Lewis F. Muir (born Louis Meuer, 1883–1915) was an American composer and ragtime performer who began his musical career as a pianist in St. Louis cafes and also played in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Moving to New York in 1910, he started publishing various ragtime tunes that he wrote.
Waiting For The Robert E. Lee is his best-known title. The lyrics were written by a journalist, Louis Wolfe Gilbert, who left this account of how the collaboration took place in 1911:
He asked me if I would write some songs with him, but I couldn’t see any money in them and refused. Later he brought me a melody that I liked and I took a chance on it and made a few dollars, and shortly after we turned out the ‘Robert E. Lee’. After that everything was plain sailing.
Muir composed productively in 1912–1913, all of them ragtime-flavoured tunes, but most of his songs have long since been forgotten.
Robert E. Lee was a steamboat named for the famous Confederate General. It was nicknamed the ‘Monarch of the Mississippi’, running between New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi, later to St. Louis or Louisville, Kentucky. It set a record by sailing the distance from New Orleans to St. Louis in 3 days and 18 hours in the summer of 1870.
Muir’s song describes ‘Robert E. Lee’ en route to New Orleans, loaded with cotton bales. The song was made famous by the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, the first full-length motion picture partly with sound.
Performing with a singer? Complete lyrics are available here:
The sound clip is computer generated using sampled sounds (AI). Transcriptions and descriptions are not AI generated.
Lewis F. Muir (born Louis Meuer, 1883–1915) was an American composer and ragtime performer who began his musical career as a pianist in St. Louis cafes and also played in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Moving to New York in 1910, he started publishing various ragtime tunes that he wrote.
Performing with a singer? Complete lyrics are available here: 
