CAMPBELL, Gertrude Dillon

Gertrude Dillon Campbell (1881–1949) was an American composer associated with the popular piano repertory of the early twentieth century. Little information about her musical training or professional career has survived. An alumni catalogue of the University of Kansas records that she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1905 and subsequently lived in Santa Paula, California.
Campbell is known principally for Pigs Is Pigs, a lively march and two-step for solo piano. Published by Jerome H. Remick & Co. in New York and Detroit in 1906–07, the piece belongs to the popular dance-music tradition that flourished alongside ragtime in the United States during the opening decades of the twentieth century. The original score identifies Campbell clearly as its composer, and surviving copies are preserved in the Charles H. Templeton Sr. Sheet Music Collection at Mississippi State University.
Although only one composition by Campbell is currently known, Pigs Is Pigs provides evidence of women’s participation in the commercial sheet-music industry and popular piano culture of the period. A Ventura County cemetery record lists Gertrude Dillon Campbell’s death on 25 March 1949 and her burial at Bardsdale Cemetery in California.