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Inside This Issue:
Music
of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja
The Germania Musical Society by Nancy Newman
Music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen Slottow
Scorsese's
Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review by Ray Allen
Eric
Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?: Review by Salim Washington
Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton
Vishio
Sondheim's Bounce:
Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee
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Filming the Music
of Williamsburg with Alan Lomax
By Carol J. Oja
In a twist on Tip O’Neill’s famous quip, “All politics
is local,” a seminar last spring at the College of William and Mary
combed sources in its own backyard to uncover a piece of hometown history
with national resonance. Fusing archival research and fieldwork, the class
project raised a number of provocative questions: what motivated the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation in 1960 to hire the well-known folk-music collector
Alan Lomax to work on a film titled Music of Williamsburg, which was produced
to give tourists a sense of daily life in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia?
Who were the traditional musicians pictured in the film? Almost all were
African American, and their performances sizzle. Yet none were named in the
credits. What political agenda might have energized the film, given its
attempt to present a realistic portrayal of the slave experience? After all,
this was 1960, a time when segregation remained firm in Virginia;
schools were being closed in defiance of Brown v. Board of Education; and the
state’s infamous “Racial Integrity Law” of 1924 that forbid
interracial marriage was still fully in force (it was declared
unconstitutional in1967).
What follows is a glimpse into
the fascinating story unearthed by a cluster of graduate students and
undergraduates, some in music, others in American Studies. We were lucky
enough to have Cary Carson, Vice President of Research at Colonial
Williamsburg, sit in on the class and lend generous assistance. Kip Lornell
also consulted with us, helping to shape fieldwork strategies. The performers
in the film turned out to include luminaries from the world of traditional
music—especially Bessie Jones, John Davis, the Georgia Sea Island
Singers, and banjo-player/fiddler Hobart Smith.
Music of Williamsburg,
directed by Sidney Meyers, was designed to combine historical recreation with
a fictional narrative. In many ways, it appears dated, even quaint, yet the
quality of the workmanship is high. Our seminar focused on the musicians, however,
rather than aesthetic criticism of the film. The main story involves a
flirtation between a “Miller’s Daughter,” played by Pamela
Tiffin (who the next year launched a Hollywood career
with Summer and Smoke, followed by Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three), and
a “Sailor,” played by Christopher Cary (who made a career largely
in supporting roles). As the couple banter with one another, they do so
against the backdrop of an imaginary day in Williamsburg
in 1768. At the opening, the sailor walks up from the James River
singing “Johnny Todd,” an early English ballad. Next a group of
African Americans appears in a cart performing “Moses, Moses.”
The film soon cuts to historic Wren Chapel at the College
of William and Mary, where a
psalm is sung. Then follows a scene of slaves in the field, rhythmically
hoeing the soil as they sing “Emma, You’s My Darlin’."
Throughout, the scene shifts steadily between European colonists and African
slaves. While whites dominate this integrated view, a crucial point is made
by not caricaturing blacks but attempting to treat them with respect. Toward
the end of the film, two long segments focus on a production of The
Beggar’s Opera, attended by the Sailor and Miller’s Daughter.
Meanwhile, extensive footage captures a frolic that goes on simultaneously in
the slave quarters.
Two musical directors were hired
to handle the different repertories. Parlor, church, and theater music for
the white colonists was “orchestrated and directed from eighteenth
century scores” by Gene Forrell of New York City;
The Beggar’s Opera was chosen because it had been performed in Williamsburg
in 1768. “Such authorities as Carleton Sprague Smith and Gilbert
Chase,” stated an unsigned précis of the project, “have been
approached about the proposed content of the Music Film and have
enthusiastically endorsed the plan” (quotations from
“Notes” [1960]).
Lomax coordinated the traditional
music, seeking vestiges of colonial practice in the contemporary world. He
was combining fieldwork with historic re-enactment. Like Forrell, Lomax did
considerable research, as outlined in a letter written to Arthur Smith,
producer of the film, where he detailed sources consulted, from Hans
Nathan’s articles about minstrelsy in Musical Quarterly, to “correspondents
at the Ford Foundation Jazz Research Project at Tulane,” to historic
travel accounts, to interviews by “WPA field workers . . . as late as
1930 (!)” [his exclamation point]. After all, this was more than a
decade before publication of Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black
Americans (1971) or Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977).
The biggest challenge for Lomax was the “slave sequence” at the
end, as he dubbed the frolic, which was filmed at night over an eight-hour
period.
For the film, Lomax scouted out musicians from across the southeastern United
States, building on his longstanding
contacts and taking a fieldwork trip, sponsored by Colonial Williamsburg,
during the month prior to filming. The musicians hired included Bessie Jones
and the Spiritual Singers of Coastal Georgia (later known as the Georgia Sea
Island Singers), Nathaniel Rahmings (drummer from the Bahamas by way of
Miami), Ed Young (fife player from Como, Mississippi), Prince Ellis (jawbone
player from Tidewater Virginia), and the Bright Light Quartet from Weems,
Virginia (on the Northern Neck). Interestingly, in light of the issue of
miscegenation that defined Virginia’s racial landscape in 1960, the
fiddler and banjo player in the slave scenes was white—Hobart Smith, legendary
among old-time musicians as one of the great virtuosos of Virginia’s
southwest mountains. Smith plays in the frolic scene but is not shown on
screen. He does appear earlier in the film, though, wearing
eighteenth-century garb and playing a fiddle in a barn.
Of the many intriguing issues that emerge
from Lomax’s work on the film, several will be singled out here,
including the relation of this film to Lomax’s release of Georgia Sea
Island Songs on New World Records; Bessie Jones’s unexpected family tie
to Williamsburg; and the
film’s racial dynamic as emblematic of the Civil Rights Movement.
For many of us teaching American music, Lomax’s recording of Georgia
Sea Island Songs, issued on New World Records in 1977, remains a crucial
sound document for exploring African retentions in the New World, spirituals,
or the glories of Bessie Jones and the singers she worked with. On that disc,
Lomax included three vocal groups, labeled “A,” “B,”
and “C,” which featured different configurations of the Sea
Island Singers. As Lomax made clear in the liner notes, Group “B”
was recorded when he went to the island “looking for musicians to
perform the black music in a film about Colonial Williamsburg.” He
dates this as 1961, but it must have been the previous year, since that was
when the film was shot. Group “C,” meanwhile, was recorded on
location at Colonial Williamsburg in 1960, and, as a result includes
musicians who were not part of the usual vocal ensemble. These were Nat
Rahmings on drums, Ed Young on fife, and, most interestingly, Hobart Smith on
banjo and guitar. Even though Lomax cites Smith as being among the
performers, I would guess that many listeners, except for specialists in
Appalachian traditions, never paused over the fact that a white musician from
the Virginia mountains performs
with the Georgia Sea Island Singers in this canonic release of their music.
Not only that, the Sea Islanders are joined by African Americans from Mississippi
and the Bahamas,
adding further complexity to the geographic mix. Smith’s story is
especially interesting given his own musical legacy of learning aspects of
claw hammer banjo technique from an African American player named John Greer
(Cohen 2001). The tunes performed by Group “C” include
“Reg’lar, Reg’lar Rollin’ Under,” “See Aunt
Dinah,” “Beulah Land,” and “The Titanic,” only
the first of which turns up in the film. Some of the other material recorded
in Williamsburg was subsequently
released on Lomax’s Southern Journey series.
Another tidbit encountered by the
class had to do with the unexpected lineages that shape history. Lomax
recruited singers from the Sea Islands because he
believed they “provided a pocket of Negro culture that has remained
relatively isolated and undisturbed (until recently) since the
Revolution” (“Teacher’s Manual”). What he
didn’t realize was that one of Bessie Jones’s grandfathers had
been a slave in Williamsburg, so
her tie to historic Virginia
was genuine. While the film was being made, Jones and other visiting
musicians, along with a number of Colonial Williamsburg employees, were
invited to a birthday party for a white baby. At some point, Jones was asked
to sing a lullaby. When she stood up to do so, Jones later recalled, she
suddenly found herself “pouring” out the story “like it was
ice out of a can” of how her grandfather had been a slave in
Williamsburg, before moving to Georgia. “Wasn’t a soul [in the
room] saying a word but me,” Jones said, “and I just told them
like it was” (Jones 1983, 51-52).
An image of Bessie Jones standing
up to speak at a mixed-race gathering in Virginia
in 1960 illuminates an unspoken political agenda behind the film: integrating
the narrative of the American past. A cluster of personalities was
responsible for this, including Arthur L. Smith, then Director of the
Audio-Visual Department at Colonial Williamsburg; Thad W. Tate, a historian
on Colonial Williamsburg’s staff who was author of The Negro in
Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, first distributed in-house by Colonial
Williamsburg in 1957; and Stanley Croner, scriptwriter and associate director
for the film (Tate 1957 [1965]). In a telephone interview with my students,
Croner acknowledged that a primary goal of the film was to include slaves
“as real people.” Focusing on eighteenth-century musical practices
provided a safe space for exploring racial history, as Croner remembered,
yielding a “political undertone that is not immediately obvious.”
But the intent was clear. “Hey fellas,” Croner recalled the film
as declaring, “in the eighteenth century there were lots of different
people, other than the aristocrats . . . that lived in the town of
Williamsburg” (Croner 2003). Furthermore, the film’s director,
Sidney Meyers, had a history of producing films that explored race and class.
The Quiet One (1949) and The Savage Eye (1959), like Music of Williamsburg,
combined drama and documentary, while Edge of the City (1957) was straight
drama that provided an early role for Sydney Poitier.
Press releases for Music of
Williamsburg made its racial content clear. “In order to portray the
important contributions of the Negro race to the nation’s
heritage,” reads one from 1962, “folk music consultant Alan Lomax
selected 22 individuals from Norfolk
and Weems, Va.,
Memphis, Tenn.,
St. Simon’s Island, Ga.,
and Miami, Fla.,
all with native talent but no professional training, to perform as dancers
and musicians in the film.” As of 1962, the film had been shown on
“approximately 150 [national] telecasts since its release to television
stations in August 1962 ” (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 1962). This
was a time before public-history sites had begun an aggressive initiative to
modify their programs to address both social hierarchy and racial issues. For
Colonial Williamsburg, it was a landmark step in moving toward an integrated
public-program agenda.
— Harvard University
(formerly of the College of William
and Mary)
Sources CitedCohen, John. 2001. Liner Notes to
Hobart Smith: Blue Ridge Legacy.
Rounder Records.
[Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 1962.] “For Immediate Release”
[press release]. March 12. Archives of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 1960. Music of Williamsburg. Re-released on video and distributed by The
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, P.O. Box 1776, Williamsburg, VA 23187-1776.
Croner, Stanley. 2003. Telephone interview with Erin Krutko, Christian Olsen, Graham Savage, and Patrick
Shaffner. Interview tape in Archives of Swem Library, College of William and Mary.
Jones, Bessie. 1983. For the Ancestors: Autobiographical Memories. Collected
and edited by John Stewart. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lomax, Alan. 1960. Letter to Arthur Smith. 26 March. Archives of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. Carbon in Alan Lomax Archive, New York City.
“ Notes” [1960]. “Notes about MUSIC OF WILLIAMSBURG.” Typescript. Archives of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia.
Tate, Thad W. 1957 [1965]. The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Issued first in typescript and then
formally published.
“ Teachers Manual.” 1960. “Teachers Manual for Music of
Williamsburg: A 29-minute motion picture in sound and color produced by
Colonial Williamsburg, Inc.” Archives of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia.
Students in the seminar included Peggy Aarlien, Anna Gardner, Erin Gordon, Erin
Krutko, Christian Olsen, Brandon Polk, Sarah Reeder, Graham
Savage, Patrick Shaffner, and Victoria
Swoap. The sources drawn upon in this article came to light through their
hard work. Special thanks to the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation.
Music of Williamsburg: A Student’s Perspective
In the spring of 2003, I was part of a seminar at the College
of William and Mary that tackled
an original research project focusing on the relatively obscure film, Music
of Williamsburg. Over the course of the semester we learned how to navigate a
large and potentially daunting undertaking that demanded archival research, oral
history, and searching for lost recordings and photographs. We tried to
situate the film in a variety of contexts, exploring topics such as American
vernacular musical traditions, song-collection practices, copyright concerns,
museum interpretation, fieldwork and oral-history techniques, and race
relations in the 1950s
and 1960s.
The first half of the semester
was dedicated to amassing as much material about the film as possible. We
surveyed records at the Colonial Williamsburg Archives and the Alan Lomax
Collection in New York City,
including film scripts, production books, pay ledgers, and correspondence
among Lomax, the museum, and the performers. In the process, we began getting
a sense about how the film was produced, how Lomax searched for performers,
and how the local racial climate affected the project.
At the same time, we were
continually refining a list of persons to interview. Initially, we combed
through archival materials and talked with museum administrators. Next we
contacted a local newspaper, asking if they would run a feature story about
the class and the film. As a result, a number of longtime Williamsburg
residents contacted us with memories about production of the film. Although
many performers in the film are no longer alive, we were able to speak with Stanley
Croner (scriptwriter for the film), Thad W. Tate (historian for the film),
and Rex Ellis (Vice President of Colonial Williamsburg’s historic
area). In addition, folk musician Mike Seeger, a lifelong acquaintance of Lomax
who happened to be spending a semester on campus as artist-in-residence,
contributed his thoughts.
With help from Colonial Williamsburg’s staff, the class also discovered
some lost treasures related to the film. Vice President of Research Cary
Carson located audio recordings that captured rehearsals as well as material
performed a few days after filming was completed. Graduate student Peggy
Aarlien worked with visual-resource librarians at Colonial
Williamsburg’s Rockefeller Library to uncover more than 500 photographs
documenting the film’s production. The most interesting images by far
were taken by Lomax himself, giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse of African
American musicians at work.
Halfway through the semester, the
seminar broke stride to discuss what a culminating project might be. A
variety of possibilities were explored. At first, we wanted to produce a
public website where visitors could listen to music clips, access primary
research materials, and read our interpretations of the film. Time closed in
on these ambitions, so instead we ended up producing a CD featuring excerpts
from Lomax’s audio recordings, accompanied by extensive liner notes.
Included are robust drum performances by Nat Rahmings with Ed Young on fife
and Prince Ellis on jawbone; crisp gospel renditions by the Bright Light
Gospel Quartet (including tunes such as “Rollin’ Through This
Unfriendly World,” “Hand Me Down the Silver Trumpet,
Gabriel,” and “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel”); and several
large-group performances by the Georgia Sea Island Singers accompanied by
Rahmings (drum), Young (cane fife), and Hobart Smith (banjo). Lomax’s
speaking voice is heard as well, counting out cues for performers. Some of
these performances were included on Lomax’s 1961 record series, A
Southern Journey, and on his 1977 release for New World Records, Georgia Sea
Island Songs. Most of the material, however, remains unissued, and soon we
hope to interest a commercial company in releasing it.
By the end of the semester, we
had learned to craft a coherent cultural narrative from a broad array of
sources. Equally important, we had uncovered a fascinating story about the
intersection of music and race in Williamsburg,
Virginia during a pivotal period in our
nation’s struggle for civil rights.
— Erin Krutko
College of William and Mary
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