The history of American popular music includes generations of songs by and about immigration. For this week's challenge, I decided to look at old popular song sheet music. Sheet music, in this context, is music for piano or piano and voice that is printed on a folded sheet, sometimes with a couple of additional pages inserted. It was a very popular format for the circulation of songs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many households had a piano for family entertainment. Among the common themes for these songs was the immigrant experience, especially homesickness. Ireland, in particular, was the subject of many songs by Irish immigrants, their children, and other popular song writers who simply capitalized on the romanticization of Irish nationalism. Songs about Ireland have remained popular with American folk groups, and some of these songs from the turn of the last century are still performed frequently, though often in new arrangements.
Sheet music that is more than 95 years old becomes part of the public domain, and can be copied and digitized freely. Many libraries and museums, including UWM's library, maintain online collections of digitized sheet music from before 1926. The links below represent just a few of the many resources for finding early sheet music online.
Immigration and American Popular Culture by 
