| Transcript |
MUSIC
music could start a cult.
people who pretend to be Indians and
camp out in tee-pees, a woman from
Southampton who has built a shrine
to Jim Reeves and apparently prays to
him, and of course an army of Presley-
ites prepared to mourn forever more—
he never came to England. I think they'd
settle for his body, though.
Now, why would a country that's
not really so bad off (don't believe
everything you read) fawn so shamelessly over another country's culture,
especially when its own culture is so
rich? Okay, Americans are a bit that
way about Shakespeare and so on, but
mostly because they feel obliged, because
they learned about this stuff in school,
and because, anyway, Shakespeare, being
pre-1776, is as much a part of American
culture as British. But what American
knows anything about British traditional
music, for example? For that matter,
hardly any British know anything about it.
There are a couple of societies that try to
save it from extinction, and clubs here
and there where the few traditional
musicians who remain will perform for
expenses and beer (I'm discounting the
"folk" movement, which includes some
festivals and the occasional good rock
group like Steeleye Span, because that's
just the hippies again), but I'll bet they're
outnumbered by the Elvis Presley clones
alone. When I've broached the subject
here, the answer I usually get is that
American music is just so much more
alive.
All right, but why? The first explanation, the easy one, is that the British
class system killed the native popular
music by not allowing it on the radio.
When you mention class here, it's no
Marxist abstraction (and anyway, don't
forget where Marx lived while he was
refining his world view;) the system has
concrete effects. All during the twenties,
thirties and forties, and even into the
fifties, when radio was proliferating in
the US, there were only two stations in
all of Britain, both of them run by a
Government corporation, the BBC, which
was run by upper-middle-class bureaucrats who thought popular music was
vulgar, as, by definition, it is ("vulgarity"
only has a bad name because of the way
the middle classes sneered when they
said it). So they wouldn't broadcast
it, British, American or any other kind.
The most "popular" music on the radio
was a Paul Whiteman imitator named
Ted Heath, who had managed to find
taints of Storeyville even in the aptly-
named Whiteman's music and had refined them out. While in the States radio
was fusing dozens of regional styles into
broad popular sounds—Nashville, blues,
bee-bop, Tin Pan Alley, swing, rhythm
and blues, rock and roll—British traditional music, including its once-thriving
Music Hall, was still in the boondocks,
still depending on live audiences, most of
whom weren't there any more because
they were at American movies or listening to American records or tapping their
toes to Ted Heath. A remaindered shipment of, say, San Antonio doo-wah
music could easily start a cult, and a
hard, expensive object like a phonograph record, if it's your only source
of the sound, doesn't go out of fashion
as easily as the momentary whims of a
disc jockey. American popular music
was rare and cherished and passed from
hand to hand, a bit like modern literature
in Moscow today—indeed, like popular
music in Moscow today. (I might add
that when the BBC put on two popular
channels and began setting up local
radio stations, one of the first results
was the Beatles.)
Another explanation, and this one's
harder, is the national passion, common
to all classes, for collecting things. Maybe
this derives from their long history as a
trading nation—who knows?—or because
their mothers don't pay very much attention, or all of the above and more, but
everybody I meet seems to be some kind
of magpie—collecting everything from
stamps, coins and matchboxes to steam
engines, beer labels and the numerals on
passing airplanes. Frazer, Darwin, Burton,
Leakey—they could only have been
British. But there is also a typically
British disdain for the people who produce or otherwise live with the things
that the British collect. A musicologist
I know, who specializes in Deep South
music, can't stand the States. He only
goes there when he has to, because he
finds the place culturally barren. By this
he means that most Americans don't
know what they've got. They sit around
in their bars and honky-tonks getting on
with drinking their lives away and being
quite grateful that somebody's playing
some music, but they don't even know
that this is Deaf Boy Blue who was born
in Yazoo, Mississippi, and used to play
with Two-Toe Jackson when Jackson
was still on one-string washtub, and in
1925 they cut three records on such-and-
such a label, and do you want to know
the serial numbers?
The attitude can be irritating, but
you'll have to admit that it's useful. It
means that the rest of us can go on living
and creating and neglecting, and there'll
always be some Englishman to pick up
what we've thrown away and put it where
it won't get lost, broken or rained on,
saving it as surely as the Karyatids were
saved when they were stolen from the
Parthenon. The British are always
wondering if they have a role in the world
any more. I think that they do and that
it's the same as it always was: the British
Museum.
VIWMM
Lynne Mutchler, editor
Harris County Women's Political Caucus will sponsor a fundraiser for Congressman
Mickey Leland on Saturday, January 19 at 8 p.m., at 1415 Indiana.
Fund-raiser for Anne Wheeler, January 26, 7-11 p.m. $5 donation, cash bar. 306 Terrace.
Houston: A Women's History is a series of free lectures exploring the contribution of
Black, Anglo and Hispanic women to Houston's history, politics, business, and the
changing status of women.
The Learning Library Program of the Houston Public Library is presenting these
lectures twice: at 2:30 p.m. on Sundays (January 20 to March 23) at the Jungman
Branch, 5830 Westheimer; and at 7 p.m. on Thursdays (January 24 to March 27) at the
Central Library, 500 McKinney.
The first topics are: A Woman's Place in Houston, Carol Brown, HCC; The Women's
Suffrage Movement: Its Birth in Houston, John Eudy, NHCC; Women in Houston
Politics: 1950 to the Present, Eleanor Tinsley, Houston City Council; Black Women in
Houston Politics, Marcelia Washington, HCC; The Changing Legal Status of Houston's
Black Women, Myrtle McKenzie, Attorney; and Mexican American Women in Houston
Politics, Olga Soliz, Business Consultant. For further information and the complete
schedule, call 222-3268.
Volunteers to work with residents of the shelter for abused women
maintained by the Houston Area Women's Center will be trained on
four consecutive Saturdays beginning January 5, 1980. Training will
be from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will include: an understanding of family
violence, crisis intervention training, information on community
resources and procedures at the shelter. For more information call the
Houston Area Women's Center at 792-4403.
Reel Women is a 10-week series of films offering an intensive opportunity to explore
how films have perpetuated myths and stereotypes and reinforced beliefs of the proper
"place" of women. The films will be shown free Saturday afternoons at 2 p.m. beginning January 12 in the auditorium of the Houston Public Library's Julia Ideson Building
at 500 McKinney.
Chronicling almost 50 years of social history, the films were chosen by Eric Gerber,
film critic of the Houston Post, and Dr. Antoinette Boecker of TSU. Each film dramatically depicts a specific era in the changing role of American women and significantly reflected and influenced the values and beliefs of its first-release audience.
January 12
Stella Dallas
1937
Barbara Stanwyck
January 19
Mildred Pierce
1945
Joan Crawford
January 26
Shanghai Express
1932
Marlene Dietrich
February 2
Klute
1971
Jane Fonda
February 9
His Girl Friday
1940
Rosalind Russell
February 16
Some Like It Hot
1959
Marilyn Monroe
February 23
A Woman Under the Influence
1974
Gena Rowlands
March 1
Rachel, Rachel
1968
Joanne Woodward
March 8
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
1977
Diane Keaton
March 15
Girlfriends
1978
Melanie Mayron
fWhat state elected the first woman governor in the United States
W and inaugurated the nations's only all-woman Supreme Court—all
f^m within the same year?
^r Texas, of course.
^ The year was 1925 when Miriam "Ma" Ferguson was sworn in
as Texas' and the nation's first female governor. "Most Texans
know about Ma Ferguson, but few have ever heard about the All
Woman Supreme Court, appointed only 5 years after women won the right to vote,"
says Travis County Commissioner Ann Richards.
Hortense Ward was appointed Chief Justice, Ruth Brazil and Hattie L. Henenburg
were appointed associate Justices by the previous governor, Pat M. Neff. The women
were appointed to hear a case involving Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization
whose members included all the male members of the Court as well as most of the male
attorneys of the state, who might be charged with a conflict of interest in the case.
These little-known facts of Texas history are being uncovered by the Texas Women's
History project of the Texas Foundation for Women's Resources, an non-profit organization. The material is being gathered for a major exhibit about Texas women—and the
role they had in shaping the state's history. The exhibit is tentatively scheduled to open
at the Institute of Texas Cultures in San Antonio in 1981. A film, a traveling exhibit
and several publications are also being planned.
"We have had calls from all parts of Texas, with offers of information, materials and
assistance to the project," sais Mary Beth Rogers, project director. More that 4,000 museums, historical organizations, libraries, universities and private individuals have been
surveyed to identify artifacts, photographs, documents and other material to include in
the exhibit.
The project will soon publish a Guide to Sources on Women's History in Texas, compiled from the unprecedented survey of historical sources made for this project.
Initial funding for the project has been provided by the Texas Committee for the Hu-
HOUSTON BREAKTHROUGH
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DECEMBER/JANUARY 1980 |
