Editor’s Note: Western North Carolina is rich with untold stories—many resting quietly in local cemeteries. In this Tombstone Tales series, we explore the lives of people from our region’s past whose legacies, whether widely known or nearly forgotten, helped shape the place we call home.
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Amid the rolling landscape of Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery rests Lamar Edwin Stringfield, a composer and conductor who carried the songs of the southern mountains into the world of orchestral music.
Born near Raleigh in 1897, Stringfield grew up in western North Carolina, where the rhythms of mountain life and music shaped his imagination. The son of a Baptist minister, he learned piano, banjo and cornet as a child and later studied at Mars Hill College and Wake Forest College before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1916. He served with the 105th Engineers Band in France during World War I and, after the armistice, studied flute and composition in Paris before completing his training in New York at the Institute of Musical Art, now Juilliard…