by Peter Berryman
Wisconsciousness
Someone recently called my lyrics "Stream of Wisconsciousness." That's a good subtitle for this episode.
In my last column I made the sloppy mistake of misspelling departing columnist Maureen Gerarden's name. My apologies to Maureen, and once again, best wishes to her in her continuing support of local folk music via Isthmus.
Whither Zither for January had been duly delivered before Mike Tuten phoned with the news that he was stepping down as Mad Folk Head Cheese and Newsletter Kahuna. As anyone even peripherally involved with Mad Folk knows, Mike has been tireless in his work for Mad Folk, and his kind competence in dealing with so many of its facets will be sincerely missed.
On to music. Last time I talked about Old Put (John A. Stone), the forty-niner goldrush songwriter, and Robert Service, the Klondike goldrush poet of fifty years later. Since then I asked Tim White, of the Mount Horeb Area Historical Society, if Service had written any songs. Tim wrote back to say that there was at least one entire book of Service songs, called Twenty Bath-Tub Ballads. The lyrics and the scores from this book are archived on a Robert Service web site, at
http://www.top.monad.net/~artude/service.html
Two warnings: First, the musical scores are large jpegs. The one I downloaded was 157k. And I don't want to sound righteous, but my second warning is that a few of these songs are depressingly racist, misogynist, or both. But certain other of the lyrics are pretty nice.
As I mentioned last time, I just read a fascinating book called Doo-Dah, by Ken Emerson, about Stephen Foster and his times. Pittsburgh's Stephen Foster was another songwriter some of whose work was notoriously racist, but immediately popular ("Old Put" himself even wrote parodies of Foster's work). Not as an excuse, but to put this in some perspective, the 1850's were as weird and strained as Service's early 1900's, if not more, in those years leading up to the Civil War. As Guy Martin points out in the liner notes to the CD American Dreamer: Songs of Stephen Foster, "For the first half of the nineteenth century in America, almost everybody carried around the same question, namely, what in blazes are we doing here?"
Racism and xenophobia were rampant. Nobody really felt at home in this turbulent time, and everyone seemed to feel threatened. When Stephen Foster, who was born only fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, was not being nasty about the current scene, he was writing wistfully about good old days that never were.
I wondered what the 1850's were like here in Madison. As reported by the marvelous book by David Mollenhoff called Madison: The Formative Years, our local population went from 250 in 1845 to nearly 9,000 in 1855! Crowding out the displaced Native Americans, displaced New Englanders (mostly from New York and Vermont) were elbowed by Germans escaping a revolution, Irish escaping a potato famine, and so forth. Madison was a burgeoning hodgepodge, and blame was scattered willy-nilly. The Irish were a popular target, even in the press, as were the Norwegians. German immigrants were blamed for the deterioration of Sunday as the Lord's Day. There was at least one attempted lynching of an African American in Madison. Anti Semitism developed.
Mollenhoff goes on to describe the horrors of Madison around 1850. Pigs ran free in the streets, alongside packs of wild dogs. Cheap unpainted shacks had been thrown up to accommodate the incoming hoards. In 1853, there were forty three saloons in Madison, which amounted to one for every ninety residents. Drinking, gambling, and brawling were everywhere. Drunken ruffians roamed the streets at night beating on pans and blowing horns. Horseraces were held on Williamson Street at midnight. Fire protection was practically nonexistent. The village cemetery, where Orton Park is now, was wandered by free roaming cows who made a mess of the grave sites. There were deadly Cholera epidemics in Madison in 1849, 1852, and 1854. Garbage was dumped in the streets. Dead animals rotted where they dropped. Offal from slaughterhouses was tossed in the lakes. Horse doo-dah was left untouched and contributed to the pervasive stench. Streets were mudholes, used for storage of everything from coal to wood to rubbish. There was one sixty desk schoolhouse for, at one point, 1,602 school-age children.
No wonder people staggered through miserable American scenes like these singing the escapist songs of Stephen Foster.
Indeed the whole world was going nuts, according to chronologies of those times. From 1847 through 1850 there were revolts in Paris, Prague, Rome, Dresdin, Baden; revolutions in Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Milan, Parma. Sardinia declared war on Austria. Switzerland was warring. US was at war with Mexico. The Anglo-Kaffir War broke out.
Not to mention Zachary Taylor's croaking in 1850, a year and a half after he was inaugurated, of "heat and imprudent eating," in the words of my Collier's Encyclopedia.
Just down the road for the US was a devastating financial crash of 1857, then soon of course the Civil War. But the antebellum US was not the Utopia it's sometimes made out to be. There's little wonder that Stephen Foster was troubled and his songs and other popular songs of the day spoke with homesickness for some imagined lovely past, and with confusion about the present. And it's little wonder that Old Put and thousands of others went trooping off to California in those days, looking for a better life, singing Foster's songs. -PB
Bibliography:
Doo Dah: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture by Ken Emerson. Paperback edition, Da Capo Press, 1998.
Madison: A History of the Formative Years by David V. Mollenhoff. Kendell/Hunt Publishing Co., Dubuque, 1982.
The Timetables of History, by Bernard Grun. Simon & Schuster, 1991.
(Recording) American Dreamer: Songs of Stephen Foster by Thomas Hampson with Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, and David Alpher. Angel Records.