John Sousa was the leader of The
Biggest Band In The World, a marching band named after himself.
John Sousa was also the composer
of many a classic marching band tune. John Sousa was a man who had even
attempted to write a marching band opera.
John Sousa was a man who was
strolling through the woods one day, musing contentedly to himself. The sun was
beaming down upon him through the pines (probably), a deer was frolicking
nearby (one presumes), and the only sound was that of a woodpecker pecking wood
(as woodpeckers are prone to do)…
Then suddenly Sousa heard a GODAWFUL
SOUND!!! One that BLIGHTED – BLIGHTED I TELL YOU!!!! - his contented
musings!!
There was a crackle! There was a
hiss! There was a voice announcing, like a circus ringmaster, that a song was
about to be bellowed. Perchance it would be by Billy Murray, mayhaps by Arthur
Collins, a duet with Ada Jones, as like as not.
Then came a blast of trumpet and
some hollering nonsense. A comical voice – a voice that managed to be both
operatic and nasal - inviting Josephine to come join him in a flying machine.
Or perhaps it was some nostalgic trifle about when the narrator was young, and
the sun was warm, and he proposed to his “tootsie-wootsie” on the banks of a
burbling stream. Or maybe it was some patriotic ditty about what an amazing
flag the United States possessed… well, Sousa presumedly sighed, he couldn’t grumble
too much about that. He had, after all, written one of the very best of those
patriotic songs: “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Written yes, but not recorded.
John Sousa could not stand for that sort of new-fangled frippery.
There may have been hit records
out there with his band’s name – Sousa’s Band – printed upon them. And it is
true, his band had recorded them. And “Stars And Stripes Forever” had
indeed been amongst the most popular of those very early recordings. And
deservedly so, since “Stars And Stripes Forever” was arguably the first record to
be able to be credibly described as an enjoyable listening experience!
“Stars And Stripes Forever” was a
mind-blowing composition. “Stars And Stripes Forever” has hooks and melodies
exploding on all sides, often when you least expect them! “Stars And Stripes
Forever” features hooks so BIG they are capable of BLASTING their way right
through all the snap, the crackle and the pop that was the dominant sound of late-19th
century records. All the technological limitations of late 19th
century recording technology cannot dim the wonder that is “Stars And Stripes
Forever.” Both the stars and the stripes shine through. (I give it an 8 out of
10!)
But Sousa himself refused to be
involved. It was all very much beneath him. His trombone player – Arthur Pryor
– took care of that side of the business. We’ll get to him soon.
Sousa HATED records! Absolutely DETESTED
them!! He hated cylinders, the short-lived beta-version of records that looked
like a tin can and led to many a pun about “canned music”, a pun that Sousa
seemed to take literally. Sousa considered recorded music the aural equivalent
to the tasteless, although admittedly convenient, canned foods that were
popping up on shop shelves across the nation. His band had recorded 1,770 cans
of music but Sousa himself had only been present for eight of them. Not only
did he hate the very idea of records, he was simply too busy. He was, after
all, the leader of the Biggest Band In The Land, a claim that was true not only
in terms of popularity but in terms of its sheer numerical size.
Sousa’s Band consisted of row
upon row of men in uniform, one hundred in all, each and every one with his
chest puffed out. Such puffed out chests were essential for the accommodation
of their patriotic pride, whilst also being necessary due to the lung capacity
required for playing a tuba or trombone. They were quite a sight.
And out at the front of them, in
the fullest of military regalia, marched Sousa himself, with a sword in one
hand, a shako perched atop of his head, his face decorated with the combination
of perfectly pointed beard and twirly moustache preferred by the male members
of the olde royal families of Europe. He looked like a King, a Kaiser, or at
the very least, a Duke. Naturally the newspapers called him the King of Marches.
Although Sousa’s Band looked and
sounded like a military band of the olde European tradition, they weren’t
really. Although Sousa did have an extensive personal gun collection, and so
probably could have led his band to war if he wanted to, they weren’t a
military marching band. They were a professional musical outfit. They were in
showbiz.
Sousa’s Band would play
everything! They’d get the crowd excited by playing “After The Ball” – the
biggest song of the decade, we’ll get to it soon – before doing a bait and
switch and exposing them to some Wagner. Sousa considered himself to be a man on
a mission. The mission being to educate the people of America about the wonders
of “good music” and to inspire them to learn an instrument themselves. He appears
to have been spectacularly successful. At the turn of the century there were an
estimated 30,000 brass bands across America!
But now, less than a decade
later, few Americans were learning an instrument anymore. They were buying
records instead! This was the development that had gotten Sousa’s goat.
This was the development that made his hatred of records personal. It wasn’t
just that the records themselves were awful (although they very often were),
they had also destroyed his life’s work. Sousa’s hyperbolic statements around
this time can be best understood as the ravings of a man who has just been hit
by the realization that his life’s work is rapidly coming undone and that all
his efforts have been for naught.
Because Sousa was making hyperbolic
statements. He was writing opinion pieces for newspapers. No doubt he was
boring his friends, and ruining dinner parties, by prattling on about
phonographic wickedness. And he was making statements – and making speeches –
to Congress!
Mr Sousa went to Washington to
give evidence before the Congressional Committee on Patents 1906. This was a
big deal. Although the opinion of other major musicians of the era were also requested
– Victor Herbert for example, America’s premier composer of light operas, gave
evidence – it was clear that Sousa was the star performer. He didn’t
disappoint. If you wanted a rant, he was going to give you a rant. Records were,
variously, a travesty to music, a travesty to military strategy and decorum,
and a threat to civilization itself!
“When
I was a boy in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find
young people together singing the songs of the day, or old songs. Today you
hear these infernal machines going night and day.”
So
far, so sensible. Many heads, one imagines, were nodding in agreement. He may
have lost them however with his next point. That, if things kept going, the way
things were going “we will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will
be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came
from the ape.”
This
wasn’t the only time that Sousa brought up his unconventional approach to
evolutionary biology. A lot of people had unconventional approaches to
evolutionary biology at the time, some of whom were Presidents Of The United
States Of America. A lot of people didn’t believe in evolution at all and were
willing to take anyone who wanted to teach evolution in their schools to court.
That’s another story that we’ll get into eventually.
In
“The Menace Of Mechanical Music”, an opinion piece that is a masterpiece of
over-statement, not to mention alliteration, Sousa asked a number of pertinent rhetorical
questions: “Then what of the national throat?
Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?”
Sousa
was also greatly perturbed by the thought of armies being led into battles by mechanical
music-makers instead of by human-led marching bands. Although honestly, the
mechanical music-makers do sound like the safer option.
The
popularity of records was “sweeping across the country with the speed of a
transient fashion in slang, or Panama hats, political war cries or popular
novels” all of which, we are led to assume from the context, are bad
things. Sadly Sousa never wrote an opinion piece about the evils of Panama hats
so we’ll never know exactly what his objections were to that particular piece
of cranial attire.
The
craze for records was as big as the craze for roller-skates and bicycles had
been a few years before, but at least those crazes gave people exercise. The mechanical-music
craze on the other hand was akin to the invasion of the sparrow, a destroyer of
the homes of proper American birds and their American bird songs.
All of this was especially
disappointing to Sousa because America had previously been making so much
progress in learning instruments, and it’s fair to say that Sousa himself could
take a lot of the credit for this; “There are more pianos, violins, guitars,
mandolins and banjos among the working classes of America than in all the rest
of the world.”
All of this progress would be
lost to the relentless charge of canned music.*
How had things gotten to this
stage? A stage where the composer of one of the world’s first hit records could
hate records so much that he’d get up in front of Congress to testify against
them? How had records become so ubiquitous that Sousa felt obliged to take such
a controversial public stance? How had they become such a menacing threat to
civilization itself?
These are questions that beg
their own supplementary questions. Such as, what exactly was John Sousa’s
problem? What exactly was this civilisation that Sousa wanted to defend?
Naturally Sousa wanted to
preserve marching bands. There were a lot of them as well. Of those 30,000
brass bands mentioned earlier, an estimated 20,000 could be described as
marching bands. The rest of them presumably just stood still. Few were as big
as Sousa’s. Most were far smaller. Ten to twenty members seems to have been the
most popular configuration. But the biggest bands were the biggest bands. That
is, they were the most popular. And not only because they could rely on
hundreds of different sets of friends and family to show up. Patrick Gilmore’s
band – for one concert at least – featured an orchestra of almost 1,000
musicians, a choir of 10,000 and a hundred firemen banging on anvils!! If that
last statistic sounds a little odd, please take into account that they were
playing Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus.”
Wherever you went in America you
could hear a marching band, partially because they were so VERY LOUD! And the
songs they played so Very Loudly were so Very Catchy, so Very Hummable. And
they were led by men who cut very distinctive and distinguished figures, with a
flair for flowing locks and outlandish facial hair.
LOUD, CATCHY, INESCAPABLE,
OUTLANDISH HAIR AND BEARD STYLES. By any definition you want to use, marching
bands were the POP MUSIC of the late 19th century! And the leaders of these
bands were the POP STARS of the late 19th century.
Or at least, this was the
mainstream pop music and they were the mainstream pop stars. The respectable
stuff.
Far less respectable, although
just as popular – and offering far more variety – was an underground scene of
vaudeville, minstrel and medicine shows, a seemingly infinite array of troupes
travelling up and down every inch of America, twisting their way back and forth,
from sleepy town to sleepier settlement, entertaining everyone from the cowboys
in the West to the ex-slaves and ex-slave-owners of the South and to drunkards
and assorted villains in saloons everywhere. A primeval ecosystem of popular
culture, where circuses blended into minstrel shows which blended into dodgy
medicine men promoting even dodgier remedies… and every last one of them trying
to find a novel hook that no-one had ever seen before, to make them to stand
out and attract paying customers.
Vaudeville – as its relatively
fancy name might indicate – was the upper crust, the sober, respectable,
middle-class, city-based version. The creamy layer of that primeval soup.
Vaudevillians at least got to play in theatres. But vaudeville was still far
from high culture. Vaudeville was a world however in which the following acts
could find a home.
Frank “Cannonball” Richards,
whose jape was getting shot by a cannonball in the stomach.
Frank Lexington, who advertised himself as a “professional leaper.” His act involved jumping over piles of furniture. As stunts go, that probably doesn’t sound especially impressive, but as the years went by the stunts became more and more spectacular. Houdini making an elephant disappear was probably the pinnacle, but Hadji Ali - “The Human Volcano” - who could regurgitate anything, including live goldfish, had its own subtle charms.
Then there was Leopoldo Fregoli,
who not only did impersonations but could change costumes so fast that critics
thought there were two of him!
There was Ferry The Frog Man, a
Black man dressed as a dandy frog, complete with an incredibly convincing frog helmet.
He would then, equally as convincingly, impersonate a frog. The crowds were
suitably wow-ed.
There was William Doss, “The
Human Telescope”, so called because he could increase and decrease his height
from his usual six foot two, upwards to seven and a half feet- he once
stretched himself taller than a giraffe, who was reportedly so taken aback by
the insult, that it refused to eat its supper- as well as downwards by a
similar extent.
There was Marshall P Wilder, an
eternally smiling dwarf. The smiling was the hook. He wrote several books about
the subject, including “The People I've Smiled With: Recollections Of A Merry Little
Life.”
And there was Buffalo Bill and
his Wild West show. Probably the biggest vaudeville show of them all, it was
less of a theatrical performance, and more like a touring theme park, including
re-enactments of bison hunts, train robberies, battles with Native Americans,
rodeos and Annie Oakley shooting cigars out of her husband’s mouth. For a short
time, it also included Wild Bill Hickok, but show-business didn’t really suit
him. One time a spotlight shone on him, and Wild Bill shot it out. Nobody was
sure if he was startled by it, or simply in a bad mood.
I could go on. And I will.
There was Piramel, a young boy
with a “parasitic twin brother” named Sami - some said was his sister - whose
legs poked out of Piramel somewhere around his abdomen. Born in Madras, India,
such an attraction was too good for America to pass up, so they migrated to the
United States to be promoted as the “Double-Bodied Hindu Enigma.” Piramel
should not be mistaken for Laloo, also from India, whose parasitic twin brother
– apparently nameless – was virtually complete, aside from his head which was
stuck in Laloo’s chest. As in the case of Piramel the brother was rumoured to
be a sister, and hence attired in a dress.
Also from Asia, The Sacred Hairy
Family Of Burma, who were originally kept by the King Theebaw Of Burma in his
palace, as a lucky charm. Given that the king was overthrown by the British in
1885 this didn’t really work out for either King Theebaw or The Sacred Hairy
Family, whose only remaining career prospects was to be exhibited at Madison
Square Garden. There was Ella Harper, The Camel Girl, whose knees pointed in the
wrong direction, and Jo-Jo, The Dog Faced Boy, and Lionel, The Lion-Faced Man
(who honestly, looked far more like a dog). There was Fanny Mills, The Ohio Big
Foot Girl, whose shoes were made from the skin of three goats!
It wasn’t just humans either!
Animals were getting into the act!! There was a violin playing baboon who could
also ride a bicycle! There was a mind reading duck!!
Vaudeville shows were so popular
that other professions, that really had no business in show business, began to
incorporate it as part of their service, or more accurately, as advertising.
Travelling medicine shows plied their trade from one corner of America to
another, wherever they could find a village both gullible and entertainment-starved
enough for their purposes. The marketing strategy was simplicity itself: they
would offer a free circus, a magic show, a slap stick comedy routine, which would
transition at some point into a sales pitch about the benefits of some dubious
concoction dished up by such characters such as Dr Williams, proprietor of Pink
Pills for Pale People. His favourite activity was skipping town before the pitchfork
waving townsfolk woke up to the fact that the pills didn’t do anything.
Maybe Dr Williams should have had
a Native American contortionist. All the best travelling medicine shows had
Native American contortionists, Not only were they highly entertaining, but their
presence inferred that the medicines were based on ancient tribal recipes.
Having a Native American contortionist lent the caper an aura of authenticity,
and some much-needed credibility.
It wasn’t just concoctions being consumed.
You could get equally dubious dental care from characters such as Painless
Parker, a dentist who wore, around his neck, all the teeth he had pulled out
over the years, hanging on a string. His show centred on the pulling out of the
audience’s teeth whilst they were high on his homebrewed moonshine and/or
cocaine.
There were magicians. Harry
Keller could make people float, and even more impressively decapitate his own
head. Ching Ling Foo could pull 14 feet poles out of his mouth and small
children out of a bowl. He was so popular
that a white man from the outskirts of New York copied his act, went
yellow-face, and called himself Ching Ling Soo. Much to Ching Ling Foo’s
consternation, his impersonator ended up being more popular than he was.
And there were impersonators of
every ethnic group in America. German-impersonators were always popular. You
couldn’t go wrong with a German-impersonation. There was another whole scene of
male and female impersonators. One female impersonator, Neil Burgess, had a
very specific niche; he impersonated old widows.
But no impersonation was more
popular, was more guaranteed of success, than the impersonation of African
Americans. It was so popular it even had its own dedicated term. It was called
a minstrel show.
It’s difficult to exaggerate quite
how popular minstrel shows were. Minstrel shows may have been as popular as the
whole of the rest of vaudeville combined. Whilst cocaine administrating
dentists, men with cannonball-proof stomachs, violin playing baboons and
mind-reading ducks all had a place in the pan-American vaudeville scene, they simply
couldn’t compete with – to put as positive a spin on it as possible, a positive
spin that it almost certainly does not deserve - white America’s half parody,
half-tribute to Black American culture. A half-parody, half-tribute that was
typically very shoddily researched.
To put on a minstrel show you
needed some minstrel songs. And so minstrel sheet music collections were
published, most of which seemed to feature more Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes
with added comedic lyrics than they did genuine African American melodies. But
then, cultural accuracy was never a great concern. Neither was it necessary,
since there was no guarantee that their audiences were familiar with African
American culture. Or African American people for that matter. There are tales
of minstrel shows pulling into small rural settlements where the citizens
thought they were genuine African Americans. For many white Americans this was their
closest exposure to African American culture.
What the average minstrel troupe
lacked in terms of comprehensive research, they more than made up for in
claiming that they had done comprehensive research. Minstrel shows were often
promoted in terms more suited to a book on philosophy or science. The Virginia
Minstrels marketed their show as a demonstration of the “sports and pastimes of
the Virginia Colored Race, through medium of Songs, Refrains and Ditties as
sung by Southern Slaves.” They made it almost sound educational.
Given how slow everything else
moved in the mid-19th century – no phones, few trains, the nation travelling at
the speed of a covered-wagon – minstrel shows and everything they stood for spread
surprisingly fast. The Virginia Minstrels kicked off the phenomenon when the
wrote “Dixie” in 1843, and within a couple of years it was The South’s theme
song. Within a couple of months they had sailed over to London (New York
was still considered small time back then) and almost instantly the whole of
Europe had gone minstrel-crazy as well. The appeal of blackface didn’t seem to have
any sort of correlation to whether or not the audience had ever seen genuine Black
faces or not.
Back in America, everyone was
doing it. From small towns to upper class fraternities, everyone seemed to be
throwing on their own minstrel shows. It was almost as though, deep down
inside, every white American seemed to want to pretend to be a Black American,
had been looking for an excuse to pretend to be a Black American, at least for
a night.
It wasn’t just considered to be
some silly dumb thing to do either. Minstrelsy had respectability. There were
some cultural critics who considered minstrel shows as the only great American
theatrical artform, the nation’s key contribution to the cultural life of the
world.
Part of minstrelsy’s popularity came
from its predictability, as each minstrel show was structured very much like
any other. It would begin with a sketch of a street wise, fast talking, city
dandy, who was usually known as Zip Coon - although sometimes his name was Jim
Dandy - a Black man trying as hard as he could to pass himself off as an
aristocratic white man. He would have a fondness for ruffles and monocles. He
would try to sound smart and use impressive sounding big words. He would always
get those words wrong.
The show would finish with
another stereotype, the polar opposite of the Zip Coon: a laid back rural Black
man known as Jim Crow. He was constantly singing songs about how he missed the
simple life on the plantation, back when he was a slave. Very often that song
was “Dixie.”
The lack of Black folk in The
North during this whole era meant that minstrel troupes could claim their act
was authentic and there was no way for the audience to judge. No way to judge
that is, until Black folk themselves started to put together their own minstrel
shows, many of which – The Congo Minstrels, The Ethiopian Band – really
emphasized their African roots. Since part of the appeal of a minstrel show was
its educational aspects, the audience’s belief that they were experiencing
authentic African American culture, genuine African Americans had a distinct
advantage.
With Black minstrel – usually
referred to as Georgia minstrel – troupes taking over the educational
“authentic” market, white minstrel troupes descended into derogatory depictions
of Black folk doing things that – as the stereotyped suggested, and as it seemed
to be universally accepted – Black folk liked to do. Such as stealing chicken. Or
eating watermelons. Or picking cotton. Or smiling. Or performing a cake walk.
Cake walks had started out as a
sort of minstrel show in reverse. They began as parties in which Black slaves
would impersonate and mock white plantation owners. They did it in style,
dressing up in the most colourful, frilliest frocks they could find. Top hats
and walking canes were particularly popular. A top hat was highly suited to
being waved up high in the air. The walking cane was perfect for being
perpetually twirled. Both were accomplished whilst walking arm in arm, chin up,
posture comedically erect, and strutting in a self-satisfied and superior
manner. The strutting was particularly important. It was critical that it
involved a high-leg prance.
This whole display was a
competition. The winner would win a cake.
White people started to notice
that this was going on, and this this is where things get weird. White people
became big fans of the “cake walk,” and wanted to become involved. First the plantation
owners performed the role of judging the walkers and presenting the cake. Then
they started cake walking themselves. The cake walk would become a popular component
of minstrel shows, thereby creating a confusing situation in which there were
white people in black face, mocking Black people who were in turn mocking white
people.
Even when performing the cake
walk themselves it was a little unclear whether white people got the joke.
Whether they realised that they were the joke. Did Teddy Roosevelt when
he cakewalked to “Hot Time In The Old Town” – the party tune of the 1890s, a
song that originated in the hottest brothel in America… well get to that – at
the 1902 White House Christmas Party? Nobody knows.
Possibly the biggest cakewalk of
the era, the “Interstate Cake Walk”, took placed in Wichita, Kansas on New
Years Day 1898. The prize was a cake three feet! The event attracted a crowd of
2,000, including professional cakewalkers so famous that they were promoted in
big bold type on the bill! One of them, Doc Brown, was famous enough that he
got a ragtime tune written about him!!
And if there was any cakewalk
that was bigger than the Wichita “Interstate Cake Walk” it was the “Monster
Cakewalk” that formed the highlight of Nate Salsbury’s “Black America!” Show.
Nate Salsbury was usually a
promoter of Wild West Shows but for “Black America!” he produced what he
claimed to be an authentic representation of African American culture south of
the Mason-Dixon Line. To ensure this, he refused to hire any performers from
north of the Mason-Dixon Line, because to quote an article in “The Morning
Times”: “the colored race of the Southern negro is peculiar to itself. The
dialect, characteristics and manner of living are as much different from the
people of the North as the methods of the Esquimau (Eskimo) and the South Sea
Islander.”
The “Monster Cake Walk” component
of “Black America!” was promoted as “20 couples who know how to walk for Cake!
The innocent diversion of Slavery Days!”
In terms of sheer spectacle, few productions
could compete with “Black America!” but in terms of popularity, its predecessor
“The South Before The War” must have come close. Compared to the 500 black
performers of “Black America!”, “The South Before The War” was a modest affair
of 60 performers, happily singing spirituals whilst picking cotton, before
celebrating with a giant cake walk. The promotional material emphasized how happy
the Black folk were, spending most of their days and nights singing and dancing
and shooting craps, whilst also emphasizing that they were the authentic,
genuine thing: “No burnt-cork and velvet-breeched, inconsistent Ethiopian
imitators, but calico-clad gunny-sacked, fun-loving, music-making, Momus-like
“mokes.”” It also featured Ferry The Frog Man.
“The South Before The War” is
important to our story, not only because, as a minstrel extravaganza, it played
a central role in America’s popular culture right at the very moment that the
first records were being produced, but because one of its acts – the
mind-numbingly generically named Standard Quartet – would make one of those
records. Most likely they did so to promote the tour. As best as I can tell
Ferry The Frog Man sadly never made a record.
Generically named The Standard
Quartet may have been, but their singing, their harmonies – the little that you
can hear piercing through the crackle and the hiss – are magnificent.
When John Sousa is talking about
“when he was a boy” sitting on the porch singing songs, this is what the rest
of America was doing to entertain themselves. This was the America that Sousa
wanted to preserve. This was the America that the phonograph was threatening to
destroy.
*Whilst these were the arguments
that Sousa put forward to the public, it’s likely that his main concern about
records was that they were eating into sheet music sales and the royalties that
came from sheet music sales. Record companies didn’t have to pay Sousa – or any
other song writer for that matter - royalties for their “canned music”, an
irritating state of affairs.
These concerns were shared by
other songwriters as well, although they were far less histrionic in the way
they put forward their arguments. Also, their feelings were rather more
nuanced. The feelings of many song-writers towards records were mixed. Sure, they
didn’t earn royalties from them, but they were a great boon for song promotion.
At least one publishing firm took
advantage of the opportunity, putting together a vaudeville quartet called the
Diamond Comedy Four, who spent their days recording the firm’s latest songs in
a nearby loft.
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