Letters home a window on traveling Amherst musician’s life a century ago

AMHERST — On sheet music for the composition “My Darling,” Gil Roberts writes “you are” before the song title, a succinct way of expressing his affection for wife Ida Mae Roberts while he was in Barcelona, Spain, in early 1934.

In his cursive handwriting on the blank reverse side of the paper, Roberts offers his spouse a more detailed account of his time abroad.

In another letter, sent from Buffalo, New York, about 12 years earlier, Roberts asks Ida Mae what is going on in Amherst, and, addressing her as dear, writes, “I see some awful pretty things I am going to get for you and the children,” at the same time making it clear that she and the kids are his priority. “I don’t have the time to want a thing.”

These correspondences are among 75 to 100 letters, drafted between 1920 and 1934, that were recently uncovered, giving new insights into both Gil Roberts’ life as a musician, father and husband, and the world in which the famed Amherst native lived.

For Anika Lopes, the founder of Ancestral Bridges and Roberts’ great-granddaughter, the initial examination reveals the extraordinary challenges he faced as he left home for work for lengthy periods of time, and as he and his family, and other people of Afro-Indigenous heritage, encountered racism and housing and medical discrimination.

The content of the letters is just beginning to reveal what he saw in his travels around the globe, visiting 21 countries, and making countless stops across the United States.

“It feels like a treasure has been bestowed on us,” Lopes said, speaking from the Cottage Street site of the center that aims to present the erased, obscure and lesser-known history of Amherst. “It’s no less than remarkable that they have landed here at this time.”

Lopes said she expects that the letters can also provide details of an important story beyond Amherst, observing that what Roberts went through applies to many Black citizens who came of age in the pre-World War II era.

“They’re already telling the story of values that haven’t been told,” Lopes said. “There hasn’t been a discovery of this scale until now.”

The letters show a progression in his career. “These show the challenges and struggles to make ends meet, and also how people move around and care for people,” Lopes said.

It also blows the lid off a narrative that Gil Roberts was only about banjo playing, which is part of the erasure of his daily life.

“It really changes the perspective. There’s never been this magnitude of first-hand accounts of what life was really like,” Lopes said.

For Lopes it allows her to meet her great-grandfather as a young man.

Lopes got to know Roberts in the years prior to his death 2002, when he was the oldest resident of Hampshire County. She recalls his playing the banjo at his Snell Street home and the music playing in the neighborhood off Northampton Road, an area now designated the Westside Historic District.

“I met him as an older, wise father figure, ” Lopes said. “Now, I’m meeting him at a young age.”

Lopes’ mother, Debora Bridges, said she is filled with emotion in reading the letters, carefully handling each with gloves as she removes them from box. Bridges has been the curator of the town’s Civil War tablets, which contain the names of more than 300 soldiers from the Amherst region who served in the Union forces, including those African Americans who served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment and 5th Calvary. 

Bridges notes that the letters sometimes run from three to 12 pages, indicating her grandfather had lots to say.

Roberts was born in 1896, growing up in a house on Hazel Avenue built by his father, Perry, who had been enslaved on Wye House Plantation in Maryland, the same plantation where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enslaved.

In his 80 years of playing the banjo, though his touring was mostly before World War II, Gil Roberts is said to have performed with jazz great Louis Armstrong and accompanied singer Josephine Baker, and to have played for audiences as diverse as Prohibition-era gangsters and Egypt’s King Farouk. He later worked as a janitor at Amherst College.

The letters were located in the home where he lived as an adult on Snell Street, in the back of an armoire. Being stored in this cool, dry place allowed for this “extraordinary archive” that Lopes said gives her goosebumps.

Lopes said this will allow Ancestral Bridges to greatly expand the story and first-person narrative. “They’re just amazing to see in person,” Lopes said.

Much of what she has read in the letters so far matches the stories that have been handed down from Lopes’ “Aunt Edye,” Edythe Roberts Harris, who is now 98.

Harris, a Greenfield resident, is daughter to Gil Roberts, aunt to Bridges and great-aunt to Lopes. When she graduated Amherst High School in 1945, she was denied a Daughters of the American Revolution scholarship, likely due to the color of her skin, and Lopes and Bridges hope to rectify that by soon offering a scholarship in her name from the now regional school.

“What a wonderful discovery,” Harris said of the letters. “A treasure trove of letters, 100 years old, from my dad to my mom.”

A cabinet inside Ancestral Bridges has Roberts’ banjo along with a teaser of the letters, with a few envelopes, as they begin to highlight “a box of voices that hasn’t been heard.”

Lopes also points to the connections to the past, including to the letter on display from Charles Thompson, who was one of the Black soldiers from Amherst serving in the 54th Regiment and who recounted his thoughts and feelings to his sister, Mary Thompson. Charles Thompson was present in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to announce and to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and formally mark the day that all slaves in the United States were freed.

Lopes said the letters from Roberts indicate, more than half a century after the end of the Civil War, some of the same struggles and same joy, offering significant parallels to the world, and the nation, as it exists in 2026.

“His stories are telling the story that hasn’t been told before,” Lopes said. “This is him telling the story of Amherst, and his experience as a Black man in the United States at that time.”

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