Tombstone with Shape Notes

Cedar Grove Cemetery, Lebanon, Tennessee

From the front page of the Lebanon TN Democrat, Sept. 10th, 1953

Watertown Girl Dies of Polio

Bulbar polio took the life of Miss Mary Brooks Smith, age 17, Watertown High School student and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Forrest Smith [Forrest and Ernestine Smith], at a Nashville hospital Friday [birth August 12th, 1938, death Sept. 4th, 1953, according to the epitaph; so that the age given in the newspaper story is wrong].
She was the second polio case of 1953 in Wilson County...
Funeral services for Miss Smith were conducted Sunday afternoon at 2:30 o'clock at the Watertown Church of Christ, of which she was a member. Thomas W. Burton officiated. Burial was in Lebanon Cemetery.
Stricken last Tuesday afternoon after complaining of feeling ill a few days before, she was rushed to Vanderbilt hospital, Nashville, and placed in an iron lung. Bulbar polio, the form most often fatal, affects the lungs.
Born in Watertown [TN], Miss Smith would have been a senior in high school this year. She is survived by her parents, a sister, Mrs. Edward Rich, Clarksville; her grandparents, Mrs. Montie Bass, Watertown, and Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Smith, Lebanon.

Carol Bass, librarian (then about to retire, around 1997) at Cumberland University Library (which holds the newspaper's archives on microfilm), helped me locate this article and provided some background. A member of the Church of Christ, she told me that many churches of this denomination (which has no official hymnal) use books printed in shape notes, and that there are still old timers who can sing the seven note Aiken shapes of the gospel tradition. She showed me a typical hymnal of this type, Songs of the Church (Howard Publishers, West Monroe LA 1977) printed in shape notes. I recognized a few texts and tunes, most extraordinarily "When I can read my title clear" (NHoC 95), set into the book in hand lettered shapes, the fuguing tune written to conform to the vertical traditional harmony of modern gospel music, with I believe only two voices written out.

According to a distant relative who attended it, it was a very large funeral, and Pat Boone sang at it, a year or so before he became famous.

Bulbar (pronounced BUHLL-BAR, with great awe and respect) polio was a particularly severe form of poliomyelitis (an infectious virus disease) in which the motor neurons in the medulla (the portion of the brain just above the spinal cord) were destroyed. The resulting paralysis of respiration, often fatal, was treated by placing the patient in what was called an "iron lung", a primitive device for ventilatory support. Mary Brooks Smith died of this terrible disease only two or three years before the Salk vaccine largely eliminated it. It is now (2002) gone from the Western Hemisphere, with some hope that the virus can be eliminated from the entire world.

Return to Bob Richmond's site map

E-mail Bob Richmond

Posted to the Web November 11th, 2001
November 30th, 2002