Here I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Sue O'Hare Attalla, great-grand-daughter of the composer, for providing much of the information given as follows. William Christopher O'Hare was an American composer, orchestrator of popular music born in Washington, D. C. Aged 21, he became the first director of the grand opera house in Shreveport, Louisiana. Whilst in Shreveport O'Hare lived amidst the black community and became interested in ragtime music, promoted it, and developed a style that has led the local historian, Eric Brock, to give him the sobriquet of "The Father of Ragtime in Shreveport." The cakewalk Cotton Pickers (1894) was his first published work giving syncopated hints of what was to come with the much recorded Levee Revels (1898) and Cottonfield Capers (1901). By 1897, O'Hare had become professor of music at Kate P. Nelson's Seminary and at the turn of the century then moved to New York City where joined M. Witmark & Sons as an orchstrator. His great-grand-daughter reports that one of her highlights was to have had the chance to hear several of her great grandfather's silent film pieces used in live film scores at the Buster Keaton Silent Film Festival in Iola, Kansas. He died presumably in New York.