Frank Lebby Stanton Biography

Frank Lebby Stanton—born 1857 February 22 in Charleston, South Carolina, died 1927 January 7 in Atlanta, Georgia, and frequently credited as Frank L. Stanton, Frank Stanton or F. L. Stanton—was an American lyricist.

He was also the initial columnist for the Atlanta Constitution and became the first poet laureate of the State of Georgia, a post to which he was appointed by Governor Clifford Walker in 1925 and which Stanton held until his death.

Stanton has been frequently compared with Indiana's James Whitcomb Riley or called "the James Whitcomb Riley of the South"; Stanton and Riley were close friends who frequently traded poetic ideas. Although Stanton frequently wrote in the dialect of black southerners and poor whites, he was an opponent of the less-admirable aspects (such as lynching) of the culture in which he lived, and he tended to be compatible in philosophy with the southern progressivism of his employer, the Atlanta Constitution, for which he wrote editorials. He collaborated with African American composer Harry Thacker Burleigh in the sheet music for Stanton's poem "Jean" (Burleigh composed and harmonized the tune). These and other characteristics of Stanton are well elaborated in the scholarly essays on him by Francis J. Bosha and Bruce M. Swain.

Multi-voice-ranges 1901 cover of Ethelbert Nevin's tune for "Mighty Lak' a Rose" for which Stanton wrote the lyrics. The dialect title means (approximately) "very much like a rose" and is supposedly sung by a mother to her young son. The first line, by which the opus is occasionally known, is "Sweetest li'l feller" (sweetest little fellow).

Shortly after his death Stanton was commemorated in the naming of the Frank Lebby Stanton Elementary School, which, after the redesignation of a street name for its eponym still unborn at the time of Stanton's death, is at 1625 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Atlanta.