Tonight I sit a-dreaming of my childhood,

Of days gone by that ne’er will come again,

Of fragrant fields and wooded mills and valleys,

And pastures green far back in dear old Wayne.

Earlier this year, Honesdale resident and local historian Larry Highhouse was going through his collection of old photographs and souvenirs when he found a postcard, dated 1915, of the old Lyric Theatre and an accompanying piece of sheet music to a song titled “In Dear Old Wayne.”

The Lyric Theatre—which stood in the space that the decidedly less-charming Turkey Hill gas station and convenience store now occupies—opened in Honesdale in 1907 and remained a cultural fixture until getting destroyed by a fire in 1961.

While still operating on Main Street, the theatre rented out a storefront to F.A. Jenkins Music House; Jenkins is credited as the composer of “In Dear Old Wayne.” The lyrics were penned by Joseph A. Bodie Jr., who ran the Bodie Studio in town, originally his father’s photography studio.

The Lyric Theatre opened its doors in 1907 on Main Street in Honesdale, PA.

Dozens of musicians draw upon the town's unique and beautiful landscape while composing songs.

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More than an ode, the song seems to be a reminiscence on Bodie’s bucolic childhood in Wayne County. Like any wistful lyricist, he’s prone to superlatives, romanticism and melancholy.

For nowhere blooms the flower so sweet,

And nowhere else is joy complete,

For heav’n and earth both seem to meet in dear old Wayne

As a Wayne County native myself, I’d like to cosign that our flowers bloom more sweetly than the fragrance-lacking phlox and magnolias of Pike and Susquehanna counties. But I fear something else may be at play. Could it be that they bloom sweetest and brightest when we are young? That before our senses have become dulled and overexposed as adults, flavors used to burst stronger on our tongues, colors appeared to roar more luminous in our eyes, and smells seemed to more fully engage our callow olfactory nerves?

Once more I see the silv’ry lakes and rivers,

The babbling brooks that wander gay and free,

And memories and scenes of dear old homeland,

Will never in this life forgotten be.

Wayne County’s most famous songwriting export is surely Richard Smith, who wrote “Winter Wonderland” while suffering from tuberculosis in Scranton’s West Mountain Sanatorium.

He grew up in Honesdale across the street from Central Park and the county courthouse. Apocryphal or not, any Honesdalian worth their rock salt biasedly maintains that it was Smith’s childhood memories of playing in the freshly fallen snow of Central Park that inspired him to write the Christmas standard years later.

Today, the natural beauty, cultural landmarks and historical significance of Wayne County—and northeast PA at large—continue to provide fodder for songwriters. Some look outward and make melodies out of what they find, others allow the environment here to envelope them, but turn inward for inspiration.

Dave Ingerson, a self-taught guitarist and songwriter who lives in Union Dale, uses music as the vehicle through which he teaches younger generations about local and regional history. Along with his wife Bonnie and his sister Denise, he founded a long-running musical group called the Black Sage Project.

“Pennsylvania has an awful big story to tell,” he said. “And every little town has a story to tell… you just have to be in tune with it, that’s all.”

Dave Ingerson

Ingerson spent his early years in Scotland, and said that traditional Celtic music has remained his primary touchstone and a style that he combines with American bluegrass and folk music in his songs.

He’s written widely about Pennsylvania history, from tragedies like the Lehigh Valley’s Mud Run Train Disaster of 1888 and the Pittston Twin Shaft Mine Disaster of 1896; he’s also written about the region’s communities, with songs about towns like Forest City and Honesdale. He takes great care to capture the spirit of the people and time periods he records through song, and he gets a little blue once he’s finished with a piece.

“When you first start out, you can’t wait to see what the outcome is going to be, because it’s always magical at the end,” he said. “But then when you finish it, it’s always bittersweet, because you figure, you know, it’s time to move on.”

Have you seen the streets of Honesdale?

What was cobblestone is blacktop,

Where the old canal used to be is now a parking lot.

The Lion in a museum for all the world to see,

Have you seen the streets of Honesdale?

It’s busier than it used to be.

Black and white pictures tell the story of long ago,

Like the changing of the seasons that seem to come and go,

Well if you see the streets of Honesdale from a Winter Wonderland,

Take a ride on the Stourbridge Line, where history’s around the bend.

—Dave Ingerson, “Streets of Honesdale”

Other local musicians—like Stephen Faubel of Hawley, and Randy Light of Lake Ariel—don’t make as concerted an effort to reflect the area through their songwriting. Yet the serenity of Wayne County’s flora and fauna affect their creative process on a more subconscious level.

In a song called “Keeping This Day Forever,” Light explores the feeling that, as he gets older, his songs will be souvenirs to remember him by, almost like saving a leaf pressed into the pages of a book.

The days grow short now over the hill,

A butterfly flutters away,

My time is coming, so here is a song,

Something left here when I’m gone.

...

Put me on a page in your picture book,

Like a maple leaf covered in film,

Write down my name so you can remember,

Put me on a shelf keeping still.

I’m keeping this day forever,

I’ve never had better weather,

I’m keeping this day forever in a song.

—Randy Light, “Keeping This Day Forever”

Faubel said he’s written much of his material in the quiet of his parents’ backyard, which he used to refer to as his “songwriting laboratory.”

“I find nature to be really where a lot of creativity comes out of me… I need to find a quiet place,” he said. “Music derives out of nature. It’s really apparent in the sounds and the rhythm. Even the day and night cycles, the moon cycles, the seasonal change; there’s a rhythm to that. We’re just playing these patterns out through the vibrations we create. ”

Sitting all alone, in my home where nobody can find me

It’s the only chance I get, so I let all the feelings go inside me

Looking out the window, and I see the world is slowly melting, enveloping, disassembling, propelling into a dream

I lay down, watch the waves and the wind wash away

All the things I believe, all the faces fall like leaves on the trees,

Neverending, reinventing, and always changing.

—Stephen Faubel, “Changing Leaves”

For Zach Bateman—for whom music and songwriting are passions, but not day jobs—local history acted as a stepping stone to songwriting about his own life experiences. Bateman attended Gregory the Great Academy in Elmhurst Township, where the oral tradition of Irish, Scottish and American folk music became deeply ingrained. He’s maintained a lifelong love of music, encouraged by his classically trained wife and her musical family.

He had a desire to write his own music since age 14, he said, but said he was too intimidated and “didn’t know where to start” for years. That was until one day he stumbled upon a book that compiled hundreds of archival, “beautiful, but kind of heartbreaking” photographs recording NEPA’s bygone coal-mining era.

“I remember looking at that and something just hit me, ‘Man, where are the songs about this?’” Bateman said. “Looking at these pictures, I just felt like I was looking at a bunch of ghosts who hadn’t been given their due.”

Zach Bateman

Bateman makes no claims to being a historian and never allows historical accuracy to get in the way of self expression, but through song he’s drawn on the past, and interlaced it, to better relay the stories of his own life.

His favorite tune of the ones he’s written, for example, is called, “Shohola,” and carries two meanings. It’s a song about the hours of childhood bliss he spent swimming in Shohola Creek in Pike County, juxtaposed with the hours past generations of children in the northeast region spent performing hard labor down in the coal mines.

A rascal in a top hat with his pocketbook parade,

A tourist land of photographs taken beneath the clay,

A moment for the gentlemen who lost their boyhood years,

A moment for the ladies lining pockets with their tears.

Go out to Shohola on a Sunday afternoon,

Slip into the river with a sanguine thought to prove.

If it wasn’t for the devil, and the way he plays our fear,

You’d see the lights of heaven shining here.

The Lyric Theatre fire of March 23, 1961. This fire completely gutted the theatre as well as the offices of Isabel Dunne a tax consultant, the Wayne …

The theatre had been bought by the Comerford Theatres chain in 1920.

The lot where the theatre once stood is occupied by the Turkey Hill gas station on Main Street.