Miller's songs were part of Tin Pan Alley, and were sold to various TPA entertainers (for example, vaudeville entertainer Tony Pastor popularized The Cat Came Back,[3]Dan W. Quinn recorded He's Got Feathers in his Hat for the North American Phonograph Company around 1895, and Edward M. Favor popularized I'll Not Go Out with Reilly Any More[4]). He specialized in quatrains and often wrote using a Georgian Black dialect, though Miller was white.[2] His contemporaries credited him with the popularization of the terms of endearment "honey" and "baby" in African-American English and the spread of coon songs, as well as the phrase, "Got troubles of my own".[1]
Miller married his wife Levina and moved to Tyrone, Pennsylvania, where she gave birth to her daughter, Gladys Lucille, in 1905.[5]
Most of his music was published by Edward Taylor Paull (and the E.T. Paull Co.), a New England publisher at the time,[6] who also composed "He's Goin' to Hab a Hot Time Bye an' Bye" for Miller.
The date of Miller's death is unknown, but he was apparently still alive in 1908.[7]
Works
Cover of Harry S. Miller's I Loves You Sadie, 'Deed I Do! (1899).
