Antique 1910s-1920s Arto Artists Own Player Piano Roll Black Hawk Waltz Mary E. Walsh Original Illustrated Box Standard Music Roll 🎹

Size: 12.5 x 2.25 inches ~ well used, with torn corners, split seams, chipped edges, rubbing and fading, a split lid edge, and the roll's leader torn at the tab and stamped TEMPO 70-90.

🎹 A Waltz Everyone Knew, Written by a Woman Almost Nobody Remembers

I love handing someone this roll and watching them try to place the name on it. It just says "Walsh." That's Mary E. Walsh, and in 1869 she wrote the Black Hawk Waltz, published that year by John L. Peters in New York. It stayed popular clear into the twentieth century - people danced to it, listened to it, learned piano on it. Then here's the part that gets me every time: she also wrote the May-crowning hymn "Bring Flowers of the Rarest" - some parishes sing it as "of the Fairest" - the one with "O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today." Same composer, and you've probably sung her work without ever hearing her name. Past those two tunes, a campaign polka she dedicated to a Philadelphia cornet band in 1864 (it's held by the Library of Congress today), and a birthplace said to be near Harleigh, a coal town up in Pennsylvania's anthracite country, her life is close to a blank page.

📜 What's Printed on It

One end of the box carries the catalog information: the ARTo ROLL mark with "Standard Instrumental" worked in between, catalog number D 3571, the title BLACK HAWK WALTZ, the dance form "Waltz," and "Walsh" printed right over the little triangular ARTo trademark. The other end reads "ARTISTS OWN ROLL," then "The Artist's own Hand-Playing Cut in the Roll," then "88 FULL SCORE ARRANGEMENT 88."

The lid is a whole little scene: a neoclassical garden terrace in blue-black ink on tan, two robed figures reclining together on one side, and a winged lute player with a small cherub kneeling beside it on the other, all behind a stone balustrade with cypress and potted trees. Tucked at the foot of it is "(c) STANDARD MUSIC ROLL CO. ORANGE, N.J. U.S.A." The opposite long side of the box carries a whole row of composer medallions, each one named and dated: Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Rubinstein, Brahms and Verdi.

The roll itself is cream paper on its spool, with a cloth pull tab and a metal eyelet, and the leader is stamped in blue TEMPO 70-90 - the setting for the tempo lever on a player piano.

🎼 What "Artists Own Roll" Actually Means

ARTo is short for "Artists Own Roll," and the box spells out the promise: "The Artist's own Hand-Playing Cut in the Roll" - a roll cut from a pianist's own playing, not laid out note by note off the sheet music. It's an 88-note roll too, the full-scale format player pianos of the day were built to take. Standard Music Roll Co., the company that made it, worked out of Orange, New Jersey, and turned out piano rolls from around 1900 to about 1925, so this one sits in that 1910s-1920s window.

🎺 The Same Company Recorded the Blues

Here's the part that always surprises people: Standard Music Roll Co. also ran a record label, Arto Records, from 1920 to 1923. It was one of the first labels anywhere to put vaudeville blues singers on disc - Lucille Hegamin cut records for Arto with her Blue Flame Syncopators, making her the second Black blues singer ever recorded, right behind Mamie Smith. Arto also pressed the sides Kid Ory's band cut for Nordskog Records, the first recordings ever made of a Black band from New Orleans. So a company that started out perforating paper for player pianos ended up with a real footprint in early recorded blues and jazz - and the roll in this box came out of the same shop.

🧭 Condition

It's a genuinely old roll and box that got used the way they were meant to be used, and what's pictured is what you'll get - the same torn corners, the same split lid edge, the same TEMPO 70-90 leader torn at the tab.