Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  10

  _______

  The Composer as Folk Singer

  FOLK SONG HERITAGE AND THE PROVINCIAL COWBOY

  At the same time Harris was experimenting with autogenesis in Farewell to Pioneers, he was also making forays into a more accessible musical language based on folk song. In response to a commission by RCA Victor—apparently the first American work commissioned specifically for recording—Harris produced the orchestral overture When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1935), which took one of Harris's favorite tunes as its basis. This was not his first attempt at folk-based composition. Dan Stehman observes that ten years earlier he had used the tune “Peña Hueca” in his Fantasy for Trio and Chorus, almost certainly working from materials provided by Farwell.1 But When Johnny Comes Marching Home did give Harris his first chance to discuss folk song before a national audience. In explaining his reliance on borrowed material, Harris had to transmute his emphasis on organic, self-expressive melody almost completely. Folk songs could hardly be made to fit his autogenetic models (though Harris sometimes pretended that they could). More persuasively, Harris grounded his use of folk material in a different kind of naturalness—not the organic unfolding of autogenesis, but the authenticity of autobiography.

  Though not literally a folk song (it was published by Patrick Gilmore in 1863), “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” had honorary folk-song status for Harris, and its rousing tune was something like a theme song early in his career. Although his emerging western aura shed no special light on the song, Harris managed to wrest it from its original Civil War context and insert it into his own, as indicated in the program note appended to the score:

  I chose an American theme which is not only well known and loved but capable of extended development: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” This was one of my father's favorite tunes, and it was he who planted in me the unconscious realization of its dual nature. He used to whistle it with jaunty bravado as we went to work on the farm in the morning and with sad pensiveness as we returned at dusk behind the slow, weary plodding of the horses. These impressions have undoubtedly influenced me in determining the use of this theme; yet the same realization of the dual character of this peculiarly fertile theme might have been arrived at by observing that it is very minor in its tonality and gay in its rhythm.2

  For Harris, it almost went without saying that the tune should be American. Beyond that, the best reasons for incorporating folk song were personal ones, grounded in biographical experience and (if at all possible) family history. The strange combination of agricultural and psychological vocabulary in this description—according to which this “fertile” tune was “planted” in Harris's subconscious by his father—is less strange than what Harris neglected to mention at all: its Irish background and Civil War connotations. The tune's more general military associations may well have added to the overture's public appeal; such associations certainly received ample attention from other quarters when Harris used the tune again in 1940 in the Folksong Symphony.3 But Harris did not mention them in 1935. Even during the 1940s, when it came to folk song, Harris preferred to let the personal overshadow the political.

  It was the plausibility of personal identification with folk song that continued to set Harris apart when American composers began turning to folk song in droves during the Depression. Harris's most famous folk-based works appeared at precisely the time when American artists left and right (but especially left) were scrambling to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with American folklore.4 The New Deal was blanketing the country with populist propaganda idealizing rural life. The nation's most intellectual flirtation with socialist thinking was making it respectable to aspire toward accessibility. Writers like John Steinbeck were valorizing the working man, Carl Sandburg was publishing Americana song and verse, and Charles Seeger was urging composers to leave the ivory tower and “discover America.” In 1934, Seeger had issued a challenge: “If…a composer is going to sing the American people anything new…he must first get upon a common ground with them, learn their musical lingo, work with it, and show he can do for them something they want to have done and cannot do for themselves.”5 Harris approached these tasks with a special kind of authority and a significant head start. Through good fortune and good publicity, he was well positioned to make a run on this “common ground.”

  By the early 1940s, however, the common ground that Seeger had in mind was getting crowded. Composers like Thomson and Douglas Moore had already written acclaimed works incorporating hymn tunes and folk materials; Copland, Elie Siegmeister, and Ruth Crawford Seeger were radically simplifying their musical languages; Morton Gould and Ross Lee Finney were producing a Cowboy Rhapsody and choral settings of cowboy songs. In this newly competitive context, Harris took steps to improve his claim on American folklore, particularly western folklore. With a somewhat exaggerated adherence to the adage “good fences make good neighbors,” he questioned his compatriots' right to set up camp in this valuable territory, partly through remarkable reconstructions of his own westernness and partly through less palatable attempts to deny others access to the authentic font of folk wisdom. Both strategies are illustrated in Harris's 1940 article published in Modern Music under the provocative heading “Folksong—American Big Business.” Harris began this contribution without facts and figures and without the elaborate economic analogies his title might have supported. He postponed making any impassioned pleas for fidelity to folk music or preservation of this national resource. Instead, he chose to relate an autobiographical fantasy: a first-person account of a western episode in which he gets to “play cowboy,” rubbing shoulders with the imaginary buckaroos “Idaho Bill” and “Shorty Kelsey.” Rather than offering a paler paraphrase of Harris's fanciful scenario, or attempting to convey the suddenness with which he lurches into a more objective enumeration of folk song's virtues, I quote the opening of his essay at length:

  We had been dancing all night—putting the finishing touches to three of the most exciting days in my life. The Cowboy's Reunion came to an abrupt end as the pale blue-green dawn crept over the little Western town nestling into the foothills.

  …Nostalgia as lonesome as the prairies, and as old, too, led me back to the Fair Grounds. There was old Idaho Bill, well over sixty, directing his outfit…. Idaho Bill figured he wouldn't come to any more Cowboy Reunions. The last time he went to Pendleton, Oregon he had felt the same way. The thing was getting a little too professional. “…It's getting to be cut and dried. When the boys ride hell-for-leather because their pardners, the old man or their girls and all the folks are a lookin' on—well that's one thing. That's real cowhide. When they calculate to make it pay for a livin'—that's a white horse of different color. You know there's somethin' cussed-ornery about that, somehow. Taint decent to be ridin' your heart out for pay.”

  Now that's what folksong is all about. Singing and dancing your heart out for yourself and the people you were born among—whose daily lives you share through the seasons, through thick and thin. From the hearts of our people they have come—our people living, loving, bearing, working, dying. These songs are as the people whom they express—salty, hilarious, sly, vulgar, gay, sad, weary, heroic, witty, prosaic, and often as eloquent as the silent poor burying their dead. They constitute a rich legacy of time-mellowed feelings and thoughts chosen through usage from the experiences of people who lived here and helped make America what she is today.6

  It is a testament to Harris's national fame in 1940 that this detailed fiction came to grace the pages of America's most prestigious contemporary music journal. Though expressed in a surprisingly whimsical way, Harris's intentions were unabashedly earnest. Even these opening paragraphs betray his motivating concern. Like Bacon, he wanted to protect the “rich legacy” of folk music from the encroaching dangers of commercialism. Rodeo riding (like composing with folk materials) was acceptable as a sincere vocation but not as a mere occupation. Harris framed the folk song question explicitly as an issue of legac
y and inheritance. Despite the vast size of the American “folk,” it produced very few chosen sons; Harris was lucky enough to have been acknowledged as one such heir.

  Of course, it was no accident that Harris chose to focus his fantasy on the cowboy rather than some other folk figure. Harris had already acquired a long history of cowboy associations, from Rosenfeld and Cowell right on down the line. The Columbia Broadcasting System certified this designation when they invited Harris to participate in their “American School of the Air” series on folk music, which aired weekly from late October 1939 until early April 1940. For the inaugural episode, Harris contributed an orchestral arrangement of cowboy tunes to share the program with songs collected by Alan Lomax.7 Though Harris was a farmer's son, he was a cowman in the popular mind; in fact, when he chose to focus on the farmer's self-sufficiency and independence from social constraint, he himself was emphasizing precisely those traits exaggerated by the stereotypical cowboy, with all his distinctly American vices and virtues.

  The cowboy's continued hold on the American imagination has been in no way discouraged by the fact that actual range-riding cowboys were only prominent in this country for about twenty-five years, from the end of the Civil War until around 1890. The cowboy's career was spurred by the westward-reaching railroad, but quickly curtailed by drought and by changes in ranching and transportation technologies. His pay was low; his life was difficult and often subservient. Yet his reputation rests on such attributes as independence (punctuated by moments of gallant camaraderie), bravado, and an expert command of both animals and nature. The nurseries of the cowboy character type were the artworks of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell and the pulp fiction of the 1880s-1910s.8 Just as Buffalo Bill had interlaced his Wild West performances with dime novel characters and plots, so artists in other media blurred the lines between the popular perception and the historical realities of the cowboy West.

  Each genre had its own cowboy-and-western heyday and its own heroes: the chivalric Virginian of Owen Wister's 1902 best seller, the melodramatic Bronco Billy of silent films, and the mysterious masked man of the Lone Ranger radio and television series. In the era of the singing cowboy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers crooned down trail after trail in American theaters, keeping comic and sentimental cowboys in circulation. By 1946, Lawrence Morton could write that “a plaintive ditty is often as essential a part of a cowboy's heroism as are his horse and his gun, as necessary to his virtue as a righteous cause and an unblemished bride.”9 As often as not in all these media, the cowboy was emancipated from the dirty work of driving cattle and recreated as a cunning tracker, patriotic Indian fighter, or glamorous rodeo star. Perhaps most striking is the pervasive whitening of the cowboy image, particularly at the hands of moviemakers but also in other cultural realms: rare indeed is the Mexican vaquero (buckaroo) from whom the cowboy learned his rope tricks, and rarer still the black cowboy, who went the way of the Buffalo soldier, bleached out by the Hollywood spotlight.

  Although John Lomax's 1910 collection Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads had appeared in four editions before 1920 and had exerted a strong influence on the repertory and character of Hollywood's singing cowboys, cowboy songs and characters had been strikingly absent from American composition before the 1930s, as Virgil Thomson was quick to point out. Sandburg's 1927 anthology, An American Songbag, earned some interest; Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell's edition of a new Lomax collection (American Ballads and Folk Songs) in 1932 fanned the flames. It may seem odd that the rugged individualism of the cowboy should have received such support from members of the radical Composers' Collective, but even uncooperative folk figures could be made to serve the cause of “proletarian music” as the cowboy reached wider and wider segments of the working class.10

  The great wave of Depression-era interest in folk song drew attention to cowboy materials, but other elements in American culture made the western wrangler America's wartime and postwar hero. As Thomson and his Plow That Broke the Plains suggest, New Deal thinking tended to underwrite the agricultural pioneer. But Harris was correct when he noted in his Farewell to Pioneers that the ways of the farmer's frontier were hard to reconcile with modern industrial society. Cowboy life, on the other hand, offered robust and assertive individualism. With the burgeoning of Hollywood, representations of cowboys saturated stage and screen to such an extent that the sheer increase in quantity brought about a change in quality: the cowboy's characteristics—aggression, humor, alienation, independence—were intertwined with American self-fashioning. As William Goetzmann has observed: “The early motion pictures had succeeded in molding for all time and for all places on the planet the archetypal cowboy as the archetypal American.”11 This transformation in the cultural significance of the western brought new seriousness to the genre: character development in Stagecoach (1939), historical pretensions in countless examples—The Plainsman (1936), Wells Fargo, Destry Rides Again (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and others—and cinematic prowess in High Noon (1952). While these developments were under way, the contrasting cowboy types enacted by Gene Autry and John Wayne rubbed shoulders as Americans tried to decide which cowboys should represent them at home and abroad.

  Thus, it was timely and strategic for Harris to don a cowboy costume when he did in 1940. In “Folksong—American Big Business,” Harris led with his strongest suit, reasserting his inimitable westernness in the most vivid way possible. Even those who might have questioned his detailed rodeo narrative could not impugn his cowboy guise. After this memorable opening move, however, Harris cautiously universalized his discussion of folk song, either by avoiding specific mention of the West or by cushioning western references in longer, more geographically diverse lists. Through a careful filtering of the folk spirit into his own biography and somewhat less careful swipes at composers without his fortunate folk affinities, he arranged to claim a genuine connection to folk song regardless of the geographical source of particular tunes: “America,” he lamented, “will have many folksong vendors in the next few years. Some city boys may take a short motor trip through our land and return to write the Song of the Prairies—others will be folksong authorities after reading in a public library for a few weeks.”12

  Whether the paraphrase of Copland's Music for Radio: Saga of the Prairies (1937) was intentional or subconscious, the sentiment is the same. In contrast to these urban charlatans, Harris presented his vision of an alternative. Though his protagonist remained unnamed, his text carried all the rhetorical force of a credo:

  But all this mushroom exploitation of folksong will neither greatly aid nor hinder it. After the era has run itself out there will remain those composers who have been deeply influenced by the finest, clearest, strongest feeling of our best songs. Because these songs are identified with emotions deeply implicit in themselves, such composers will be enriched and stimulated…. They will absorb and use the idioms of folk music as naturally as the folk who unconsciously generated them. They will have learned that folksong is a native well-spring, an unlimited source of fresh material; that it can't be reduced to a few formulas to stir and mix to taste. Those composers who are drawn to and richly satisfied with folksong will inherit the privilege of using it with the professional's resources and discipline and the amateur's enthusiasm and delight.13

  This was a multifaceted manifesto. It reiterated Harris's understanding of folk song as a legacy to be inherited. It asserted by fiat (and through a judicious use of the future and future-perfect tenses) that the worrisome “exploitation” of folk idioms would prove inconsequential. It reaffirmed the basic criterion that Harris had espoused for the composition of autogenetic melodies: the composer's work should be instinctive. Once the composer had absorbed enough of “the best” songs to radiate folk feeling from sources that were “deeply implicit” within him, he could do no wrong. Harris also took this opportunity to inoculate himself against potential charges that his folk-based works might be less imaginative than pieces with no borrowed material.
Harris would not lose his own voice when he chose to sing cowboy songs. On the contrary, because of his faith in folk song, Harris would find an inexhaustible natural resource where others encountered only dry formulas. The professional's tools would be transfigured by the amateur's delight.

  HOME ON THE RANGE

  These attitudes are exemplified in Harris's largest folk-based work, the Folksong Symphony (1939-40). The symphony stands as a musical counterpart to the credo cited above, both in its attention to the cowboy and in its aspiration to an Americanness not limited to a single geographic region. In fact, the symphony corresponds so neatly to the concerns expressed in “Folksong—American Big Business” that the two must be considered companion pieces: the polemical article served as an artistic justification for the new work immediately after its premiere on 25 April and as publicity for its upcoming performances in Cleveland on 26 December 1940 and in Boston, under Koussevitzky, on 21 February 1941.14

  The Folksong Symphony took shape as a set of four folk-song settings for chorus and orchestra commissioned by Howard Hanson for the American Spring Festival at the Eastman School of Music in April 1940. The vocal writing reflected Harris's commitment to composing music that could be used by nonprofessional ensembles, especially high schools, but also university groups, following on his teaching stint at Westminster Choir College (1934-38).15

  Sometime later that year, Harris offered Carl Engel and the publishing house of G. Schirmer an expanded manuscript, entitled Folksong Jamboree. The work now contained five folk-song settings for chorus and orchestra and two instrumental interludes, based on what some reviewers heard as “western” fiddle tunes. Engel pushed him to modify his folksy title, and the composer acquiesced: the resulting Folksong Symphony seemed a more suitable (though perhaps less accurate) designation for Harris's next magnum opus.16 Although only the vocal score was published, the work stands as Symphony No. 4, cataloged between the two purely instrumental single-movement symphonies that are most frequently praised as noteworthy examples of Harris's more abstract melodic and formal innovations.