Frederick A. Brodie and Andrew E. Barrett, I accepted the challenge (as you knew I would), and I'm glad I did, because it turned out to be pretty easy to determine why Elmer Olson disappeared from the record at some point in the mid-1920s!
Elmer Olson was born on September 1, 1892 in Duluth, Minnesota, according to what he put on his WWI draft card:
His father was Ole Olson and his mother was Caroline Olson. The family moved to Minneapolis when Elmer was a boy. The particular piece shown here today (Shock Rag) is not one that Elmer appeared to remember much later, because he kept telling newspapermen that his first piece was written in about 1914! It's apparent that like so many composers who we in the ragtime community tend to remember as writers of instrumental pieces, Olson's output started out as being primarily that but soon turned primarily to songwriting. Certainly there was a lot more money to be had in those days as a songwriter than as a composer of rags and such. Here is a short list of a few of Elmer's compositions, from an article in the Minneapolis Star, May 8, 1926, page 13:
Of course you see the pieces we think of Elmer Olson for, specifically the wonderful "Town Talk", but mainly songs.
Olson was not only a composer/songwriter, but also an artist, and he enjoyed hunting and fishing. Here, from the same article, is his headshot superimposed on his MS of a hit song:
Ok, having read this far, you're waiting for the juicy bit! It seems that Elmer Olson had a few lady friends in the mid-1920s. One was a violinist named Valerie Cox. Possibly a little later, Olson also came to be intimate with a divorcee (as they said in those days) named Fredellen Kanar, who was a beautician. Let us see what these ladies looked like:
That was Miss Fredellen Kanar, the beautician. Here is the Minneapolis violinist, Miss Valerie Cox, with a bonus inset of Elmer Olson in the corner:
So it seems that Valerie was getting pretty jealous of Fredellen, apparently with pretty good reason, according to Fredellen, who will tell us that she and Elmer were engaged by sometime in 1928. According to Elmer's younger brother William, Valerie was at a party at William's apartment and picked up a knife and made some sort of threat to Elmer, before she was calmed down and disarmed. William said that when Valerie brandished the knife at him, Elmer had exclaimed, "My God! She would kill me!", to which Valerie replied "You're damned right, I would." And another time, Elmer was at a restaurant in Minneapolis, with Valerie (!!), Valerie went into the back to talk with the restaurant owner, whom she knew, and picked up a bread slicing knife and asked the owner "What if I should run this through Elmer?", who was presumably sitting out there in the restaurant, maybe finishing his soup or something! Again, the restauranteur talked her down and disarmed her.
Come July 1928, and there's some kind of party at a cabin in Hayward, Wisconsin, and there are 4 people in the room, including Miss Valerie, Elmer, and Esther Stockwell and Ted Bloom. I guess Elmer is there for the fishing. Esther says she saw Valerie pick up a butcher knife. (Maybe you have to have one easily at hand when you're on a hunting/fishing trip, I dunno.) Somehow, Esther and Ted did not see what happened next. Maybe they ran out! But next thing you know, Elmer is lying in bed, bleeding like mad. It was reported there was some broken glass in the room. Perhaps he somehow rolled around in the bed onto some broken glass, and it had nothing to do with the other stuff about the knife and Valerie. But apparently the glass pieces had no trace of blood on them. Also, a guy in town said that Valerie had come to him saying that Elmer had "fallen on a knife". Well, that seems consistent with the fact that a doctor testified that the wounds Elmer had received were as from a knife. At any rate, Elmer died the next day, July 19, 1928.
The ensuing trial, where the state attempted to prove Miss Valerie guilty of murder in the first degree, reminds one of absolutely nothing more than "Chicago", the musical. The part played by Richard Gere in the movie was played by a defense attorney named A.M. Gunn. Of course the climactic scene was where Miss Fredellen was testifying that she and Elmer had been engaged for about a year (!!), meanwhile Miss Valerie was sitting there staring daggers at her!
Wildly enough, the jury of 12 men deliberated for about 7 hours before breaking what was originally a 6-6 deadlock to reach the unanimous verdict of "not guilty"! The problem was that the State's case was merely circumstantial - nobody admitted to seeing Valerie actually stab Elmer, or to witness Elmer's injury produced in any way. Valerie wept when the verdict was announced then announced that she was going to move to California to continue her musical career. Nothing in the paper about the fiancee, Miss Fredellen Kanar, and what her future plans were.
[Audrey Van Dyke interjected the comment at this point: "I’ll bet her future plans were to get as far away from Val as she could!"]
[Also, Fred Brodie replied regarding my observation about the similarity to the plot of "Chicago": "As I understand it, the musical Chicago was based on a real case from 1924 (Beulah Annan = Roxie Hart). But it’s entirely possible that Miss Valerie’s defense lawyer cribbed some strategy from that famous and factually similar trial."]
So that's the tale of the end of Elmer Olson (Sept. 1, 1892 - July 19, 1928).
Here is his grave marker, in Crystal Lake Cemetery, Minneapolis, MN. I have added a photo to the memorial and suggested adding his birthdate and some biographical material to Find A Grave. The URL is https://www.findagrave.com/.../100738219/elmer-myron-olson
Once I found his tombstone (which I found by first finding his mother Caroline's 1936 obituary, which said that she was to buried at Crystal Lake Cemetery in Minneapolis, so then I looked in Find A Grave for Elmer Olsons in that cemetery after I found her grave there), I could see that the stone said that Elmer Myron Olson (ah! that's what the M stood for - he didn't put it on his WWI draft card) was a veteran of the US Marine Corps as a Sergeant in the 6th Regiment. So that allowed me to find his military records. Although in 1917 Elmer had said that he was the support of his widowed mother, by June 1918 he evidently decided to enlist, on June 18, 1918. He was in training at Paris Island, SC in the summer of 1918. By October, he had been shipped out to Chatillon France. I can't tell if he saw action in that last month of the war. He went AWOL overnight in late November, after the armistice, and he was punished by a reduction in grade and forfeited 2/3 of his pay for two months. But then in January 1919 they made him a Sergeant anyway. His serial number was 4,607,575. The records seem to indicate, if I understand them correctly, that he was in a band, predictably enough.
He was discharged with the usual notation "Character Excellent". departing Brest, France with a group from the Headquarters Company of the USMC 6th Regiment on July 27, 1919 aboard the USS Wilhelmina, and reached Hoboken, NJ on August 6, 1919, from which he returned to Minneapolis and hopefully to a hero's welcome.
It seems that Elmer's first published song (with lyrics, that is) was "Zum-zum-zum; a stein song", to a lyric by Oscar F.G. Day, copyright March 31, 1914 and published by the Minneapolis Brewing Co.! Obviously a commercial job, that. So maybe he knew exactly what he was saying about his first song being 1914 - he wasn't counting the instrumentals "Shock Rag" and "Spatter Rag", which also were not copyrighted, apparently.
I've done a listing now of all of Elmer's registered copyrights.
1913 - 1 (that's Rag De Luxe)
1914 - 2 (both songs)
1915 - 1
1916 - 6
1917 - 3 (including our favorite, "Town Talk")
1918 - 4
1919 - only 1 revision of a song from the year before
1920 - 1 (that is Syncopated Echoes, another instrumental, which turns out to be the original, and somewhat better to my mind, version of the 1927 publication "Funny Tune")
1921 - 2
1922 - 3
1923 - 2 (including that song he said was a rewrite of his first song from 1914)
1924 - 4 (including his big hit, Kiss me goodnight)
1925 - 2
1926 - 1
1927 - 4 (including his last instrumental, Funny Tune)
1928 - 1 (apparently his swan song was "Pretty Thing", just like Miss Valerie and Miss Fredellen undoubtedly were)
That is a total of 28 songs, and we know about 6 instrumentals. But it sounds like there may have been show tunes that were not copyrighted in addition.
In digging around some more, I was astonished to find that Olson was not kidding at all about his first song being from 1914 and being entitled "Blondy's Melody". Here's the published sheet's cover! Complete with a photo showing Olson at the piano, with his lyricist there too.
This does not show up as a registered copyright, either. It seems to have been very common that small-time publishers often did not bother to actually spend the one dollar plus postage needed to register a copyright the way you were supposed to.