The first half of That Crazy American Music is a sadly self-indulgent run-through
of the history of music in America since colonial days, mainly a sequence of space-filling
anecdotes interspersed with lengthy opera plots. Only when his remarks seem to have some
half-way personal application does Paul’s prose suddenly lift, for example as he
describes the German emigré Johann Christian Gottlieb Graupner’s
turn-of-the-Eighteenth Century discovery of Negro music:
Every musician knows what it means to hear, suddenly and unexpectedly for the first
time, a kind of music he has never heard before - new timbre, a different beat, a tune
from some weird and unknown source. Graupner... wept with joy when first that Negro music
burst on him, not because it was sentimental or in any way nostalgic or sad, but as a
botanist might have wept in finding without warning a new kind of orchid or a striped
satanic vine.
- or in the characterisation of Stephen Foster and Foster’s attitude to family and
marriage:
His amazing product ranges from careless slapstick to sublime detachment and esthetic
tranquillity. To describe his best works as sentimental, nostalgic, miniature or with any
of the usual combination of adjectives, misses their essentials and falsifies their
appeal.... He was never profound, or truly tragic. His character was loose. His sins were
largely of omission. His personality must be understood from various angles, separately;
and whatever integration results must come, largely, from the scope and experience of the
observer, or judge....
Stephen Foster was a hard drinker, the kind who today would be labeled an
"alcoholic...." Unequipped for happiness, he had learned as a youth to get along
without it.
Much has been made of his "love" for his family, and his dependence on
its members, when actually he was more a misfit in the bosom of his family that in society
in general. His parents had no understanding of Forster’s gift for music, and tried,
with unbelievable density, to steer him away from his only supportable course. One may
grant that his wife... was technically faithful....
...Stephen spent little time at home. He did not love [his wife], nor miss her when
any other company was at hand....
...Stephen Foster’s experiences, including his befogged inner life, were
characteristically North American. He loved his parents without wanting to be near them or
expecting them to understand anything vital to him. This density on their part he never
resented. He took it for granted. His marriage he realized was a blunder, but he assumed
others were, and that men and women, somehow, were not equipped to make one another happy.
He found that being broke was a nuisance. When, intermittently, he was in funds, he did
not enjoy any sprees or excesses. Money simply leaked away.1
Despite illuminating passages, the book remains largely inert until mid-way through.
Suddenly, however, Paul’s prose comes alive as he begins to describe black American
music: "How little those able and successful white [composers]... seemed to realise
that the Negroes (while working against all odds for a foothold as free men) were creating
the really pure and crazy American folk music that was to fascinate and transform the
world!"
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It is as if this were the book’s true and originally-intended beginning, with the
earlier parts added to make up the length. There is a direct relationship between the
music he admires and the quality of his writing about it. The chapter on "Dixieland
Jazz" radiates belief:
Imagine [Buddy] Bolden, at the age of twelve, standing in the dust and smoke of Congo
Square, hearing and seeing his race reveal itself and give promise derived from vitality
and rhythm, yearning and melody, counterpoint (from the urge for mass or neighborly
activity) and weird suggestions of harmony (because the different range of voices flowed
an octave, or a fifth or a fourth or even a third apart). The young boy, on the side lines
in order to see the great spectacle and sense its significance as a whole, had the same
ease of posture, the confident tilt of the head, the personal acceptance and artistic
curiosity, the necessity to create, which he showed years later wherever there was music,
indoors or out. The extent to which he would be effective in passing on the best of his
racial gifts (refined and clarified, with an appeal to all peoples) was not known to him;
but the desire for leadership, for doing big things, for giving voice to the whole gamut
of emotions, caused him to grow and improve his foothold in several essential respects at
once. He shined shoes, but always near the saloons, honky-tonks or barbershops where there
was music and talk. He listened and his mind found patterns....
When he listened to the whites’ European classics or standard pieces, or the
mellow smooth Creole band music, or Baptist hymns being transformed into spirituals, he
realized that the process of transformation had just begun, and that it impelled an
inspired musician to move forward in a continuous present - a maximum of searching, a
minimum of static rest or imitation.
Later (in the book’s Envoi), Paul identifies "his feeling for a
continuous present", which he had once thought he saw in the writings of Gertrude
Stein, with jazz itself. It functioned best, in its halcyon days, in one of those few
indoor locales in which Paul ever felt at ease, the brothel "parlour." (He
devoted pages of his chapter on New Orleans to Storyville’s "200 bawdy
houses.") The latter, jazz-inspired half of That Crazy American Music, some of
which had perhaps been research or "treatment" for the film "New
Orleans," is a different book, with sustained prose about Bolden, Joe Oliver and
Louis Armstrong - who "has furnished as many springboards for creative musicians as
Picasso has suggested to modern painters." But the book fades again into only fitful
consequence: Paul’s sympathy for "bop" and "be-bop" as legitimate
developments in African-American - and therefore American - music, and even a surprising
defence of Liberace as a popular entertainer, cannot outweigh his distaste for the
contemporary "rock and roll" and in particular the Elvis Presley phenomenon, for
Paul a saddening matter of musical dilution and mass marketing. In conclusion, he was
ambivalent, embarrassed, and apologetic about his too patched-up cook’s tour of
the essentials of European long-hair music in America, early American pioneer
imitations, folk music, Foster, minstrel music, boogie, jazz, Dixieland, swing, small
combinations and big bands, Tin Pan Alley songs, vout, rock and roll, college or
contrapuntal Jazz; not to mention musical comedy, church music, the blues[, bop and
be-bop].2
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