NRR Project: Marian Anderson sings at the Lincoln Memorial (April 9, 1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘Marian Anderson: the Lincoln Memorial Concert’

Recorded April 9, 1939

Marian Anderson (1897-1993) was one of the most gifted contraltos of the 20^th century. Her only problem – she was Black.

Fighting prejudice every step of the way, she trained with various voice teachers and finally made an impact with a recital held with the New York Philharmonic on Aug. 26, 1925. People loved her rich, velvety voice, which expressed itself with precision and grace. However, because of her skin color, many times she could not get access to traditional classical-music venues in America.

So she went to Europe to study and perform. There she became incredibly popular, building a reputation, and notably establishing a friendship with the composer Sibelius. Her increased reputation led to more concert appearances in the U.S., but again she had problems being accommodated in hotels and restaurants due merely to her skin color.

In 1939, she attempted to give a concert at Washington, D.C.’s Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, which had a whites-only policy. She was denied. She then tried to secure the use of the auditorium of D.C.’s Central High School – and was again turned down, this time by the District of Columbia Board of Education. Thousands of her supporters were pissed, and a coalition of Black activists got to work.

Finally, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was convinced to stage her recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This they did on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. The open-air concert was attended by more than 75,000 people, and was carried on NBC radio. “Genius, like Justice, is blind,” declared Ickes.

Anderson sang her heart out. She sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” the aria “O mio Fernando” from Donizetti’s “La Favorita”, and Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” After a brief intermission, she sang three spirituals, “Gospel Train,” “Travelin’”, and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” She was applauded frenetically. For once, a Black artist stood up to the racists that controlled the American culture, and triumphed over them with a concert heard by millions.

She continued her career. She sang for the troops during World War II and the Korean War. She headlined on live TV on June 15, 1953, broadcast on both NBC and CBS. Finally, on January 7, 1955, she became the first Black singer to appear on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera. She continued to work extensively until her retirement form singing in 1965.

Only excerpts of her concert were released on newsreel film at the time, but the entire performance was recorded on film and archived. Today we can see and hear her thrilling performance, and wonder now what kind of society made it so hard for her to shine her light for everyone.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dorothy Thompson: Commentary and Analysis of the European Situation for NBC Radio.

NRR Project: 'Strange Fruit' (1939)

 

‘Strange Fruit’

Music and lyrics by Abel Meeropol

Performed by Billie Holiday

Recorded 1939

3:12

 

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

 

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

 

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop”

Strange Fruit was originally a poem, composed in 1937, penned in outrage over the lynching of Black people in the South, which was endemic in America during the early part of the 20^th century. Its author sought people to set the poem to music, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the poet himself (now under the name of Lewis Allan) made a song out of it. A few New York singers, most notably Laura Duncan, performed the song, most notably at Madison Square Garden.

Billie Holiday heard the song and wanted to record it; her label, Columbia, declined. However, it gave her permission to record the song with another label. She did – and the recording sold more a million copies, making it the biggest-selling recording of her career. Holiday feared reprisals over her performance of it, but did it anyway. It was usually performed at the end of her appearances, with no encore.

This powerful denunciation of racial violence was named the Best Song of the Century.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial.

NRR Project: 'Rose Room' (1939)

 

‘Rose Room’

Music by Art Hickman, Lyrics by Harry Williams

Performed by the Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian

Recorded Oct. 2, 1939

2:45

The guitar was not thought of initially as a natural jazz instrument. The sound was too soft to compete with the brass and drums of the big bands. Therefore, it was used primarily as a rhythm instrument.

It took Charlie Christian and the invention of the electric guitar to change that. Utilizing an amplifier, the electric guitarist could make himself heard above the surrounding musicians. However, it took a musician of Christian’s genius to make the instrument essential.

Christian grew up in Texas, the son of musicians. He developed his skills on the electric guitar and soon gained a reputation for his work. Record producer John Hammond encouraged him to try out with Benny Goodman. Goodman was reluctant to try him. However, he gave him a chance at a date in a Los Angeles restaurant. Goodman had his band play “Rose Room,” which fortunately Christian knew inside and out. The song went on for 45 minutes, with Christian improvising an incredible 20 choruses. He was hired.

Christian became part of Goodman’s fabled sextette and performed extensively until his death in 1942. His supple single-note style of play fit in perfectly with the sound Goodman was trying to produce. Before Christian’s demise, he is said to have coined the phrase “bebop” for the new and challenging type of jazz he was pioneering with a few other musicians in L.A.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Billie Holliday sings ‘Strange Fruit.’

NRR Project: 'Peter and the Wolf' (1939)

 

Peter and the Wolf

Composed by Sergei Prokofiev

Performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzsky, conductor

Richard Hale, narrator

Recorded 1939

24:24

Holy cow! I was asked by the Library of Congress to write about this piece, which I did in 2019. My explanatory essay sits at the National Recording Registry website, which you can read here.

The official term for music that educates is pedagogic music, and most of it is as awful as that sounds. Official culture in every society seeks to inculcate its values, moral and aesthetic, in each of its young generations, and many a child has been bored to tears by something earnest and condescending it is thought they “should” like. It’s a rare piece of music that remains as fresh and persuasive as Peter and the Wolf.

In classical music, there are a number of designated “kid-friendly” pieces that serve as gateways to Western art music, the symphonic world. Saint-Saen’s Carnival of the Animals, Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. There are inadvertently famous classical riffs as well, and some children graduate into a love of the classical music they only heard snatches of. The Lone Ranger’s signature music is eventually understood as the overture to Rossini’s opera, Giullaume Tell, and the grand three-note opening theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey becomes Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (especially as taught by kid-friendly composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein at one of his televised Young People’s Concerts).

One of the most successful of these compositions is Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a “symphonic fairy tale for children” written in the Soviet Union but first recorded in America, by Serge Koussevitzsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since its premiere, it’s been recorded more than 400 times, in a dozen languages.

The young and enterprising Prokofiev left the fledgling Soviet Union in May, 1918; after many successes, he returned permanently in 1936. There, educator Natalya Sats asked him to write a piece that would teach instruments of the orchestra to children, for her Central Children’s Theatre.

The official culture of the day in the USSR was socialist realism, a style that featured idealistic depictions of the common man, depictions that were mandated, reviewed, critiqued, and censored by the central government. A useful work of art taught a moral lesson and reinforced Soviet values. For a libretto, Prokofiev started with a rhyming narrative by popular Soviet children’s writer Antonina Sakonyskaya, about a Young Pioneer (the Soviet equivalent of a Boy Scout) challenging an adult mired in reactionary, pre-Revolutionary thinking.

Dissatisfied, Prokofiev tossed the original poem aside and wrote his own story in prose. Turning to the music, he completed the piano score in less than a week, and the orchestration in another. Peter and the Wolf debuted on May 2, 1936 at a children’s concert by the Moscow Philharmonic. The American premiere took place in Boston in March, 1938, due to the presence there of Koussevitzsky.

Serge Koussevitzsky was another Russian, but one who chose life in the West after the Russian Revolution. A respected bassist and composer, his financial situation enabled him to advance his career by doing such things as hiring the Berlin Philharmonic for his conducting debut and forming a dominating music-publishing company that printed the work of composers such as Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and . . . Prokofiev. Koussevitzsky led the ensemble during a period of artistic greatness. (The primary performance space at the BSO’s legendary summer concert venue Tanglewood bears the name of the Koussevitzsky Music Shed.)

According to Koussevitzsky biographer Moses Smith, “Prokofiev appeared as a soloist and guest conductor for a program of his own music which included ‘Peter and the Wolf’ in its first American performance. In a pre-concert interview with newspapermen he had pointedly alluded to the bad reception Boston had previously accorded his more ‘serious’ works, which he was accordingly omitting from the forthcoming program.” Prokofiev biographer Simon Morrison adds, “Prokofiev informed a Time magazine reporter that because audiences in Boston could not grasp his ‘serious music,’ he was obliged to pander to them with ‘simple things.’”

Despite the composer’s deprecating comments, the simplicity of the composition is not to be confused with a lack of quality. It’s the story of young Peter, who, defying his Grandfather’s words of warning, defeats and captures a hungry wolf, with the aid of a few animal friends. Each character has a dedicated instrument and a distinct theme — what Wagnerians would call a leitmotif. Peter is voiced by the strings, and there is his grumpy Grandfather (bassoon), a bird (flute), a duck (oboe), a cat (clarinet), and the wolf himself (French horns). With precision and economy, Prokofiev sketches out the characters thematically as he moves the story along.

The role of the Narrator in the performance is key, and the debut recording features Richard Hale as such. The respected baritone was a frequent concert-hall performer; in later years he turned to character acting in films, becoming a familiar face in fare such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Hale gives the reading a directness and emotional force absent in many other renditions of the role. In Hale’s performance, the story is thrilling and vital.

After the premiere in Boston, Prokofiev toured America in 1938. He made a point of going to Hollywood and playing Peter and the Wolf for Walt Disney, in the hopes he would craft an animated film based on the score. Disney nearly added a Peter and the Wolf segment to his animated/classical music anthology Fantasia (1940), but eventually produced it as a segment of the anthology Make Mine Music in 1946.

The premiere recording exists as a six-part set of 78-rpm records bound together (these bulky, heavy folders gave us the phrase “record album”). The initial release was wildly popular, and soon recording followed recording, sporting narrators as varied as Boris Karloff, David Bowie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Alice Cooper. Peter and the Wolf is popular — and sturdy — enough to endure hundreds of renditions.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Charlie Christian plays ‘Rose Room.’

 

SOURCES

 

Koussevitzsky

Moses Smith

Muriwai Books

2017 (1947)

 

Serge Koussevitzsky

Hugo Leichtentritt

Harvard University Press

1946

 

The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years

Simon Morrison

Oxford University Press

2009

 

 

NRR Project: 'Over the Rainbow' (1939)

 

NRR Project: ‘Over the Rainbow’

Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

Performed by Judy Garland with Victor Young and his Orchestra

Recorded July 1939

2:47

One of the greatest American songs was crafted for the groundbreaking Technicolor fantasy film The Wizard of Oz in 1939. It was written expressly for Judy Garland to sing as Dorothy in the sepia-toned prologue to the movie, set in Kansas. There, amid her colorless, ramshackle environment, Dorothy sings of wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere “the dreams that you dream really do come true.”

First, read Walter Limler’s excellent explanatory essay here. It breaks down just how difficult it was for composer Harold Arlen to come up with the music for this song. He was adept at crafting comic songs, but this one needed to be heartfelt. (In musicals, this type of song is often referred to as a “wants” song, one in which the lead character expresses longing for change.)

The movie was a hit, and so was the song. It became Judy Garland’s theme song (she was only 16 when she first recorded it), and is one of the most familiar tunes of all time.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time:‘Peter and the Wolf.’

NRR Project: 'O Que e que a Bahiana tem’ (1939)

 

NRR Project: ‘O Que e que a Bahiana tem’

Performed by Carmen Miranda and Bando de Lua

Recorded December 1939

3:17

Carmen Miranda (1909-1955) persists in our collective imagination as “the lady in the tutti-frutti hat,” the exuberant Brazilian songstress whose outrageous outfits were her trademark.

There are two excellent explanatory essays on her at the National Recording Registry – one byKathyrn Bishop-Sanchez, here; and one by Cary O’Dell, here. I can only add a bit myself.

She released her first album in 1930. She was already popular in Brazil when she recorded this song in 1938. It’s from her fifth film, Banana di Terra. The song took off and she recorded it in New York in December of that year.

She was an immediate hit. She dressed in an approximation of the wardrobe of the Bahia women – Brazilian peasant-class ladies who dressed extravagantly. She wears bright colors, enormous jewelry, and fantastic headgear, usually featuring fruit and flowers.

“O Que e que a Bahiana tem” and other numbers she performed in the New York show Streets of Paris in 1939. Soon she was seen on the screen, usually filmed in New York due to her theatrical commitments. She was dubbed the Queen of Samba.

In 1940 she did her first American movie, Down Argentine Way. She is always presented as a cliché Other, a weird amalgam of entertaining traits combined with an excessive visual style. She made 13 films in all.

As derided as she might be for her look, her musicianship was excellent and as distinctive as the later Yma Sumac, another Latin phenomenon. She did help immensely to inject Latin music into the American mainstream.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time:‘Over the Rainbow.’

NRR Project: The John and Ruby Lomax Southern States Recording Trip

 

NRR Project: The John and Ruby Lomax Southern States Recording Trip

Recorded March 31 – June 14, 1939

350 performances

The most epic journey in American roots music began March 31, 1939. Seventy-two-year-old John Lomax and his wife Ruby Terrill, 53, set out on an expedition into the heart of the American soul, as expressed through music.

They recorded everything and everyone. They recorded English and Spanish, all faiths, all colors. According to Matthew Barton and the National Recording Registry from which you read here, “the Lomaxes captured a wide range of traditional musical styles in English and Spanish, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs, as well as interviews with the performers.”

In fact, just cut to Barton’s essay here. Just read it. It’s really good!

I can only add that, for the lover of American music, this collection of musical pieces, all fully accessible online, is the mother load of content. In only 10 weeks, the Lomaxes found and captured hundreds of bits of oral culture that could never be accessed today. The wealth of what they collected is still impacting scholars and musicmakers today.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Carmen Miranda sings ‘O Que e que a Bahiana tem’.