Grace Kerns

American concert soprano (Born August 27, 1879 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania – died September 10, 1936 near Williamsburg, Virginia) Between 1900 and 1905, Kerns taught music lessons in Norfolk, VA. She herself studied voice with the famous opera singer and voice teacher Madame Louisa Cappiani in New York City and under Alfred Giraudet (died in 1911) at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juillard School), also in New York. By 1914, Kerns had become a successful concert singer, performing especially in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. In 1914 and 1917, she sang in Carnegie Hall in New York. For 13 years, she also served as solo soprano at St. Bartholomew Episcopal Church in New York (purportedly as the highest paid church singer in America). In 1915 she accompanied Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra on a fifteen-week tour through the United States as a featured solo soprano. Kerns was a prolific recording artist. Between 1911 and January 1917, she recorded almost 140 titles for Columbia. She interrupted her recording career in 1917 to go to France where she spent eight months entertaining American troops during World War I, becoming known as the "Nightingale of the Trenches." After her return from Europe, however, she was only able to make a few more recordings, for Okeh in June 1918. Regardless, she continued performing live for several more years, singing, for example, the soprano role in Handel's "Messiah" five times with the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, first in December 1919. Kerns retired from performing in 1932 and joined the faculty of Randolph Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, as an associate professor of voice. Four years later, Grace Kern, her brother Howard Kerns, and her nephew Howard Kerns Jr. died in a head-on collision with a bus two miles outside of Williamsburg while trying to visit her sister Katherine Kerns in Richmond.