Silver Crown Schottische (mp3) is an 1895 song by J. H. Jennings that I stumbled onto via sheet music on a personal site.

This song isn’t well known, I guess, but in a way it’s not obscure at all, since a little part of it was adopted by a TV commercial and became known as The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song: “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner, that is what I’d really like to be / cuz if I were an Oscar Meyer weiner / everyone would be in love with me.”

This song wasn’t completely lost. Look it up on Google and you will find references here and there. There’s another version on YouTube, for example, though I think it’s from a different version of the source, maybe retroactively arranged to emphasize the part used in the famous commercial.

The source site that I learned this from is a good hearted project. It was a page titled “19th Century Tunes” that describes itself this way: Click below to get gif files of some 19th Century Tunes from old books I own. That’s it. Nothing complicated — somebody took a bit of trouble to scan some old books, and after a while other musicians had the pleasure of turning the scans into sound. I believe the person who created that page and the scans is mandolinist named Jim Garber.

The instrument on this recording is an 1900 Fairbanks mandolin. Made in Boston.