From the Shelves

Donald Davidson and the Heart of Old Hickory

One of my first “serious” book purchases was The Heart of Old Hickory and Other Stories of Tennessee by Will Allen Dromgoole, dated 1895. While I collect Tennessee-related items, I “needed” this one because it was Donald Davidson’s personal copy, and Ms. Dromgoole inscribed it to “Mr. Donald Davidson, Singer of beautiful songs: a tongue of silver and a heart of gold, Will Allen Dromgoole—Nashville, 1929.”

Ms. Dromgoole, born in 1860 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was nurtured to share her father's love for the outdoors. The Middle Tennessee landscape fostered her affinity for the land and its people. For nearly 30 years, she chronicled the lives of Middle Tennesseans in her "Song and Story" column for the Nashville Banner. 

During World War I, at age 57, she volunteered for the Navy, possibly becoming the first woman in its ranks and likely the oldest to enlist. Returning to the Nashville Banner after the war, she became literary editor in 1922, a role she held until her death in 1934. As I wrote in a previous post, Davidson edited the books page for the Nashville Tennessean from 1924 to 1930, and I guarantee their paths crossed more than once in their editorial duties.

Over her prolific career, Dromgoole published 13 books, 7,500 poems, and 5,000 stories and essays. In 1930, she was named poet laureate of the Poetry Society of the South.

Back to the “silver-tongued Singer of beautiful songs.” If you’ve read some of my other pieces on Davidson, I mentioned his love of music and ballads. At Vanderbilt, he taught the course “The British and American Traditional Ballad” and actually sang the ballads, which was quite unorthodox at the time. I read somewhere that he was happiest when singing and playing music. George Pullen Jackson thanked Davidson and Dromgoole in his Spiritual Folks-Songs of Early America for providing him with new tunes and stories.

It's a genuine honor to have this bit of Tennessee's literary past tucked away on my shelf.

Sources:

https://rutherfordtnhistory.org/dromgoole-a-rutherford-original/

http://tnency.utk.tennessee.edu/entries/will-allen-dromgoole/