Work, Henry Clay, , Connecticut 1832 1884 Male Songwriter song-writer, was born in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of Alanson and Aurelia Work, and a descendant of Joseph Work who emigrated to Connecticut from Ireland in 1720.
His father was a militant abolitionist, who, in order to help in the cause of freeing runaway slaves, moved his family to Quincy, Ill. , when Henry was three years of age.
Henry Work received a common-school education in Middletown and later in Hartford, where he became an apprentice in the printing shop of Elihu Greer.
In a room above the print shop Work found an old melodeon; he practiced on it, studied harmony, and began writing a few songs to sing to his friends.
In Illinois and Missouri he aided about four thousand slaves to escape by maintaining his home as one of the "stations" of the Underground Railroad.
In 1864 he wrote his famous temperance song, "Come Home, Father. "
This was tremendously successful, and, as a "story-song, " was thoroughly in keeping with the taste of the period.
For years it was sung in the play, "Ten Nights in a Barroom. "
The opening lines of Work's long "serio-comic" poem, The Upshot Family (1868), are typical of his other efforts in rhyme: "Far up in Vermont, Where the hills are so steep That the farmers use ladders To pasture their sheep . "
Following the success of "Kingdom Coming, " Root & Cady offered Work a contract as a song-writer for the firm, and he was able to abandon his work as a printer.
He maintained his headquarters in Chicago until the great fire of 1871, when the firm of Root & Cady was ruined financially and the plates of all his songs were destroyed.
The venture was not succesful.
The exact number of Work's published songs is not known, although the records of his family show a list of seventy-three (Work, post).
Her mental illness in her last years was the burden of Work's sorrow before his death.
[B. Q. Work, Songs of Henry Clay Work (privately printed, n. d. ); George Birdseye, "America's Song Composers, " Potter's Am.
Monthly, Apr. 1879; W. S. B. Mathews, One Hundred Years of Music in America (1889); J. T. Howard, Our Am.
For a time he lived in Philadelphia and then moved to Vineland, N. J. , where he had joined his brother and an uncle in purchasing one hundred and fifty acres of land for speculative purposes.
He died in Hartford, Connecticut, while visiting his mother, and was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery beside his wife, who had preceded him in death about a year.
They had been married in Chicago between 1860 and 1864.
Two of their three children had died in Chicago.
