Tears Make My Rainbows

Chicago, Illinois: Egyptian Press, 1932. Folio, 5 pp. Wraps torn at seam, slightly musty odor, good condition.. An unrecorded composition by a woman who travelled through the midwest claiming to be a descendant of Cleopatra using the name Princess Dalla Pattra. The details of the princess are murky, as she disappears from newspaper records after 1930, when she admitted in court to using a manager to stage a publicity stunt in St. Louis.[1] In her hearing, she also admitted that she had been arrested for embezzlement in San Francisco in 1920. Two years later, rather inexplicably, this songsheet was published in collaboration with a Max Lander, who according to patent records was English.

The introduction to the song reads: “Hear the desert winds shriek and the tom-toms in the distance thrilling with the weird undertone of the desert night then the calm as the Royal Egyptian Maiden sings her love song to her desert prince.” We find no record of the composition in OCLC or anywhere else, or of the princess in newspapers after her 1930 court appearance, with the only findable record of her continued impersonation a patent registered in 1931[2] and this song sheet.

[1] “St. Louis Wonders if it Got a Fooling”, Kirksville Daily Express and Kirksville Daily News, April 6, 1930.
[2] “Only to be with you, just for a day”, Catalog of Copyright Entries Part 3: Musical Compositions (Library of Congress Copyright Office, 1932), 22760, accessed at ​​https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ZS5jAAAAIAAJ/page/1165/.