Mary Wheeler Ballad Collection

Born in 1892 in Paducah, Kentucky, Ms. Wheeler was the daughter of a well-known attorney.  It was part of a young society woman's education to be trained in music, but Ms. Wheeler took this training and made it her life’s work.  She is best known for two books she authored: Kentucky Mountain Folk Songs (1937) and Roustabout Songs: A Collection of Ohio River Valley Songs (1939). In a time when a young woman’s training was to prepare her for her “life’s work” of marriage, the music educator became one of the first career women in her hometown.  Ms. Wheeler studied in New York and Chicago and in 1925, she began her studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.  Her summers were devoted to her studies and the other months of the year, she was much in demand as a vocal performer.  She obtained her B.A. in voice in 1933 and her M.A. in musicology in 1937. Taking a year away from her studies, Ms. Wheeler taught music at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Knott County, Kentucky beginning in the fall of 1926.  It was during this time that she collected the tunes she eventually published in the late 1930’s.    She made many friends among area residents in the course of her ballad and song collecting. She was very concerned that she accomplish an authentic documentation of the tunes she had been entrusted with. Because children at the Settlement School were from different areas, there were often differing versions of the same ballad which Wheeler painstakingly transcribed by hand (see Wheeler’s Mountain Notebook). Upon leaving Hindman, Ms. Wheeler began to include Hindman area songs in her repertoire, and the public was eager to hear her sing them to the accompaniment of the dulcimer -- an instrument native to parts of eastern Kentucky. In pursuing her master’s degree, Wheeler turned to a subject she had been familiar with all of her life: the Ohio River.  Raised within walking distance of the river, part of Ms. Wheeler’s childhood was seeing the packet boats and hearing the music of the black “roustabouts” that loaded and unloaded cargo from these boats.        As she grew older, she was perceptive in noticing that that paddle boats were disappearing and those most familiar with this way of life were also aging.  Ms. Wheeler was aware that as African-American people as a whole progressed socially, there might not be much of an interest in preserving this genre of music -- the lyrics of which are in dialect and which spoke of a time some may have preferred to forget. None of Ms. Wheeler's notes from her roustabout songs are in this collection; however, there are one or two newspaper clippings on the subject of “Negro Music”.        Ms. Wheeler spent many years as a faculty member of the music department of Paducah Community College (formerly known as Paducah Junior College).