"Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey" was a popular ragtime tune first published in 1902. This comedy short of a man reading a newspaper and laughing as letters spell out the news he has done so, appeared a couple of years later.
It looks very primitive, nor was it very advanced in cinema terms at the time, but in terms of titles, it is very interesting. Straightforward, descriptive film titles had only been used for two or three years at this time; the idea of playing with them may have been used for parts of a program in which a singer sang a song and then led the audience in singing it -- this evolved into the Fleischer Screen Songs in the 1920s and the 1930s. Here, in its primitive form, it's ancestral not only to those, but to the elaborate art titles of the 1920s.
