Samuel Silas Curry

Samuel Silas Curry (November 23, 1847 – December 24, 1921) was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts.

Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when his family's farm was alternately appropriated by both the Union and Confederate armies.

With no school nearby, his early education was received at home. He would work outdoors all day and study at night, reading late into the evenings by the light of the fireplace. His parents encouraged his learning, and shared with him their love of history and literature. As a young man, he left the farm to attend East Tennessee Wesleyan University (later Grant University), where he proved to be an outstanding scholar, graduating in 1872 with the school's highest honors.

He continued his studies at Boston University, where he concentrated on literature, oratory, and theology. At B.U.'s School of Oratory he studied with Dr. Lewis B. Monroe and Alexander Graham Bell, then a professor of physiology at the school. In 1878 he graduated with both a diploma in oratory and a Master of Arts degree, and went on to earn his PhD. in 1880. In that same year he also received a diploma from Guilmette's School of Vocal Physiology in Boston.

He was planning to enter the ministry, when a sudden loss of voice forced him to embark on a new path. He said of this incident:

One Sunday morning I stood before an audience in the middle of an address, unable to speak a word. The horror of those moments has never been blotted from my memory. The failure was a climax of several years of misuse of my voice, though during that time I had sought help from every available source. I determined to search still more diligently to find the causes of my condition.

Over the next few years he sought advice from many vocal specialists both at home and abroad. In the States he studied with Lewis B. Monroe, Alexander Melville Bell, and Steele MacKaye; he also spent two summers in Europe studying with Emil Behnke, Lennox Brown, Francesco Lamperti, and the famed François Joseph-Pierre Regnier, head of France's National School of Acting. After this extensive study, he had both re-gained his voice and acquired a thorough knowledge of elocution pedagogy. But instead of returning to the pulpit, he chose to become an educator himself. His travels had caused him to realize that he fundamentally disagreed with the prevalent methods of teaching elocution. He was known to say that he “had essayed the systems of forty different teachers, and found them all lacking in different degrees.” This realization led him to embark on his life's work—the establishment of a new method for teaching vocal expression. Curry called his method of instruction that was grounded in principles of psychology the “think-the-thought” method that focused on using the entire body and especially proper breathing technique. Curry “believed that his greatest contributions to students were in his ideas for encouraging positive attitudes toward life and his method for training the mind. He wanted his students develop a way of thinking that ensured the words, when spoken, would have inner content. Curry saw the art of public reading as superior to acting, based on his belief that understanding the text was crucial to bringing text to life and that the “art of reading…must appeal more than the mind than to the eye.

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