Archives West Finding Aid

During the 1940s and 50s, Ione Love Thielke (pronounced Til-key) was known as the Musical Poem Recorder of Cascade, Idaho. She set poems to music--her own poems and poems of others. She sang them before live audiences and on the radio, and recorded them on discs, using a disc recorder she personally owned. She turned her love of music and poetry into a small business, advertising that she would "accept any poem that can be sung and weave for it a fitting melody. She will send the poet an eight-inch record of the song she composes sung by herself, and she will also use the song on her radio programs and public appearances." More often than not, she accompanied herself on the tiple, a mandolin-like string instrument that became her trademark. The Deseret News, of Salt Lake City, Utah, characterized her musical style as a "revival of the original folk song music," and she recorded many poem-songs of a Western nature. Frances Yost in the Soda Springs Sun wrote that her "voice is soft like a thrush, but people hear her, no matter how large the audience. For there isn't any talking going on while Ione sings. It's quiet except for the strum strum and the soft melodious voice. Soon you get the rhythm of her foot as she keeps time and somehow you wish her song would never end."

Ione Love Thielke was born in California in 1903, daughter of James B. and Blanche Love. Her mother taught her how to play the mandolin. According to a 1948 article in the Boise newspaper Statewide (which she annotated as "my 1st write-up"), she lived in California, Oregon, and Texas before coming to Idaho. She also stated that she spent time in Nevada, where she worked with cowhands on the range. "When she appears now in her cow-girl outfit," the Statewide reported, "she wears it with the ease of long practice--a surprise to those who know her only in chic feminine dress."

While living in Cascade with her husband Richard Thielke, she performed at conventions, conferences, and other gatherings in Idaho and elsewhere in the West. The first appearances documented in the collection were in the late 1940s, though a clipping from 1951 stated that she "was one of the first persons to be televised on an experimental TV show held at the World's Fair at Treasure Island in San Francisco in 1939." She had her own radio program on a Weiser radio station and appeared numerous times on KDSH in Boise and other Idaho radio stations. She did some patriotic recordings for the Crusade for Freedom in 1950 and sang songs promoting Idaho agricutlural products for the Idaho Advertising Commission in 1952. In a letter dated March 15, 1952 (Box 1, Folder 6) she described a tour through California, where she made radio appearances and appeared on Del Courtney's television show, out of San Francisco. Later that same year she travelled East, and wrote to her husband of a forthcoming audition in New York with one of Arthur Godfrey's talent scouts. She said the receptionist gave her a "bad time" until someone in the office overheard her say she played the tiple--and immediately scheduled an audition. There is no record, however, that she ever appeared on Godfrey's television program.

In 1953 Ione Love Thielke moved to Mill City, Oregon, to care for her ailing father. She lived in Oregon from then on. Working from Mill City, and then Eugene, she continued to make public appearances and occasional radio broadcasts through the early 1960s. She later married Donald Barnes. Ione Love Thielke died in Eugene, Oregon, in 1979, leaving behind a trove of papers and recordings documenting her musical career.