Columbus Monthly / November 2010 / Anne Grimes's greatest hits

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Anne Grimes's greatest hits

A giant in the field of folk music died before she could finish her life's work. Her daughters took up the cause.

Even when a life is long, it still can be too short. Such was the case with Anne Grimes.

When she was past 90, Grimes, a major figure in folk music, set out to compile a book based on her extensive research. Sadly, she died before finishing. But her four daughters worked together to complete that job for her.

It wasn’t an easy labor of love. Her daughters have scattered to Amherst, Massachusetts (Sara Grimes), Chagrin Falls (Jennifer Grimes Kay), Brooklyn, New York (Mary Grimes), and Hotchkiss, Colorado (Mindy Grimes), so they had to advance the project entirely by e-mail.

The book—Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music, published by Ohio University Press—is a collection of songs and reminiscences of 40 people out of the thousands that Grimes amassed. The words belong to Anne; the selections were chosen by her daughters.

Tucked in an envelope on the back page is a CD sampler of her recordings of folk songs and stories. “The CD was one of the most difficult parts,” Sara Grimes says. “It was really hard to choose the final collection.” They listened to more than 1,000 tape recordings in their mother’s files and selected 33 for the CD, including songs performed by Bob Gibson, Pete Seeger and Carl Sandburg. The sisters call the CD “Anne Grimes’s greatest hits.”

The final choices required unanimous agreement among the sisters. “That took a long time,” Sara says. “But it makes the book richer.” They didn’t have a problem finding a publisher, however. “We sent the material to three or four publishers,” Sara says. “The first responses came within two days. All of them were positive.” The sisters chose Ohio University Press because “they shared our vision of the book,” Sara says.

Born in Columbus in 1912 to Clarence and Fanny Hagerman Laylin, Anne was immersed in music from an early age. She started piano lessons at 5 and soon was part of the family chamber music evenings, teaming with her mother on piano. Her sister and brother played violin and her father, an Ohio State University law professor, played cello. For many years, the family home on Indianola Avenue resounded with music. She graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1934 with bachelor’s degrees in arts and music, then took graduate courses in music history at OSU. In the early 1940s, she hosted a music series on WOSU radio and during World War II she was the music and dance critic for the Columbus Citizen.

Grimes dated her start in folklore from the time in the 1940s when a scheduled guest canceled an appearance on her program. “To fill the time,” she recalled, “I sang some of my grandmother’s songs. The response was tremendous, with listeners calling in similar passed-down family and community songs.”

Starting in 1953, Grimes lugged a 50-pound reel-to-reel tape recorder around most of the 88 counties in the state to collect songs and stories from hundreds of people in their homes. Julie Elman, who kept a blog while designing the book for Ohio University Press, notes, “It’s remarkable to think about what Anne did, on a practical level.” The people and their songs, she adds, “would have melted into obscurity if it wasn’t for Anne and her tenacity and drive to document their music and stories.”

Those people, the Grimes daughters write, “were representative of the complexity and diversity of Buckeye tradition. They were homemakers, poets, farmers, educators, businesspeople, lawyers, ministers, artists, domestic workers, and politicians.” Her encounters with them were limited to single visits or launched the start of long and warm associations.

While collecting these songs, Anne added them to her repertoire and performed them for groups in concert-lectures, always ending with the question: “Does my singing remind you of any songs from your own family?” Often they did, and she would have another home to visit, another interview to record.

As a result, Grimes came across a number of rare folk songs first catalogued by Francis James Child (known by folklore scholars as the Child Ballads), reaching into the 19th century and earlier. She also found a number of bawdy songs, too off-color for Child to have included in his compilation. Her daughters write that she considered them “some of the most important and choice of her early material.” Although she did not perform them often (out of deference to the age and sensibilities of her audience), “she appreciated them on many levels and researched them to their Renaissance and even medieval roots.”

Grimes’s forays around Ohio took her to homes that still didn’t have electricity. She would have to find the nearest church or school to tape the person’s song or story. The trips yielded wonderful finds. For instance, she located a retired blacksmith in Ray, a minuscule town in Jackson County, who sang for her a song he learned from a Civil War veteran, pausing periodically to use the spittoon at his feet.

Her husband, James Grimes (whom she usually referred to as “Jimmy”), was her constant partner and booster. The Grimes daughters write that he “helped her in many ways, including designing the costumes she wore in performance, accompanying her on collecting trips and locating dulcimers.” He took most of the photographs included in the book.

The family resided in Upper Arlington and James was a professor of fine arts at OSU. Along with their brother, Steve, the girls grew up in an active and rich environment. Mindy remembers sitting on the lap of Albert Graham, the founder of 4-H Club, hearing him sing his version of “Yankee Doodle.” Jennifer recalls OSU graduate students from all over the world coming to their home. “Music was a part of it,” she says. Anne would perform, and “sometimes we performed with her,” Jennifer says. “We’d wear old-timey costumes and hoop skirts.” Anne’s selection of her repertoire was guided by listening to their spontaneous music at home. “If I hear the kids humming the tune of a song around the house,” one of them remembers her saying, “I know it’s a good one.”

Early in her development as a folklorist, Grimes became entranced with the dulcimer, a favored instrument in Appalachian music because it is easy to play and well suited for home concerts. Dulcimers can be crafted from materials that are near at hand; one person told her that his had been made from an old bedpost. She soon switched from playing the autoharp to a dulcimer and began collecting them. Her art professor husband had a great eye for finding beautiful ones. At final count, she owned 31 vintage dulcimers, all made before 1940. She displayed many of them on the walls of her home. As she worked on a new folk song, she would take one of the dulcimers and play it. She favored “an old walnut dulcimer she found in Middletown,” her daughters write, because of its wide fretwork and rich tone.

In 1957, she recorded for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the record label for the Smithsonian Institution, the album Ohio State Ballads: History through Folk Songs: Anne Grimes, with Dulcimer. (It is still available as a CD.) Five years later, when James Grimes became chair of the art department at Denison University, the family moved to Granville and settled in a stately 1834 home. By that time, Anne was so well-known among folkies that they sought her out. “People would just show up at the door,” Sara says.

“It was a wonderful time,” Jennifer says. “Granville was such a perfect place for my mother.” Anne remained in her Granville home until 1995, when she moved to a retirement community, Kendal at Oberlin. She died in January 2004, just short of her 92nd birthday.

The book recalls a time when music didn’t come from a radio, a CD or an iPod. It came directly from people moving through their day. It was a natural expression of their lives. Grimes recalls in the book the words of her Richland County maternal grandmother, Adeline Hughes Hagerman: “We sang about our work indoors and outdoors. At any time and in all seasons when out-of-doors, one could hear a boy as he was plowing, harrowing, cultivating, husking or hoeing. We sang about our work in the kitchen, in the sitting room in the afternoon as we sewed, and in the winter evenings. It was not planned singing—oh no. Someone would unconsciously hum a tune, another in the same unconscious manner would add bass or alto, and before the end of the verse there would be a full quartet.”

Grimes’s extensive files and tapes are in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and the Ohio Historical Society has duplicates of her tape recordings. After her death, all of her dulcimers were donated to the Smithsonian and now they are at the National Museum of American History. During her lifetime, she received honors from the historical society, the Ohio State University School of Music and the Ohio Wesleyan University Alumni Association.

But perhaps her most fitting memorial is Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music. Certainly, she would have been proud of her daughters’ work.

Dennis Read is a freelance writer who contributes frequently to Columbus Monthly.