By the time of the American bicentennial in 1976, Ives's reputation as a towering patriarch of American composition seemed solid. Leonard Bernstein called him “our Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson of music,” celebrating Ives's output as a pinnacle of the first two hundred years of musical achievement in the United States. Ives's mystique loomed so large that Frank Rossiter, in his 1975 biography of Ives, oriented his discussion of the composer's reception in terms of an “Ives legend.” For Rossiter, the legend had eight aspects, leading off with “Ives's precedence as a musical pioneer and ‘father of the moderns.’”

In 1987, this “precedence” was challenged by Maynard Solomon in “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity.” Published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the article had special importance because it was the first time the journal—the so-called journal of record for American musicologists—had devoted an article to Ives. Solomon argued that Ives's autobiographical writings “crossed the line between delusion and deception” and that his re-dating of manuscripts “suggests a systematic pattern of falsification sufficient for the prudent scholar to withhold acceptance of Ives's datings pending independent verification.” “Questions of Veracity” attracted a great deal of attention, ranging from pointed correspondence between Solomon and Philip Lambert in a subsequent issue of the journal to a lengthy write-up in the New York Times.