Piper, Edwin Ford, 1871-1939

Edwin Ford Piper was born in 1871 in Auburn, Nebraska, a few miles west of the Missouri River. As farmers moved in and rangeland disappeared, his family moved farther west in Nebraska. While he was growing up, he listened to the songs, rhymes, square dancing calls, prayer meeting calls of the hired hands, hobos, itinerant fiddlers -- anyone who created music. He also learned songs from his mother Lucinda and his sister Ella. These folk expressions had a great effect upon Piper. In 1893, he entered the University of Nebraska, where he earned an A. B. in 1897 and an A.M. in 1900. In 1905 he joined the University of Iowa faculty, where he remained until his death on May 17, 1939, just days before he was to be the guest speaker at the University's Commencement Supper. At the University he taught Chaucer and writing. A poet in his own right, he published five books of verse: Barbed Wire (1917); The Land of the Aiouwas (1922), Barbed Wire and Wayfarers (1924), Paintrock Road (1927); and Canterbury Pilgrims (1935). He was in great demand as a reader of poetry and his habit of breaking into song when the poem demanded it earned him the nickname "the singing professor." In 1897, Piper began transcribing ballads and songs remembered from his childhood. In 1909, he became more systematic about this endeavor, gathering songs printed in newspapers and magazines, collecting them from older singers, exchanging them with other scholars. Eventually, indexes were made for the songs he had collected. These materials now comprise the Piper Collection.