Fred Emerson Brooks was a very popular late-nineteenth-century poet. He wrote collections of verse on a wide variety of subjects. A literary device he was especially fond of was writing in dialect. Audiences ate it up.

Brooks was touted as "Always Smiling. Always There. The Man Who Never Disappoints." The Central Lyceum Board of Chicago gushed about him: "To supply the place of Brooks we would have to secure the best humorist, the finest orator, a star actor, the foremost character delineator, a dialect reader, a story-teller, a ventriloquist, an animal imitator, and there would still be lacking the author."