Music midterm paper

4 Southern Music/American Music

can folk music traditions met and fused, was the land that gave rise to virtually every form of American popular music. The premise is simple, but the story is as complex as the multilayered relationships between the South and the rest of the United States. To begin to understand it better, we shall first turn to the

folk roots of the music. Chapter 1

FOLK ORIGINS OF SOUTHERN Music

The folk music reservoir of the South was formed principally by the confluence of two mighty cultural streams, the British-Celtic and the African. But if one looks for purity in the music of the South, one searches in vain. Southerners are often thought of as highly traditional people, and southern music has deep roots in the past. However, to ignore the adaptability of southern music is to miss one of its greatest realities. British and African styles did not leave their home continents in undiluted forms; constant population movements and economic transformations warred against the kind of stability that would have promoted musical isolation or stasis. In this country, they did not simply over- lap and interact; they also borrowed from and influenced the musical folk- ways of other subcultures in the South—the Germans of the Southern Piedmont and Central Texas, the Cajuns of Southwest Louisiana, and the Mexicans of South Texas. Music from Spanish sources, already admixed with African idi- oms, also came in from the Caribbean via New Orleans and the Gulf South or across the Mexican border into Texas. Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton spoke of the "Spanish tinge" as an essential ingredient of early New Orleans jazz, but the influence was also felt in the rhythms of other styles as well. Furthermore, the songs and styles of English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Scottish, and Welsh settlers intermingled so rapidly and frequently on the southern frontier that they defy the efforts of folklorists and ethnomusicologists to distinguish conclusively among them or to determine their exact origins. Alan Lomax is probably cor- rect when, recalling the composite quality of this music, he describes it as more British than anything one can find in Great Britain,"1 but these styles

reached across cultural boundaries and were influenced by the music of people who were not British at all.

Slaves built and occupied a community that white people could observe, and sometimes appreciate, but never wholly understand. In many ways, as Lawrence Levine has argued, their music "remained closer to the musical styles and performances of West Africa and the Afro-American music of the West Indies and South America than to the musical style of Western Europe."2

6 Southern Music/American Music

Intimately linked to work and worship, and marked by improvisation, an "overriding antiphony," and expressive bodily movement, African-American music spoke to the deepest needs of its creators with idioms that seemed both irresistible and alien to white listeners. Nevertheless, black and white southerners also shared a musical sphere. Acculturation of enslaved Africans to the ways of Europeans began early, from the first moments they encountered one another, particularly on board the slave ships. No one can date precisely the exact mo- ment when black and white southerners began to exchange musical ideas, but the process probably began about the middle of the seventeenth century, when slaves and indentured servants mingled on the farms and plantations of colo- nial Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.3 Racial prejudice, then and since, did not deter cultural borrowing: slaves absorbed much of the white people's music while also retaining as much of their African inheritance as they could, or dared. White musicians, of course, ran up a huge, and continuing, debt to black sources. Levine notes that this "relatively free trade of musical ideas and forms" continued long after the imposition of segregation at the end of the

nineteenth century.4Musical interchange existed from such an early date in the South's his- tory that it is not only difficult to calculate the degree of borrowing on either side, but also nearly impossible to determine the "racial" origin of many south- ern folk songs and styles. In fact, one can posit the existence of a folk pool shared by many blacks and whites, a common body of songs known in one form or another by poor people, regardless of race, that defied the ugly facts of racial bigotry and exclusion. Poor whites and blacks did not simply share a milieu that was rural, agricultural, and southern; they also had common expe- riences with poverty, isolation, and exploitation. The oppression of slavery, and the cruel system of racism on which it rested, set African Americans apart from poor whites in many crucial ways, but the two groups nevertheless fash- ioned an overlapping reservoir of culture and music that largely defined the rural South. Much that came to be termed "soul," for example, was not so much the product of a peculiar racial experience as it was of a more general rural southern inheritance. A taste for cornbread, black-eyed peas, and collard greens is not the exclusive province of any one race; it once was a class prefer- ence, and something of a necessity, that cut across racial lines. Common song preferences similarly reflected such a shared culture, permitting outlets for emotion, distractions from the cares of the day, occasions for communion

with ftiends, and encouragement in the face of adversity. That inclinations in music were not rigidly segregated, even during sla-

very, can be seen in the ballad tradition of the South, in the singing of the "songsters"—African-American singers who built diverse repertories aimed at

Folk Origins of Southern Music 7

both blacks and whites—and in much of the religious music that prevailed in the two communities. Black singers sometimes sang their own versions of the venerable British ballads, often regarded as the most durable manifestations of British culture in North America. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American songsters fashioned repertories that went far beyond what is now described as the blues, providing music for all sorts of social occasions, white and black, in the years before phonograph recordings appeared. Song- ster expectations were very high, and they prided themselves, says Paul Oliver, "on their range, versatility, and capacity to pick up a tune," a skill that came in handy particularly in their work singing and playing for dances. According to Oliver, they used "social songs, comic songs, the blues and ballads, minstrel tunes and popular ditties" to set the tempo for a variety of dancing require- ments, "for spirited lindy-hopping or for low-down, slow-dragging across a puncheon floor."' Even well into the twentieth century, such songsters as Henry Thomas, John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, and Huddie Ledbetter clung to a rep- ertory that was older and more diverse than those of most blues artists, singing ballads, love songs, and pop tunes as well as blues numbers.

Religious music of southern blacks and whites also drew from common sources. The degree to which the Christian message replaced the religious world view of the Africans has been a much debated question,6 but slaves received religious instruction from their masters by the mid-seventeenth cen- tury and the Church of England had begun its missionary work in the Ameri- can mainland colonies as early as 1701. Along with the teachings of Christ came the English tradition of hymnody, a body of music that evolved from psalmody, the singing of the Psalms with a faithfulness to the English text, and with a minimum of melodic variation. White people, of course, had the great- est access to such music, but slaves learned songs from the English hymnbooks at least as early as the 1750s. Many blacks long cherished the old, stately long- meter hymns, which they often called "Dr. Watts's hymns" because of their similarity to the compositions of Isaac Watts, the eighteenth-century English composer who made the first significant departure from psalmody by creating new songs with less literal reliance on Scripture and greater melodic diversity. Black choirs still sing these old songs, revering a song such as "Amazing Grace" as strongly as white singers do and performing it in varying styles that appeal to both white and black audiences.

Although slaves received formal instruction in the Christian religion at an early date and worshipped often in segregated sections of white churches, their first major exposure to the religious music of the poorer whites came in the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century. This revival movement had dramatic manifestations both

8 Southern Music/American Music

in the North and in the South. It became especially noted, however, because of the use on the southern frontier of an evangelistic method called the "pro- tracted" meeting, a revival event lasting several days, held in a rural setting in which participants camped, heard preaching, and sang, often having just learned the songs at the meeting. The camp meetings were giant outdoor arenas in which poor black and white southerners learned both songs and styles from each other. In these emotional, ecumenical gatherings, streams of Presbyte- rian, Methodist, and Baptist evangelists thundered their diverse yet remark- ably compatible messages of foreboding tempered with hope. Along with the preaching, songs floated freely through the forest clearings and brush arbors from one group to another. Some old hymns were supplemented by the addi- tion of choruses—possibly a black innovation that broadened a song's appeal by guaranteeing the sort of regular repetition that otal cultures frequently employ in memorized material, a feature of benefit to poorly educated south- ern whites as well as to African Americans. Other old hymns were replaced by new, spirited songs specifically designed for quick comprehension and mass performance.' Many of the songs were soon forgotten, but others appeared in printed hymnals or were absorbed into the folk culture where they became the

common property of southern blacks and whites. Many of the camp meeting songs, along with other types of religious

song material, circulated in the South, and northward, accompanied by a form of musical notation long cherished by rural southerners. The shape-note method, introduced in New England around 1800 and first made available in 1802 in The Easy Instructor, published in Philadelphia, was a simplified form of musical instruction in which four musical syllables, "fa-sol-la-mi," were designated by geometric shapes to denote their pitch, with three shapes re- peated to make a complete scale. The itinerant singing-school teachers of the early nineteenth century took their shape-note method from New England into Pennsylvania and then into the Shenandoah Valley where the first great concentration of southern shape-note activity occurred, proving of great ben- efit to earnest would-be singers with limited education and little or no formal musical training. Shape-note composers and songbook compilers adjusted readily to a new seven-note "do-re-mi" system, introduced in 1827 and widely popularized after the Civil War, but the most popular of all the southern- produced books, and one long revered in many southern homes as second only to the Bible, was Benjamin E "White's Sacred Harp (1844), a book that adhered to the four-note style and still serves as the principal instruction manual for many southern singers. White and other shape-note teachers and writers ministered largely to the needs of white people, but the method, and the hym- nals that conveyed it, also moved into the homes of some African Americans.

Folk Origins of Southern Music 9

George Pullen Jackson referred to black shape-note singers in 1933, and Joe Dan Boyd noted remnants of the tradition in the 1970s.8 The paperback gos- pel songbooks of the twentieth century, which contained both the oldest hymns of Protestantism and the newest compositions, were color-blind. Songbooks with compositions by both blacks and whites, such as those published by R.E. Winsett in Dayton, Tennessee, could be found in great profusion in homes and rural churches throughout the South. Through such material, and through radio transmission after 1920, the gospel composers circulated their songs, on the whole oblivious to racial considerations. As a result, songs such as "I'll Fly Away" and "Turn Your Radio On," both by Albert Brumley, the popular Okla- homa-born white composer, became fixtures in the repertories of black sing- ers. White gospel singers, on the other hand, might have been surprised to learn that such familiar songs as "Precious Lord" and "Peace in the Valley" were written by the black composer Thomas Dorsey, or that such standards as "Stand by Me" and "Take Your Burdens to the Lord (Leave It There)" came from the pen of a Philadelphia African Methodist Episcopal minister, Charles H. Tindley.

In response to the musical needs of southern religious folk, there arose in the nineteenth century a set of enterprising purveyors of tunebooks for singing schools and songsters for camp meetings whose love of music and the gospel was matched by their business sense and marketing expertise. They combined evangelistic and entrepreneurial instincts for the purpose of mak- ing religious music accessible to southerners of modest means but also inad- vertently contributed to creating one of the few ways southern-produced music made its way into the North before the Civil War. The Shenandoah Valley became the seedbed of southern religious music, especially due to the efforts of a Mennonite named Joseph Funk, a resident of the little community of Singer's Glen, near Harrisonburg, Virginia. He printed, in German, his first songbook, Choral-Music, in 1816 and began educating students and siring offspring who contributed greatly to the circulation of the shape-note method throughout the southern backcountry and as far west as East Texas. The songbooks, usually paperback in the twentieth century but normally oblong hardbacks known as "long boys" in the nineteenth, were sold throughout the South and into the North by a network of companies mostly descended from the Ruebush-Kieffer Company, founded byJ.H. Ruebush and Aldine Kieffer, two descendants of Joseph Funk. It was the parent organization, directly or indirectly, of virtually all of the southern religious music publishing houses that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of many of the singing schools and teachers that flourished throughout the South. Ruebush-Kieffer and its descendants and the R.E. Winsett Company helped

10 Southern Music/American Music

blacks and whites, North and South, shape a body of religious music that came to be one of the most powerful forces in vernacular music in the country.

In addition to the often-intertwined religious music traditions of south-

ern blacks and whites, a string-band tradition also encompassed musicians of both races, although African Americans tended to excel and innovate in the use of stringed instruments earlier than their white counterparts. Many slaves brought with them to the Americas a facility with stringed instruments that was deeply rooted in Africa. Several West African cultures possessed a wide array of stringed instruments, one-stringed or more, which were both plucked and bowed, descendants of which can still be found occasionally in the Deep South. African Americans mastered the guitar in the late nineteenth century, long before southern white musicians. In the most inaccessible regions of the South, the guitar appears to have been a somewhat late acquisition among white folk musicians, coming to the Appalachians after the 1880s and to the Cajun bayou country of Louisiana even later. Black musicians may have in- spired one of the most distinctive of all styles of guitar playing, the so-called Hawaiian guitar technique of fretting with a steel bar, usually with the instru- ment lying flat across the musicians lap. Folklorist David Evans suggests that African-American sailors may have prompted this style when they introduced their bottleneck style of guitar playing into the Hawaiian Islands at the end of the nineteenth century.9 At about that time, guitarists of both racial groups benefited from the arrival of widespread marketing of guitars by Orville Gibson. C.F. Martin had built guitars as early as 1833, but the instruments were not widely available until after 1894 when Gibson made his innovations. Both companies further strengthened the instrument's importance among south- ern folk musicians with the introduction of steel strings in 1900, an innova- tion of great benefit to musicians who often struggled to make themselves

heard in noisy dance settings. Long recognized as an instrument of African origin, the banjo has been

associated with black Americans as early as 1749. The addition of the fifth, or drone, string is often attributed to a white southerner, Joel Walker Sweeney, a popular minstrel entertainer from Appomattox, Virginia, although there is little proof for this assumption and some evidence that slaves had added a fifth string long before Sweeney's time. Scholars also disagree about the means by which the instrument moved into the hands of southern white folk.10 Did they learn directly from black people, as Sweeney probably did in the 1830s. Did the "frailing" and "clawhammer" styles of banjo picking—later popularly identified with white Appalachian musicians—come to the mountains with black musicians who arrived as slaves or as industrial laborers? Or did south- ern white rural musicians adopt the banjo and its performance styles rrom

Folk Origins of Southern Music 11

touring white song-and-dance artists, who came to the South as blackface minstrels or as members of circuses or medicine and tent shows? The answer to each question is probably "yes." Confederate soldiers, in many cases, were already playing banjos when they marched off to war, and they and other white rural musicians had ample opportunities to see and hear the instrument played by slaves and free blacks and by itinerant professional musicians. After the war, in fact, many of those traveling musicians were African Americans who had begun to professionalize their art through performances in blackface troupes. Regardless of its origins and stylistic sources, by the middle of the 1920s the five-string banjo was presumed to be the exclusive property of white musicians, first popular with stage entertainers, then with such southern folk or hillbilly performers as Uncle Dave Macon.

No instrument has been more readily identified with southern whites than the fiddle. Small enough to fit in a saddlebag, the fiddle moved westward with the southern frontier. Fiddlers could be heard practically anywhere a crowd gathered: at county court days, political rallies, militia musters, race days, county fairs, holidays, house-raisings and similar work/social functions, and of course at fiddle contests, which have been held in the South since at least 1736, when fiddlers competed for prizes in a contest in Hanover County, Virginia. The fiddle tunes constituted America's largest and most important body of folk music preserved and transmitted without benefit of written scores, and many of the tunes are still performed by country musicians, although in styles that their European or African forebears would scarcely recognize. In- cluded among them were old British dance tunes such as "Soldier's Joy," in- digenous tunes of anonymous origin such as "Hell among the Yearlings," songs commemorating historical events such as the Battle of New Orleans in "The Eighth of January," and songs learned from the popular stage or from sheet music such as "Arkansas Traveler" or "Over the Waves."

Aside from public gatherings, the country dance was the natural setting that showcased the fiddle's versatility. The country dance was the most impor- tant social diversion among rural southerners, and it continued to be so through the 1920s, although the tradition dates from the earliest stages of British colo- nization of the South. Southern colonists often described dances as "frolics," borrowing a British expression, by which they meant essentially any social or community event centered around dancing but usually accompanying wed- dings, holiday celebrations or some other occasion such as the conclusion of a barn raising or other communal work project. Although some dances con- vened in public settings such as taverns or dance halls, most typically they took place in private farm homes. Such dances were so closely associated with People's homes that the)- were commonly called "house parties" in the late

12 Southern Music/American Music

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a family sent out the word that a dance was scheduled for a particular evening, farm folk came by horse and wagon from all over the countryside and gathered in a room that had been stripped bare of furniture, usually moved outside the house. In some cases, two rooms were prepared for the dancers, and a fiddler sat or stood in the doorway between the two rooms. Because of the central importance of fid- dlers to the house dance tradition, they were among the most prized members of a community. Quite often they played alone for the long duration of the dance, keeping the dancers happy with a variety of numbers, often featuring numerous choruses to guarantee everyone ample opportunity to dance to a particular favorite tune. It was exhausting, if rewarding, work. Occasionally, though, a fiddler worked with an accompanist playing a parlor organ, piano, French harp, banjo, or guitar. As late as the 1920s, in some parts of the Appa- lachian South, a fiddle and banjo duo was considered to be a band. Elsewhere, a fiddle and guitar formed the most popular combination, and it was this unit that anticipated and often formed the nucleus of the larger and more diverse country music bands of the future.

Fiddling has been so important in white country music for such a long time that it is easy to forget how popular it once was among blacks. Newspa- pers, travel accounts, memoirs, plantation records, runaway slave narratives, and WPA interviews with ex-slaves abound with references to slave fiddlers. Black fiddlers often played simply for the enjoyment of their fellow quarters- dwellers, but they were also in demand for the social festivities sponsored by the planters. Plantation balls and barbecues and town functions featured both individual fiddlers and entire orchestras composed of slaves. To what extent modern country fiddling is indebted to the techniques or styles of slave musi- cians, or to the tunes played by slaves, is unknown, but the degree of mutual borrowing between blacks and whites may have been very large. In the twen- tieth century, black fiddlers such as Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, "Papa" John Creech, and Butch Cage performed publicly, but their numbers were dwarfed by the hordes of white country fiddlers.

No definitive explanation exists for the decline of the black fiddling tradition. Its demise, along with the virtual disappearance of the string-band and ballad traditions among African Americans, coincided with their transi- tion from slavery to freedom and the emergence of widespread racial segrega- tion. Emancipation brought African Americans new forms of discrimination and oppression, but it also permitted a self-expression that was not possible under slavery. Post-Civil War black musicians eagerly sought forms of artistic assertion that were uniquely their own, and they experimented with all types of instruments. African Americans' musical inclinations were shaped par-

Folk Origins of Southern Music 13

. u[arly by their contacts with cities. As their immersion in the urban experi- deepened, ties to their rural past weakened. Younger black musicians

rally rebelled against that which was reminiscent of the slave past. The fddle not only evoked "old plantation days," it was also identified with the

resumed enemies of the African Americans, the southern poor whites. Ex- ceptions existed, of course, such as could be found in the family of DeFord Bailey, one of the early members of the Grand Ole Opry, the musical bastion of southern poor whites. Bailey, an African-American harmonica player, had a grandfather who was a contest fiddler. He recalled how black and white musi- cians shared string-band tunes, incorporated them into his harmonica reper- tory, and bemoaned the fact that "black hillbilly music" got overwhelmed in the 1920s by the "blues craze.""

Musical interchange among southern working people did not take place in a cultural vacuum independent of either commercial or cultivated sources. Folk musicians did not simply learn from each other. They also absorbed songs and musical ideas from professional entertainers and from formally trained musicians. Little is known concerning the extent to which the southern lower classes were exposed to the fine arts during the colonial period or even during the nineteenth century. While some formal education was available for the children of the poor, only rarely did they gain admission to musical conserva- tories. Plain folk sometimes attended concerts given by such musical luminar- ies as Jenny Lind and Ole Bull, but opportunities for them to have heard concerts or recitals of high-art music during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have been uncommon. The difficulties of travel and the ve- neer of social elitism associated with the music naturally inhibited attendance at these events.

Music audiences in the South, as elsewhere in the United States, were divided very early between people who clung to the idea of music as a formal, academic art that could only be appreciated by an educated elite and people who thought that music was an informal, emotionally perceived expression accessible to the masses. High-art music, defined in such terms, was not only aesthetically elitist, it was also inherently class-conscious. Musical preference became, and remains, a means of distancing oneself socially and economically from one's neighbors. During the colonial era the southern upper classes did not yet possess a cultural sense of mission that encouraged inculcating musical appreciation among the lower classes. On the contrary, Charleston's Saint Cecilia Society, founded in 1762, the first organized group of music devotees in the South, rigorously limited its membership to 120 men, each of whom paid dues of twenty-five pounds a year. The society, which sponsored concerts and recitals and organized its own troupe of instrumentalists, was above all a so-

14 Southern Music/American Music

daily exclusive club of gentlemen. There is no reason to believe that the "lower orders" ever heard any of the concerts sponsored by the organization. Other concerts, such as those given by touring groups of French musicians at the end of the colonial period, were also oriented primarily to the upper classes. Social extravaganzas sponsored by planters were exclusively upper-class affairs too for the most part, although black house servants certainly heard the music performed at these functions, and slave musicians were encouraged to learn the varieties of music featured there. Lower-class whites normally were not invited to the plantation balls or to the other gala social affairs conducted by the planters, but on very special occasions such as weddings or political barbe- cues, the social barriers might come down, and poor white neighbors or rela- tives might be invited to partake of the festivities.

Music of high-art origin, however, did insinuate itself into the con- sciousness of the southern folk, if not through direct contact then through the performances of popular entertainers who had somehow absorbed music from the cultivated tradition. The first incidence, of course, of the interrelationship between the cultivated and folk traditions may very well have been the cher- ished British ballads. No problem of folk scholarship has been more hotly debated than that of ballad origins,12 and it is not known whether such be- loved old songs as "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Wife of Usher's Well," and "The Lass of Roch Royal" originated among the anonymous folk or were the cre- ations of sophisticated writers who intended them for a literate audience, though both sources probably played a part in the process. Regardless of where they began, ballads were adopted by the folk, who reshaped and preserved them and then bequeathed them to their American descendants.

Folk dances of the southern United States, both black and white, clearly demonstrate the interplay between the cultivated and folk traditions. At least since the mid-nineteenth century, when minstrel performers popularized such folk forms as jigs, clogs, hornpipes, and "patting juba," dance steps of pre- sumed folk origin have persistently made their way into the realm of popular entertainment. The origins of such dances as the Charleston, the Black Bot- tom, and the Bunny Hug are generally well known, but it is less well known that many "folk dances" were survivals or imitations of formal or even courtly dances. The cakewalk, so important in the development of ragtime music, may have originated among slaves as a parody of formal plantation dances, although their white masters may not always have recognized the satire.13 Square dancing, strongly identified with frontier America, appears to have been a survival of the early-nineteenth-century upper-class fascination with cotillion dancing. Cotillions were popular with members of the English upper class who adopted them from continental European sources, especially French.

Folk Origins of Southern Music 15

' dancin^ moved back and forth across the English Channel, popular- • ed among the upper classes in France and England by John Playford's book 'Tl ("51 The English Dancing Master. When the English country dances moved

they became fashionable, were renamed "cotillions" and "quadrilles," A re published along with printed instructions for the dancers. From

they were re-exported to England and North America. The terminol- of square dancing—promenade, allemande, dos-a-do, sashay—suggests

its French associations.14 Though mostly identified in recent decades with Scottish Highland danc-

nd Irish step dancing, solo dancing was quite common both in the Brit- ' h Isles and in North America until well into the nineteenth century. Until then, a hornpipe was a solo dance, a fact long forgotten by most folk dancers and musicians. Probably the ancestor of the tap dance, it was featured by stage entertainers and nimble equestrian performers. The dance was brought to North America by French and English dancers in the eighteenth century. Ru- ral southerners no longer remember the dance, but they have preserved some of its accompanying tunes. Virtually every country fiddler knows "Sailor's Hornpipe," familiar to many people as the theme song of the cartoon charac- ter Popeye, "Rickett's Hornpipe," and "Durang's Hornpipe." Probably only a few of them, however, know that John Bill Ricketts gained his fame, and inspired the tune named for him, by dancing hornpipes on the backs of gal- loping horses or that John Durang of Philadelphia, the greatest dancer in the United States in the early nineteenth century, earned the honor of having a dance tune written to commemorate his exploits.

It may never be known how such material found its way into the backcountry South, but enough circumstantial evidence is available to suggest the manner in which the process occurred. In the years following the War of 1812, several troupes of actors and musicians moved into the South bringing their various brands of culture and entertainment to the most remote regions. The dramatic companies of Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith, which were com- bined after 1834, made regular annual circuits from Louisville to St. Louis to Memphis to New Orleans to Mobile and thence to Nashville. They, and other groups similar to them, typically offered songs and variety entertainment, in addition to dramatic presentations running the gamut from farce and melo- drama to Shakespeare. In 1822, for example, Ludlow gave the first public performance of "Hunters of Kentucky," the famous song celebrating the Battle

- / • O D

ot New Orleans that had taken place just downriver from that city in 1815. oerious dramatic performers learned to give audiences what they wanted,

especially if they hoped to compete with an expanding list of entertainers whose central aim was to amuse and not to elevate. Before the Civil War

16 Southern Music/American Music

blackface minstrels, singing clowns, Punch and Judy shows, which often had accompanying fiddlers or other musicians, equestrian performances by trick riders such as John Bill Ricketts, showboats, and the omnipresent medicine shows roamed far and wide through the towns and villages of the South. These performing units, along with the scores of tent and vaudeville shows that toured the region after 1865, created and circulated vast numbers of songs, dances, performing styles, and comedy routines. These remained popular long after their original creators had been forgotten, though it must be pointed out that the "original creators" can never be known conclusively because so much of this material arose from folk sources.

Phineas T. Barnum, the great humbug, was the first promoter to realize that with the proper ballyhoo the American people could be encouraged to patronize the highest forms of art as well as the low. When Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," visited the United States under Barnum's tutelage in 1850 and with a guarantee of $187,000, she encountered a tumultuous recep- tion everywhere she visited, including such southern cities as Memphis and New Orleans. The size and enthusiasm of the crowds that responded to her presence suggest that the Jenny Lind mania was not confined to the upper classes. Ole Bull, the flamboyant Norwegian violinist, also attracted large, en- thralled audiences during his southern tours of 1843—1844 and 1853. Whether the reception of such musicians indicates a genuine hunger for, or apprecia- tion of, high culture among southerners is open to question. In the days be- fore phonograph records, radio, or television, many audiences starved for entertainment thronged to whatever was available. They could alternate easily between a melodrama and a Shakespearean tragedy, a minstrel show and a concert by Jenny Lind.15

New Orleans may have been atypical of the South in its devotion to music and in the breadth of its cultural interests, but chroniclers of its music history argue that people of all social classes patronized opera there. Operas were performed in the city as early as 1791, and at least three opera houses flourished there before the Civil War, mounting productions by French, En- glish, and Italian companies. Beginning in 1827, a New Orleans-based opera company staged well-received productions in such northern cities as Philadel- phia, Boston, and New York. Many of these early productions were ballad or light opera, but several of the grandest of operas, such as The Barber of Seville, were presented in New Orleans before they were performed anywhere else in the United States. Opera has certainly become separated from the masses in New Orleans, as it has elsewhere in the United States, but at least two scholars of the New Orleans music scene, Ronald Davis and Henry Kmen, argue that attendance at opera performances in the antebellum era was much more so-

Folk Origins of Southern Music 17

. ,| Jiverse than it became after the war. According to Davis, "opera became U ' tegral part of the city's life not for just the wealthy and elite, but for the , i |est citizen as well." Street vendors and draymen hummed melodies from , I t productions, and Kmen contends that some elements of this music

may have made its way into jazz.16 While attempts to separate music into categories reflecting social dis-

' ctions have generally succeeded, various forms have often intermingled in expected ways. Even the most "serious" music has occasionally been adopted

nd reshaped by folk communities, and devotees of high-art music are well aware that some of the world's great music has a folk basis, such as the peasant music borrowed and adapted by Liszt and Bartok. In the United States, many high-art proponents have supported the utilization or exploitation of folk music, as long as the composers involved had sufficiently rigorous traditional aca- demic training. Further, they have not necessarily opposed folk musicians as lone as those musicians adjusted their styles to the demands of the cultivated tradition. Occasionally, gifted folk musicians found themselves encouraged to abandon their uneducated tastes and cultivate their natural talents in a conser- vatory or under the direction of a master teacher. Folk music in its natural state was seldom appreciated, and performers of such music were almost to- tally ignored.

Nevertheless, cultivated musicians in the South occasionally explored the folk resources of their region in order to appropriate them for artistic purposes. This exploration did not assume the proportions of a crusade until about the turn of the twentieth century, but there was at least one major mani- festation of it before the Civil War. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, born in New Orleans in 1829, was the Souths first great classical musician and composer, and the nation's first musical matinee idol. As a child prodigy, Gottschalk received the best formal musical education available, studying under such European-born masters as Francois Letellier, the organist and choirmaster at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, and then traveling to Europe at the age of twelve for further study. His ability impressed his European teachers and Frederic Chopin, who heard him in concert, and he won great acclaim in Europe before he became widely known in his own country. Impressed by Jenny Lind's earlier success, he came back to the United States in 1853 and made a whirlwind concert tour of major cities, including New Orleans. Like most crowd-pleasers in American musical history, Gottschalk achieved fame with more than just splendid musicianship. Dramatic stage presence, dark good looks, and an exotic Latin charm all contributed to the charisma that earned Gottschalk his international reputation. He also learned to give his audiences what they wanted to hear: patriotic songs, "classical" arrangements

18 Southern Music/American Music

of popular melodies, and genteel, sentimental airs such as his own most en during composition, "The Last Hope."

Gottschalk was more than an entertainer, however. He was also a corn poser, and in his role as songwriter he tapped, at least partially, the folk re- sources of the South. In compositions such as "Bamboula," "Le Bananier" and "La Savanne," written during his European sojourn in the late 1840s and early '50s, Gottschalk drew upon the African, Creole, and Caribbean resources of New Orleans music. Gottschalk's first principal biographer, Vernon Loggins points to his subject's childhood experiences in New Orleans as the primary factors that motivated such compositions: the drumbeats accompanying slave dances at the Place Congo, now known as Congo Square, the site of the city's Municipal Auditorium; the rhythmic chants of street vendors; and the lulla- bies and other snatches of tunes sung by his slave nurse, Sally.17 Gottschalk's second principal biographer, S. Frederick Starr, discounts the role of Congo Square in the making of the young Gottschalk's music, saying he learned his Creole songs "in his own home" from his grandmother as well as from his nurse: "The music of old Saint-Domingue formed an essential element of the Gottschalks" family life."18 Folk music of various kinds was certainly available to Gottschalk during his formative years, but so was the popular music of the traveling entertainers who often visited the city. Blackface minstrelsy was still in its early stages when Gottschalk sailed for France in 1841, but "Negro music" as conceived by white men was already the rage of both the United States and Europe by the time he returned to this country twelve years later. Although Loggins refers to "The Banjo" (1853) as Gottschalk's most enduring black composition, the piece seems more obviously modeled on Foster's "Camptown Races," just as "La Savanne" had earlier drawn on the frontier dance tune "Skip to My Lou."1'1

Thoroughly grounded in the European art tradition, Gottschalk was also a highly eclectic musician who scarcely could have avoided either con- sciously or unconsciously drawing upon the varied musical forms that so vig- orously interacted in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In addition, according to Starr, he was a thoroughgoing American nationalist and demo- crat. Several of his uncles fought with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and, though he was an ardent regionalist, he emphasized national themes over regional ones. Although he was greatly cosmopolitan, he resisted the tendency prominent at the time to segregate classes according to presumed cultural attributes. It so happened that the peak of Gottschalks artistic production came during the first great flourishing of popular culture in the United States.20 The boundaries between folk and popular culture al- ready were so thin that it is next to impossible to determine the origin or

Folk Origins of Southern Music 19

h ticity" of much of the music of the era. Gottschalk's work only served bscure those already hazy boundaries. His sensitivity to the unique presen-

• n of the varieties of music available, especially that of the people of New ~ I ns slaves, free people of color, Creoles, Jews, the Irish, "Americans"—

' his ingenuity in translating these musical forms into his own composi- • s demonstrated the potential that the southern folk tradition already held

for musicians, both high-art and vernacular. Whatever the precise sources of his compositions, their imagery and rhythm captivated the popular imagina- tion in a way that anticipated a continuing fascination with romantic south-

ern themes.