Song poem
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Song Poem usually refers to song lyrics which have been set to music for a fee. This practice, which has long been disparaged in the music industry, was also known as song sharking and was conducted by several businesses throughout the 20th century in North America.
Typically, the service was promoted through small display ads in popular magazines, comic books, tabloids, men's adventure journals and similar publications with a headline reading (essentially) Send in Your Poems - Songwriters Make Thousands of Dollars - Free Evaluation. The term lyrics was avoided because it was assumed potential customers would not understand what the term meant.
Victims who sent their poetry invariably received notice by mail that their work was worthy of recording by professional musicians, along with a proposal to do so in exchange for a fee (early 20th century versions involved setting the words to music and printing up sheet music from expensively engraved plates). The melodies were either improvised or recycled and musicians often recorded dozens of songs per recording session using minimal resources, often in one take. The recordings were then duplicated on 45 RPM vinyl singles or compilation LPs with dozens of other songs by amateur lyric writers, or individual cassette tapes. Copies were sent to the customer. Promises that they would also be sent to radio stations or music industry executives were rarely if ever kept -- partly because the recordings would not have been taken seriously by professionals. The practice played off the intense desire of unsophisticated people, who often lived in remote areas, to realize their ambitions of making money from writing popular songs.
Some surviving recordings of song poems (especially from the 1950s and 60s) gained interest during the 1990s. For some listeners, unusual, amateur lyrics combined into recordings made by rushed or at least marginally professional musicians almost half a century earlier offer a unique sound heard nowhere else. More information is available at the American Song Poem Music Archives (http://www.aspma.com/).