Born in Oakland, California, there are two different birth dates given for Leland Stanford Roberts given by Ancestry.com, either November 12, 1884 or 1885. His father worked at a variety of skilled manual jobs and brought up his family in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood on Oak Grove Street and where Roberts attended San Francisco public schools before his family moved to San Mateo County.
Lee S. Robert's family returned to San Francisco where he worked as a music store clerk from 1900 for the Benjamin Curtaz and Son store. Although I cannot find any information abut his musical education, he must have been a very proficient pianist. After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire he moved to Spokane, Washington where worked as a salesman for the Simon Piano Company between 1907 and 1909. While living there he doubled as a church organist and professional musician.
He had already begun writing music when he was still in San Francisco. His song "Good-bye Blue Eyes" was published in 1905 by The Alturas Music Publishing Company, a small local publisher. From 1912 onward, his compositions steadily made their way into print. While he frequently self-published, he also had works accepted by major music publishers like M. Witmark, Joseph W. Stern, Sam Fox and Leo Feist.
Roberts achieved greater prominence as a performer of player piano rolls. The 1910 census lists him as a piano salesman in Chicago. He went to work for the Melville Clark Piano Company there and quickly joined their subsidiary, the QRS Company - a manufacturer of player pianos and the rolls they played.
A piano roll created by Lee S. Roberts (image source: Made In Chicago Museum)
These were paper rolls with perforations that activated the piano keys creating a performance without a performer. Roberts toured throughout the country as a salesman for this technology. He returned to San Francisco in 1912 to demonstrate the Melville Clark product. It's hard to imagine today the sensation that these automatic instruments made at the time.
A 1914 news account tells of a demonstration made by Roberts at the Rotary Club in Cincinnati. The story describes him as a "composer and interpreter of the work of old masters ... who has interpreted probably three-fourths of the piano-player selections now on the market." He wowed the audience by showing the fidelity of the recordings. Disc and cylinder recorders of the time contained surface noise and had a limited frequency range, however, the player piano had the full acoustic richness of the instrument itself.
Lee S. Roberts, Vice-President Q. R. S. Music Co. and World's Leading Authority on Player Rolls
image source: Roehl, Player Piano Treasury.
He worked his way up the company, became Vice-President of the Company and worked for a time in New York City. A 1919 article in Music Trades noted his executive position and prominence as a recording artist. They also remarked that "He started writing songs when young and worked his way up from obscurity at San Francisco to his present position as vice-president of the company and as composer of some of the most successful songs ever presented in the country."
The 1920s were the boom time for player pianos - the instruments hit their high point in sales in 1923 while sales of the piano rolls continued to grow until 1926 when nearly 10 million were sold. A 1919 article marked the QRS Music Company as the largest piano roll company in the world with 500 employees.
An advertisement for topical piano rolls performed by Lee S. Roberts (source: Asia December 24, 1924)
He modestly said in a 1921 interview that: “I had no intention of becoming a pianist or composer... I owe all my achievement and success in that direction to the influence of the player [piano] and the extensive amount of musical literature with which it surrounded me.”
He achieved a number one hit song in 1918 with "Smiles," co-written with lyricist J. Will Callahan. This song that became a popular standard will be the subject of a later blog entry. A 1923 article in The Dominant announced that he had signed an exclusive contract with Forster Music Publisher of Chicago. By the 1930s his style of songwriter had come and gone - a 1936 Variety described an unsuccessful trip he took to New York to try to find publishers for 200 new songs.
Roberts was a prolific composer of both songs and instrumental music and no attempt has been made to date to inventory his musical corpus. Our library catalog has seventeen listings for him, while the Dorothy Starr Collection has another thirty. Some of his music has been listed online in the Lester S. Levy Collection and Johns Hopkins University and in the
Digital Commons at the University of Main.
In 1925 he returned to San Francisco where he opened a store to sell Chickering pianos. He soon became active in the nascent Bay Area radio scene. In 1927 he presented the Chickering Hour on KPO radio (the San Francisco Chronicle's station). In 1929 he presented the Zenith Hour on KFRC. He returned to KPO 1930 presenting the Shell Happytime show sponsored by Shell Oil. Sperry Flour took over sponsorship of his program renaming it the Sperry Smiles program, eventually moving to over to KGO and NCB's West Coast network. In 1933 he presented a Folgers Coffee sponsored radio program on KGO.
Advertisement for His Old Memory Box, KGO and KFI (San Francisco Chronicle April 2, 1933).
Roberts' His Old Memory Box program ran from 1933 through 1935 on KGO (and on KFI Los Angeles). In 1935 he was appointed the program manager of the Hearst-owned radio station KYA.
Lee S. Robert's death in San Francisco on September 10, 1949 received relatively little attention in the San Francisco media or in the music trade journals. This is surprising for the creator of a hit song ("Smiles") whose music was presented by major publishers and who was a pioneer of early San Francisco radio.
Bibliography:
Clayman, Andrew, "QRS Music Company est. ca. 1900," Made In Chicago Museum [website]
"Device Records Music," Spokane Spokesman-Review October 16, 1912
History of Westchester County, New York, Alvah P French and Will L Clark, editors. (Lewis Historical Pub. Co., 1925).
"KFRC Offers Song Writer," San Francisco Chronicle September 25, 1929.
"Lee Roberts,"
The Dominant March 1923.
"Lee S. Roberts, Composer to Join KYA Staff," San Francisco Examiner December 29, 1935.
"Lee S. Roberts, Musician, Dies,"
San Francisco Examiner September 13, 1949
"Music Lovers Enjoy Concert," Cincinnati Commercial Tribune December 10, 1914.
"Q R S Company," The Economist April 19, 1919
"Q R S Recording, Editing and Master Recording Sections Come to New York with Lee S. Roberts,"
Music Trades September 13, 1919.
"Radio Reports," Variety December 8, 1931.
"Second Week of The Pacific Grand Opera," San Francisco Examiner September 29, 1912
"Snappy Shots,"
San Francisco Examiner June 13, 1925.
"200 Tunes Seek Pub,"
Variety August 12, 1936.
"Today's Air Doings to Be of Interest to All Fans,"
San Francisco Chronicle January 5, 1927.
"West Coast News; More Symphonies,"
Billboard April 8, 1933
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