Back when I was a kid, I started collected books and somehow acquired the ten-volume book set, "The complete works of James Whitcomb Riley" (1916). Many years later, the title to my 2024 book, "In the Land of Used to Be: Memories of a Rural Pennsylvania Childhood" was inspired by the first verse of Riley's poem "The Used-to-Be." (See the text of the poem below.) Just for fun, I used software to set the poem to string quartet music. To listen to the resulting song version of the poem, click here, or click on the song cover artwork below.
L. Dietle
The following copy of the poem is from Riley's 1893 book "Poems Here At Home".
