Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 09: BIOGRAPHY – Visitors
Series 28: BOOKS
Series 30: MUSIC AND DANCE
Loraine Wyman (Painter) (1885?-1937)
Howard A. Brockway (1870-1951)
Visitors at PMSS 1916

---

TAGS: Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway, singers, song collectors, ballads, folk songs, Lonesome Tunes, Twenty Kentucky Mountain songs, Henry McMahon Painter, musicians, composers, recording artists, piano roll editors, American Piano Corporation, Alphonso Smith, Virginia Folk-Lore Society, Child’s Ballads, Francis James Child, Josephine McGill, Hindman Settlement School, Lucy Furman, Henry Shapiro

---

LORAINE WYMAN and HOWARD BROCKWAY Visitors

 PMSS Visitors (Researchers), May (?) 1916

In 1916 Loraine Wyman (October 23, [1885?] – September 11, 1937) a singer and song collector, and Howard A. Brockway (November 22, 1870 – February 20, 1951), 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 Lonesome Tunes (New York: H.W. Gray, 1916) and Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs (Boston: O. Ditson, 1920). 

The visit of Wyman and Brockway was documented in 1916 by an unknown photographer in the four photographs [damaged] on this page as they performed for children in the area. The photographs, part of  the Pine Mountain Settlement School archive, have been digitally altered for quality. They were included in the  Angela Melville Album II – Part V.

Loraine Wyman (1885? – 1937) 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 that described a music gathering effort in Perce, Quebec.

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.

She was married in 1920 to Henry 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.

Howard A. Brockway (1870 – 1951) was an accomplished musician and also a composer. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and like Loraine, he was trained in Europe but instead of France, his training was in Berlin. There he studied composition with Otis Bardwell Boise and piano with Heinrich Barth. 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.

Expanding his talents he worked as a recording artist and also as a piano roll editor for the American Piano Company [AMPICO] 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.

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.

IN THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS

Several events pointed the two musicians to the Cumberlands, not the least of which was the work of Alphonso Smith, an English Professor at the University of Virginia who founded the Virginia Folk-Lore Society.  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.

What Smith so passionately expressed was that song collectors should look closely at Child’s ballads, the work of Francis James Child ** who in the late 1800s published the largest collection of folk songs that became the canon for all later collections. [See his final publication The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in 1882–1898, 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, as quoted by Appalachian historian Henry Shapiro said 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.

Using Child’s as a guide Wyman and Brockway set about to do just as Smith suggested. But even their early collecting expedition was not the first one to the Southern Appalachians. The first collector on the eastern Kentucky scene was Josephine McGill (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 in 1917. She had read of eastern Kentucky in the popular novels of Lucy Furman whose stories of life along the Troublesome tributary captured the romantic notions of many women of the day. Furman’s work was at the time being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and 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.

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 founding 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 album of Angela Melville.

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. Ethel de Long writes briefly about their visit in letters to her family. The comments are brief and curt.

The remarks of Evelyn K. Wells, a former staff member at Pine Mountain, are even more telling. Her acknowledgement of the work of Wyman and Brockway was silence. In her book ***The Ballad Tree (1950) she makes no public mention of either Wyman or Brockway. She notes on page 53 of The Ballad Tree, for example, that she collected her version of The Merry Golden Tree (The Golden Vanity, 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 The Brown Girl  [Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 73] and the popular Barbry Ellen (84), and The Hangman (The Maid Freed From the Gallows, 95).

In her book, The Ballad Tree, Wells also speaks disparagingly of Katherine Pettit, noting that she knew little about the literary history of ballads but was

… struck with the remarkable repertoire of a little boy from 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. **** Pettit’s work preceded Wyman and Brockway by nine years.

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). This account of Pettit and Josiah Combs is recounted in Wells’ Chapter 13 on Cecil Sharp. 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.”

COLLECTED SONGS Relating to PMSS

According to the inventory of Wyman and Brockway found in the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KYVL), among the list of songs collected for Lonesome Tunes and for Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs are about 26 that may be identified with the Pine Mountain Settlement School, the surrounding area, or the Pine Mountain students. The following 26 “ballets and love songs” listed by Wyman and Brockway appear in other lists of Pine Mountain songs and ballads.

[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.”]

1. The Little Mohee (Mary Ann Bagley, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 8, 1916)
2. Pretty Polly (Mary Ann Bagley, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 8, 1916)
3. Pretty Polly (Fidella Day, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
4. The Dying Soldier, or, Brother Green (Art Boggs, Big Laurel, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 10, 1916)
5. The Nightinggale [sic] (Mary Ann Bagley, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
6. Jackaro (Fitzhugh Draughn {student at Hindman Settlement and worker at Pine Mountain Settlement] and May Ritchie [student at Pine Mountain]
7. The Ground Hog [sic], second version (Una Ritchie [student at Pine Mountain Settlement]
8. The Sweetheart in the Army, (Mary Ann Bagley, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
9. The Sweetheart in the Army, second version [Begley ?]
10. Peggy Walker (Abner Boggs, Big Laurel Creek, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 10, 1916)
11. Sourwood Mountain (May Ritchie) [Student at Pine Mountain]
12. The Mary Golden Tree, or, The Lonesome Sea (The Pine Mountain School)
13. Little Sparrow (Fitzhugh Draughn, a student at Hindman and worker at Pine Mountain)
14. I’ve Always Been a Poor Girl, or, Loving Nancy (Abner Boggs, Big Laurel Creek, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 10, 1916)
15. Ona West (Fidella Day, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
16. Poor Ona Wise (Miss Pettit, [Katherine Pettit, Director] Pine Mountain)
17. Florella (Mary Ann Bagley [Begley] , Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
18. Little Birdie, (Cyndie Boggs, Big Laurel, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 10, 1916)
19. The Sinner Man (Children of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
20. The House Carpenter (Mary Ann Bagley [Begley], Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
21. The Drowsy Sleeper (Mary Ann Bagley [Begley], Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
22. The Lonesome Sleeper  (Mary Ann Bagley [Begley], Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)
23. The Lonesome Scenes of Winter (Fitzhugh Draughn [Hindman Student and Pine Mountain Worker] Knott County
24. Lord Bateman (Mary Ann Bagley [Begley],Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)  )
25. The Lady Gay (Jasper Day, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 4, 1916)
26. Rocks  in the Mountains (Fidella Day, Pine Mountain, Kentucky, May 1916)

**********

*Note: Peter Rogers suggests that the date for the Pine Mountain visit is largely correct. His calculations are based on the following:

From this info [information from Brown Library, Loraine Wyman Collection], it seems about 18 were collected at Pine Mountain. Of these:  

7 show specific collection dates between the 8th and 10th of May 1916.

9 just say May 1916.

2 don’t show the date.

Of these, 8 were sung by Mary Ann Begley.

This says they were at PM May 8-10 but could have been much longer.

See Also:
MUSIC Guide

---

Title	Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway
Alt. Title	Loraine Wyman Painter, Howard A. Brockway ;
Identifier	LORAINE WYMAN and HOWARD BROCKWAY
Creator	Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, KY
Alt. Creator	Ann Angel Eberhardt, Helen Hayes Wykle ;
Subject Keyword	Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway ; Loraine Wyman Painter ; Howard B. Brockway ; Pine Mountain Settlement School ; singers ; song collectors ; accompanists ; ballads ; folk songs ; Lonesome Tunes ; Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs ; photographs ; Walter and Julie Wyman ; folklorists ; Henry McMahon Painter ; Peabody Institute ; NY Institute of Musical Art (Julliard School of Music) ; Mannes College of Music ; musicians ; composers ; recording artist;s ; piano roll editors ; American Piano Corporation ; Al Sterling ; Andrei Kmita ; Cumberland Mountains ; Alphonso Smith ; University of Virginia ; Virginia Folk-Lore Society ; Child’s Ballads ; Francis James Child ; Josephine McGill ; Hindman Settlement School ; Lucy Furman ; Henry Shapiro ;
Subject LCSH	Wyman Painter, Loraine, — October 23, [1885?] – September 11, 1937 Brockway, Howard B., — November 22, 1870 – February 20, 1951 Pine Mountain Settlement School (Pine Mountain, Ky.) — History. Harlan County (Ky.) — History. Education — Kentucky — Harlan County. Rural schools — Kentucky — History. Folk songs, English — Kentucky. Schools — Appalachian Region, Southern.
Date	2016-09-20 hw
Publisher	Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, KY
Contributor	n/a
Type	Collections ; text ; image ;
Format	Original and copies of documents and correspondence in file folders in filing cabinet
Source	Series 09: Biography – Community, Guests and Visitors
Language	English
Relation	Is related to: Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, Series 22: Community, Guests and Visitors.
Coverage Temporal	1885 – 1952
Coverage Spatial	Pine Mountain, KY ; Harlan County, KY ; Evanston, IL ; Paris, France ; Brooklyn, NY ; Berlin, Germany ; Baltimore, MD ; New York, NY ;  Knott and Letcher counties, KY ;
Rights	Any display, publication, or public use must credit the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Copyright retained by the creators of certain items in the collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Donor	n/a
Description	Core documents, correspondence, writings, and administrative papers of Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway; clippings, photographs, books by or about Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway ;
Acquisition	n/d
Citation	“[Identification of Item],” [Collection Name] [Series Number, if applicable]. Pine Mountain Settlement School Institutional Papers. Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, KY.
Processed By	Helen Hayes Wykle ; Ann Angel Eberhardt ;
Last Updated	09-20-2016 hhw ; 2016-10-07 aae ; 12-09-2018 hhw; 12-08-2018 peter rogers ; 05-28-2023 aae
Bibliography

Return to BIOGRAPHY – A-Z