Authors starting with S

- Frank L. Stanton (February 22, 1857 - January 7, 1927 ) -

Ancestry: Charleston, South Carolina, USA

Frank Lebby 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 was born to Valentine Stanton (a printer, Confederate soldier, and farmer) and his wife Catherine Rebecca Parry Stanton, whose father owned a plantation on Kiaweh Island, South Carolina. From early childhood he was influenced by the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley and was reared in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. After starting school in Savannah, Georgia, Frank Lebby Stanton found his education cut off by the American Civil War. At age 12 he became apprenticed to work as a printer, a position which allowed him to enter the newspaper business. In 1887 he met Leone Josey while he was working for the Smithville News; they married and, in 1888, moved to Rome, Georgia, where Frank Lebby Stanton had received an offer from John Temple Graves to serve as night editor for the Rome Tribune. With encouragement from Joel Chandler Harris, Stanton in 1889 switched to the Atlanta Constitution (where for a few months he worked for Henry W. Grady prior to Grady's death), and began to focus more on writing editorials and columns, a newspaper role which he filled from then until Stanton's death in 1927. Stanton's writing became quite popular and assiduously read. His column News from Billville (later Up from Georgia) forms the basis for claims that he was even the prototype for American newspaper columnists. Frank Lebby Stanton and Leone Josey Stanton were survived by their children—Marcelle Stanton Megahee and Frank Lebby Stanton Jr.

Frank Lebby Stanton's verse is marked by simplicity and charm as well as sentimentality which was then en vogue. His poems include a number which he wrote in dialect, a challenge for which he had special knack, such as "Mighty Lak a Rose" (which was set to music by Ethelbert Nevin [1862-1901]). The music for "A Plantation Ditty" (first line "De gray owl sing fum de chimbly top") by Stanton was composed by Sidney Homer. Several of Stanton's ballads were set to music by Oley Speaks. Possibly Stanton's most successful hit in popular music was his lyrics for the wildly selling 1901 parlor song "Just Awearyin' for You" for which Carrie Jacobs-Bond provided the familiar tune.