James Anderson Carson – Carrollton’s musical maestro

By Editor | December 4, 2024 |

By Carmen Ensinger

The Greene County Historical Society program for November explores the life and musical talent of James Anderson Carson, who was born in 1866 and died in 1944 and spent much of his life in Carrollton teaching music.
Historical Society President John Langer gave the presentation from information garnered from Carson’s son, Gerald Carson.
According to the younger Carson, the piano was seldom silent in the Carson home when he was a child, and not merely because he was a music teacher with a full schedule of pupils. When he was not teaching, he was usually at the keyboard himself to polish and improve his own technique and to make music for the sheer joy in what he was doing. Music was a life-long love to which he was ever faithful.
“Apparently, music was in the Carson genes,” Langer said. “His father was a farmer, poor in worldly goods, but rich in names. His full name was Gideon Blackburn Thomas Emmons Carson.”
He was named after his uncle, The Rev. Gideon Blackburn, the Pioneer Presbyterian clergyman who founded Blackburn College in Carlinville.
“Gid” Carson lived at the small settlement called Summerville, near Medora in Macoupin County where he supplemented his slender income by conducting a subscription singing school in the winter,” Langer said. “He had attended what was known as a ‘musical convention’ held by George F. Root, the well-known music educator and composer of songs. The purpose was to train teachers in the latest methods of class instruction in singing and this knowledge he passed on to James Anderson Carson.”
Gideon Carson died young – he was only in his middle fifties, leaving James, who was only 17 at the time, who was now the “man of the house” with a mother, two sisters and a younger brother to support.
“Technically, he was still a boy himself, but he still tried to support his family as a farmer,” Langer said. “But his heart just wasn’t in it. The horses were old, the land poor and partly uncleared and the farm tools worn out. Not only that, but there was no capital. So, he talked with his mother and then set out to make music his livelihood.”
This was a new and risky idea in that time and place. He began with five students, going into their homes and charging 65 cents for a full hour of instruction on the piano or organ. Each night he would place his earnings in an old sugar bowl to spare his mother, Catherine Kemper Carson, known in the Medora area as “Aunt Kitty”, the humiliation of having to ask him for money.
When he could accumulate some savings, he went to study in St. Louis and later Chicago and finally managed to save up to spend a year, the most stimulating year of his entire life, at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
To make a living he had to cover a lot of ground, geographically speaking. He traveled to Chesterfield, Greenfield and finally to Carrollton where he was invited to appear as a piano soloist at the high school commencement exercises in June, 1889.
He was well received in Carrollton and came to live there in 1890, boarding with the Miner family who were distant cousins. One of his pupils was Minnie, a graduate of the Illinois Female Seminary at Jacksonville, now MacMurray College, and daughter of the Rev. M.A. Hewes, minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Carrollton in the early 1890’s.
A common interest in music blossomed into romance and they were married Dec. 24, 1892 at Saybrook. Carson then transferred his church affiliation from the traditional Carson family Presbyterian faith to the Methodist faith.
Throughout his long life, he served the church as organist and choir director and the organ, still in use in the Methodist Church in Carrollton was purchased as a result of his efforts to find just the right organ and to raise the money to pay for it.
For many years, Carson taught music in the public school with no salary, but received a studio and janitor service free of charge. The connection gave scholastic standing to the Carson School of Music and the Carrollton School System became the first in this region to offer musical instruction.
“At one time, Mr. Carson even organized an orchestra,” Langer said. “His baton is still a family treasure along his father’s tuning fork. According to Carson’s son, Clem Reimie, the Carrollton photographer and Mayor played the flute and Dr. Neil Vedder, the well-known dentist, played the cello. His wife was also in the orchestra. He also assisted with piano instruction.”
James Anderson Carson also sold pianos and his son, in his recollections, remembers sitting on a little jump seat in the buggy when he drove out into the country to some farm home with musical daughters.
“According to Gerald Carson’s letters, his father would play a little, discuss the musical progress of a daughter and collect a payment on the note for the piano,” Langer said.
During the prosperity of the 1920’s, Carson expanded, teaching part of the week in Jerseyville and maintaining a selection of pianos in the jewelry store of Otto Borger in the Kergher Building on the south side of the Carrollton Square.
“As Carson’s musical reputation became more widely known, the Victor Talking Machine, Co. offered him the dealership for the Victrola,” Langer said. “This was a valuable franchise. But he turned it down cold, insisting that people should make their own music.”
Of course the son and only child of the town’s leading music teacher should be a shining example of the quality of instruction provided by the Carson School of Music, whose pupils had appeared in some 200 recitals, usually upstairs in the Carrollton Public Library.
Gerald Carson’s debut took place at the Christian Church on Main Street and was a stumble through a simple piano piece by Grieg.
With little success on the piano, the elder Carson tried his son on the violin and Gerald did win a prize in the annual Greene County Contest, but he never rose above second violin section in the student orchestra at the University of Illinois.
James Anderson Carson was often called Professor Carson, which didn’t mean a great deal at the time since it was also bestowed upon pitchmen who hawked patent medicines off the tailgate of a wagon or the magician who pulled a rabbit out of a top hat at the opera house.
But the title was well meant and accepted in the spirit in which it was conferred. Carson was warm and friendly, idealistic, enthusiastic about his life’s work and known as something of a story teller as he sauntered around the square greeting friends and acquaintances, sharing the interest of his fellow citizens in the weather and the price of corn and hogs.
However, he was somewhat of a lonely man as well. His music was his life. He died July 6, 1944, after surgery at Our Savior’s Hospital in Jacksonville.
In noting his passing, the Carrollton Patriot said, “he was destined to become an acknowledged leader in musical circles in central Illinois, and to exert a wider influence, culturally, than perhaps any other person ever to live in the community.”