Hidden Songs

by Elsie Boyce and Ben Watkins

If you were to step into my dining room this afternoon, you’d see small piles of papers spread across the table—handwritten poems, letters, and yellowed music sheets. It’s a collection I’ve been gathering and sifting through for weeks. It reveals a quiet collaboration few people ever knew existed.

Elsie Boyce was a presence in Lancaster. She was the principal of Dobson Elementary School, a member of First Presbyterian Church, and a neighbor to my family. She was also a quiet poet who would send my dad slips of paper with typed verses. She would ask him to set the words to music.

I don’t know when she sent the first one—maybe in the mid-’60s. The last poem came in 1992, four years before Dad’s death. By my count, this happened six times. Six poems became six musical compositions, each one a bridge between our living room piano and an elementary school chorus. There are three more poems that have no music.

One of the first was built around lines from A Psalm of Life by Longfellow. I have both the original verses and my dad’s music. Elsie wrote a note explaining that this had been a special theme at Dobson during 1967 and ’68—a time when the school emphasized famous men and women, along with their contributions to society. I also found a letter she wrote to Lavoy Bauknight, asking for a photograph of my dad to display alongside the music on the school bulletin board.

Then there was a wilder one: a poem she wrote called Jump or Jiggle, full of frogs, caterpillars, and all things small and wriggling. Later, it gained a second title: Lord God Made Them All. Dad called it the most difficult composition he ever attempted. I suspect it never made it past the manuscript stage, except perhaps in an elementary school music class.

And there are others—five more pieces bearing the same small stamp in the corner: “Mrs. T.W. Boyce – Ben Watkins.” I don’t know whether they ever traveled beyond the dining room table, or whether anyone besides me ever sang them, but spreading them out now feels like opening a window into forgotten rooms: Mrs. Boyce’s small den, our living room with the piano.

Elsie once wrote a poem called My View of Life—sixteen lines of quiet wisdom. Across the top, she wrote, “Wish I had had Ben set to music.”

That sentence lands differently now.

I had intended this post to close out my group of posts about Elsie Boyce and Ben Watkins. But as I read her words carefully and hum Dad’s tunes in my head, I realize there needs to be more done with this music and these words. I need to find a piano player to play them, a choir to sing them, maybe even an elementary school chorus willing to ‘Jump and Jiggle.’

These songs need an audience.

Encore

Brahms Song of Destiny from the 1968 LHS band spring concert.