Archive for January, 2010

Georgia Traveler Features the Wren’s Nest, Amelia, and Curtis

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Georgia Traveler, everyone’s favorite travel show not starring Michael Palin Anthony Bourdain Rick Steves, stopped by the Wren’s Nest a few months back for a segment on their “Book Tour” episode.

Amelia did most of the talking:

Curtis did most of the storytelling:

And Georgia Traveler did a bang-up job.  Thank you, Georgia Traveler! Watch the entire episode online, here (just click on the “Watch” icon next to the page title).

Our segment starts about 4 minutes in, but the whole episode is worth your time.  They stop by the Uncle Remus Museum, Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia, the Margaret Mitchell House, and the Grit.

P.S.  Do you know how hard it is to find a screen grab where people don’t look like they’re drooling?  It’s medium-hard!

Uncle Remus by Henry F. Gilbert — the Opera that Wasn’t

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Henry F. Gilbert, an important early 20th Century American composer,  collected scores of African-American folk songs and aspired to write an opera called Uncle Remus.

I swear I’m not messing with y’all.

Gilbert never secured the rights to the Uncle Remus tales and couldn’t complete his opera, but he did write its prelude.   Gilbert derived these two songs, performed here by Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev in 2004, from the prelude –

Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev — “Uncle Remus”

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Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev — “Brer Rabbit”

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Thanks to Fleur de Son Classics for permission to use the music.  If you like it, consider ordering the album here.

The Uncle Remus prelude premiered at a Central Park concert in New York in August of 1910.  4,000 people attended.

The Boston Symphony performed the prelude the following year.  Some people objected to the jaunty ragtime rhythms, but most responded positively “to the youthful vigor, the racy humor and the romantic nature of this new music.”   Philip Hale, in the Boston Herald of April 14, 1911, wrote:

“The overture stirred the blood of the audience.  All rejoiced in hearing a new voice with something to say and an original way of saying it.  The fugue did not dampen the interest of the hearers, for the old form was used with dramatic spirit.  No wonder that the audience, surprised and delighted, was for once in no hurry to leave the hall. [...]  The overture is distinctively, but not bumptiously, not apologetically, American.”

Gilbert was one of the first American composers to break free of the Germanic style of classical music.  For Gilbert, African-American folk music was a great source of inspiration and “seemed closely related to the spirit of all America.”

Gosh, sounds a lot like Joel Chandler Harris who, regarding A.B. Frost’s illustrations of Brer Rabbit and his critter friends, remarked: “We shall then have real American stuff, illustrated in real American style.”  Shame he wasn’t around to hear the soundtrack… embedded in a blog post… on the internet. Really woulda blown his mind.

Related: Henry F. Gilbert: a bio-bibliography by Sherrill V. Martin