Book Review

Septimus Winner: Two Lives in Music. By Michael K. Remson. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8108-4540-7 (cloth). Pp. x, 328. $ 55.00

The Songs of Septimus Winner. By Michael K. Remson. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8108-4749-3 (pbk.). Pp. x, 144. $34.95

Though largely unknown today, Septimus Winner's importance in the development of American popular song will be reclaimed through Michael Remson's Septimus Winner: Two Lives in Music, a chronicle of the composer and his pseudonym/alter ego, Alice Hawthorne. Remson delves into the "complex relationship between one man and the woman he created" (xviii) through an application of gender theory and feminist scholarship. Within the scope of a biography and analysis of the composer's works, the author also poses such questions as: "Was Winner a cross-dresser or homosexual?," "Did Winner write 'female' music as Hawthorne?," and "Why create Alice? Was Alice a gimmick to sell songs?" (217).