Born to a musical family in Janesville, Wisc., Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946) was a self-taught musician who did not take up composing as a career until after the death of her second husband in an accident, an event that left her penniless and forced her to support her family by painting ceramics and giving piano lessons. In Chicago, she published her own songs starting in the late 1890s, which became wildly popular. Though her sentimentalism and moralizing lyrics made her music defiantly old-fashioned, she operated outside the musical establishment and owned the rights to almost all of her music, reportedly becoming a millionaire by 1910.