“Remember that MGM musical with Judy Garland and Van Johnson working in a music shop on Wabash?” said Lois Weisberg, head of the Department of Cultural Affairs, to Brad Thacker one day in April. “Isn’t it called Good Old Summertime? They sing from sheet music, don’t they? We should celebrate that.”
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She knew she had a receptive audience. Thacker, a project administrator at the DCA, has been collecting sheet music from the 1930s and ’40s–flyer-size pop scores arranged mostly for piano and voice–since 1984, when he mounted a dinner theater revue called Sentimental Journey in Bloomington, Illinois. “It took me a while to find an original,” he says of the title song, “one that has Doris Day on the cover.” Since then, he’s bought some 800 music sheets at “rummage sales, estate auctions, you name it. The fun is in the search. I seldom go on eBay, however. I want to touch the sheets, inspect the cover art, hum the music.”
The gallery across Randolph from the Cultural Center was vacant after “Here Is New York,” a touring show of photographs from September 11, packed up in March, but the long overhead wires from which the photographs had hung were still in place. Thacker decorated the gallery as a parlor, complete with player piano and period furniture, and hung the sheet music from the wires. To supplement his own contributions, Thacker asked several other collectors to participate, including Tim Samuelson, the city’s recently appointed cultural historian.
