Alfred Solman (May 6, 1868 – November 15, 1937) was a prominent composer of popular songs in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

[1] He arrived in the United States on February 8, 1894, with his wife Eugenie and young son Kurt (later Curt), settling in Chicago, where he worked as a musician or music teacher and where his daughter Lucy (sometimes Lucille) was born on December 1, 1895.

[8] He remained very interested in theatre, writing music for Paris by Night (1904), The Errand Boy (1906), and other shows and revues; and he and Harry Bissing, a stage electrician, formed a short-lived management company.

His most enduring song was a comic novelty, “The Bird on Nellie’s Hat” (lyrics by Lamb), published in 1906, interpolated in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!

Similar songs are dotted through his career; indeed, his final publication, “Try Tappin’” (lyrics by his son, Curt Kremer), belongs to this genre.

However, Solman was more celebrated for “high-class” ballads, telling tales of love or absence and utilizing compound meters, long, arching lines, and chromatic harmonies.

A 1908 profile described him as a “cultured musician” who “has had little opportunity to write the class of music for which he is temperamentally suited.”[18] At the turn of the century Solman did take on a few more ambitious projects, such as “The Way of the Cross,” an extended sacred anthem for solo voice, and Daddy Longlegs, a collection of over twenty short songs designed for children to texts by James O’Dea, with illustrations by Edgar Keller.

A final, quite large number of songs arose out of Solman's lifelong fascination with theatre and film.