Musician: Julia Niebergall (1886 – 1968)

There are better known musicians buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, but only Julia Niebergall has had one of her compositions performed by a Chinese Wind Ensemble! Born into a family of Indianapolis musicians, Niebergall’s father played double-bass, her brother percussion, and her sister was another piano player.

She only composed six pieces for ragtime piano, but two of them, “Hoosier Rag” (1907) and “Red Rambler Rag” (1911), were popular enough to be included in the ragtime repertoire still played today. The father of her friend and fellow composer, May Aufderheide, had a music publishing business that helped get her music out to the masses.

When she was in her mid-teens, Julia began accompanying dance classes at the Normal College for teachers located in the Athenaeum. For the next five decades, she played for gym classes at the Athletic Club, for other gym and dance classes, gave performances around town, and taught music. Her ability to improvise made her a natural to accompany silent movies in theaters. Only briefly married in the 1920s, she was an independent woman able to support herself and is believed to be one of the first women in town to buy and drive her own car. She continued to live and work in Indianapolis until moving to Bloomington in the 1950s, working in some musical capacity at Indiana University.

Listen to one of Niebergall’s arrangements here.