by Bobby Norton; Bobby Horton, 5245 Beacon Drive, Birmingham, AL 35210.
Bobby Horton does not use the conventional language of the historian—he explains, for instance, that despite its Yankee genesis the lugubrious ballad “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight” became popular around Southern campfires and thus was “a true crossover hit”—and yet his tape of Confederate Army war songs is an impressive and affecting piece of historical reconstruction.
Civil War soldiers were often poorly trained, poorly led, poorly fed, and poorly armed, but no two armies ever went into the field equipped with better songs. It is hard to say which side had the musical edge—the North may have had the best lyrics (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), but the South had the best tune (“Dixie”), and both sides sang it whenever they got the chance.
The songs, of course, reflected the temper of the armies: merry, homesick, melancholy, irreverent, and brave. The eighteen Horton has selected for his tape range from the sad and gorgeous “Lorena” to “Home Sweet Home”—another one popular with both armies—played on the hammer dulcimer. Here is “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” with stuffy lyrics trying to make this stirring Yankee song appropriate to the Southern cause, and a much more convincing transformation in which “Listen to the Mockingbird” becomes “Listen to the Minie Balls.” The postwar “I’m a Good Old Rebel,” with its chilling and childish grudge bearing (“Three hundred thousand Yankees are stiff in Southern dust/We killed three hundred thousand before they conquered us/ They died of Southern fever, of Southern steel and shot/I wish it was three million, instead of what we got”), is counterbalanced by the mellow lilt of “Long Ago,” a veterans’ celebration of the bold days of their youth sung to the tune of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.”
The best of the songs are as rousing today as they were in the 1860s. Horton calls his renditions homespun because “I played and sang all of this music myself and recorded it here at my home on an old Teac four-channel tape recorder.” In fact, however, the performances are highly polished and full of verve and conviction. Horton brings us very close to the spirit of the army that, Stephen Vincent Benét wrote, “Swore and laughed and despaired and sang ‘Lorena,’/Suffered, died, deserted, fought to the end.… Who wept for the mocking-bird on Hallie’s grave/When you had better cause to weep for more private griefs.”
Freedom Bound
A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement
by Robert Weisbrot; W. W. Norton & Company; 319 pages.
It all started with lunch counters. “To our mind, lunch counter segregation was the greatest evil facing black people in the country and if we could eliminate it, we would be like gods,” the activist Julian Bond recalled of the student sit-ins of 1960. The civil rights movement soon grew from localized action against racist restaurants into a nationwide struggle the likes of which had not been seen since the Civil War. In telling the story Robert Weisbrot brilliantly examines the course of American race relations over the last thirty years, linking grassroots protest campaigns to national political trends.
Civil rights leaders envisioned the beginning of a new era of national change with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. When Kennedy proved hesitant to introduce sweeping reforms, interracial “freedom riders” boarded segregated bus lines throughout the South. The veteran civil rights advocate Roy Wilkins characterized this as a “desperately brave, reckless strategy … that made those touch-football games played by the Kennedys look like macho patty-cake.” But Kennedy became convinced of the need for action after witnessing the violent response to James Meredith’s entry into the University of Mississippi in October 1962 and to Martin Luther King’s peaceful campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, a year later.
Following Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson quickly pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. Blacks cast 95 percent of their ballots for Johnson in 1964, and he soon came through for them again with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nevertheless, the movement now began to fall into disarray. The interracial, nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King came under fire as advocates of more militant tactics emerged.
King’s harshest critic was Malcolm X: “Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I Have A Dream’ speeches? And the black masses of America were—and still are—having a nightmare.” Coalitions split along generational, gender, and philosophical lines. King saw his campaigns in Albany, Georgia, and in Chicago end in failure, while provocative spokesmen for the movement like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver alienated white audiences. The House minority leader Gerald R. Ford vocalized white frustration in a 1966 speech following a series of riots in sixteen cities across the United States: “How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick though your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?”
More wanton violence broke out in the shadow of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., after King’s assassination in 1968. The subsequent murder of Robert F. Kennedy “removed the last remaining figure able to calm the polarized forces sweeping the country,” Weisbrot writes. Issues that once seemed clear degenerated into shouting matches over the politically charged questions of forced busing and affirmative action.
Weisbrot chooses to stress the movement’s many successes, however, and this spirit of triumph makes Freedom Bound an eminently enjoyable work. In one of the book’s finest passages, Weisbrot examines the political transformation of the former Alabama governor George Wallace. Less than twenty years after physically barring the University of Alabama to black students, Wallace renounced racism in his successful 1982 run for governor. “Whatever Wallace’s deepest sentiments,” Weisbrot concludes, “his actions were a striking testament to the legacy of civil rights protests he once vowed to crush but that instead have left an indelible imprint on [the] nation’s moral landscape.”
The Swing Era
The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945
by Gunther Schuller; Oxford; 919 pages.
In a footnote deep in this monumental jazz history, the author remarks that “jazz-writing and criticism, even more than classical music, is a field rampant with hotly contested judgments and acrimonious feuding between writers who have staked out territories they possessively consider their private domains of expertise.” Indeed, the jazz experts have had a field day picking at the strengths and weaknesses of this book. But they all agree that it is a milestone, perhaps the most important single history of jazz yet written, and by an author who seems to stand above the usual battling. Schuller is not only a jazz historian but also a respected jazz player, a prominent orchestral conductor, a noted composer, the longtime head of the New England Conservatory of Music, and a scholar of the music of several centuries. His breadth and depth of knowledge is unmatched and his musicality unquestioned.
This volume follows an earlier, much slimmer one on the pre-swing era; the author now promises a third book that will complete the cycle, covering jazz from 1945 to today. His focus in The Swing Era is principally on the big bands. His organization is encyclopedic: He starts with chapters on Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong and their bands and follows with sections on lesser big bands, great soloists, and small groups, with the result that the book is as useful as a reference as it is as a narrative history. Look up Nat King Cole and you can trace in nine pages his important work as a pathbreaking jazz pianist before his great popularity as a vocalist eclipsed that achievement. Or turn to the section on Earl Hines and follow his influence and adaptability as a bandleader and piano player from the mid-thirties right up to the seventies.
Throughout the book Schuller integrates technical detail, nontechnical musical description and criticism, discussion of individual recordings, and the larger historical picture. For example, he describes with some precision what Frank Sinatra brought to popular singing that was entirely new—his phrasing, his vocal quality, his ability to stretch slow tempos. He discusses how Sinatra’s talent grew during his years with Tommy Dorsey, how his unprecedented success helped put a whole new emphasis on the solo singer in popular music, and how this emergence of the popular singer in turn became one of the nails in the coffin of the big-band era. All this takes about two absorbing pages out of nine hundred.
Bill McCloud’s What Should We Tell Our Children about Vietnam?, originally an article in the May/June 1988 American Heritage, will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in October. John Garraty’s 1,001 Things Everyone Should Know about American History, based on features in the December 1986 and 1987 issues, was published this spring by Doubleday.
