I Love You Truly is a popular love song with the senior adult population I work with.
This song was a parlor song published in 1901. This musical composition was written by Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
Bond’s husband, Frank, died in 1895. While on a trip to her hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin she wrote I Love You Truly. She struggled to make ends meet at her home in Chicago and she wrote songs, rented out rooms and painted china to make ends meet.
In 1901 she published a sheet music collection of her songs in a book called Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose. I Love You Truly was one of the songs published. Five years later the song was published as a single. The 1906 publication sold over a million copies.
I Love You Truly is one of the earliest songs composed by a woman to achieve selling a million copies. Bond went on to become the leading woman songwriter in America and was the first millionaire woman songwriter in American music history.
The song has been performed on numerous TV shows and movies, including It’s A Wonderful Life.
The song has become a standard for weddings, barbershop quartets and other performers.