Appalachian Figures
When people in Appalachian churches open an old shaped note songbook, the name B. C. Unseld often appears in small capitals above a tune title. For most singers he is only a set of initials. Behind those letters stands a life that ran from a river town in what is now West Virginia to a boomtown publishing house in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, with stops at Fisk University, New England Conservatory, and the first great normal school for southern singing teachers.
Tracing Unseld’s story pulls together several strands that matter for Appalachian history. He grew up within sight of an Antietam battlefield ridge, helped train the Fisk Jubilee Singers who carried spirituals around the world, shaped the normal school tradition that stocked mountain communities with music teachers, and spent his last years designing curricula and songbooks for James D. Vaughan’s Lawrenceburg publishing empire. The hymn tunes that still echo in rural congregations are only the most audible part of that legacy.
Shepherdstown Roots and a War Shadowed Childhood
Benjamin Carl Unseld was born on October 18, 1843, at Shepherdstown, then in Virginia and now in West Virginia, on the Potomac’s edge where the Blue Ridge foothills begin to roll northward. Later accounts recall that as a teenager he witnessed part of the Battle of Antietam across the river in September 1862, a brush with Civil War violence that surely colored his memories of home.
Formal schooling ended for him at fourteen. He clerked in a country store, then followed railroad work to Columbia, Pennsylvania, where music moved from hobby to vocation. A friend who had attended a singing school began teaching him basics after work; soon he was renting a melodeon, singing in the church choir, and serving as organist for the Methodist congregation in Columbia.
Seen from an Appalachian angle, his early life fits a familiar pattern. A boy raised in a small river town on the edge of the mountains leaves school early, takes commercial work, and learns music through the singing school tradition rather than through elite academies. What sets Unseld apart is how quickly that tradition carried him into the very heart of northern music education.
From Providence to Tonic Sol fa
Unseld’s break came when he enrolled at Eben Tourjée’s Musical Institute in Providence, Rhode Island. There he studied voice, piano, organ, and harmony. Tourjée soon discovered that his new student was as capable in the office as at the keyboard and made him secretary of the school. When Tourjée helped organize the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Unseld followed and became the Conservatory’s first secretary while continuing his studies.
In this circle he met Theodore F. Seward, a tireless advocate of John Curwen’s English Tonic Sol fa system. Together Seward and Unseld adapted the method for American use in The Tonic Sol Fa Music Reader, first issued in 1880 and then revised in the 1890s.The book is a full graded course in Curwen’s movable do notation, with lessons, exercises, and songs tailored for day schools and singing schools. In their preface they told American readers that the new notation “removes three fourths of the difficulties of music from the path of the beginner,” a bold promise from two men who had spent years in classrooms.
For Appalachian historians, the Sol fa reader matters in two ways. First, it shows Unseld as a bridge between British pedagogical experiments and the American singing school. Second, it is one of the clearest primary sources for his teaching philosophy. He and Seward emphasized step by step progression, practical drills, and the idea that ordinary people could master what had once been reserved for trained professionals. That spirit would later animate the rural normal schools and singing conventions that dotted the southern highlands.
Fisk University, Jubilee Singers, and New Market
In 1874 Unseld’s path turned south. Hymnary and later reference works note that he taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he helped train the Fisk Jubilee Singers for their European tour. Scholarship on the reception history of spirituals describes how Seward brought his student Unseld to work with the chorus, using fa sol la notation and shaped note pedagogy to drill young singers who often had little formal music training but immense vocal power.
Those months in Nashville placed a white teacher from the Shenandoah Valley in the middle of an African American musical project that would reshape global views of Black sacred song. The Jubilee Singers carried spirituals learned in plantation cabins into concert halls; Unseld and Seward supplied technical training and notated some of those songs for publication. The work sits at a complicated intersection of race, religion, and education, yet it also illustrates how antebellum Appalachian and border regions fed unexpectedly into Reconstruction era Black institutions.
That same year, Aldine S. Kieffer and the Ruebush Kieffer Company in the Shenandoah Valley organized the Virginia Normal Music School at New Market, Virginia, with Unseld as principal. Jacob Henry Hall’s near contemporary Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers calls this institution “the mother school” of a whole system of southern normal schools and notes that it was probably the first broad ranging teachers’ school of music held in the South after the days of the Everett family schools.
Students came from Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and beyond to study sight reading, part singing, and class leadership. For Appalachian communities that could not afford conservatories, the New Market normal became an engine for creating local singing school teachers, many of them young people from the ridges and valleys who would take Unseld’s methods back to their home churches.
Songbooks, Children, and The Choral Standard
Over the next three decades Unseld turned his normal school experience into a stream of books. He worked for Biglow and Main in New York, for Fillmore’s Music House in Cincinnati, and for the Lorenz Publishing Company in Dayton, Ohio, editing hymnals and composing tunes.
The Tonic Sol Fa Music Reader remained his best known pedagogical collaboration, but by the 1890s he was also authoring independent works. The Choral Standard, published by Biglow and Main around 1895, offered a complete course of instruction in vocal music with graded exercises, part songs, and anthems for choirs and classes. A few years later he produced Illustrative Lessons for the Singing Class Teacher, a teacher’s guide keyed directly to The Choral Standard that walked instructors through example lessons.
Alongside these came Fillmore’s School Singer for Day Schools, Juvenile Classes and Teachers’ Institutes, co authored with J. H. Fillmore, which paired simple exercises with children’s songs and advised teachers to keep youthful singing lively rather than dragging. Progress in Song, issued by Fillmore Brothers around 1911 and co edited with E. T. Hildebrand, extended his graded approach into more advanced part songs and choruses for singing schools, colleges, and conventions.
Taken together, these books show Unseld as a methodical pedagogue. He was less interested in dazzling solo display than in turning whole communities into readers and singers, building skills that could sustain choirs, conventions, and singing schools across the Appalachian and southern countryside.
Lawrenceburg and the Vaughan School of Music
By the early twentieth century James D. Vaughan had turned Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, into one of the key hubs of southern gospel publishing. Vaughan moved his firm there in the first decade of the century and in 1911 opened the Vaughan School of Music to train teachers, quartet singers, and songwriters.
For a dean he hired a veteran: Benjamin C. Unseld, whose normal school experience and editing work for Ruebush Kieffer, Fillmore, and Lorenz made him ideal for designing curricula and drill routines. Musical Kaleidoscope’s overview of Vaughan’s work notes that Unseld was brought in to coordinate the school’s curriculum and serve as its principal, tying the new Tennessee enterprise back to the older Virginia normal tradition.
Wikipedia and the CPDL biography agree that Unseld moved to Lawrenceburg in 1911 to take this position and remained there until his death. During those years he also edited or contributed to Vaughan’s house periodical, The Vaughan Family Visitor, a monthly newsletter begun in 1912 that carried news of singing schools, new songbooks, and the company’s growing quartet business.
The Sounding Spirit Digital Library’s scan of Awakening Praises, a 1923 Vaughan songbook for Sunday schools, revivals, and conventions, lists Unseld alongside Vaughan family members, Stamps Baxter writers, and other southern gospel composers as an author. The book appeared the same year Unseld died and represents one of the last publications to carry his name from an active Lawrenceburg imprint.
In Lawrenceburg he also taught younger figures who became important for Appalachian gospel music. William B. Walbert, for example, a Barren County, Kentucky, musician who married Vaughan’s daughter and helped lead Vaughan quartets and schools, studied under Unseld before becoming a prominent teacher and songwriter in his own right.
Unseld died in Lawrenceburg on November 19, 1923. A Tennessean obituary summarized his long career and noted that his body was taken back to Shepherdstown for burial in Elmwood Cemetery, closing an eighty year life that began and ended in the same Potomac Valley town but left its strongest institutional mark in southern Middle Tennessee.
Twilight Is Stealing and Other Traveling Tunes
For many Appalachian singers Unseld’s name survives most clearly in hymnal tune indices. Hymnary’s person entry lists dozens of tunes associated with him or adapted by him for various texts, ranging from psalm settings such as ANCYRA to gospel pieces written with lyricists like Fanny J. Crosby and James Rowe.
His most widely traveled piece appears to be the song better known by its opening line, “Twilight is stealing over the sea.” Aldine S. Kieffer wrote the text and Unseld supplied the tune, often labeled TWILIGHT IS STEALING. The song first surfaced in nineteenth century collections like Triumphant Songs No. 2 and then migrated into a broad range of hymnals, from rural shape note books to later gospel song collections.
The language of twilight, shadow, and “voices of yore” resonated with congregations who sang it at funerals and evening services. In some Appalachian counties it became such a staple that families sang it by memory long after the books wore out. More recently it has turned up in Mennonite recordings and in contemporary gospel interpretations, reminding us that a tune crafted in the late 1800s still moves singers in very different settings. Amish America+1
Other Unseld tunes followed similar paths. The psalm tune ANCYRA, for instance, appears in the Trinity Psalter Hymnal and other modern collections, while pieces like SHEPHERDSTOWN and EUPHEMIA show up in older denominational books and regionally printed songbooks. Through Vaughan’s Lawrenceburg press, many of these tunes entered singing school repertoires in eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and the coalfields farther north, carried home by students who spent summers at the Vaughan School of Music.
Appalachian Singing Schools and Unseld’s Legacy
Unseld’s career illuminates how Appalachian music education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on mobile teachers and printed songbooks rather than on permanent conservatories. He began as a store clerk in a small border town and became a secretary in one of the nation’s premier music schools, yet he consistently poured his energy into settings that put music within reach of farmers, miners, and small town clerks.
Through the Virginia Normal Music School at New Market he helped create a model for southern normal schools that would later be imitated by Vaughan in Lawrenceburg and by other publishers across the region. Through his work at Fisk he helped shape the rehearsal discipline of a Black chorus that brought spirituals born in slavery into European concert halls. Through his tune writing and editing for Vaughan he left melodies that still surface whenever people in the mountain South open an old book of “new” gospel songs.
In 2004 the Southern Gospel Music Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame, formally recognizing what his contemporaries like Hall had already sensed. A century earlier, Hall had written that Unseld was “a persistent student of methods of teaching” whose work deserved the thanks of “nearly the whole teaching and gospel song writing fraternity of the South.”
For Appalachian historians, Unseld’s importance lies not only in anthems and hymn tunes but in the infrastructure he helped build. He stood at the junction of border state hymnody, Black spiritual performance, and southern gospel publishing. The singing schools he led and inspired trained countless local leaders whose names rarely made it into biographical dictionaries but whose classes still echo in church basements and courthouse conventions.
Why Unseld’s Story Matters
Today, when congregations in Kentucky, Tennessee, or West Virginia sing from shaped note books printed a century ago in Lawrenceburg, they participate in a musical world that Unseld helped to design. His life illustrates how an Appalachian borderland boy could move through war, migration, and industrial change to become one of the central architects of American gospel pedagogy.
Studying him also reminds us that the sound of Appalachian worship has never belonged only to isolated hollows. It grew from networks that linked Shepherdstown to Providence, Nashville to New Market, and Lawrenceburg to remote coal camps, carried along train lines, postal routes, and the worn covers of songbooks where the name B. C. Unseld still waits in small type above the staff.
Sources & Further Reading
Theodore F. Seward and B. C. Unseld, The Tonic Sol Fa Music Reader: A Course of Instruction and Practice in the Tonic Sol fa Method of Teaching Singing, with a Choice Collection of Music Suitable for Day Schools and Singing Schools (Biglow and Main, 1880; revised ed. 1890), especially the prefaces where Seward and Unseld outline the goals of the system. Internet Archive
Jacob Henry Hall, Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), chapter “B. C. Unseld,” which gives a near contemporary narrative of his life, his role at the Virginia Normal Music School, and his reputation among southern teachers. IMSLP+1
Gustavus D. Pike and Theodore F. Seward, The Singing Campaign for Ten Thousand Pounds; or, The Jubilee Singers in Great Britain, with later editions listing Unseld among contributors, for context on Seward, Fisk, and the Jubilee Singers. Online Books Page+1
Awakening Praises: For Sunday Schools, Singing Schools, Revivals, Conventions and General Use in Christian Work and Worship (Lawrenceburg, Tenn.: James D. Vaughan, 1923), which credits James D. Vaughan, B. C. Unseld, and others as authors and shows Unseld’s late work within the Vaughan network. Sounding Spirit Digital Library+1
Hymnary.org score and tune pages for “Twilight is stealing over the sea” and other Unseld tunes, along with scans of nineteenth and twentieth century hymnals that carry his music. Hymnary+3Hymnary+3FBC Radio+3
“Benjamin Carl Unseld,” Library of Congress NLS Music Division blog, American Composers from A to Z: U V (Part 1), for a concise modern biography and summary of his Tonic Sol fa work. The Library of Congress
“Benjamin Carl Unseld,” ChoralWiki (CPDL), for a reliable overview of his life, movements between cities, and his move to Lawrenceburg in 1911 as dean of the James D. Vaughan School of Music. CPDL
“Unseld, Benjamin Carl,” Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music (Routledge), and related reference entries that place him alongside Vaughan, the Vaughan Family Visitor, and the Virginia Normal Music School in the broader history of southern gospel. Internet Archive+1
“Tennessee GenWeb: James D. Vaughan Publishing Company and School of Music,” and materials from the James D. Vaughan Gospel Music Museum in Lawrenceburg, for local history on the publishing house, Vaughan’s Family Visitor, and the Vaughan School of Music. TNGenWeb+1
Appalachian State University’s “Shape Notes and Their Songbooks” collection guide, which lists numerous Vaughan publications and documents how those books circulated through Appalachian singing schools and conventions well into the mid twentieth century. Home