Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond
Janesville-born songwriter of "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day"; first woman credited with a million-selling song
$1 million
Carrie Jacobs-Bond is the Janesville-born songwriter who put "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day" into a century of American weddings and living rooms. Born on August 11, 1862, in her grandparents' house at Pleasant (now West Court) and Oakhill, she could pick out piano tunes at four and, as a girl, sat down after Blind Tom Wiggins and played his piece back to a stunned crowd. Her father died; a first marriage ended; her second husband, Dr. Frank Bond, fell on the ice in Iron River, Michigan, after a child's snowball and died in 1895. She came home in debt, sold the furniture, ate once a day, painted china, and ran a rooming house. In a Janesville apartment she and her son opened the Bond Shop, and after returning to 402 East Milwaukee Street she wrote "I Love You Truly." Publishers would not take a woman seriously, so she published herself. Opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis paid to print Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose (1901); Jacobs-Bond drew her own cover art, and the wild rose became the trademark. "I Love You Truly" made her the first woman credited with selling a million copies of a song. "A Perfect Day" (1910) sold some twenty-five million copies of sheet music. She sang for Theodore Roosevelt and later at a Harding White House dinner; Herbert Hoover called her "America's gallant lady of song." Period reports put her royalties above $1 million before the end of 1910, an earnings claim in 1910 dollars rather than a sourced estate figure. Her son, Frederick Jacobs Smith, killed himself in 1932 while "A Perfect Day" played on the phonograph; she largely stopped composing afterward. She died in Hollywood on December 28, 1946. Bond Park marks the Janesville birthplace. The songs still get requested.