Oldtimer Remembered

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: when he was a child, a fugitive slave stopping at his father's house had told how his sweetheart, Nelly Gray, had been sold into slavery. Hanby mailed the manuscript to a Boston publisher. The song swept the nation, sold more copies than any previous song except Foster's Old Folks at Home.

But Hanby had failed to copyright his song. First inkling he had that it was in print came a year later, when he saw it in a Columbus, Ohio music store. He wrote to his publisher. Came the reply: "Nelly Gray is sung on both sides of the Atlantic. We have made the money and you the fame. That balances the account." Songwriter Hanby hired a lawyer, who settled for $100, kept half as his commission.

After leaving college, Hanby became a preacher, but there was more music in him than preaching. When Benjamin Hanby died at 33, he had written 75 songs. Two others are still sung today: a children's Christmas song, Up on the Housetop (Up on the housetop, click, click, click; Down through the chimney with good St. Nick), and the hymn Who Is He?, included in the hymnal of the Church of England in Canada.

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