It was 1921, and this singer, songwriter, publisher, and teacher was really spreading his wings, someone might say. Eugene Monroe Bartlett may have been in a relatively small place in western Arkansas – Hartford, in Sebastian County – but that did not seem to limit his vision with respect to what he wanted to do with the music he loved so much. You might say he saw a much grander location than where he was, a place where “Everybody Will Be Happy (Over There)”, and inhabited by many times the number of folks living in Hartford. He had many reasons to feel upbeat, even ebullient, so that his cup overflowed. Although he found a way to express his emotional state in four verses and a chorus, this one song could not contain all he was feeling. Let’s see what other ways Eugene found to broaden and share what he was too excited to keep to himself.
The spiritual overflow that was obvious in Eugene’s personal faith, and which was expressed in the poetry of his song, had many other tentacles that reached out into related directions at about the time that ‘Everybody …’ was published. Eugene and two partners had established the Hartford Music Company just three years earlier, a platform for the emergence of two of the partners’ (Eugene’s and John McClung’s, as well as those of others) musical creations. Since one of Eugene’s business partners (David Moore) was a singing instructor, it was a natural outgrowth of their publishing enterprise when Eugene founded a music institute to teach shape-note singing also. A magazine, The Herald of Song, also arose at the same time to cover the musical groups that helped promote the ongoing activities at Hartford. It’s probably safe to say that Bartlett and all of these ventures were notable fixtures in the Hartford community of about 2,000 people (its population, according to 1920 census data), but these would not be confined to that one area. The publishing enterprise’s output was hundreds of thousands of volumes, if not more, and eventually burgeoned into branches in six other sites in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas, from where songbooks were shipped to 35 U.S. states and two foreign countries. Yes, Eugene’s vision encompassed much more territory than Hartford. It was also wider than any map detailing his company’s songbook shipments would show, too, as the words he penned for the 1921 ‘Everybody…’ suggested. He was talking about the ‘great beyond’ (v.1), a place where indeed his company’s volumes could not go, except in the memories of those who purchased them. How many numbered the ‘everybody’ that Eugene could imagine? Incalculable, he’d probably say. The ‘saved of earth’(v.1), family members, and certainly ‘Christians of all nations (alternatively ‘ages’)’ (v.2) were those Eugene could see. Though we know not what explicitly prompted Eugene’s poetic words, he had plenty of blessings, professionally and otherwise, to transport his enthusiasm into musical verse.
Did everything go swimmingly for Eugene every day? If he were here, he could probably tell us about songbook shipments that went awry, or copies that were initially printed with mistakes, songs that just never worked, or students whom he couldn’t motivate. If one or more of those were true, Eugene would have had an alternative reason for writing this poem – he longed for a better place that would not disappoint. But, since he continued to administer Hartford Music’s affairs into the mid-1930s, we can presume he had many more positives than negatives in his life’s ledger. He might also have said that all that he had while a mortal in 1921 was just a foretaste, that ‘over there’ would dwarf the ‘here and now’. He seemed to be counting on that truism. How about you?
See the following for brief biography of the author: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/b/a/r/t/bartlett_em_sr.htm
See more biography here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Monroe_Bartlett
See more biography here: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/e-m-bartlett-2660/
See here for description of the company that the author founded: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hartford-music-company-and-hartford-music-institute-2661/
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