do you remember sweet alice?
Alice Wilder? Alice Ingalls? No, Sweet Alice remembered by Ben Bolt in the popular song of 1848.

Nelson Kneass, who adapted a German tune to the poem by Thomas Dunn English, died in 1868 and is buried in Chilocothe, Missouri, which is not too far west of Rothville. Now, I'm not trying to suggest anything between the Ingalls family and Kneass, although I naturally wonder how much news sifted around about things like that at the time. But in order to pin down Kneass's death year to my own satisfaction (I kept seeing that he died in 1868 or 1869), I went back to old cemetery records and old newspapers and I got bogged down in reading everything about the 1922 effort of Chilocothe citizens to erect a monument in Edgewood cemetery to honor Kneass. Apparently he was so famous that fans had chipped away at the small marker placed at the grave by his wife, and it was no longer readable.

This sort of tangential LH research takes on a life of its own very quickly. In looking for the basics about a LH song, I'm suddenly printing out proclamations from the Governor of Missouri and thinking about buying 1870s sheet music and an old 78 rpm record when I don't even own anything to play it on.

Just who was Ben Bolt, anyway?
- posted by pioneergirl at 4:28 PM