming houses (“Just Behind the Times”). By the time radios crackled with “Nobody Knows, Nobody Cares,” Harris had already etched his name on the soundtrack of a swelling century.