James Milton Dungan, husband of hymnist Helen Silcott Dungan, was a well-known composer of sacred music, and a respected music professor.
He was born December 31, 1851, in Franklin, Johnson County, Indiana, the youngest child of Elisha and Lurania (Tilson) Dungan. Dungan was born into a musical family and showed musical talent at an early age. He studied at the Dana Musical Institute at Warren, Ohio, and later attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. After graduating from college he became a professor of music, and taught for the next twenty-two years at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana. In 1894 he moved to Indianapolis, where he founded the Indianapolis College of Music, which was later merged into the Metropolitan School of Music. In 1897 he founded a private music school, the Indianapolis Piano College.
Dungan was considered “a very fine musician and a master of the pipe organ.” (Noblesville Ledger). He was also said to be an excellent music teacher, who “knows just how to engineer a music class successfully,” and according to at least one source, “can get more music out of a tuning fork than any other man living.” (Edinburg Courier, 1878 & 1882.) In addition to his teaching, Dungan was the author of two textbooks, Normal Piano-Forte Method and The Normal Text-Book, both published at Lafayette, Indiana, in 1890.
Dungan later became involved in politics, and in 1901 was the Prohibition party candidate for mayor of Indianapolis.
After the death of his first wife, Helen Silcott, he was married on November 6, 1915 to Alice Hughes, a high school history teacher from Noblesville, Indiana, who was twenty years his junior.
On February 6, 1925, while riding a public street car on the way to his home, Dungan suffered a heart attack and died. He was interred next to his first wife at Greenlawn Cemetery in Franklin, Indiana.
Notes:
Dungan’s brother, Stephen W. Dungan (1837- 1922) was also a music teacher, and studied music in Chicago under William B. Bradbury, George F. Root, and others.
Biographical sources:
“James M. Dungan Dies Suddenly on Street Car Here,” Indianapolis Star, February 7, 1925, 1, 9; “The Prohibition Ticket,” Indianapolis News, August 7, 1901, 9; “Greeting Friends,” Noblesville (Indiana) Daily Ledger, August 11, 1917, 2; “City and County,” Edinburg (Indiana) Daily Courier, 12 October 1878, [3]; “The County Seat,” Edinburg (Indiana) Courier, September 14, 1882, [4]; Donald E. Thompson, Indiana Authors and their Books, 1917-1966; a Continuation of Indiana Authors and their Books, 1816-1916, and Containing Additional Names from the Earlier Period (Crawfordsville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1974), 178; Helen Kelly Brink, The Descendants of William Kellie of Scotland (Marco Island, Fla.: H. K. Brink, 1994), 433.
Latter-day Saint Hymnology 