James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home

Aside from his talent as a writer and performer, James Whitcomb Riley was also a talented musician! Despite never learning to read music, he was able to play the piano, violin, and the Guitar. In fact, here at the Lockerbie Street home we have one of Riley’s guitars produced by the Regal Music Instrument Company of Indianapolis. Riley quickly picked up how to play the guitar after his brother John brought one home with him when they were young. He would play classic American folk tunes, like “Swanee River” or “The Arkansas Traveler,” the latter of which you can hear a recording of played by The Blue Ridge Duo Gene Austin and George Reneau, from 1924: https://archive.org/details/78_arkansas-traveler-breakdown_the-blue-ridge-duo-gene-austin-and-george-reneau_gbia0189597a
In 1876, Riley had decided to give up his days of travelling and playing music, and pushed himself into working toward becoming a famous poet. That year he wrote the poem “The Old Guitar,” perhaps reflecting this feeling of leaving this part of his life behind. It goes as follows:

Neglected now is the old guitar
And moldering into decay;
Fretted with many a rift and scar
That the dull dust hides away,
While the spider spins a silver star
In its silent lips to-day.

The keys hold only nerveless strings—
The sinews of brave old airs
Are pulseless now; and the scarf that clings
So closely here declares
A sad regret in its ravelings
And the faded hue it wears.

But the old guitar, with a lenient grace,
Has cherished a smile for me;
And its features hint of a fairer face
That comes with a memory
Of a flower-and-perfume-haunted place
And a moonlit balcony

Music sweeter than words confess,
Or the minstrel’s power invent,
Thrilled here once at the light caress
Of the fairly hands that lent
This excuse for the kiss I press
On the dear old instrument.

The rose of pearl with the jeweled stem
Still blooms; and the tiny sets
In the circle all are here; the gem
In the keys, and the sliver frets;
But the dainty fingers that danced o’er them—
Alas for the heart’s regrets!—

Alas for the loosened strings to-day,
And the wounds of rifts and scar
On a worn old heart, with its roundelay
Enthralled with a stronger bar
That fate weaves on, through a dull decay
Like that of the old guitar!

It is said that on September 14th in the year 1321, the famous medieval Italian poet Dante Aligheri met his end in the city of Venice, due to a bout of malaria. Most of James Whitcomb Riley’s literary influences were of more contemporary English literature: Dafoe, Dickens, Longfellow; however, it is certain that he was familiar with the Florentine bard.
Born in 1265, a tumultuous time in medieval Italy, Dante was exiled from the city of his birth, Florence, by his enemies in 1301. He would remain exiled for the rest of his life, during which time he would composed his most famous work: Comedìa, better known today as The Divine Comedy, chronicling his fictional journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
An interesting artifact we have here, a reminder of the close-knittedness of the old Lockerbie Square neighborhood, is a book on the study of Dante that was a Christmas gift to a neighbor named Sadie Kinder. In it, Riley wrote: “O, Mr. Dante! would it might have been [rousafed?] to you to know some of [our?] people on Lockerbie Street!”
Featured in this week's photographs, we have a near contemporary fresco of Dante which appears in the Bargello, along with a depiction of Dante on a door in the Uffizi, as well as Dante's house, all three in the city of Florence. There are also the two books we have at the home on Dante, as well as the little message to Sadie Kinder written inside. Can you make out what this "rousafed" word is supposed to mean, because we are a bit stumped.

We often get questions about James Whitcomb Riley’s faith, and, like many things with Riley, this is something he kept rather close to the vest. Riley was very meticulous about crafting his public personage, and how people saw him, and so he never talked about his religious faith very often. We can glean some of his writings that he was “Christian” though he did not ascribe to any one denomination. An experience in his early twenties led to him shying away from the immovable orthodoxy of many of the churches around him in Greenfield at the time. When people asked him where he went to worship, he would simply reply, “In the woods.” In many ways, he modeled his spiritual outlook on the transcendentalist poets and philosophers of the generation before him, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and, Riley's primary literary inspiration, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In the 528 Lockerbie Street home’s library there are numerous works on various world religions both modern and ancient, as well as books on spiritualism—something that we may expand on as we venture closer to Halloween.

Included in the photographs are some of the books in the house related to religion: a book on the founder of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, a book on divine healing, one of the only bibles original to the home, a book on Islam, and a biography of Martin Luther. For now, we will leave off with a popular poem by Riley from 1880 titled “A Perfect Prayer.”

Dear Lord! kind Lord!
Gracious Lord! I pray
Thou wilt look on all I love,
Tenderly to-day!
W**d their hearts of weariness;
Scatter every care
Down a wake of angel-wings
Winnowing the air.

Bring unto the sorrowing
All release from pain;
Let the lips of laughter
Overflow again;
And with all the needy
O divide, I pray,
The vast treasure of content
That is mine to-day!

Happy Labor Day! The first official Labor Day was celebrated in 1894, the year after James Whitcomb Riley had come to live here at the 528 Lockerbie Street home. Riley was a man who never took a strong or outspoken stance one way or the other, especially in regard to politics. He only vocally supported one presidential candidate in his life, that being Benjamin Harrison, because the two were friends prior to Harrison’s running for office. Despite that, Riley was associated with Hoosiers of all political bents, including Eugene V. Debs, the famous Terre Haute born founder of the American Socialist Party, who ran for president four times in the early 20th Century.
The two were quite fond of one another, Debs writing that Riley, “had the profoundest respect for and sympathy with honest toil and in many poems he paid sincere tribute to the working class.” Riley wrote of Debs once, “God was feeling mighty good when he created ’Gene Debs, and He didn’t have anything else to do all day.” Debs even sent Riley flowers when the poet took ill around 1890, which may have inspired Riley’s dedicating his 1892 poem titled “Them Flowers” to him.

Included in the photos is a copy of Debs' biography we have here at the home gifted to Riley by Debs himself in 1908.

Early on in James Whitcomb Riley’s career as a poet, he came to be frustrated at the prevailing attitude among the American literary community. Nearly all American authors and poets of any repute were from the East Coast, with authors in the West (anywhere west of the Appalachians) being passed over by eastern critics. And so, Riley sought to play a little trick.
In 1877, working with a friend named J.O. Henderson, editor of the Kokomo Dispatch, hatched a scheme to write a poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, and then pass it off as a long-lost poem of Poe’s. Henderson published an article in the Kokomo Dispatch outlining how a local farmer in Kokomo found the poem written inside an old book that was left behind in his old father’s inn back in Virginia decades before, and, although he couldn’t read, thought the poem might be of some value. The news of the discovery of a lost work of Poe’s quickly made national news, and many believed it to be genuine.
But eventually, it was leaked to the Dispatch’s rival paper, the Kokomo Tribune, that Riley was the true author, and the Tribune published an exposé, revealing the truth. This actually resulted in Riley losing his job at the Anderson Democrat; however, in the long run the so-called Poe-Hoax came to be the first time Riley’s name entered national discourse and also led to him becoming associated with people that would help boost his early career as a poet, such as Charles Phillips of the Kokomo Tribune.
What follows is the infamous poem at the center of the Poe-Hoax, Leonanie:

Leonainie—Angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white;
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.—

In a solemn night of summer,
When my heart of gloom
Blossomed up to greet the corner
Like a rose in bloom;
All forebodings that distressed me
I forgot as Joy caressed me—
(Lying Joy! That caught and pressed me
In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper
In the angel-tongue;
Yet I, listening, heard her whisper,—
“Songs are only sung
Here below that they may grieve you—
Tales but told you to deceive you,—
So you must Leonainie leave you
While her love is young”

The God smiled and it was morning.
Matchless and supreme
Heaven’s glory seemed adorning
Earth with its esteem:
Every heart but mine seemed gifted
With the voice of prayer, and lifted
Where my Leonainie drifted
From me like a dream.

Most people who would recognize the face of James Whitcomb Riley picture him as a small, kindly, clean shaven man, but did you know that he once had a mustache? Early on in his days as a travelling sign painter, Riley wore a big red hued mustache that hung over his front lip. As he gained his reputation as a kindly poet, he began to craft his image accordingly.

In the Victorian period, beards became tied to images of masculinity and courage, with military men and politicians commonly wearing mustaches and impressive sideburns. A century earlier, during the Enlightenment, a common belief of the time was the facial hair was a form of bodily excretion, and in an age of “enlightened” thinking, the thought of keeping excrement on one’s face was considered backward and barbaric. This is why you will never see an image of the Founding Fathers bearing beards of any sort.

As germ theory took hold many doctors, by the early 1900s, began touting beards as a vector of infection, since they could collect spit and thus expose people to diseases, especially tuberculosis. In 1916, the year of Riley’s death, an American doctor named Edwin F. Bowers wrote in McClure’s Magazine, “There is no way of computing the number of bacteria and noxious germs that may lurk in the Amazonian jungles of a well-whiskered face, but their number must be legion...”
While Riley’s reason for keeping clean shaven weren’t tied to his health, his clean kempt image became lodged in the minds of his fans.

Included in the photos here are Riley’s personal shaving kit, on display here at the 528 Lockerbie St home, and the shaving sink, where Riley would have shaved daily. The photos of Riley are a copy of his portrait by TC Steele hanging in our Visitor’s Center, and two photos of a mustachioed Riley from around the age of 24.

When James Whitcomb Riley was employed at the Indianapolis Journal as their resident poet, over a decade before he would move into the home, he would often take walks on Lockerbie Street to escape the noise of the city. At that time, Lockerbie Square was effectively on the outskirts of Indianapolis and became an ideal place for the poet to clear his head.
What follows is a poem Riley wrote in 1880 titled “Lockerbie Street” illustrating his early love and appreciation for the street he would, unknowingly, spend his final years on:

Such a dear little street it is, nestled away
From the noise of the city and the heat of the day
In cool shady coverts of whispering trees,
With their leaves lifted up to shake hands with the breeze
Which in all its wide wanderings never may meet
With a resting-place fairer than Lockerbie street!

There is such a relief, from the clangor and din
Of the heart of the town, to go loitering in
Through the dim, narrow walks, with the sheltering shade
Of the trees waving over the long promenade,
And littering lightly the ways of our feet
With the gold of the sunshine on Lockerbie Street.

And the nights that come down the dark pathways of dusk,
With the stars in their tresses, and odors of musk
In their moon-woven raiments, bespangled with dews,
And looped up with lilies for lovers to use
In the songs that they sing to the ti**le and beat
Of their sweet serenadings through Lockerbie street.

O my Lockerbie street! You are fair to be seen—
Be it noon of the day, or the rare and serene
Afternoon of the night—you are one to my heart
And I love you above all the phrases of art,
For no language could frame and no lips could repeat
My rhyme-haunted raptures of Lockerbie Street.