TABLE TALK
The American Muses
DENIS BROGAN
In a world of frontal exposure and an in- ability to think of words of more than four letters, the evolution of taste (good or bad) and the replacement of traditional taboos by a policy of total laissez-voir makes an his- torical investigation of the changes in mores (as the Americans put it) very interesting if it is competently done—and it is more than merely competently done in Professor Russell Nye's friendly book (friendly, that is to say, to the forces of liberation).*
In one way, for me and other oldsters of my generation, many of the art forms dis- cussed and assessed here are a kind of madeleine, recalling the remote days of Calvin Coolidge and the attempt of the Boston Watch and Ward Society to keep Massachusetts pure, to drive out such dis- turbers of the peace as H. L. Mencken and to save the school children of Tennessee from the sinful heresy of Evolution. So much has happened. There has been one of the most horrible-wars in history. There is a simmering jacquerie, not only in the South, but in the dreary industrial towns of the North. Such once famous names as John Roach Stratton mean nothing to the young today and one wonders what bells are rung in the minds, even of the Confederate young, by such preachers of the old-time religion as the Reverend -Oral Roberts (his name, alas, early gave rise to a ribald parody), perhaps the most famous of the Australian missionaries to the sinners of Yankeeland.
It is natural to note the decline if not quite the fall of the old-time religion, for the popular culture of the United States was deeply involved with the hymnody and the formal ethical teaching of the dominant Protestant culture. Had not Burke described the about-to-be-rebellious colonists as em- bodying 'the dissidence of dissent'?
Of course, Professor Nye is not only or mainly concerned with 'the Wars of the Godly' but the godly were especially warlike in America till very recently and popular culture in what is now the United States was what is loosely (very loosely) called 'Puritan'. This has meant that popular arts have had to cater to a culture hostile to 'k luxe pour Dieu', in music, in architecture, in painting. Of course, the almost superstitious fear of popery made the cultivation of many forms of the fine arts highly suspect.
What the artist had to face in an environ- ment still obsessed with a Manichean horror * The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America Russell Nye (The Dial Press, New York $12.50) of the flesh, is revealed in the hysterical assault on the famous Titian of the Uffizi Tribuna made by the author of 1601, Mark Twain. Professor Nye aptly tells us of the 'tent shows' that 'families could see without blushing'. But there are cynical historians who think that the famous assault on that rather depressing French nude, September Morn, was really a publicity stunt to attract the attention of that `Roundsman of the Lords', Mr Sumner. 'Banned in Boston' be- came in the 'twenties a selling point—and the title of a frivolous song.
But, a point not dealt with by Professor Nye, there were, of course, irreverent paro- dies of generally accepted songs, but I know of no American equivalents of the supple- mentary volume of Percy's Reliques. In the same way, there has long been an underground corpus of Burnsiana, which is now freely on sale. But when I discovered that 'breeks' had been altered to 'pants', I gave away the corrupt text at once to English friends. It has just occurred to me that I had been given my copy by a Scot who may have been as shocked as I was by the barbarism of the reading. Can any one soberly (or even drunkenly) say: 'Ye canna take the pants aff a Hielanman'? No! A thousand times, no!
Of course Professor Nye (and other scholars) are not concerned only with what Bishop Percy called 'lewd, loose and humor- ous songs'. But although Professor Nye deals with respectable popular art, this means that he ignores not only the underground circula- tion of unprinted or irregularly printed but widely circulated skulduddery (to quote Sir Walter's usage) but with the ingenious ways the public and private censors have been circumvented. This sabotage of public morals has even degraded, so my Philadelphia friends tell me, the statue of William Penn on the top of the City Hall! But it is the verbal sabotage that is more serious. How far this has gone was shown, quite a long time ago, by that eminent musicologist, Dr Sigmund Spaeth, in his admirable parergon, The Facts of Life in Popular Song. And it is one of the losses of modern 'freedom' that these ingenious examples of 'boring from within' are hardly worth spending time on.
But of course most of American popular song is as clean as a hound's tooth. (The smell of the mouths of most of the dogs I have owned or merely known, suggests that this is hardly a criterion of cleanliness which would not meet the standards of John Sumner and Oral Roberts.) But there are aesthetic as well as ethical problems involved. American popular religion started with two
strikes on it (to use a baseball metaphor). The late Percy Scholes did his best to defend the claims of musical Puritanism, but I think in this case securus judicat orbis terrariim. That good Lutheran, Bach, wrote Masses. But the American colonists, although ther were often musically minded, were not neces.- sadly musically equipped. The Bay Psalter was not a good basis on which to build a great musical tradition.
Of course, some of the taboos from which New England suffered were not merely 'American' (to use a neologism creeping in by 1700). There was the fear of elaborate instrumental equipment. Organs were suspect in Scotland as well as in New England. When the Episcopalians put an organ into their first Glasgow church, St Andrew's on the Green, they were accused of installing a o' whistles'. But of course, there were less serious innovations than organs in New England as well as in Antique Scotia. You can read about church orchestras in Thomas Hardy, and there were rough (very roughl equivalents on the frontier.
Church music, such as it was, was the basis of a great deal of popular music in the nine- teenth century, although the arrival of serious German musicians greatly raised the expecta- tions, if not the actual enjoyment, of church music in the mid-nineteenth century. In America it was often God, not the Devil, who had the best tunes, which suffered from asso- ciation with dreadful banal words. But there was no equivalent of Burns or Moore and so no such ambiguous or bogus masterpieces as 'Comin' Through the Rye' or 'Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms'.
America had one minor master, Stephen Foster, who added some permanent trea- sures, perhaps silver not gold, to the Anglo- Saxon score of follcsong. That cantankerous and not very good historian, Freeman, when asked what had pleased him most on his only American tour lamented the absence of any historical or cultural associations. He had only once got the thrill that Europe had so often provided, when a train conductor pointed to the sluggish and unimpressive stream the train was crossing and said, 'That's the Swanee River'. (Since then, the Dresser [or Dreiser] brothers have provided a good- ish song for the Wabash.) With modern times there is an embarrar de richesse. And there is far more sophisti- cated music and, often in an ambiguous sense, more sophisticated words. There are some classics (or so I think). I can remember being stirred to an agreeable nostalgia for the 'twenties when I heard in the town square in Brisbane that masterpiece from The Garrick Gaieties, 'Mountain Greenery', or when I remember the impact of 'You're the Top'. I still cherish that agreeable piece of schmalz from Theodora Goes Wild when Irene Dunne sang 'Be Still My Heart'. But a great deal of modern music and musicology is above me.
Yet-I am patriotically glad at the success of the greatest sons of Liverpool (since Mr Gladstone). Of course I mean the Beatles. I can remember being driven across their trail on their first American tour in 1964. They had cut out Omaha (although its cathedral. like that of Albi, is dedicated to St Cecilia). The reason was simple. Kansas City had offered more. A foolish defender of the Omaha Establishment had told the indignant young that it was all right. Next week Billy Graham was coming. Metaphorically, the Graham fans provoked the biggest razzberns of protest since William Jennings Bryan puE Nebraska on the map.
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