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TAGS:<\/strong>\u00a0Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway ; Pine Mountain Settlement School ; singers ; song collectors ; accompanists ; ballads ; folk songs ; Lonesome Tunes ; Twenty Kentucky Mountain songs ; folklorists ; Henry McMahon Painter ; musicians ; composers ; recording artist;s ; piano roll editors ; American Piano Corporation ; Cumberland Mountains ; Alphonso Smith ; Virginia Folk-Lore Society ; Child’s Ballads ; Francis James Child ; Josephine McGill ; Hindman Settlement School ; Lucy Furman ; Henry Shapiro ;<\/p>\n In 1916 Loraine Wyman<\/strong> (October 23, [1885?] – September 11,\u00a01937)<\/em> a singer and song collector, and\u00a0Howard A. Brockway<\/b> (November 22, 1870 \u2013 February 20, 1951),<\/em> her accompanist, spent six weeks in eastern Kentucky intent on gathering ballads and folk songs of the area. They arrived at Pine Mountain Settlement School in late May [?] of 1916.* The two publications that resulted from their visit to the Pine Mountain and neighboring areas were\u00a0Lonesome Tunes (New York: H.W. Gray, 1916<\/a>) and Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs (Boston: O. Ditson, 1920).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The visit of Wyman and Brockway was documented by an unknown photographer in the following four photographs [damaged] from the Pine Mountain Settlement School archive taken in 1916 as they performed for children in the area. The photographs have been digitally altered for quality. They were included in the\u00a0\u00a0Angela Melville Album II – Part V\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n “Loraine Wyman.” [melv_II_album_156x.jpg]<\/p><\/div>Loraine Wyman<\/strong> (1885? – 1937)<\/em> was born in Evanston, Illinois, as the youngest child of Walter and Julie Wyman. Her parents divorced early and Loraine moved to Paris with her mother where she studied with Blanche Marchesi and later voice with Yvette Guilbert. By all accounts, she was an accomplished singer with an “extensive repertoire including classical and romantic lieder and chansons, opera and English and French folk songs. Her training as a folklorist is not fully described though she published an article in the Journal of American Folklore<\/em>\u00a0that described a music gathering effort in Perce, Quebec.<\/p>\n She earned a living through her music with a series of recitals and lectures and later through her publications. Her accompanist in her public performances was Howard Brockway.<\/p>\n She was married in 1920 to\u00a0Henry McMahon Painter and the two lived for a time in Grez-sur-Loin in France. Painter is described as a doctor, but it is uncertain where and what he practiced. Their fourteen-year marriage ended in March of 1934 with the death of her husband followed by her own death in September 1937.<\/p>\n Howard A. Brockway<\/b> (1870 \u2013 1951) was an accomplished musician and also a composer. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and\u00a0like Loraine, he was trained in Europe but instead of France, his training was in Berlin. There he studied composition with Otis Bardwell Boise<\/a> and piano with Heinrich Barth<\/a>. On his return to the United States, he was employed as a piano teacher and composer at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and later at the New York Institute of Musical Art now known as the Julliard School of Music. For a brief time, he also taught at the Mannes College of Music also located in New York.<\/p>\n Expanding his talents he worked as a recording artist and also as a piano roll editor for the American Piano Corporation [AMPICO]<\/a> where he recorded approximately 155 works for their classical catalog between 1911 – 1920. Like Wyman, his expertise was valued and he gave a series of lectures on a variety of topics.<\/p>\n Brockway served with Wyman as the editor of the two collections of songs gathered in Kentucky. Not all of his work is assigned to Howard Brockway, as he sometimes recorded under pseudonyms including Al Sterling and Andrei Kmita. His compositions cover a wide range of musical styles and genres including a symphony, symphonic ballads, a piano concerto, chamber music, choir music and a variety of songs. The two were an eclectic twosome and apparently not to everyone’s taste.<\/p>\n Several events pointed the two musicians to the Cumberlands, not the least of which was the work of Alphonso Smith<\/a>, an English Professor at the University of Virginia who founded the Virginia Folk-Lore Society.\u00a0 He had been advocating for the collection of America’s rich folklore and Wyman and Brockway found his advocacy provocative. His article published in 1913, “A Great Movement in Which Everyone Can Help,” caught the eye of many musicians.<\/p>\n What Smith so passionately expressed was that song collectors should look closely at Child’s ballads, the work of Francis James Child<\/a>\u00a0** who\u00a0in the late 1800s published the largest collection of folk songs that became the canon for all later collections. [See his final publication\u00a0The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in 1882\u20131898<\/em>, at first in ten parts (the tenth, posthumously) and then in five quarto volumes. His work remains one of the best authoritative sources for balladry.] The “English” and “Scottish” focus suggested in the title does not do justice to the broad international range of Child’s work which included some 30 different language sources. When Smith asked that folklorists in America look closely at the Child’s canon he was wisely steering scholars away from the less authoritative work of Wyman and Brockway and others but he was not discouraging their efforts. In fact, Smith,\u00a0as quoted by Appalachian historian Henry Shapiro<\/span>\u00a0said of his recommendation of Childs, “…If our American versions [of ballads] are not collected quickly they can never be collected at all …It is now or never.” [Shapiro, p.250] In this sense, Wyman and Brockway were significant contributors to the early collection of Appalachian balladry and were inspired by a cautious nudge.<\/span><\/p>\n Using Child’s as a guide Wyman and Brockway set about to do just as Smith suggested. But even their early collectings was not the first expedition to the Southern Appalachians. The first collector on the eastern Kentucky scene was Josephine McGill<\/a>\u00a0(died 1919) who came to the Appalachian mountains from Louisville and specifically to Knott and Letcher counties and to Hindman Settlement School in 1916. She published her book Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains<\/em> in 1917. She had read of eastern Kentucky in the popular novels of Lucy Furman whose stories of life along the Troublesome<\/a> tributary captured the romantic notions of many women of the day. Furman’s work was at the time being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly<\/em>\u00a0and other publications. She had caught the imagination of the readers and many other “Appalachian” tales followed with their own interpretation of Appalachian music, song, and dance. Much of McGill’s work was conducted from Hindman and it is most likely that Wyman and Brockway had access to her folklore journeys through the staff at the School while they were in residence there.<\/p>\n Wyman and Brockway made their way to eastern Kentucky in May of 1916, and two years later, they went to Hindman and while there added the newly founded Pine Mountain Settlement School to their base of operation for ballad collection. 1916 was just three years following the\u00a0founding of Pine Mountain Settlement School in 1913. The work of Wyman and Brockway in the area was captured in a series of photographs located in the Pine Mountain Settlement School archive in an\u00a0album of Angela Melville.<\/a><\/p>\n Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway,\u00a0performing for children. [melv_II_album_157x.jpg]<\/p><\/div>History has not treated the two ballad collectors gently. The Appalachian historian Henry Shapiro characterizes them as rapacious and insensitive to the culture of the Southern Appalachians.\u00a0Ethel de Long<\/a> writes briefly about their visit in letters to her family. The comments are brief and curt.<\/p>\n Howard Brockway. [melv_II_album_155.jpg]<\/p><\/div>The remarks of\u00a0Evelyn K. Wells,<\/a>\u00a0a former staff member at Pine Mountain are even more telling. Her <\/span>acknowledgement of the work of Wyman and Brockway was silence.\u00a0In her book ***<\/span>The Ballad Tree (1950) she\u00a0<\/em>makes no public mention of either Wyman or Brockway. She notes on page 53 of The Ballad Tree,<\/em> for example, that she collected her version of <\/span>The Merry Golden Tree<\/em> (The Golden Vanity<\/em>, 286) “As sung by the children in the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Harlan County, Kentucky, to E.K. Wells, 1916.” This year, 1916, would have been the same year that the duo of Wyman and Brockway visited the School. Other songs that Wells notes were collected in 1916 by her were <\/span>The Brown Girl<\/em>\u00a0 [<\/span>Lord Thomas and Fair Annet<\/em>, 73] and the popular <\/span>Barbry Ellen<\/em> (84), and <\/span>The Hangman<\/em> (<\/span>The Maid Freed From the Gallows,<\/em> 95).<\/span><\/p>\n In her book, The Ballad Tree,<\/em>\u00a0Wells also speaks disparagingly of Katherine Pettit, noting that she knew little about the literary history of ballads but was<\/p>\n “… struck with the remarkable repertoire of a little boy from <\/em>back of beyond, who could sing about London Town and lords an ladies of high degree. She wrote his songs down and sent them to Profesor George L. Kittredge, Child’s successor at Harvard, and they appeared under the joint editing of Mr. Kitterage and Miss Pettit in The Journal of American Folklore in 1907 [XX (1907), 251-77.****<\/strong> Pettit’s work preceded Wyman and Brockway by nine years.<\/em><\/p>\n The “little boy” who so impressed Pettit was Josiah Combs who graduated from Hindman and went on to write his thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris on Folk Songs du Midi des Etats-Unis (1925).\u00a0<\/em>This account of Pettit and Josiah Combs is recounted in Wells’ Chapter 13 Cecil Sharp<\/a>. Research remains to be conducted on the perception of Wyman and Brockway in the eyes of the community where most of their “ballets and love songs” were collected and the influence of “little boys” and girls who were the true collectors of “ballets and love songs”.<\/p>\n Howard Brockway and Loraine Wyman.[melv_II_album_158x.jpg]<\/p><\/div>According to the inventory of Wyman and Brockway found in the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KYVL), among the list of songs collected for Lonesome Tunes <\/em>and for Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs <\/em>are about 26 that may be identified with the Pine Mountain Settlement School, the surrounding area, or the Pine Mountain students. Included in the following 26 “ballets and love songs” listed by Wyman and Brockway, many appear in other lists of Pine Mountain songs and ballads.<\/p>\n [Note that Wyman spells Begley as “Bagley”, a possible transcription error. An error also appears in the repeated process of spelling Letcher County as “Setcher County.”]<\/p>\n Table of contents from “Lonesome Tunes” Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway<\/p><\/div>\n *Note:\u00a0 Peter Rogers suggests that the date for the Pine Mountain visit is largely correct. His calculations are based on the following:<\/p>\n See Also:<\/strong> MUSIC Guide<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Title<\/p>\n<\/td>\n Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n Alt. Title<\/p>\n<\/td>\n Loraine Wyman Painter ; Howard A. Brockway ;<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n Identifier<\/p>\n<\/td>\n \n
\n![\""Loraine](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/melv_II_album_156x-1024x613.jpg\")
LORAINE WYMAN AND HOWARD BROCKWAY:
\nIN THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS<\/strong><\/h3>\n![\"Loraine](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/melv_II_album_157x-1024x691.jpg\")
![\"Howard](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/melv_II_album_155x-1024x600.jpg\")
![\"Howard](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/melv_II_album_158-1024x604.jpg\")
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