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The Alleghanians
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Voice and Spirit

The Alleghanians, "Voice and Spirit" (Biographical Booklet)

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Preface

There were probably no trembling knees on stage when James M. Boulard, Richard Dunning, and leader William H. Oakley gave their first public concert under the group name, the Alleghanians.  These three were seasoned performers out of the big, confident New York music community.  Soon thereafter this trio became a quartet through the addition of Miriam G. Goodenow, a talented soprano who was still in her teens and popularly judged to be highly attractive.

The Alleghanians got started giving paid concerts in the spring of 1846 at a time when the principal stars of their genre, the Hutchinson Family, were on tour on the other side of the Atlantic.  The Alleghanians, as far as is known, never claimed to be a family act, even at times when the group included close relatives (James M. Boulard and daughter Maria Boulard, sisters Mary Packard and Belle Durgin).  But in the mid-1840s, following the success of the Hutchinsons, the more genteel strain of American popular music was dominated by Hutchinson-style traveling families of singers.  For better or worse, the Alleghanians may always be most often compared to New Hampshire natives the Baker Family and to the singing Hutchinsons whose origins were also in the Old Granite State.

Members of the Alleghanians seldom represented hard news stories the way the Hutchinsons often did.  According to Philip D. Jordan and Lillian Kessler in their book, Songs of Yesterday, "'Everyone has heard of the Hutchinsons,'  wrote an Iowa editor.  These were no idle words indeed, for the Hutchinsons were known throughout the United States and in England and Ireland for lifting their melodious voices in the causes of temperance, abolition, and woman suffrage.  From the time they gave their first concert in 1839 they were constantly in the news."

The Alleghanians career was built on two things these musicians shared with the Hutchinsons: talent and hard work.  The group's early success was built to a very great extent on the glorious voice of Miriam Goodenow, along with her skilled use of her musical gifts, plus her easy to observe but harder to define star power.

A great many Alleghanians press notices from the 1840s and early 1850s contain strikingly similar descriptions and appraisals to those that appear in Hutchinson Family reviews. Clearly the Alleghanians set out to produce a type of musical entertainment very similar to that which made the Hutchinsons famous.  Voices were sweet, harmonies were almost miraculously close, melodies were often quite simple, and lyrics were considered at the time to be well selected with a highly literary quality.

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Jordan and Kessler explained that family concerts "emphasized the melodramatic, the comic, and the sentimental; songs . . . were robust, told a story, or pointed a moral.  Their chorals, anthems, glees, and descriptive narratives were sung in a simple, unaffected way with emphasis upon clearly enunciated words.  Frequently they sang without accompaniment.  Sometimes they used a melodeon or violoncello."   The Alleghanians differed a bit from the norm in that these singers liked to tour with a piano accompanist or a singing pianist.  The most authoritative, carefully considered study of this type of music production appears in Dale Cockrell's essential Hutchinson Family book, Excelsior.

The Alleghanians greatly outdistanced the better-remembered Hutchinsons in the bredth of their touring.  The Alleghanians made several trips to Europe and the West Coast of the United States and through the American South.  Starting in the late 1850s, the group made an amazing tour across the South Pacific and back home by way of South America.  The Alleghanians also performed often and traveled widely in Canada including a mid-1870s trip to the Canadian Northwest.

Personnel changed over time, as did the group's level of public awareness and financial fortunes.  Career peaks included the late 1840s in general, a celebrated 1852 trip to the California Gold Rush, a world tour which was marked by acclaim in the South Seas and South America, and an evidently highly successful attempt by 1872 to rebuild the group with younger singers and players and with mostly new concert programs.

More than a century and a half after the first Alleghanians engagements, surprisingly little work has been done in the way of compiling information about the group's career and the biographies of its members.  Carrie Hiffert was with this outfit longer than just about anyone except for James M. Boulard.  Yet I do not recall ever so much as hearing of her until maybe a year or two ago.  Readily available information about the Alleghanians is patchy to say the least and is heavily concentrated on the original quartet of the 1840s and early 1850s.

This booklet-length biography of the Alleghanians is intended to serve as a high quality information source, while tapping into the phenomenal interactivity of the Web.  A significant part of the information posted here comes in some sense from a loose network of researchers who could not possibly have gotten together any way other than over the Internet.  It is my own hope that further Web-based connections with researchers who have related interests, including genealogists and local historians, will make it possible to fill in some of the holes  -  some of which can be gaping  -  in our knowledge of Alleghanians history.

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While this booklet does not tell the Alleghanians story quite to the end  -  it would be helpful to actually know the ending of the story first, and I am indebted to President Theodore Roosevelt for this insight  -  I am not aware of any work on this topic that is anywhere near as comprehensive as this one.  Please correct me if this is wrong, but I believe Voice and Spirit tells the first 30 years of Alleghanians history for the first time, in one place, ever, with some detail and with documentation of information sources.  John Goldrosen's 1975 book Buddy Holly: His Life and Music, for me, set the standard. (It was later revised and renamed The Buddy Holly Story, after the major feature film it inspired.)  There are amazingly comprehensive, fully developed music biographies which follow already heavily traveled paths.  But for blazing a wholly new trail, the Goldrosen book would be very hard to beat.  Also, here in western New England, we have a popular music columnist named Dave Madeloni.  It is my observation and belief, after many years of reading his articles and columns, that Dave has true genius for gathering together diverse bits of information and readily seeing the story they collectively tell.  It is my hope that I have, in fact, learned as much from these two writers as I normally give myself credit for.

Get ready to become acquainted with a cast of characters, many of whom are little known today and some of whom are quite fascinating.  By no means were all of them members of this group, and by no means do we know each of them equally well.   A few of the names  -  in addition to the singers in the original Alleghanians quartet  -  and especially Miriam G. Goodenow  -  are Frank L. Benjamin, Buckley's Serenaders, the Durgin sisters (Mary E. Packard and Belle Durgin), Carrie Hiffert, Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., the Hutchinson Family, William H. Mershon, Jesse Bullock Packard, Frank Stoepel, Daniel G. Waldron, and Agatha States.

Early thanks are probably richly deserved by more people than it likely will occur to me to name here, in an imperfect list of appreciated contributors.  So I will just say, for starters, thanks to Dale Cockrell, the Hutchinson Family and especially Jesse Hutchinson and Ludlow Patton, Sarah T. Rothman, Kati Szego, Alleghanian Mary P. Waldron, and a huge cast of genealogists many of whom have not made a Web posting in five years or more and, sad to say, I imagine are no longer with us.  The wonderful reference and Interlibrary Loan staff at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont, and the ILL staff at the Vermont Department of Libraries made this work possible.  It was quite simply not going to happen without them.

So far this Alleghanians project  -  from start to finish  -  has been outnumbered, overextended, badly underfunded, and totally outgunned.  Yet somehow, right now, it is already much farther along than I would have ever imagined possible.  This booklet is five to six times the length I originally projected.  If we can tap the power of the Internet for all it is worth, perhaps an expanded second edition of Voice and Spirit can bring the full Alleghanians story into the 21st century.

Alan Lewis

Behold the day of promise comes,  full of inspiration The blessed day by prophets sung for the healing of the nation Old midnight errors flee away, they soon will all be gone While heavenly angels seem to say the good time's coming on The good time, the good time, the good time's coming on The good time, the good time, the good time's coming on

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Alan Lewis. Voice and Spirit: The Alleghanians (Vocal Group).
Brattleboro, Vermont: Published by the author. 2007.

Copyright © 2007 by Alan Lewis.
All rights reserved. Used with permission.