href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38023@[email protected]#page_234" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">234

Memoirs of
An American Prima Donna

CHAPTER I

MY FIRST NOTES

I was born in Sumterville, South Carolina, and had a negro mammy to take care of me, one of the real old-fashioned kind, of a type now almost gone. She used to hold me in her arms and rock me back and forth, and as she rocked she sang. I don't know the name of the song she crooned; but I still know the melody, and have an impression that the words were:

She used to sing these two lines over and over, so that I slept and waked to them. And my first musical efforts, when I was just ten months old, were to try to sing this ditty in imitation of my negro mammy.

When my mother first heard me she became apprehensive. Yet I kept at it; and by the time I was a year old I could sing it so that it was quite recognisable. I do not remember this period, of course, but my mother often told me about it later, and I am sure she was not telling a fairy story.

There is, after all, nothing incredible or miraculous about the fact, extraordinary as it certainly is. We are not surprised when the young thrush practises a trill. And in some people the need for music and the power to make it are just as instinctive as they are in the birds. What effects I have achieved and what success I have found must be laid to this big, living fact: music was in me, and it had to find expression.

My music was honestly come by, from both sides of the house. When the family moved north to New England and settled in Birmingham, Connecticut,—it is called Derby now—my father and mother played in the little town choir, he a flute and she the organ. They were both thoroughly musical people, and always kept up with musical affairs, making a great many sacrifices all their lives to hear good singers whenever any sort of opportunity offered. As for my maternal grandmother—she was a woman with a man's brain. A widow at twenty-three, with no money and three children, she chose, of all ways to support them, the business of cotton weaving; going about Connecticut and Massachusetts, setting up looms—cotton gins they were called—and being very successful. She was a good musician also, and, in later years, after she had married my grandfather and was comfortably off, people begged her to give lessons; so she taught thorough-base, in that day and generation! Pause for a moment to consider what that meant, in a time when the activity of women was very limited and unrecognised. Is it any wonder that the granddaughter of a woman who could master and teach the science of thorough-base at such a period should be born with music in her blood?

Lydia Atwood
Maternal Grandmother of Clara Louise Kellogg

My other grandmother, my father's mother, was musical, too. She had a sweet voice, and was the soprano of the church choir.

Everyone knew I was naturally musical from my constant attempts to sing, and from my deep attention when anyone performed on any instrument, even when I was so little that I could not reach the key-board of the piano on tip-toe. That particular piano, I remember, was very old-fashioned—one of the square box-shaped sort—and stood extremely high.

One day my grandmother said to my mother:

"I do believe, Jane, if we lifted that baby up to the piano, she could play!"

Mother said: "Oh, pshaw!"

But they did lift me up, and I did play. I played not only with my right hand but also with my left hand; and I made harmonies. Probably they were not in any way elaborate chords, but they were chords, and they harmonised. I have known some grown-up musicians whose chords didn't!

I was three then, and a persistent baby, already detesting failure. I never liked to try to do anything, even at that age, in which I might be unsuccessful, and so learned to do what I wanted to do as soon as possible.

My mother