Biographical Note
Joseph Francis Lamb was born December 6, 1887, into a musical family in the Montclair township of New Jersey. He was the youngest of four children and learned composition and piano from his two sisters who had formal training. In 1905, two years after he completed preparatory school and seminary in Canada, he became a published musician. That year, the Toronto publishing house H. H. Sparks Music Company issued his "Celestine Waltzes." They published twenty of Lamb's works during the subsequent five years.
From 1906 to 1911, Lamb directed his own ragtime ensemble, The Clover Imperial Orchestra. During this same period, two other pivotal events occurred in his life. The first transpired in 1907 while he was purchasing sheet music in the office of New York publisher John Stark. It was then that he encountered Scott Joplin. As an avid admirer of the King of Ragtime, Lamb was happy to discover that Joplin was so impressed with his music that he was willing to persuade John Stark to publish it. The Stark Music Company issued twelve of Lamb's compositions in twelve years, including "Sensation," which listed Scott Joplin as the arranger. The second momentous event of this period was Lamb's marriage to Henrietta Schultz in 1908.
For about ten months in 1910, Lamb worked as a Tin Pan Alley arranger and song plugger before returning to the textile industry. In 1914, he was hired as an accountant for L. F. Dommerich & Co. Inc., where he continued to work until he retired in 1957. His son Joseph Lamb Jr. was born in 1915. On February 20, 1920, his wife Henrietta passed away during the influenza epidemic. Nearly three years later, on November 12, 1922, Lamb remarried. Amelia Collins was the sister of a longtime friend and, after the couple moved into a large home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, they had four children: Patricia (1924), Richard (1926), Robert (1927), and Donald (1930).
After the emergence of jazz in the early 1920s, the popularity of ragtime dwindled and Lamb faded into anonymity. It was not until nearly thirty years later during a national "ragtime revival" that his music was discovered by a new generation. Lamb subsequently submitted many of his unpublished pieces for copyright and was soon lionized for his compositional achievements. He passed away in Brooklyn on September 3, 1960, at the height of his musical rebirth. Posthumously, he received New York's distinguished citizen award from Mayor Mario Cuomo and, in 1974, Public School No. 206 in Brooklyn was named The Joseph F. Lamb School in honor of his contribution to American music.