Grace Clemons: Music in Early Tryon

Like many women with cosmopolitan backgrounds, Mrs Clemons joined the Lanier Club. Its building constructed in 1905 was, then, a library secondly and a clubhouse primarily. Central space with a fireplace, surmounted by a big niche for the bust of Lanier, poet and flautist for Baltimore’s Peabody Orchestra, professor at Johns Hopkins and theoretician on the nature of sound. This assembly room served the Tryon public for lectures, art shows, and music events. Even teas and private evening parties, smoking permitted. Two or three afternoons per month, members and their guests gathered for club programs. During 1910 the programs included a talk “Musical Conditions of Shakespeare’s Time” with interpretations of songs from the Bard’s plays, another a concert of songs by a children’s chorus and a harp solo, another a lecture “Scotch Poetry and Music” followed by Bertha Payne Newell singing Scots airs with piano accompaniment.

In years following music at Lanier Club figured prominently. A program about poets Browning was interspersed with piano selections composed by Chopin, Liszt and W.C.E. Seeboeck (Vienna-born student of Brahms who in 1880 immigrated to Chicago, wrote the opera The Missing Link and some 200 other works, and died there in 1907). Their innovative education program about bird species included bird songs by the singing class of professional artist Lois Wilcox and bird music on piano played by Isabel Missildine; she led Tryon’s Ladies Glee Club and they sang for other programs. In 1914 Wilcox presented a hilarious lecture-recital Bluebeard: A Musical Fantasy, parody published that year in New York. (Its author Kate Douglas Wiggins explains “herein lies the story of the miraculous discovery in a hat box of an unpublished opera by Richard Wagner dealing in most unique and climacteric manner with feminism, trial, marriage, bigamy and polygamy; its libretto and leit-motive now revealed with religious zeal.” Her dedication was “to my friend Walter Damrosch,” famous champion of new American music.)

Not all performers at Lanier Club events were women. Flute duets were played by brothers Harold and Lawrence Doubleday. Negro spirituals were sung by Arthur Alden Carver, recently returned from New York where he went for advanced voice training and to sing with professional choirs in Manhattan. Dwight Smith, actor recently retired from Broadway, would appear for dramatic readings. Conversely, women members would, not uncommonly, present on serious and even alarming topics.

Grace Clemons’ debut at Lanier was during a program of piano compositions in 1922, at which she performed solo. The club’s instrument was a grand, not an upright. At the time she was managing Ye Basket Tea Shop at Mountain Industries, a non-profit organization to benefit “mountain people” and less-fortunate residents in the area. In ’23 she accompanied a Thanksgiving vocal recital, and served the tea at Lanier Club.

Whether Grace and her husband had known Mazzanovich in the late 1890s in Chicago we don’t know. Grace and Lawrence were identical in age. But we infer they got to know each other rather well as Tryon Choral Society conducted its innumerable rehearsals that spring, under the expert and painstaking direction of Mrs. Fry. Grace Clemons sang alto in the chorus. Lawrence sang bass. Some people had been skeptical of such an ambitious program, given the small size of the Tryon community, but its concert at the new Episcopal Parish House auditorium was a grand success. Mixed chorus sang Orpheus with His Lute by Edward German (its lyrics taken from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII), The Plume Grass by Russian composer Yuri Sakhnovsky, The Brook by Arkangelsky, Heav’n by Burleigh (a Black spiritual first published in 1921). Women’s chorus sang Odel mio amato ben by Donaudy and Page’s Song by Harold Osborne Smith. Among the solo numbers, Mazzanovich sang Tchaikovsky’s The Pilgrim and Koenemann’s When the King Went Forth to War. The long program concluded with Gounod’s 1871 motet Gallia.

The 1925 concert is memorable especially for a violin solo by “mountain fiddler” Fannie Lindsey. She was 18, able to read and write, though married to an illiterate man who lived by Glassy Mountain. It’s not likely Fannie could read a musical score by Belgian composer Charles de Beriot, his three-movement Ninth concerto of 1858. It’s thought – though not documented – that Grace Clemons made Lindsey’s performance possible by coaching her in technique of classical repertoire. Clemons’ work with Mountain Industries inspired her interest in broadening cultural opportunities for Appalachia’s people; Fannie made her Tryon public debut that February playing violin at Lanier Club. (The club, a year prior, hosted a mountain songs program sung by girls from Saluda, masterminded by Miss Sarah Padgett working as Polk County demonstration agent.) Ear-splitting applause followed Fannie Lindsey’s 15-minute performance of the famous De Beriot. Polk County News reviewer gushed “Music is expression of thought in sound of another kind. Like an actor with a new role, Mrs Lindsey strained every nerve to make interpretations as impressive and attractive as possible taking advantage of contrast, climax, emphasis etc. in order to play upon emotions of audience. Her capacity for feeling, imagination and analysis, her sincerity in rendering with every movement, together with excellent phrasing and ability to modulate her instrument made us feel presence of beauty, the advent of new creation, the irresistible appeal to highest instincts of the soul . . .”

Arthur Carver’s professional career was coming along moderately well. Tryon Chorus planned and meticulously rehearsed several popular pieces of that era for the baritone as their featured soloist. Shortly before the concert Carver was stricken by one of his epileptic seizures, which brought about his death at 41 just six years later. Mazzanovich stepped in to perform other songs he knew well. The 1925 concert was another success, contributing to Tryon’s reputation for musical excellence.

By his first wife from Sweden he had six children, by his second from Nebraska he had ten, including daughters Myrtle and Mary Elda born in Tryon. Sons, brothers and nephews were swept into Stephen Case’s enthusiasm for pianos, establishing retail enterprises and maintaining fine instruments. (Case Brothers Pianos yet exists in Spartanburg S.C. in fifth generation of ownership, with its fine private collection of unusual pianos going back to the 19th century.)

In 1925 Grace Clemons purchased a spacious lot in Gillette Woods, a new high-quality development on hilly land assembled by Connecticut playwright William Gillette. It was intended each home would be unique and architect-designed with landscapes to preserve the bosky character, especially mature trees and native shrubs. Her friend from Lanier club was married to imaginative architect John Foster Searles. He was well-off and took on clients only if the project interested him. Grace’s goals were unusual. The picturesque home Searles designed for her is one-of-a-kind, the only historic residence in Polk County before World War II created for the specific desires of a musician.

Most important, of course, was her custom Clemons & Crane piano. Unlike most houses where locating the instrument was secondary, where it would go was paramount. From the front entrance (back then in Tryon visitors would often just let themselves in) one would see Grace’s face across her black walnut piano, and she’d greet them without moving her hands from the keyboard. If a fire were burning in the rustic fireplace, Grace could observe it from her playing position. There, cozy seating was arranged for visitors. To her right a pretty staircase with a landing led upstairs. Behind her piano bench came sunshine through the sunroom, while a long wall to her left (the long side of the grand piano) was pierced only by one small window, so as not to allow south-exposure sun to shine on her instrument at any time of any day. Solar gain on the long stucco-over-tile wall would help to warm the house on cold days, while a retractable awning over the adjacent terrace shielded the piano wall from heat on hot days. All such features, and many more for the Clemons house, obviously were thought through carefully, yet executed in a manner that seems perfectly natural and comfortable.

Clemons’ broad flagstone terrace, with low fieldstone seating walls, is set upon a platform raised above a down-slope by a barely-detected retaining wall. Access from the house is via French doors from the sunroom, and by gently curving flagstone walks to the front entrance and to a private garden with a stone ring to encircle a sundial or a bird bath. To enhance the feeling of discreet privacy, entrance to her house from the narrow lane is down a quaint, short flight of stone stairs nestled into the ground. Around all of this is a combination of indigenous and cultivars, what remain of lush plants that must surely have been planned by Sheridan expertly.

Upon completion of her attractive new house, Clemons’ widowed mother resettled with her from Wisconsin, where Grace grew up near Lake Geneva. Susan Downs was a delightful old lady, a college graduate who loved the countryside, a fine companion. Her misfortune was to fall and break her hip. Complications ensued, and at age 91 she died of pneumonia. The body was shipped to Wisconsin for burial in February 1928.

During this period many of Grace’s musical Tryon friends became enamored of horticulture, garden planning and forest conservation. Now that women could vote in elections they became, as the Twenties went on, ever more involved in social and political matters. Grace Clemons raised money for tuberculosis research. She was among donors to benefit Tryon Colored School; indeed one of her forebears had been a noted antebellum Abolitionist in New York state and actually had conducted a “station” on the Underground Railroad. Issues of racial justice were, even in the South, increasingly demanding more attention and more response – while Jazz and Black music generally were becoming more performed, more understood, more a mainstream trend in America’s musical life.

The next year the Great Depression hit America with full force. Tryon was fortunate, compared to many communities, but it was not spared. Soon the Lanier Club found itself weak financially. It pulled out of the national Federation of Women’s Clubs and took in male members for the first time. A sign of changing times was when Benno von Kahlden, long-time Tryon teacher and viticulturist, presented his “concert” for a Lanier program in 1930. It wasn’t live music, it was a session where he brought in his favorite music recordings and played them on a Victrola. We can only imagine Grace’s angst, as her ex-husband’s piano firm had gone bust, so now in Chicago he was selling music records for Victrola to make ends meet. That year Kay Swift became the first woman to score a hit musical for Broadway, Fine and Dandy.

Other intriguing developments in Black American music occurred in Tryon while aging Grace Clemons was surviving the Thirties, besides the phenomena that many young white people were dancing to Jazz and buying saxophones. A young Charlestonian, DuBose Heyward, who’d once come up to Tryon to study art and later switched his creative field to writing, had published his hit novel Porgy that was made into a play. In 1934 he invited composer George Gershwin from New York to join him and his playwright wife, Dorothy, to spend the summer pleasantly at Folly Island near Charleston. Gershwin there decided to write the music for Porgy and Bess and went to work seriously on it.

Then as now, a road trip from the South Carolina coast to the Northeast could be a bore, so why not stop someplace nice? Heyward’s mother liked Tryon very much. She’d twice successfully produced ticketed programs about Gullah culture at its Episcopal Parish House. DuBose hadn’t been there for a while, but when he stayed in the North Carolina mountains his go-to physician was Dr. Jervey at Tryon who came from Charleston. Margaret Law, artistic wife of handsome young Tryon artist Homer Ellertson, had deep roots in Charleston and so her husband had painted and exhibited there. Homer had collaborated with an architect named Searles, to design Modernist wrought iron decorative elements for his unusual Tryon houses. The Ellertson home and studio El Taarn in Gillette Woods was really unique, jazzy it was said, and it had been featured in books and in a national design magazine. They had a standing invitation to stop by Tryon, for a visit to El Taarn.

So they did. The Ellertsons welcomed them warmly and the six enjoyed a languid luncheon on a beautiful Tryon day. The editor of the Tryon Daily Bulletin got wind of their get-together, but reported it next day as simply another social occasion when Tryonites were entertaining interesting out-of-town friends. From her house close by, Grace Clemons probably did not see nor hear anything. No doubt she was quietly gardening or playing something she liked on her piano.