In 1934, New York attorney Samuel Moanfeldt set out on a three-month journey. He made his way across the United States, traveling from Colorado to Pennsylvania, and eventually ending in Kansas.
He was hired by the Music Publishers Protective Association, an organization desperate to find out who originally wrote the song “Home on the Range.”
They needed an answer fast.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently declared the folk song to be his favorite, causing an explosion in popularity and with it a wealth of controversy as musicians and publishing houses attempted to claim the work as their own, even though the song had been believed to be in the public domain up until then….