Though he is the one everyone remembers, Stephen Collins Foster was not the only U.S. songwriter of the 19th Century. This week a lesser, yet gifted writer of old-time songs, dead for 75 years, was honored by having his most famed song broadcast by many a radio station. The songwriter: chin-whiskered Benjamin Russell Hanby of Ohio. The song: Darling Nelly Gray.
Songwriter Hanby was just the right age, 23 and a sophomore at small Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, when he wrote Darling Nelly Gray, in 1856. What caused it was a boyhood memory:...
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