COLLECTIONS

Gertrude Thomas was born to Washington and Frances Thomas in Stockton on December 19, 1887. She attended schools in Stockton and graduated from Stockton High School. She married Jesse Hamilton in 1910 and they lived in the Linden area where he was a farmer. Gertrude was civic minded and contributed to causes such as Grand Army of the Republic, the Salvation Army relief fund, and the Liberty Bond drive during World War I. She was also a Sunday School teacher for the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Stockton and supervised the Busy Bee Club, which was the church’s youth social club that raised $1,000 to beautify the church.

In April 1927, Gertrude Thomas Hamilton had a dream that inspired her to write the lyrics for the song “Violets and You,” which was a waltz ballad. She dreamt about the Dale family who lived in the forest. The Dales had a daughter and had taken in an orphan by the name of Allan Blake. One night their daughter Margaret went into the forest to pick violets in the moonlight. Allan follows her and asks her to marry him, giving her his mother’s wedding ring. She says yes and tells her mother, who is happy for her. Margaret places violets in her mother’s hair and her mother waits outside in the moonlight for her husband to return home. When her husband sees his wife, he remembers the first time he met her and she had blue violets in her hair. Because Gertrude did not have any musical training, she enlisted the help of a music student from the College of the Pacific to put her words to music. A few days later, Manlio Silva began working on the orchestration for the song.

On April 24, 1928, the song was sung by Leo Foster at the California Theatre and the idea of the song was presented in a pantomimic fantasy by Clara Shepherd Reid, Alice Cooley, and Heber Steen. The song was so popular that radio stations requested to play it, with requests for the song as far north as Canada and as far south as Florida. Attendees of the performance also received a card to redeem for a souvenir bouquet of violets.

Mrs. Hamilton was said to be the first woman in Stockton and Black woman in California to have composed, published, and presented a musical composition. She donated $500 from the sale of the first 1,000 copies of her song to the San Joaquin County Society for Crippled Children. She also sent complimentary copies of the song to W.E.B. Du Bois, President Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Mayor Rolph of San Francisco, and to the ruling heads of England, France, Germany, and Italy. Canadian publisher William Southam sent a $350 check to be included in her donation.

Some of her other works included “My First Love” (a song about mothers), “My Wild Rose of America” (set to a story called “The Magic of the Wild Roses”), “Farmerette,” “Will Rogers Memorial Song,” “Dionne Lullaby” (for the Dionne quintuplets), and “The Prayer” (music set to President Eisenhower’s Inauguration prayer in 1953). Gertrude passed away on October 26, 1964 with an estate worth over $185,000.