On January 10, 1820, Amasa Fuller shot and killed Palmer Warren in his office in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Fuller had been engaged to a young lady when he left for Brookeville, Indiana, in late 1819. That December, Amasa received a letter from Palmer Warren, signed by Fuller’s future wife, renouncing her love for Fuller and returning his ring. In response, he left Brookville on foot and arrived on January 7th, 1820. He borrowed two pistols and challenged Warren to a duel on the 10th. When Warren refused, he shot him dead and supposedly proclaimed, “I have been ridding the earth of a vile reptile! I glory in the deed!” Fuller was charged with murder. Despite six defense attorneys, he was convicted and executed on March 31st, 1820. The case became a local sensation. Murder ballads are cautionary tales. Most stories are warnings to women about love and deceitful men. Themes of broken engagements, cheating scandals, and witchcraft are found in most murder ballads that survive today. They served not only as a way to spread tantalizing news, but as a reminder to their singers of the passive role women should take in society to prevent these bloody crimes.

Murder ballads have been an American tradition since the founding of the country. They were made popular in Europe by the development of broadsides in the 16th century. Broadsides were cheap pamphlets and posters that were printed to make news accessible to everyone. They took stories—often true crime—and set them to poems and songs. While not everyone could read, many could sing using their memory. Broadsides were posted in taverns and public spaces for entertainment and educational purposes. Early American colonists brought broadsides and their musical tradition with them.

The story of Fuller and Warren was turned into a murder ballad in 1820. It became so popular that over forty-four versions have been found throughout the United States and Canada. Yet the lady's name, Catherine Farrar, was only identified years after the incident. In the ballad, she carries the burden of the murder, not Fuller. “Fuller and Warren” is Indiana’s continuation of balladry tradition.

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In 1837, Presbyterians in the United States began to split over theological issues. The “Old School” Presbyterians of the first church wanted to maintain their religious views and were more tolerant of slavery. The “New School” supported abolition and reform. On November 13, 1838, the Second Presbyterian Church was created in Indianapolis. Fifteen members of the First Presbyterian Church founded it. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most infamous preachers in the United States in the 19th century and brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, became its first pastor. Beecher had initially been a pastor to the First Presbyterian Church in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, but accepted the position at the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis in 1839. He was able to build the church into the second-largest Presbyterian Church in the state before he left in 1847 to preach in New York.

Beecher believed that music was an important way of teaching spiritual beliefs. He said that “there is more sound instruction given to a congregation by [proper use of music] than by almost any other [means].” His brother, Charles Beecher, led the choir of the well-known Church. Under his leadership, there were between forty and fifty singers. They often gave public performances. The song “Man the Lifeboat, Brother” was a favorite. Charles was a skilled organist and violinist and would accompany the choir. For the new church, he acquired a pump organ that had to be pumped by hand by the organist. The church would also bring to Indiana one of the first large concerts featuring music by renowned composers like Mozart and Haydn in December 1842. In fact, Henry Ward Beecher sang with the choir’s performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass during that concert.

The Second Presbyterian Church was not the only congregation that placed importance on the use of music in worship in Indianapolis. The First Baptist Church, established in 1822, had a choir. They would have the first pipe organ in the city installed in 1863. The First Presbyterian Church had a flute and string orchestra that was started around 1846 and lasted five years. Nearly every singer, music teacher, and orchestral director was linked to churches or church unions in the 19th century. The foundation of music in Indiana’s capital is built on the work of dedicated preachers, teachers, and performers through worship.

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On June 16, 1859, a Methodist camp was founded in the Indianapolis District of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Located in London, Indiana, part of Shelby County, a group of twenty-eight ministers, Methodists, and laymen founded a campground in Indianapolis. Originally, the area was a village named Farmersville, which was platted as a stop on the Cincinnati and Indianapolis railroads. It was later renamed Acton and was incorporated into Indianapolis. The campground was quite successful. In 1864, it was used as a Union hospital during the Civil War. The camp mysteriously burned to the ground on August 4, 1864. According to official reports it was done by “enemies of the county.” It is also likely that those living in Acton burned it down because they didn’t want a military hospital near their homes. By 1866, it was completely rebuilt and the town flourished. By the 1880s, Acton had multiple churches, stores, mills, and around three hundred residents.

One of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century camp meetings was worship through music. Camp meetings were an essential part of the spread of religion in rural populations. While Acton effectively had its own church, and many nearby, not every town did. Music, especially shape-note music, was a central part of the sermons. Shape notes are not only a way of printing music, but they were also a way of teaching it. By using shapes to represent intervals, anyone could follow along regardless of their ability to read music. The first shape note book was printed in 1801, and they became wildly popular in the United States. The Methodist Harmonist, published by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1833, was one of these books.

Acton was not the only campground. According to a lecture in 1881 in Acton, there were campgrounds in Wayne County and Henry County in the 1830s, and camp meetings were held throughout the state. Music was a part of their sermons from the beginning. Father James Havens, in 1837, led a prayer circle at a meeting near Marion County. He appointed men to “bring out the people and come singing to the circle.” While it is not directly called a shape-note performance, circle singing was the primary way of conducting them. Havens reportedly “mounted a bench and gave a most powerful exhortation” and led the congregation in singing the hymn “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy.” Havens, among other early preachers, would later come to the Acton Campground. The tradition of spreading the gospel through music was undoubtedly brought with them.

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In 1854, six German men founded the Indianapolis Maennerchor or “Men’s Choir”. Their members formed the group to keep their German heritage alive in Indianapolis. Singing songs from Germany, their first public concert was on May 28, 1855. Within a year, they had turned from a small amateur choir to a recognizable group in the German American music scene. They performed in the National Saengerfest, or song festival, in Cincinnati in 1856. Almost eight hundred guests and forty-one musical societies attended a year later when they hosted the event in Indianapolis.

Nineteenth-century German immigrants in the United States made large contributions to American culture. The Maennerchor was just one of the recreational traditions brought over from Germany. German immigrants became one of the biggest immigrant populations in Indianapolis. They built large buildings meant to house social events. Sports clubs, playgrounds, and even bowling alleys were influenced by German culture. Concert halls for singing societies and the theatre were essential to their lives. By the late nineteenth century, men’s choirs were putting on performances in Indianapolis for thousands of audience members. Almost 50 years later, the National Saengerfest included seventy-five thousand visitors. It solidified Indianapolis as a site of German American culture.

The Maennerchor was not the only German performance group in Indianapolis. A symphony orchestra was created in 1895. Other societies like the Liederkranz, Frohsinn, and Lyra Society formed as well, inspired by the Maennerchor. A Mrs. Louis Schulmeyer organized the ladies’ section of the Indianapolis Social Turnverein in her home in 1878.

The Maennerchor had their final performance in 2018. Yet their legacy, and that of other German musical groups, continues in the orchestras, choirs, and music schools still in the city.

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Music festivals in the 19th century were grand and well attended. Tomlinson Hall, a large civic building, was built in the 1870s and 1880s right next to the City Market near Monument Circle. The building was over 20,000 square feet and designed to seat 4,200 guests and 650 people on stage. For context, the Murat Theatre in the Old National Center can seat just over 2,600. Hilbert Circle Theatre, a few streets away from where Tomlinson Hall stood, can only hold 1,660.

The Indianapolis May Music Festivals were just one of the festivals held there. At least nine were held between 1889 and 1897. Conductor Carl Barus put on the festival. He first came to Indianapolis in 1882 to work with the Maennerchor. Barus conducted the opening performance at Tomlinson Hall in 1886 and became involved in planning the May Music Festival. The festival wasn’t just small bands and singers. An entire festival orchestra, chorus, and various soloists performed pieces by classical and contemporary composers. It was not necessarily an orchestra from Indiana. Orchestras came from all over the country to perform works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and other composers still listened to today.

The festival featured many notable singers of the era. Clementine De Vere performed as a soloist in 1890. It was her first time performing in Indianapolis, though she had done stints in New York and Europe well before this festival. The program even compared her to Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” who was one of the most highly renowned singers of the 19th century. Italo Campanini, one of the most successful operatic tenors of the late 19th century, performed in the festival in 1892. The program said that “his successful career is too well known to be republished here…Campanini is one of the greatest singers of this age.” Each festival had around ten soloists, each with at least a local following. Having an event this large was important to the culture of the city. The 1890 pamphlet said that “Indianapolis needs the Music Festival for the same reason that the West needs the World’s Fair. A great undertaking is a stimulus to any population.”

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By 1915, the Starr Piano Company decided to start recording the discs to be played on those phonographs: records. Records were first issued under the Starr name until a separate division, Gennett Records, managed by Henry Gennett’s sons Harry, Clarence, and Fred, was established in 1917. The first recording studio was in Manhattan, and in 1921 the Richmond studio was established within the Starr Piano Company manufacturing complex. The studio was 125 feet long and 30 feet wide and once resided about midway along the current Walk of Fame, which begins to the right of the Logo Building, and features 34 medallions honoring some of the musicians who once recorded with Gennett. The first inductee to this Walk of Fame, Louis Armstrong, remembers a Mohawk rug being placed on the floor of the recording studio for sound proofing. The Gennett label concentrated on genres of music commonly deemed neither profitable nor potentially popular enough for the big record labels. Throughout the early and mid-1920s a stream of artists from the Midwest and South came to Richmond’s “Starr Valley”, including future legends like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Gene Autry, and Hoagy Carmichael among many others.

Recording the Ku Klux Klan

Gennett Records was among the earliest to record both African American and white musical styles in a largely segregated industry during a period when the Ku Klux Klan had a stronghold in Indiana. On October 5, 1923, King Oliver's Jazz Band, which included Louis Armstrong among their ranks, for example, recorded a second series of discs at the Richmond studio while a large group of Ku Klux Klan members gathered in Richmond’s Glen Miller Park for a parade. The Richmond Item had predicted it would be a “mammoth parade” with an airplane “swinging a fiery cross” as the grand finale. The following day, the Richmond Item reported that over 30,000 people were in attendance. In addition to producing records for consumer sales, Gennett also had a cash recording business, where anyone could pay to rent a studio, record their own material, and have it pressed into private records. Musical groups associated with the Ku Klux Klan, such as the “100% Americans” and the Vaughan Quartet, were among those who participated in this side of Gennett’s business. Their recordings had red labels with gold lettering, were not listed in Gennett catalogs, and were sent directly to Klan headquarters in Indianapolis. The Cradle of Recorded Jazz Richmond has often been called the “Cradle of Recorded Jazz,” yet Gennett produced a wide range of music. Many different grassroots genres had their earliest recordings created in the Starr Valley, including Gospel, blues, spirituals, country, and hillbilly. With all these different individuals and groups coming and going from the studio, Gennett’s story gives a snapshot into the vast diversity of music, culture, and politics in the United States in the 1920s.

The Cradle of Recorded Jazz

Richmond has often been called the “Cradle of Recorded Jazz,” yet Gennett produced a wide range of music. Many different grassroots genres had their earliest recordings created in the Starr Valley, including Gospel, blues, spirituals, country, and hillbilly. With all these different individuals and groups coming and going from the studio, Gennett’s story gives a snapshot into the vast diversity of music, culture, and politics in the United States in the 1920s.

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By the 1870s, more business flowed toward Richmond, Indiana. In 1872, George Trayser, a renowned piano maker from Germany who had previously maintained factories in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, and had been awarded several U.S. patents for his innovative piano technology, moved his operations along the Whitewater Gorge. This move, funded by local businessmen James M. Starr and Richard Jackson, marked the beginning of Richmond’s music industry. By this time, pianos had become an extremely important part of not only public performances, but also the parlor in the home. Pianos had been expensive and hard to acquire in the early part of the century. This made upright and smaller pianos by companies like Starr favored. Pianos could be used for social gatherings, education for children, and family bonding. This only added to the success of the Starr Company. While the name of the piano factory changed several times as the business was passed from investor to investor—the Trayser Piano Company, the Chase Piano Company, the James M. Starr and Co., and finally, in 1893, the Starr Piano Company – its success and the quality of its award-winning pianos remained constant. By 1915, Starr Piano Company showrooms dotted the Midwest. In addition to Starr pianos, the factory manufactured and sold pianos bearing brand names including Duchess, Remington, Richmond, and Trayser.    The Rise of the Gennett Family  In the 1880s, a Nashville, Tennessee, piano and organ retailer began selling Starr pianos across the south. This proved to be an eventful partnership when, in 1893, two employees from this retailer, Henry Gennett and his father-in-law John Lumsden, became investors in the Starr Piano Company. Ultimately, Henry Gennett took over the Starr Piano Company and brought his sons Harry, Clarence, and Fred into the operation. Under Gennett’s leadership, the company began diversifying its catalog by adding player pianos and phonographs to its manufacturing line-up in the early 1900s. The company’s facilities continued to grow and expand (the last building was constructed in 1920) to encompass 35 acres and 24 buildings in Richmond.  The Decline of the Starr Piano Company and Present Day  The Great Depression put an end to nearly all musical manufacturing for the Starr Piano Company. The sprawling complex fell into disrepair, and most of the buildings were torn down in the 1980s. The land that once held the Starr Piano Factory is now nestled in Whitewater Valley Gorge Park, which boasts nature trails and picnic areas around what is now called the Starr Gennett Historic Site. The only remaining building, known as the Starr Gennett or “Logo” Building, was saved after a major fire in 1993. The once six-story building has been stabilized and transformed into an amphitheater and is used for various cultural events and festivals.   Today, the Starr Gennett Foundation, in collaboration with the Richmond Parks Department and community investors, works to keep the spirit of this remarkable company alive.  

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Howard Hoagland Carmichael died in Rancho Mirage, California, on December 27, 1981. Although he had lived first in New York City and then in California since 1929, he chose to be buried next to his mother, father, and little sister Joanne in Bloomington.

Hoagy remained fond of his hometown and alma mater throughout his illustrious career. He frequently visited, donated money, and wrote commemorative songs. In 1937 he presented his “Chimes of Indiana” to Indiana University. When the football team won a place at the Rose Bowl in 1968, he wrote “To the Team,” which was performed by the IU Singing Hoosiers choir at several pre-game events. An accomplished amateur painter as well as a musician, Hoagy in the early 1970s executed a 5 foot by 7 foot painting of the “Constitution Elm” tree in Corydon, Indiana, a work that now hangs in the IU Memorial Union. His alma mater conveyed its appreciation of Hoagy’s achievements and loyalty by awarding him an honorary doctorate of music. That 1972 ceremony coincided with the dedication of the university’s new Musical Arts Center, which his donations had helped fund.

After Hoagy’s death, the Musical Arts Center became the site of the January 4, 1982 memorial service for Bloomington’s favorite son. Hundreds of people attended the event. Hoagy’s coffin was surrounded by flowers sent by President Ronald Reagan, Senator Barry Goldwater, and his college fraternity, Kappa Sigma, among others. Former classmate, band member, and fellow Bent Eagle Howard “Wad” Allen spoke of their formative years playing hot jazz and carousing at the Book Nook, and a faculty band played a medley of Carmichael songs. The climax came when soprano Sylvia McNair sang a single chorus of “Star Dust,” with Charles H. Webb, Dean of the School of Music, accompanying her at the piano.

According to biographer Richard Sudhalter, many of Hoagy’s songs express the “idea of home, a place where wandering ceases and the heart comes to rest.” When Hoagy Carmichael returned to Bloomington in 1982 to lie beside his parents and little sister, he finally found that resting place.

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Hoagy attended Indiana University from 1920-1926. His mother and grandmother encouraged him to study law as a more practical and reliable career than music. Hoagy obliged, but as a student at IU he put most of his time and energy into playing at dances, movie theatres, and other venues with his band Carmichael’s Collegians. Encouraged by the virtuoso cornetist Bix Beiderbeck, who first visited Bloomington in spring 1924 and became a close friend and important influence, Hoagy began to compose tunes. In May 1925, he and others recorded two of his songs, ”Washboard Blues” and “Boneyard Shuffle,” at the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana. Still, Hoagy kept to his legal studies, and after graduation in June 1926 he headed to Florida to practice law.

He found a job in the collections department of a Palm Beach law office, though he continued to play music gigs, including a ten-day cruise to Nassau and Havana, where he was excited by the rhumba music he heard there. When he failed the Florida bar exam he also lost his job, and 1927 found him back in Bloomington, once again living at his old fraternity house (Kappa Sigma), playing music and booking bands.   He gave the law one more shot when he joined the firm of Bingham, Mendenhall & Bingham in Indianapolis, and he passed the Indiana bar exam in November 1927. By early 1929, however, he and the firm agreed that his destiny was not as a lawyer, and he was let go. Hoagy spent a few months in Los Angeles. Then in August of 1929 he traveled to New York City with the renowned Paul Whiteman orchestra (whose members included the crooner Bing Crosby). It was here in New York City over the next few years that Hoagy’s career as a composer and performer began to take off. He loved his student days at IU, but his musical extra-curricular activities, rather than his formal studies, were what prepared him for his life’s work.  

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The Book Nook played a major role in Hoagy’s social life and musical career.  A  soda and sandwich shop popular among Indiana University students, the Book Nook was frequented by campus musicians who kept strict control over who was allowed to play the piano on site. When he was still in high school, Hoagy, who was already performing at local dances, began to spend time at the Book Nook as a “townie” outsider. One night he was invited to play the piano alongside Big Man on Campus Batty DeMarcus on saxophone. Hoagy’s performance won Batty’s approval, and he thereafter became an accepted member of the Book Nook inner circle. He became even more ensconced in the Book Nook community after he enrolled at IU in fall 1920.   One influential friend of these years was William Moenkhaus. Moenkhaus had spent much of his childhood in Germany and Switzerland where he was exposed to the Dadaist art movement, with its rejection of bourgeois values and embrace of the absurd. Moenkhaus was a serious student of classical music and composition at IU, but outside of his formal studies he wrote whimsical, avant-garde pieces for The Vagabond campus magazine (under the pseudonym Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhouse). He became the leader of a group of like-minded pranksters and rebels against conformity known as the Bent Eagles. Hot jazz, with its avant-garde, cross-racial overtones, fit in with Moenkhaus’s aesthetic, and Hoagy (a.k.a. Hogwash McCorkle) became a core member of the group, whose home base was the Book Nook. In June 1928, the Bent Eagles staged a Mock Graduation ceremony at the Book Nook, during which Hoagy was awarded a D.D. or "Doctor of Discord" degree. Hoagy, wearing a bathrobe and playing the cornet, participated in the “commencement” parade.

Robert Harris’s Princess Theatre opened on June 23, 1913, with the photoplay Mlle. Coquette accompanied by a six piece orchestra. The program also featured chimes playing Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Rosary.” As the first built-from-the-ground-up-movie theatre in Bloomington, it featured a 400-seat auditorium which sloped in a semi-circle to the screen. During these early days the Princess was the only theatre to feature Edison Talking Pictures, the original “talkies,” along with popular silent films.  In his autobiography Sometimes I Wonder, Hoagy described how his mother Lida helped supplement his father’s income by playing piano in the local movie theatres including the Princess, the Indiana, and the Wonderland. His mother, he said, “was dreamy, musical, and could rattle the eighty-eight keys of a piano with a speed and expertise that showed she wasn’t fooling. She accompanied the flickering celluloid epics of the day, busting out in fragments of Wagner for train wrecks and fires, bringing in the sobbing notes for Way Down East and giving the Indian Love Call its most cloying chords whenever the plot hinted of outdoor men enmeshed in turn-of-the-century sex.”  When vaudeville acts, French girlie shows, and tramp comics came to play at town theatres, Lida Carmichael played accompaniment, knocking out the zoom, zam, boffs, and socks on the theatre piano. Hoagy reminisced that, because she played picture-show music, he was admitted free and considered himself the most important kid in town. Renovations to the Princess 1923-Present An enlarged and remodeled Princess Theatre reopened in 1923. The new theatre doubled the size of the auditorium and began featuring Indiana University jazz orchestras that performed in the evenings. A variety of notable musicians, including Hoagy Carmichael, headed those orchestras.  In 1929, sound systems for Vitaphone and Movietone were installed and the Princess became a “talkie” theatre. The stock market crash and depression closed many theatres throughout the country, but the Princess remained open. The façade of the theatre was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The front half of the auditorium and stage walls collapsed in 1985. This area was razed and condominiums and commercial storeroom facilities were constructed in their place. The area that once contained the foyer and lobby has been renovated throughout the years for use as a variety of restaurants and was most recently home to a restaurant called the Village Pub.

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In his unpublished memoir Jazzbanders, Hoagy said of his hometown, “Bloomington offered everything. Creeks, ponds, rabbits, circuses and wide open spaces. I could cross a dusty street here in my bare feet without the aid of a traffic cop.” The Carmichaels lived close to the IU campus. As a boy Hoagy played baseball in the summer and football in autumn on Dunn Meadow.

According to his account (as reported in Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody), Hoagy's breakthrough as a pianist came one rainy summer day. He was home in the family parlor after his baseball game on Dunn Meadow had been cancelled. The sound of the bells in the IU clock tower playing “Hail to Old I.U.” struck his ears. Suddenly he began to pick out the tune on his mother’s piano. Although he had heard his mother play all of his young life, this was the first time it occurred to him to try playing it himself. His mother had not wanted to impose her interest on the boy. However, when she discovered his own passion and aptitude for the instrument she was thrilled and began teaching him the keyboard. From this point on, Hoagy’s love of music grew apace. The rained-out baseball game on Dunn Meadow proved to be a blessing in disguise!

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The house on Dunn Street is one of several homes where the Carmichael family lived during Hoagy’s childhood. Born in Bloomington on November 22, 1899, Howard Hoagland was the first child and only son of Howard Clyde (“Cyclone”) and Mary Lida Robison Carmichael. Three girls were to follow. The youngest of them, Joanne, died when she was three, much to her brother’s distress. He blamed her death on the family’s poverty and wrote on the back of a photo of her that her loss made him vow, “I would never be broke again in my lifetime.”

Cyclone Carmichael held a number of jobs, none of which seemed to last long or pay well. He periodically uprooted the family in pursuit of better opportunities. In 1904 they moved to Indianapolis but were back in Bloomington two years later. A more dramatic move came in 1910 when Cyclone transported the family to Missoula, Montana. It was a vast, cold, and sparsely populated area that ten-year-old Hoagy found bleak and forbidding. As his eldest son Hoagy Bix later recounted, however, the boy discovered that Black musicians played hot ragtime on pianos in local brothels. Hoagy would steal there to listen to them, without his mother’s knowledge. By spring 1911, much to Hoagy’s relief, his father’s Montana dream had ended. The family was back in Bloomington, first at the Dunn Street house again and then at 325 South Fess Avenue, just two blocks away.

Hoagy’s mother Lida was a skilled pianist. She supplemented the family income by playing at silent movie theaters as well as fraternity and sorority parties on the IU campus, frequently accompanied by her son. Hoagy didn’t reveal a special interest in music, however, until he was eleven years old. He claims he became fascinated with the song “Little Boy Blue” and asked his mother to teach him to sing it. She later taught him to play the piano as well. Their mutual love of music became a lifelong bond between Hoagy and Lida.

In 1916 Cyclone Carmichael once again moved the family to Indianapolis. This disrupted the social and musical life Hoagy, now in high school, had begun to enjoy. He dropped out of Manual High School in Indianapolis when he was sixteen. He then worked a series of jobs on a construction crew, assembly line, and, most grimly, in a slaughterhouse. In early 1919, at the age of eighteen, Hoagy returned to Bloomington. He lived with his Robison grandparents at 907 Atwater St., and re-entered high school, from which he finally graduated in 1920.

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