William S. Hays |
William Shakespeare Hays was born July 19, 1837, in Louisville, Kentucky. After attending college in Indiana, Tennessee, and his native Kentucky, he became a reporter for the Lousiville Democrat, a vocation to which he would return later in life as a columnist for Lousiville Courier-Journal after a stint as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.His facility with the written word eventually led Hays into the field of songwriting. Little Ones at Home was published in 1856, the first of some 350 songs he composed during his lifetime. Mollie Darling, written in 1872, sold a phenomenal million copies. During the War Between the States, Hays was jailed in New Orleans for writing songs that supported the Confederate cause. Hays died July 23, 1907, in his hometown of Louisville.
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