Gems of Love

Myra Viola Wilds was born in Mount Ollie, Kentucky. In 1911 she lost her eyesight from eye strain and overwork as a dressmaker. In the three years following, Wilds endured severe illness before, on March 10, 1914, at 3 a.m., she woke from a sound sleep and wrote her first poem, “Sunshine.” Less than a year later she completed her first book of poems, Thoughts of Idle Hours. In the preface, Wilds writes, “Every line and verse in this little volume has been composed and written with my own hand notwithstanding the loss of my eyesight.” Taking inspiration from the beauty of the natural world she could no longer see, Wilds encourages us to scatter love everywhere we go. 

Conductor, composer, and bass-baritone Dusty Francis (he/him) enjoys an active career across both the United States and the United Kingdom. He currently serves as Director of Music Ministries at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, MI and Artistic Director of Out Loud Chorus. Past roles have included musical leadership of the New York City Master Chorale, The Fourth Choir, and the Park Slope Singers, as well as solo singing engagements spanning styles and periods from Bach to Puccini and Schubert to Sondheim. 

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There is no biography of Myra Viola Wilds available, but public records and contemporaneous newspaper reports, especially from The Philadelphia Tribune in the 1910s and 1920s, give more information about her life. In the 1900 census, her birth month was self-reported as July, 1871, and in the introduction to her 1915 book of poetry, Thoughts of Idle Hours, she gives her birthplace as Mount Ollie, Kentucky. She married Dodd H. Wilds in 1897, and her marriage license gives her birth name as Marie Viola Brown—but she was known professionally and personally as Myra. Wilds was a singer, pianist, violinist, choral conductor, and composer, in addition to being a poet, and her public performances included music as well as recitations of her poetry. At least three of her compositions are listed in U.S. copyright records: “Come and Mobilize for Jesus,” a song from 1915 written in the context of World War I, and “Sheep Without a Shepherd” and “The Lord Is Coming Again,” from 1918. She and her husband lived in Philadelphia starting sometime before 1900, and she was a well-known figure in the Black community there, with her name appearing often in the social column of the Tribune. Her death certificate shows that she died on October 25, 1932, and that she was buried in Eden Cemetery, just outside Philadelphia.

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Note: There are places online where Myra Viola Wilds’s birth and death years are given incorrectly as 1875 and 1935. This seems to have come from an online source that confused her with a different Black woman poet, Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875–1935).

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