Loraine Wyman
(Julie) Loraine Wyman (October 23, 1885 – September 11, 1937) was an American soprano,[1] noted for her concert performances of folk songs, some of which she collected from traditional singers in field work.
[5] On 2 April 1880[6] Julie Moran married Walter C. Wyman (1850–1927), a "coal merchant", "society man",[7] and collector and dealer in Native American anthropological artifacts.
[5] Wyman was quite wealthy; the Chicago Tribune remarks that the couple "made their home in the Edwin E. Brown mansion, and maintained there a lavish establishment of servants, horses, and carriages.
[13] The Chicago Tribune later described how the mother and daughters made their final escape via New York (March 1897): they were "taken aboard of an outgoing French steamer by a launch which was in waiting in the North [i.e. Hudson] river.
Julie Wyman died a suicide in 1907 in the apartment of her daughter Caroline in New York; Loraine and her older sister Florence were still living in Paris at the time.
The discrimination, finesse, and sincerity of her interpretations relies especially on the tradition founded by Gaston Paris and Julien Tiersot and broadened by Yvette Guilbert, of whom she was a pupil.
Stamler writes, She became a popular touring concert artist, performing French and British songs in peasant costume and charming audiences and critics across the country.
[21] In 1914, the New York Times reported that she had achieved critical success as a performer in London, and in January 1916, she stood in for an ailing Guilbert at the Metropolitan Opera, to rave notices.
For example, one review (Rochester Post Express, 13 November 1912) said: Miss Loraine Wyman gave a costume ballade recital last night before the members of the Alliance Francaise and their friends ...
[30] The early stages of Wyman's performing career coincided with a widespread awakening of interest in the folk songs of the southern Appalachian mountains, where the local population—at the time quite geographically isolated—had conserved and evolved a centuries-long heritage of melody and lyrics by oral transmission across generations.
Already, several state folklore societies had formed to collect and record these songs, and Olive Dame Campbell had gathered (though not published) a fairly extensive body of material.
[31] Previously, Wyman had sung on stage only folksongs gathered by others, mostly French and British, and it is only natural that she would develop an interest in field work in such a fertile territory, fieldwork whose results would permit her to expand her performing repertoire with American material.
[2] Thus in 1916 Wyman undertook, with her accompanist the composer Howard Brockway, a six-week journey through the Cumberland Mountains to collect Appalachian folk songs.
[32] A contemporary reviewer described the work as follows: Attracted to the songs by a study of their purely literary aspects as published some time ago by Professor Bradley,[33] these two musical patriots tramped some 300 miles through the Kentucky wilds, "climbing mountains, fording streams, enduring superlative discomforts and ... rebuffs from the suspicious inhabitants, but emerging in the end with something like eighty entrancing melodic specimens in their note-books, representing both the 'lonesome tunes' and 'fast music', as they are called.
[35] They also worked at the Hindman Settlement School, and ultimately journeyed through seven counties of eastern Kentucky: Knott, Harlan, Letcher, Estill, Pulaski, Magoffin, and Jackson.
Then, forgetting their reserve, they would seek to correct me in some detail and present we had what we had sought, tho[ugh] it sometimes required much persuasion to make them repeat a melody or even a phrase.
They premiered their renditions of Appalachian song at the Cort Theater in New York in October 1916,[38] and per Stamler, "continu[ed] for the next decade to uniformly enthusiastic reviews.
"[2] They also published selected songs from their fieldwork, along with Brockway's piano accompaniments, in two collections: Sales figures of these volumes are apparently not available, but Stamler, noting their widespread appearance in library catalogs, infers that they sold well.
[32] Wyman commented in her article on the nature of folk song fieldwork: Folk-song gathering, to be well and thoroughly accomplished, must be done slowly and deliberately, regardless of the passing of time.
[57] In the first half of the 1920s Wyman frequently appeared on concert programs with the early music specialist, harpsichordist, and pedagogue Arthur Whiting, usually in college and university settings.
[67] Loraine Wyman left a substantial scholarly library, "an extensive collection of books about folk music and folklore mostly of the British Isles, the United States and France.
The Australian composer-pianist Percy Grainger, who had a strong interest in folk music and did field work on folk songs himself, performed the Wyman-Brockway settings in public,[2] and noted a kind of emotional connection to the published volumes: he performed the songs in Lonesome Tunes at home with his mother (taking the vocal part on a saxophone or sarrusophone), and said of the book after her death "in other ways, also, a most sacred relic to me".
She shone a popular light on Appalachian culture, and she presented the material in concert and in books in a way that, according to all available accounts, was designed to both inform and delight her readers and listeners while treating her sources with dignity and respect.
