The Gotham-Attucks Music Publishing Company was an African-American owned firm based in Manhattan, New York, that was formed July 15, 1905, by merger of the Gotham Music Company and the Attucks Music Publishing Company. The Gotham Music Company was founded by composer Will Marion Cook and songwriter Richard Cecil McPherson (aka Cecil Mack) and the Attucks Music Publishing Company, the first African-American music publishing company in the United States, founded in 1904 by Sheperd Nathaniel Edmonds (1874–1941). Gotham-Attucks ceased to operate as a legitimate music publisher after its sale to the "song shark" Ferdinand E. Miersch in 1911.

Ford Thompson Dabney was an American ragtime pianist, composer, songwriter, and acclaimed director of bands and orchestras for Broadway musical theater, revues, vaudeville, and early recordings. Additionally, for two years in Washington, from 1910 to 1912, he was proprietor of a theater that featured vaudeville, musical revues, and silent film. Dabney is best known as composer and lyricist of the 1910 song "That's Why They Call Me Shine," which for eleven point four decades, through 2023, has endured as a jazz standard. As of 2020, in the jazz genre, "Shine" has been recorded 646 times Dabney and one of his chief collaborators, James Reese Europe (1880–1919), were transitional figures in the prehistory of jazz that evolved from ragtime and blues — and grew into stride, boogie-woogie, and other next levels in jazz. Their 1914 composition, "Castle Walk" – recorded February 10, 1914, by Europe's Society Orchestra with Dabney at the piano – is one of the earliest recordings of jazz.