What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“A COMPLETE TUTOR FOR THE FIFE.”

The June 26, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette carried an advertisement in which Michael Hillegas announced the publication and sale of “A COMPLETE TUTOR FOR THE FIFE, comprehending the first Rudiments of Music, and of the Instrument, in an easy familiar Method.”  That was not all that was in the manual.  This American edition included “the Fife Duty, and the usual Collections of Lessons, Airs and Marches, in the English Edition, [and] a Variety of new favourite ones never before printed.”  Hillegas may have hoped that the promise of tunes not previously available would entice even customers who already knew how to play the fife or had a copy of another edition of the musical manual.

According to JoAnn Taricani, Hillegas is “[p]erhaps best known as the First Treasurer of the United States,” yet he “maintained a number of mercantile enterprises during his lifetime, one of which was the music store he operated from approximately 1759 to 1779.”  At the time he advertised an American edition of “A COMPLETE TUTOR FOR THE FIFE,” his music shop, “the first business devoted specifically to musical merchandise in Philadelphia” and “the only specialty store for music in the colonies prior to the Revolutionary war,” had been open for more than fifteen years, likely making it familiar to many residents of the busy urban port.  “Virtually all printed music had to be imported,” Taricani notes, with “only a few efforts at music printing … attempted prior to the war.”[1]  A series of nonimportation agreements interrupted trade before the war, prompting American entrepreneurs to produce and to promote “domestic manufactures” or goods made in the colonies.  Hillegas apparently joined that effort with an American edition of a manual for learning to play the fife, though the advertisement did not make clear whether he published “A COMPLETE TUTOR FOR THE FIFE” or merely sold copies of it.  Eighteenth-century readers knew to separate the phrases “JUST PUBLISHED” and “to be SOLD,” with the latter referring to the advertisers but not necessarily the former.  Taricani suggests that the partnership of Hall and Sellers, the printers of the newspaper in which the advertisement appeared, published the musical manual.[2]  While Hillegas did not print “A COMPLETE TUTOR FOR THE FIFE,” he may have collaborated with Hall and Sellers in publishing it.  Neither the advertisement nor the imprint allows for a definitive conclusion.  What they do reveal is that the publisher believed a market exited for an American edition of the manual as the Revolutionary War continued and Hillegas attempted to incite even greater demand.

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[1] JoAnn Taricani, “Musical Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia: The Letters of Michael Hillegas,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 4 (October 1989): 609-610.

[2] Taricani, “Musical Commerce,” 618.