Thirteenth in a Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

River traffic blew open the West after 1820, driving development and reducing isolation along major valleys. Boats arrived at wharfs and landings round the clock, all types of watercraft bringing people, technology, information, and culture—arts and entertainment. “The tremendous part the river life played in developing the ambitions and intelligence of the western settlers can never be estimated,” Ida M. Tarbell observed for McClure’s monthly in the latter century.

An entertainment core developed along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, including “floating theaters” that landed practically anywhere. “Almost every actor of the time with courage, ingenuity, and a crusading love of [the] art wanted to play the West. The river and boats were ready to provide transportation,” wrote Philip Graham, author of Showboats: History of an American Institution.

The famed Chapman family revolutionized entertainment on water during the 1830s. The talented Chapmans garnered grassroots acclaim from aboard their showboats—a series of flat barges until purchase of a steamer—literally delivering their extraordinary performances in drama, comedy and song. The Chapman Floating Theatre started each trip from Pittsburgh, wending southwest to Cairo then south to New Orleans, and stopped at every shoreline mustering an audience, town or plantation, especially with good fishing.

“Most of the wealth of the region gravitated toward the rivers, and audiences along their banks needed entertainment and were anxious to pay for it,” Graham observed. Modern musicologist Bill C. Malone, author of Southern Music/American Music, noted that early audiences “responded to whatever was available. They could alternate between a melodrama and a Shakespearean tragedy, a minstrel show and a concert by Jenny Lind.”

River entertainers, in turn, learned to expect anything. A Shakespearean troupe worked down the Mississippi on a flatboat in 1835, self-billed as the “Ark Theatre,” staging Hamlet dockside at one village. “Here were music, madness, moonshine—philosophy, poetry and performances—comedy, tragedy and farce, all [on] water,” recounted an actor in attendance.

Lo, a real villain untied the barge, casting it adrift to “our horror and astonishment…,” the actor recorded, “finding ourselves in the mighty current of the Mississippi, floating downstream, without sail or rudder, at the rate of five miles an hour!” The craft was run ashore safely, but far downriver. “I will not tire your gracious patience with the details of our tramp through interminable swamp and across muddy creeks,” sniffed the dramatist. “Suffice it to say, that half the party lost their shoes and all their tempers, and that at about sunrise the next morning, a set of squalid, tired, bespattered and hungry wretches were seen entering the village.”

A theater audience lost control on a summer night at Louisville, indoors under gas chandelier and candlelight. “Louisville was a grand harbor for flatboat men and steamboat men,” explained a Courier-Journal account, decades later, recalling “the free-and-easy style of manners which were sometimes witnessed in the old theaters.”

At Samuel Drake’s theater on the evening of Louisville legend, 1837, audience action eclipsed the stage show after a drunken boatman passed out in tier seating. Had the man slept quietly “the attention of the crowd of spectators would not have been diverted from the stage, where several stars were moving in all their luster,” the paper recounted.

“Alas! The sleeper snored. He emitted long rolls of nasal thunder whose noise threatened to drown out the deep-chested declamation of the actors.” Objections arose immediately at rear of the auditorium, from sweaty river men packed in “the pit,” a sunken area for standing only. “The admission fee there was only a quarter, and the demons of the pit entered their part of the theater through the basement… For such an assembly the sleeper’s notes of defiance were too provoking.”

The snoring continued and catcalls increased until the sleeper woke suddenly, enraged, to curse and threaten his critics. “A knot of men in the pit directly under him especially attracted his attention by their demonstrations… so he quickly leaped over the railing, right in among them and began making his fists play furiously around him.”

“But his courage availed him nothing,” The Courier-Journal continued. “The pit wanted a fight badly… the usual arrangements of the night were completely reversed, the spectators being converted into impassioned actors, while the professional actors, arranged in the spangles, plumes and tinseled finery of the drama, looked in utter amazement on the contest that raged below them.” The offending theatergoer was beaten to the floor, “an unsightly mass of rags, blood and filth,” and carried out. Stage actors resumed their work but warily, lacking the passion of boatmen.

Louisville boomed as gateway to the West and far South, capitalizing on slave trade among businesses. Population spiked, ranking Louisville among leading U.S. cities, and entertainment options grew proportionately. Big circuses were spectacles that stretched urban blocks, such as the G.R. Spaulding and Dan Rice shows, inspiring a holiday atmosphere. Louisville hosted ventriloquists, magicians and occultists, and “human oddities” like Tom Thumb, with his manager P.T. Barnum, of the traveling American Museum and menagerie.

Stars in drama, comedy and music, talents of America and Europe, played regularly in Louisville, typically at Drake’s theater or the Apollo Rooms of William C. Peters and partners.

Drake, as in his management practice since the legendary Green Street Theatre in Albany, employed stock actors at Louisville while allowing amateurs their stage turns. “The Drake family were a magnificent company in themselves,” said E.S. Conner, American actor who tutored under Drake. “Samuel and his sons Sam and Jim were artists, each in their line. His daughter Julia was a transcendent lovely and fine actress. She [became] mother of the renowned Julia Dean.”

W.C. Peters, like the elder Drake, was a charismatic English emigrant, a talented musician and capable entrepreneur. Classically trained, Peters performed, composed and arranged songs prodigiously. He came to Louisville from Pittsburgh, opening a music store and teaching piano and guitar; he founded a music library, circulating sheets of lyric and melody.

Peters branched into song publishing around 1835, right on time for serving America’s first native wave of popular artists. These maverick musicians, primarily whites from the North, needed independent publishers like Peters of the West and South, in the beginning. Their collaboration proved integral for the marketing of purely American music, ballads and spirituals of English and African origins.

This antebellum American music, foreshadowing genre offshoots to come, was forged of interracial sharing, of positive synergy between whites and blacks, yet roiled by racial insensitivity and malice. Interracial greatness entwined with racial conflict would endure for generations in America, and mark the evolving, epic music of the South.

“Ironically, much of the distinctiveness of southern music comes from the region’s long juxtaposition of the white and black races and from its widespread rural poverty and isolation,” wrote Charles P. Roland, historian and editor, in 1979.

“Aesthetically unsophisticated and, by the usual standards, deprived, poor southerners responded by preserving and developing a folk tradition of ballads and spirituals, of blues and jazz, and of hillbilly, country, and gospel music. Finally, strains from all of these types blended to help create rock, the nearest thing there is, perhaps, to an ecumenical art form.”

Select References

Afloat—Chapman’s Floating Theatre. (1837, June 6). New Orleans Times-Picayune, p. 2.

Amusements. (1889, June 2). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 13.

An Old Actor’s Memories. (1881, June 5). New York Times, p. 10.

Baynham, Edward Gladstone. (1944). The Early Development of Music in Pittsburgh [PhD thesis]. University of Pittsburgh Graduate School: Pittsburgh PA.

Booth, J.B. (1835, July 17). Theatrical Adventures on the Mississippi. Weekly Mississippian, Jackson MS, p. 1.

Brown, Maria Ward. (1901). The Life of Dan Rice. Author published: Long Branch NJ.

Chapman. (1839, Aug. 15). New Orleans Times-Picayune, p. 2.

Chillicothee’s 1897 Yesterdays. (1928, June 8). Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune MO, p. 2.

C.L. (1881, June 5). An Old Actor’s Memories. New York Times, p. 10.

Cockrell, D. (1997). Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, and New York NY.

Co-Partnership. (1839, May 4). [Advertisement.] Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 2.

Death of a Well-Known Citizen. (1866, April 23). Louisville Daily Journal KY, p. 1.

Dietz, M.M. (1921, May). A History of The Theatre In Louisville [MA thesis]. University of Louisville, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Louisville KY.

Drake, J.G., & Peters, W.C. (1835). Wound Not Thou the Heart that Loves Thee. George Willig: Philadelphia PA.

Dramatics on a Flatboat. (1884, Jan. 20). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 14.

Dumont, F. (1896, April 5). The Origin of Minstrelsy. Philadelphia Inquirer, p. 3.

Extract from a Letter Dated Cairo, Illinois. (1840, Feb. 1). Salt River Journal, Bowling Green MO, p. 3.

First Appearance of Mr. Felix. (1836, June 22). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 2.

Gen. Tom Thumb. (1850, Jan. 23). Louisville Daily Courier KY, p. 3.

Gerteis, L. (1995, Spring). St. Louis in the Age of the Original Jim Crow. Gateway Heritage, 15 (4), pp. 1-9. Missouri Historical Society: Columbia MO.

Graham, P. (1951). Showboats: The History of an American Institution. University of Texas Press: Austin TX.

Gudmestad, Robert H. (2011). Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge.

Handy, W.C. (1941). Father of the Blues. The Macmillan Company: New York NY.

He Is Truly American. (1889, Sept. 1). Why Pianist William M. Sherwood Is Fond of Chicago. Chicago Tribune, p. 7.

Hornblow, A. (1919). A History of the Theatre In America: From Its Beginnings to the Present Time. J.B. Lippincott Company: Philadelphia PA and London, England.

Inge, M.T., & Piacentino, E. [Eds.] (2010). Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology. University of Missouri Press: Columbia MO.

Kleber, John E. (2015, Jan. 13). The Encyclopedia of Louisville. The University Press of Kentucky: Lexington KY.

Latest Eastern Musical Publications. (1845, May 6). [Advertisement.] Louisville Daily Courier KY, p. 4.

Letter From New York. (1850, Dec. 21). New Orleans Times-Picayune, p. 2.

Lhamon, W.T., Jr. (1998). Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA and London, England.

Local and Provincial. (1848, Oct. 18). Free-Trade Hall—“Juba” and The Serenadors. London Guardian, England, p. 5.

Local and Provincial. (1849, Jan. 24). Juba and The Serenadors. London Guardian, England, p. 5.

Louisville Song Writers. (1900, Dec. 9). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 29.

Ludlow, N.M. (1880). Dramatic Life as I Found It. G.I. Jones and Company: St. Louis MO.

Malone, B.C. (1979). Southern Music/American Music. The University Press of Kentucky: Lexington KY.

Messrs. “Potters and Waters.” (1837, Feb. 22). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 2.

Music. (1848, Oct. 2). New Orleans Crescent LA, p. 1.

Music at Home and Abroad. (1866, April 21). Louisville Daily Courier KY, p. 3.

Music of the Future. (1891, May 19). Chillicothe Morning Constitution MO, p. 3.

Musical Notes. (1889, Aug. 25). Chicago Tribune, p. 28.

Narine, D. (1995, June 18). African Music’s Journey to Mainstream. Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel FL, p. 1F.

New and Popular Music. (1849, Jan. 24). Nashville Tennessean, p. 3.

O’Connell, JoAnne. (2016). The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham MD.

Owen, R. (2001, April 20). King of Pop: PBS Celebrates the Life and Songs of Stephen Foster. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p. 44.

School For Young Ladies. (1836, Aug. 27). [Advertisement.] Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 3.

Smith, S. (1868). Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years. Harper & Brothers: New York NY.

Tarbell, I.M. (1896, July 12). The Mississippi Valley Fleet. Salt Lake Herald UT, p. 10.

The Circus in Earlier Days. (1880, Dec. 9). [Advertisement.] Milan Exchange TN, p. 3.

Theatricals In Louisville. (1881, Dec. 11). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p.9.

Thompson, R. (1955, March 19). A Saturday Night Historical Notebook. Dixon Evening Telegraph IL, p.4

Two Nights more of the Great Magician. (1836, June 6). Louisville Courier-Journal KY, p. 2.

William C. Peters, 1805-1866. (Accessed 2017, Oct. 20). loc.gov [online]. United States Library of Congress: Washington DC.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

 

Twelfth in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Monday, October 16, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

Twenty-year-old Noah Ludlow figured he could sneak away from loved ones without informing them of his adventurous plan, or foolhardiness.

It was July of 1815 in Albany, N.Y., and Ludlow’s widowed mother fretted enough already. Her youngest son had left a business apprenticeship upon his father’s death, only to land at the local theater, of all places, where he pursued “a passion for histrionic fame,” as Ludlow later recalled in memoirs. “My mother was a very religious woman, of the strictest sect, and my father a man who found no particular pleasure in the so-called amusements of the day; therefore my very early youth had been kept free of such ‘delusions’ as theatres.”

Now Ludlow was leaving home to be an actor in the “far, far West,” having joined a theater troupe bound for Kentucky. Eastern actors with paying jobs had rejected the “wild scheme,” so troupe organizer Samuel Drake, Sr., solicited novices like Ludlow. “He told me very candidly that he was going on a voyage of adventure, which possibly might result disastrously,” Ludlow recounted. “I was too glad of an opportunity to embark in what had become now my entire ambition, to hesitate an hour in giving him an answer.”

Ludlow accepted enthusiastically but rued the thought of leaving his mother and young sister, and he told them nothing. Ludlow forwarded baggage to the Albany coach office then, at daybreak of his departure, crept through the family home. “I quietly walked from my bedroom, and as I passed that of my mother, the door standing ajar, I beheld her on her knees in prayer, and heard her utter these words: ‘Oh, Father! Be with him in his journey through life, and keep his soul from sin.’ My heart nearly failed me… I rushed out of the house and saw her no more for 10 years.”

“This was the first regretful act of my life,” Ludlow later confessed. “Reflection soon brought to my mind the anguish of that mother who almost doted on the son that had left her without a parting word, and the thought haunted me like a ghost.” An older brother disavowed Ludlow, calling him a “genteel vagabond” unworthy of family name.

Nonetheless, Ludlow and the rest of Drake’s humble troupers were following a destiny—“pioneer actors of the West,” by a later pronouncement—for a country yet unfolding. Modern historian Louis Gerteis, specializing in entertainment lineage of St. Louis, observed: “In  a  period  of  American  history  that  textbooks  traditionally  associate  with  the ‘politics of the common man,’ an outburst of theatrical entertainment brought an abrupt end  to  a  long-standing  American  bias  against  theatrical  entertainment. The period between 1820 and 1850 marked an unprecedented era of  theatricality.”

In summer 1815, the humble Drake company of 11 actors and actresses were harbingers of a movement, “a stream of theatrical migration westward,” observed Gerteis. The troupe traveled rural New York, working little theaters, presenting productions of tragedy and comedy interspersed with song. Ludlow took the stage at Cooperstown, overdoing his villainous character in “damned bad” fashion, Drake criticized, but novelist James Fenimore Cooper enjoyed the show and encouraged “our pioneer efforts in the cause of the drama,” Ludlow recalled.

At Canandaigua the group outfitted with a pack wagon, small carriage and three horses for the 150-mile trek southwest, to headwaters of the Allegheny River. Able troupers walked the distance, like Ludlow. The wagons and horses were sold at Olean, N.Y., a river access point of few cabins where Drake purchased a flatboat for transport south to Pittsburgh. The American frontier confronted young Ludlow, born and reared in New York City. “The men, especially the young ones, were expected to ‘rough it,’ and rough it we did,” he wrote.

Another traveler joined the Drake party at Olean to complete a dozen for boarding the boat, of adults and teenagers. They were Samuel Drake, Sr., troupe manager, age 46, and his children Samuel, Jr., Alexander, James, Martha, and the youngest, Julia, at 15; Noah M. Ludlow; Frances Ann Denny; Joe Tracy, a stage hand; Mr. and Mrs. J.O. Lewis, with he a carpenter; and the young newcomer, Hull, an army lieutenant during the recent war with England, returning home to the Mississippi Valley.

Drake’s flatboat was a small barge of Kentucky “broadhorn” style, about 25-feet long by 15-feet wide, with sideboards and two compartments for sleeping. A long-stem paddle served as guidance system, mounted at rear, with hardwood poles for emergency maneuvering. The boatload besides people included food provisions, cookware, personal baggage, tools, and stage accessories: a drop curtain, green carpeting, and scenery backdrops, six painted on drapery such as a kitchen setting and a garden.

The party launched for Pittsburgh, 260 miles down the Allegheny, about 10 days by flatboat, and stopped the first night on an island—“for fear of wild beasts, less likely to visit us there than on the mainland,” Ludlow wrote. Coffee and food were prepared over campfire. “I must say, I never enjoyed a meal more in my entire life than that rural supper. After our evening meal, the men smoked, and the ladies sang, and the time passed delightfully.”

But daytime in July on the boat deck proved unbearable. The sun was searing amid drought for mountainous western Pennsylvania; the Allegheny stood at low stage with current at a crawl. Heat was miserable on the flatboat, and females suffered for their dense garments. A small canopy and umbrellas didn’t shield well enough so a scenery panel was unfurled for cover. Rest was finally possible but the rudderless barge drifted into a mill channel, dammed ahead. Men leapt overboard to halt the heavy flatboat, and they towed it back to the river by rope,  walking the bank and tugging against current.

At nightfall wolves yipped and howled along the Allegheny, having frightened the theater group since the overland trails of New York. Wolf packs prowled the river valley, seemingly the only beings after dark for boat travelers of remote Pennsylvania. “The country then was very wild, the buildings small log cabins, and the accommodations very limited,” Ludlow wrote later in memoirs, utilizing a personal diary of the 1815 trip.

On most nights the Drake party landed, mooring at a settlement if possible, where beds and food might be procured. The boat compartments slept the married couple in one, teen girls in the other, while everyone else sought a comfortable way to lie down. A barn with hay or straw suited the men, if available. One night the river-weary troupe landed late at a darkened homestead “indicating cleanliness and plenty,” Ludlow wrote. “It was a substantial Pennsylvania farmhouse, large and well built.”

The owner came out in greeting, an affluent doctor and farmer who rousted his family to meet the “comedians.” A 10 o’clock supper went on in the kitchen while peach brandy was served in the music parlor. Sam Drake, Jr., classically trained in violin, was impressive in “scraping off” a Scottish ballad and English opera melody, accompanied on piano by the doctor’s wife. The army veteran Hull “astonished us all…,” Ludlow attested, “by sitting down to the piano and playing one or two marches and some other pieces in a very creditable manner.” Merriment continued past midnight, and everyone who needed a bed was accommodated on the estate. The gracious hosts also sent a ham, live chickens and vegetables downriver with the travelers.

A few nights later the Drake troupe reached headwaters of the Alleghany River, “Three Rivers,” where the former met the Monongahela to form the Ohio. “About nine o’clock… to our great delight, the glimmerings of a city broke into our view,” Ludlow recalled of arriving at Pittsburgh. The flatboat docked and the young males went downtown in search of lodging and excitement. Even in darkness, the city’s trademark of coal industry was apparent in soot-covered buildings and streets.

The local theater was sooty too, as the thespians discovered. “It was situated on the eastern outskirts of the city [and] had been built, I think, by some amateur in theatricals,” Ludlow wrote. “It contained a pit and one tier of boxes, as they were called… The decorations, if such they might be termed, were of the plainest kind, and every portion bore the Pittsburgh stamp upon it—coal smut.”

Drake’s troupe cleaned the theater to open a Pittsburgh season of productions, which quickly drew 400 spectators nightly, including miners, boatmen, foundry workers, mechanics and livery drivers. Ludlow would remember “beautiful ladies” and a formative period of his career. “The success I met with in my first two weeks in a regular theatre, and in a city of no small consequence even at that early day, gave me great hopes that I might ultimately become an actor of some notoriety. In thought, I saw a realization of my youthful daydreams. [Drake] was obliged, owing to the limited number of his company, to give me characters of importance to play, quite beyond my inexperience to do justice… But my ambition was great, and I labored hard to gratify its cravings.”

The triumphant actors launched from Pittsburgh in a bigger, better flatboat, to float the Ohio southwesterly for 400 miles. Several of the northerners experienced the South for first time, touching down in Virginia then Kentucky, slave-holding states along the great river. At Limestone, Ky., the group unloaded and Drake sold the barge, obtaining more wagons and horses for an overland tour to Lexington, Frankfort and Louisville.

The Limestone port led into Kentucky where Daniel Boone and frontiersmen had battled Shawnee Indians until the 1790s. Now U.S. territory stretched to the Rocky Mountains, Boone and followers were resettled outside St. Louis, and native tribes were removed or contained. The new West and South were open for entertainment of actors and musicians.

The Drakes went on to establish the Louisville City Theatre, an American showcase for drama and music in the Ohio Valley. Historians anointed the Drakes as a first family of popular entertainment in America.

Noah M. Ludlow opened the first showboat in 1817, a hundred-foot barge without steam power at Natchez on the Mississippi River. Later he co-founded theaters in New Orleans, Mobile and St. Louis. Ludlow partnered with Sol Smith, another New York native thespian, as they “dominated the theatrical world in the South and West for nearly two decades and became noted for their fair dealings with performers,” according to a modern analysis.

Arthur Hornblow, author of a 1919 history on American theater, saluted Ludlow and the humble Drake troupe of lore: “The pampered stage favorite of today who gazes idly out of the [train] window, as his private car speeds smoothly across the continent… can have little idea of the hardships and perils the pioneer actors of the West had to face when they set out a hundred years ago to carry the message of Thespis through the American backwoods.”

Select References

Bakeless, J. (1939). Daniel Boone: Master of The Wilderness. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln NE.

C.L. (1881, June 5). An Old Actor’s Memories. New York Times, p. 10.

Dietz, M.M. (1921, May). A History of The Theatre In Louisville [MA thesis]. University of Louisville, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Louisville KY.

Gerteis, L. (1995, Spring). St. Louis in the Age of the Original Jim Crow. Gateway Heritage, 15 (4), pp. 1-9. Missouri Historical Society: Columbia MO.

Graham, P. (1951). Showboats: The History of an American Institution. University of Texas Press: Austin TX.

Hornblow, A. (1919). A History of the Theatre In America: From Its Beginnings to the Present Time. J.B. Lippincott Company: Philadelphia PA and London, England.

Inge, M.T., & Piacentino, E. [Eds.] (2010). Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology. University of Missouri Press: Columbia MO.

Ludlow, N.M. (1880). Dramatic Life as I Found It. G.I. Jones and Company: St. Louis MO.

Smith, S. (1868). Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years. Harper & Brothers: New York NY.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Eleventh in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Saturday, September 30, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

America’s early steamboats shocked witnesses along the major rivers, conjuring fear in many, doom in the very naive.

Thurlow Weed was a boy at Catskill, N.Y., in 1807, when he joined chums on an island to watch Robert Fulton’s maiden steam voyage up the Hudson. “We had heard for several days that some sort of vessel was coming up the river against wind and without sails. Such a thing was regarded as utterly impossible,” Weed later recalled, as a prominent newspaperman.

“Finally we saw the monster coming, vomiting fire and smoke and throwing up sparks. The paddlewheels were not covered. We were frightened almost out of our senses, and at first ran out of sight, but presently took courage and cheered the pioneer steamboat with the people that lined the bank of the river.”

A Fulton-backed steamboat launched on the Ohio River from Pittsburgh in late 1811, christened the “New Orleans.” The $38,000 steamer was built “for the navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, to carry goods and passengers between New Orleans and the different towns of those rivers,” eastern newspapers reported.

“We are told she is an excellent well-constructed vessel;  about 140 feet long, will carry 400 tons of goods, has elegant accommodations for passengers, and is every way fitted in great style. It is supposed that she will go 35 miles  a day against the stream… considerably faster with the current.”

The news moved slower downriver from Pittsburgh than the boat, however. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys—encompassing most western states and incorporated U.S. territories—stood hardly informed that a “steam boat” was en route. And epic earthquakes would raise tension as the foreign machine appeared on western waters.

The New Orleans steamed into Louisville, Ky., by moonlight, alarming inhabitants of both shores, Indiana Territory as well. “The novel appearance of the vessel, and the fearful rapidity with which it made its passage over the broad reaches of the river, excited a mixture of terror and surprise among many of the settlers on the banks, whom the rumor of such an invention had never reached,” The Louisville Courier later recounted.

Farther downstream on the Indiana shore, the steamer attracted settlers who expressed “great alarm,” but not because of the boat. Locals attested of hearing “strange noises on the river and in the woods.” They claimed the shoreline shook earlier that day, “insisting that they had repeatedly felt the earth tremble.” Indeed, the earthquakes of 1811-12 had begun from an epicenter in Missouri Territory at New Madrid, along the Mississippi River, some 170 miles southwest of the steamboat’s location.

Small tremors had been undetectable aboard the steamboat on the Ohio, with the loud engine’s rattling everything, but deck occupants felt jarring that night at anchor. The next day, as a crewman would recall, “we heard a rushing sound, violent splash, and finally saw large portions of the shore tearing away from the land and lapsing into the watery abyss. It was a startling scene… the crew spoke but little.”

The steamboat reached the mouth of the Ohio a week before Christmas, at confluence with the Mississippi River, and crewmen moored on the southern tip of Illinois Territory, future site of Cairo settlement. Directly across the Mississippi sprawled a vast alluvial plain—Missouri Territory of swamp and virgin timber, sparsely populated. A few folks met the steamer on the Illinois side, woodcutters drawn to the landing by talk of “a great monster walking upon the water.”

But earthquakes had become everyone’s concern. Massive shocks erupted as the steamboat headed southward on the Mississippi around Dec. 19, 1811. “Trees along the shores of the river were seen waving and nodding… and all this violence seemed only to increase,” the Louisville paper recounted. “The steamer New Orleans had no choice but to pursue its course down the river… a fearful stream, now unusually swollen, turbid and full of trees.”

The boat docked for a time at New Madrid village, seismic ground zero where the “greatest distress and consternation” gripped residents. “Part of the population had fled in terror to the higher grounds; others prayed… as the earth was opening in fissures on every side, and their houses hourly falling around them.” Superstitious types blamed the steamboat, declaring its manifestation in concert with a current comet at night triggered catastrophic earthquakes and likely end of time.

Thirty miles downstream, at Little Prairie village in future Pemiscot County, Missouri, the steamer was “brought to by the cries of some of the people who thought the earth was gradually sinking,” stated a Natchez dispatch. “Some distance below the Little Prairie the bank of the river had caved in to a considerable extent, and two islands had almost disappeared.”

The steamboat chugged on, passing the Chickasaw Bluffs where Memphis would soon rise, to reach Natchez on Dec. 30 and load cotton bales, the ship’s first cargo. The steamer finally docked at namesake city New Orleans on Jan. 10, 1812; Louisiana statehood was pending, three months away.

“The New Orleans entered the American bloodstream at a propitious moment,” observed modern author Robert H. Gudmestad in his Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. “The Louisiana Purchase had recently doubled the country’s size and Americans were eagerly moving over the Appalachian Mountains.”

By 1860, states of the great Mississippi drainage basin boasted almost half the American population. “The interior South—those slave states west of the Appalachian Mountains—figured prominently in these changes,” Gudmestad noted. “Its population shot from 806,000 to nearly 7 million people… When the New Orleans completed its first voyage, over 17,000 people lived in New Orleans. Fifty years later, 168,675 people dwelled there. Memphis, a city that did not exist in 1812 and owed its existence to riverboats, was the country’s thirty-eighth largest city in 1860.”

“A decade after the first riverboat touched the New Orleans levee, over seventy steamers prowled the western waters. By the time Abraham Lincoln took up residence in the White House, the number surpassed eight hundred.”

Select References

A Talk With Thurlow Weed. (1878, July 1). New York Tribune, p. 2.

Bagnall, N.H. (1996). On Shaky Ground: The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812.  University of Missouri Press: Columbia.

Gudmestad, Robert H. (2011). Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge.

La Pariere. (1884, Jan. 6). Opening The Ohio: Initial Trip of the New Orleans, Made During the Convulsive Earthquake of 1811. Louisville Courier Journal KY, p. 9.

Latrobe, C. (1856, Feb. 15). First Steamboat in the West. Louisville Courier Journal KY, p. 1.

Natchez, Jan. 2. (1812, Feb. 22). Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, St. Louis, p. 2.

Steam Boat. (1811, Oct. 18). Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, p.2.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Tenth in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

With the 19^th century concluding in America, as the first musical notes of jazz and “ragtime” rose along the Mississippi River, a pioneer pop artist was remembered again for his great old song.

Nelson Kneass was famous before the Civil War, playing his hit Ben Bolt on piano and banjo, when the sheet music sold thousands in America and abroad. The legend revived during the 1890s, long after Kneass died in rural Missouri. A popular novel and stage drama featured Ben Bolt, the “plaintive melody” sung by comely heroine Trilby O’Ferrall—under hypnosis of the evil Svengali, no less—and suddenly fans worshipped a dead pop star in Kneass.

Kneass was a Pennsylvania native who sang Ben Bolt as early as May 1847, according to advertisements of the Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, although initially he might’ve used music of other composers. Various musicians were adapting the song from a poem, in forgettable versions, until Kneass arranged his smash hit. “Kneass was not only an excellent singer but also a very capable pianist, a versatile banjoist, and a talented composer [presenting] first-class entertainment,” observed historian Ernest C. Krohn.

Vocalist Joseph H. McCann said Kneass produced his golden take of Ben Bolt during a riverboat trip they shared from Memphis around 1847, steaming up the Mississippi then eastward on the Ohio. Kneass finished his composition on a landing at Grahamton, Ky., and summoned McCann, according to Will S. Hays of The Louisville Courier-Journal. “If we are not mistaken, Mr. McCann was the first person who ever sang [Ben Bolt by Kneass]… He did so from the manuscript,” reported Hays, a noted lyricist and columnist. McCann toured with the famed Kneass Operatic Troupe and other companies, but ceased in the early 1850s to open a music store in Louisville, among his successful business ventures.

Kneass continued in entertainment but his name faded in the war period. Struggling financially, Kneass complained of receiving paltry royalties for Ben Bolt, a tune beloved in America like Home Sweet Home and the classic Oh Susanna—which Kneass had introduced, incidentally, on stage. A wife died in a riverboat accident while his drinking and declining health caused problems. One story had Kneass arriving at his own funeral, after missing for days, to stun family members and friends gathered round a corpse they’d mistaken for him, fished from a river.

The performer felt illness creeping by September 1869, stomach malaise, while a Kneass troupe toured northern Missouri. His condition worsened on a train ride and he succumbed that night, Sept. 8, at a boarding house in a railroad town named Chillicothe. Nelson Kneass died virtually penniless at about age 46, leaving a young wife and children. His widow could afford $6 for the burial but no gravestone, and the family relied on charity for money to travel home in the East. Surviving troupe players made do from Missouri, largely on their own.

Publicity, praise revived for the showman in his wake. “Nelson Kneass… is dead,” announced a theater critic, unidentified, in The Memphis Appeal. “He was one of those men that worked hard, lived poor and died miserably. He was a genius.”

“He was a fine musician and composed much…,” saluted a newspaper commentary, widely printed. “Ben Bolt was sung in the lordly mansions and in the lowly cottages all over the land. There was a sadness and sweetness that touched all hearts alike.”

“He was the author and originator of very many popular songs,” said Sam S. Sanford, American stage legend, in remembering Kneass. “He and Stephen Foster are the two bards of the minstrels… Kneass belonged to Philadelphia, and as a boy was dressed in petticoats [impersonating girls] on the stage. He was with the Wood’s [minstrels] at Park Theatre in New York, when English opera was first produced. He died poor and unattended by friends… The publishers of Ben Bolt made $50,000 from that one song alone, and its author often needed bread.”

Eventually a modest granite marker was placed on the Kneass grave in Missouri, and the site stood undisturbed a few decades. Then came the “Trilby” sensation, 1890s, the sexy storyline made fashionable through a magazine serial, a best-selling book, and a stage production.

Neo-fandom for Kneass was vogue and visitors to the Chillicothe cemetery cracked into his tombstone, carrying away pieces. “Kneass’s grave was marked until within the last year or so, when curiosity and relic hunters have chipped souvenirs from the slab,” reported The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1899, adding that “scarcely enough of it remains to show that a headstone had ever been there.”

Select References

A Monument To Be Built at Chillicothe, Mo., in Honor of Nelson Kneass, Composer of “Ben Bolt.” (1899, May 21). St. Louis Post-Dispatch MO, p. 34.

Amusements. (1869, Sept. 19). Memphis Daily Appeal TN, p. 4.

Andrews’ Eagle Ice Cream Saloon [advertisement]. (1847, Aug. 12). Pittsburgh Daily Post PA, p. 2.

Ben Bolt. (1869, Oct. 1). Fort Wayne Daily Gazette IN, p. 1.

Ben Bolt. (1894, Oct. 21). Washington Post DC, p. 4.

“Ben Bolt” Author in Missouri Grave. (1913, March 9). St. Louis Star and Times MO, p. 24.

Chillicothe Cullings. (1883, Dec. 11). St. Joseph Gazette-Herald MO, p. 3.

Chillicothe’s 1897 Yesterdays. (1928, June 8). Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune MO, p. 2.

Death of The Author of “Ben Bolt.” (1869, Sept. 25). Clarksville Chronicle TN, p. 1.

Free Concerts Every Evening This Week At The Eagle Saloon [advertisement]. (1847, May 27). Pittsburgh Daily Post PA, p. 2.

From Thursday’s Daily, Sept. 16. (1869, Sept. 18). Weekly Atchison Champion KS, p. 3.

Grise, G.C. (1947, August). Will S. Hays: His Life and Works [master’s thesis]. Department of English, Western Kentucky State Teachers College: Bowling Green KY.

Hays, W.S. (1883, May 26). The Late Joseph McCann. Memphis Public Ledger TN, p. 1.

Krohn, E.C. (1971). Nelson Kneass: Minstrel Singer and Composer. Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical, 7, pp. 17-41. University of Texas Press: Austin.

Missouri Points. (1897, Feb. 18). Kansas City Journal MO, p. 4.

Most Melancholy Accident—Death of Mrs. Kneass, Late Mrs. Sharpe. (1848, Feb. 26). Poughkeepsie Journal NY, p. 2.

Naming Theatre “Ben Bolt” Revives Famous Old Song. (1949, Aug. 16). Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune MO, p. 11.

Nelson Kneass’ Double. (1896, April 12). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 34.

Personal. (1868, July 4). Nashville Tennessean, p. 2.

Songs We Used To Sing. (1890, Sept. 20). Sterling Daily Gazette IL, p. 3.

The Kneass Opera Troupe [advertisement]. (1847, Oct. 16). Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 3.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Ninth in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Thursday, Sept. 14, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

During the 1960s, U.S. Highway 61 was reduced to a byway in southeast Missouri—and throughout the lower Mississippi River Valley—supplanted by Interstate 55 of the new federal road system. And traveling southbound from Cape Girardeau and Scott City, where I-55 blazed over knobby foothills, motorists met a stunning vista: the great delta flatland, stretching out of sight. The interstate’s twin tracks bore straight south, seemingly melding together in the distance, with the horizon a flat line.

Southeast Missouri had been ocean coastline in eons past, an ancient embayment subsequently altered through ice ages and meltdowns, according to geologists. The modern Mississippi River stood relatively young at around 10,000 years of age, scientists calculated in the 20^th century, with the delta basin composed of sediments washed from across the continental interior. Core drilling indicated more than one thousand cubic miles of sediment filled an entrenched rock valley from Cape Girardeau to New Orleans. Geologists concluded that the New Madrid Fault, notorious seismic rift of the valley, would never resolve for the encroachment of boulders far underground.

Pristine delta swamps and spillways were drained in the early 1900s, giving way to farms and communities from Missouri to Louisiana. Population influx was led by planters and sharecroppers from the Old South, escaping regions beset by soil depletion and the boll weevil. In the “reclaimed” delta, basic scenery amounted to level crop rows, on and on—gigantic expanses of cotton, corn, beans and alfalfa, framed only by fence and tree lines.

On appearances the delta seemed no place for artistic greatness to influence a civilization, yet it became the talent wellspring of American music. Multiple musical genres were impacted: gospel, jazz, blues, country, folk, and, ultimately, rock ‘n’ roll. And the primary delta factor, said music authorities and others, was the struggle of class and race for people who tried to forge a living from a harsh frontier.

“All the music culture that’s come into Memphis has come in here from poor whites and poor blacks,” said Judd Phillips, record producer, in 1979. “I think we need to take into consideration that poor whites and poor blacks came in here looking for jobs… and they were singing their hearts out. It’s not there in Chicago, or New York, or on the West Coast. It came from right here in the melting pot of human suffering.”

The delta musicians “created a sound out of the way they lived and their backgrounds and their roots,” said Al Bennett, a records magnate reared on a farm in northeast Arkansas. “I don’t think it was designed.”

“There are two choices in Arkansas…,” said singer Ronnie Hawkins, founding member of The Hawks, in 1970. “You either pick cotton for three or four dollars a day, or you can play music and get out. So there’s an awful lot of people trying to pick guitars in that area.”

As a boy Johnny Cash helped family clear tangled swampland for their meager farm at Dyess, Ark., where floodwater was a constant threat. Cash believed the experience translated later for his music, attracting wide audience. “When you work close to the earth on some poor dirt farm… you learn to understand the basic things about love and hate and what people want from life,” Cash observed.

“I think the Mississippi delta was just as fertile to American culture as the delta was in ancient Egypt,” said author Nick Tousches, biographer of Jerry Lee Lewis, in 1994. “It was where black people heard the white man’s music and made something new out of it. It was where the white man heard the black man’s music. And people say the blues came from Africa; well, I think they really came from the Deep South.”

Author Rose Marie Kinder heard lyricism in everyday delta expressions. The language of her native southeast Missouri “differs from anywhere else in the state or country,” Kinder said in 2006. “It’s subtle, perhaps, but you’ll know the true southeast Missouri vernacular when you hear it. It’s not Southern inflection, not just metaphor and certainly not just colloquialisms. It’s wit and pacing and sharp, apt observation.”

“An added pronoun or two can make music if they’re in the right place.”

Select References

Brown, T. [Prod.], & Perry, H. [Dir.] (1994). Rhythm, Country and Blues [VHS]. MCA Records: Universal City CA.

Chipmunks to Millions. (1977, Aug. 24). Manhattan Mercury KS, p. 15.

Drew, R. (1967, Aug. 19). Listen Hear. Pasadena Independent Star-News CA, p.7.

Eberhart, J.M. (2006, May 14). ‘The Land Is Rich’: Missouri Author Brings a Sense of Place to Her Writing. Kansas City Star, p. H6.

Elvis ‘Got Black Music Into White Homes.’ (1979, Aug. 17). Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman, p. 15.

Fisk, H.N. (1944, Dec. 1). Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. U.S. Mississippi River Commission, War Department Corps of Engineers: Vicksburg MS.

Gormley, M. (1970, Feb. 13). Canadian Music Legend: The Story of an Arkansas Rock Singer and His Band. Ottawa Journal, Ontario, Canada.

Hilburn, R. (1969, July 14). Clearwater Revives Its Delta Heritage. Los Angeles Times, p. B18.

Holbrook, J.M. (1994, June 6). Interview with author at Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau.

Holbrook, J.M. (2017, Sept. 14). Email correspondence with author.

Holbrook, J.M., Snowden, J.O., & Aide, M.T. (1996, Feb. 5). Interviews with author at Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau.

Interstate 55 Portion South Opened Today. (1965, Sept. 1). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, p. 1.

Landforms of Southeast Missouri [map]. (1987). USDA-SCS-National Cartographic Center: Ft. Worth TX.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Eighth in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Thursday, August 24, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

Screaming girls confronted Elvis Presley in the South by early 1955, signaling his popularity. In southwest Texas his name wasn’t yet electric, “but his star was already destined to rise heavenward,” reporter Sam Kindrick later recalled. “He had that indefinable charisma which turns female innards to mush, female knees to rubber, and sends them into a hysterical state of screeching woozels. When he finished his performance in the Alpine High School auditorium, girls were hoisting their dresses so that Presley could autograph their petticoats.”

The “first Presley riot” concluded a show in Jacksonville, Fla., on May 13.  Elvis kidded about meeting every girl backstage so a mob chased him there, scaring his mother in the audience. That summer females tore away his shirts, including at the B&B Club in Bootheel Missouri. Soon Presley signed a recording contract with RCA Victor and sold a million copies of his Heartbreak Hotel.

Elvis starred on national television, easily passed a Hollywood screen test, and fan madness escalated. “Wherever he appears, screaming crowds of teen-age girls make his entrances and exits a test of strength…,” The United Press reported from New York City in spring 1956, “and the young rock-n-roll hillbilly, or ‘rockabilly,’ invariably ends up minus a jacket, shirt and tie.”

Presley said, “It’s all happening so fast that some nights I just can’t fall asleep. It scares me, you know. It just scares me.”

Weeks later, he showed up shirtless for a press conference in Kansas City, Mo. “Elvis wore a thin sport jacket, gray with black flecks in it,” reported The Kansas City Star Times, “and otherwise was entirely buff bare above the waist.”

Rabid fans necessitated the style, claimed Presley. “These people, teenagers mostly, kept tearing my shirt off—just had to quit wearing ’em,” said the 21-year-old heartthrob. “Never wear a necktie, of course. It can be dangerous—some girl grabbing at my neck could choke me. Never wear a belt. Seems like that’s what they go for next to neckties.” Presley said fans removed watches and rings from him. “They strip anything off me if they get a chance.”

The paper described Presley as “rather handsome. He has big, solemn eyes [of] gray-green, long brown hair cut ducktail and long sideburns.” Presley declined to smile for a photographer, “brooding” instead for the shot.

A newsman posed: “Now you’re in the big time and in the big money. How does it feel to be mobbed by teen-agers everywhere you go?”

“First of all, I wouldn’t say I get mobbed,” Presley continued at the airport presser. “I wouldn’t call a bunch of teenagers a mob. I’d just say they get very excited. They’re excitable… like down in Tulsa a few weeks ago they threw rocks to break out the windows so they could get at me. But when they get inside they only want to shake hands with me, get an autograph or maybe tear off some of my clothes for souvenirs.”

“Now, about being in the big time. It’s really great but I’m more nervous than I used to be… After a show I go up the alley to my hotel and in through a back door… so people can’t contact me. I got to get a little rest.”

A reporter noted that girls chased Presley far more than pop icons Frank Sinatra and Johnny Ray, previously.

“I don’t just know how big they went for Sinatra or Johnny Ray,” Elvis responded. “I hate to say how big they go for me. It would sound like bragging. I guess it’s because I sing rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll is so hot right now.”

Shrieking females greeted Elvis at Kansas City Municipal Auditorium on May 24, 1956, when he took the stage with guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana. The music started and Presley went into action. “Between gyrations, Elvis jigs across the stage dragging the microphone after him and leaning at almost horizontal angles,” Bill Moore reported for The Star Times. “He whangs the daylights out of a guitar. He shouts and moans.”

The few policemen on hand sensed a bad situation. “Police gathered on the stage,” Moore recounted. “Others strode at a sort of a dog trot around the sides, attempting to herd the girls back—gently but just sort of firmly… Elvis got through four or five songs before the roof finally fell in. A girl got past the police, bounced up on the stage, and hugged and kissed her panting [idol]. A policeman got her off again, but the signal for the avalanche was on… [kids] poured over the front and over the sides of the stage.”

The United Press reported: “Rock and roll singer Elvis Presley and his band just gave up and quit in the middle of their show… hundreds of teenagers rushed up onto the stage, threw his drummer into the orchestra pit, tore a bright red coat off Presley, and damaged band equipment. Lights were quickly turned out and Presley and his crew escaped further danger from the crowd of mostly girls who reduced [Black’s] upper clothing to a collar of shred-like tassels.”

Moore watched Presley flee, with or without his side men. “Elvis fought his way clear of the hysterical swarm of teen-age girls that broke through the police lines, then he jumped into a motor car parked in the corridor backstage, and was off like a frightened gazelle.”

The Elvis escapade, only the latest to make headlines, amused entertainment columnist Dorothy Kilgallen in New York. “Elvis Presley’s brain trust is having a harder time keeping his name out of the papers than getting it in these days—the crown prince of rock ’n’ roll leads such a colorful life and has such impetuous admirers,” Kilgallen declared.

Presley had rare places to hide by Thanksgiving 1956. Not even in delta southeast Missouri, around relatives, could the pop superstar enjoy privacy. Holiday dinner for the Presley family was foiled, at least for Elvis to attend. Relatives were notified he couldn’t leave Memphis for the get-together at Sikeston, where the negative development dampened “considerable excitement,” according to a local newspaper.

“Sorry, girls, maybe another time,” the reporter cracked.

Not likely. Now Presley starred in movies, banking his first million dollars. People pursued him everywhere, media and all sorts, including sanctimonious preachers who condemned rock music. Fan mail brought 10,000 letters a week. Girls at Springfield, Mo., were irate to learn Presley had stopped in town on a train without public notice; a reporter who’d kept the secret in exchange for an interview received 300 nasty letters.

Elvis stalkers reached family members, who learned silence regarding the reclusive celebrity. Personal information about Elvis, like his coming and going, was becoming family confidential from Mississippi to Missouri.

If the public Elvis were gone along Highway 61, his effect carried on in southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Presley’s former local presence and his exploding publicity—national spotlight, global fame in ’56—left lasting impact in the upper delta. More young males passed over activities like ball sports to concentrate on music.

A New York marketer joked he might move to Memphis and “open a used guitar lot.”

Series continues soon at ChaneysBlog.com

Select References

706 Union Avenue Sessions. (Accessed 2017, Aug. 24). www.706UnionAvenue.com.

Bass, M.R. (1956, Sept. 18). The Lively Arts. Berkshire Eagle MA, p. 16.

Belser, E. (1956, March 30). Elvis Presley and His Guitar Locate Success. Corsicana Daily Sun TX, p. 3.

Eisenberg, D.D. (1974, July 4). Elvis Presley: Star and Country Boy Still. Burlington Daily Times-News NC, p. 41.

Elvis Will Not Be Here. (1956, Nov. 21). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, p. 4.

Fans Mourn Elvis. (1977, Aug. 17). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, pp. 1, 16.

Gardner, H. (1956, Nov. 6). Coast To Coast. New York Herald Tribune, p. 13.

Jennings, C.R. (1968, Feb. 18). Elvis Lives! Los Angeles Times, p. M28.

Johns, P. (2016, May 26). Elvis Comes to The Ozarks. Bolivar Herald-Free Press MO [online].

Kilgallen, D. (1956, June 4). Elvis Keeps Brain Trust Rocking. Washington Post, p. 32.

Kindrick, S. (1972, March 16). Offbeat: It’ll Be a Madhouse When Presley Appears. San Antonio Express TX, p. 22.

Lloyd, J. (1977, June 5). Elvis Presley: The Once and Past King. Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram CA, p. 40.

May 13, 1955—Jax Fans Chase Elvis After Show, Tear Off His Clothes. (Access 2017, Aug. 24). www.FloridaHistoryNetwork.com.

Million Sellers Launch Legend of a Heartbreaker. (1977, Aug. 20). San Antonio Express TX, p. 4.

Moore, B. (1956, May 22). Cool, Man, Especially Minus Shirt: To Keep Teen-Agers From Ripping Them Off, Singer Elvis Presley Just goes Without. Kansas City Times MO, pp. 1, 2.

Moore, B. (1956, May 25). Rolls When They Rock: Elvis Presley Flees to Car After 20 Minutes On Stage. Kansas City Times MO, pp. 1A, 2A.

Presley Says He’s Scared. (1956, May 14). Monroe County News IA, p. 8.

Robertson, H. (1957, Oct. 23). Presley Families Shudder When Telephone Rings. Harrisburg Daily Register IL, p. 7.

Ross, D. (1956, Nov. 11). Long-Haired Idol of Bobby-Soxers. New York Herald Tribune, p. D1.

Teenagers Mob, Break Up Show of Elvis Presley. (1956, May 25). Monroe News-Star LA, p. 10.

Wilson, E. (1958, Jan. 14). It Happened Last Night. Newsday, p. 4C.

Wood, D. (1956, April 19). Presley Leaves’Em Limp—8,000 Squeal at 1^st Show. Tulsa World, pp. B1, B7.

Matt Chaney is a writer and consultant in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Seventh in A Series

By Matt Chaney, for ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Saturday, August 12, 2017

Copyright ©2017 for historical arrangement by Matthew L. Chaney

A version of this passage posted previously in Chaney’s article ‘The Local Elvis: From Good Kid to Garbo in Rock Legend’

Memphis, Tenn., wasn’t so big a city in the mid-1950s; many locals knew or encountered Elvis Presley on everyday terms. The kid was a regular downtown and on the riverfront since relocating to Memphis with his parents, Vernon and Gladys, in 1948. The family had left behind a hardscrabble existence at Tupelo, Miss., when Elvis was 13. He was the surviving child, after a twin brother was stillborn, and the little family stayed tight-knit while hovering above poverty. As Elvis completed high school the Presleys dwelled in North Memphis, “The Courts,” an urban complex of subsidized, segregated housing.

Music stardom beckoned Presley at outset of 1955, when he turned 20, already a singing sensation on the Louisiana Hayride circuit. Around Memphis he remained known as a mannered youth enamored with song. As a schoolboy he’d been shy and often solitary, but a good kid, a church-goer, always working a part-time job. Many people called Elvis a Mama’s Boy, too attached to Gladys, but he was no pushover at physical maturity, standing six-feet tall and solidly built.

Presley hadn’t yet blown apart American pop culture, refitted the model, and for a final period he would live and work in relatively common fashion. The local Elvis character remained personable on the street, liked by others, even if flashy and a bit nervous, according to his profile drawn from numerous accounts.

Presley was fond of extended family like cousins, aunts and uncles, and he surely felt at ease in driving across the bridge from Memphis and keeping north on Highway 61. The river road carried Presley through Arkansas and Missouri, delta countryside and communities familiar to him since a boy on visits to relatives.

During 1955 Presley would travel Federal 61 north for gaining work and building audience, popularity, for his song hits with Sun Records and live performances. At least nine Elvis shows were scheduled in the delta corridor from West Memphis to Cape Girardeau, a 170-mile belt of flatland through Arkansas and Missouri. His trio, now promoted as the “Blue Moon Boys”—Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black—would appear at roadhouses, dance halls, schools, armories and fairgrounds.

Small venues largely booked the Blue Moon Boys, among some 280 shows across 14 states in ’55. The act opened January on a tour of Texas, finding enthusiastic audiences in a string of towns. An excited deejay, mispronouncing, declared “a kid named Parsley played to 800 folks at Boston, Texas, and they went plumb crazy.”

In mid-January, northeast Arkansas, school kids from Leachville burst into a newspaper office. The giddy teens promoted their fundraiser with Elvis Presley at the high school, fabulous rockabilly heard afternoons and nights on radio from Blytheville and Memphis. “He’s great! He’s going to be a star!” the students gushed to editors. The paper published a notice complete with publicity photo of Presley’s trio: Elvis smiled radiantly at center, darkly handsome in sporty tie and jacket, draping his arms around Moore and Black, who beamed in cowboy shirts. The three had become good friends, together since summer, however long they’d last under mounting showbiz pressure.

Soon America’s hottest new band reached Sikeston, Mo., a bustling agri-center of 17,000 at intersection of U.S. Highways 61 and 60. For the history of Presley appearances in small-town Missouri, the Sikeston event on Friday, Jan. 21, 1955, left a cache of documented fact and recollection. The evidence portrayed a friendly Elvis in Sikeston, mixing freely, endearing himself to locals. Presley charmed and impressed people, winning fans on a night he apparently enjoyed.

The Sikeston area felt homey to the young entertainer, for ancestral ties and a cluster of his relatives. Calhoun Presley, a great uncle and family patriarch, was a local fixture in farming, and cousins of Elvis were becoming established in business. Jesse Presley, Elvis’s grandfather and a brother of Calhoun, had share-cropped in southeast Missouri. Additionally in Sikeston, Elvis appreciated meeting recording artist Onie Wheeler, area resident and a Nashville performer with the Grand Ole Opry. Presley admired the classy Wheeler, a soft-spoken music talent and war veteran who offered encouragement and advice. Elvis returned his best compliment, remarking that Wheeler reminded him of mother Gladys.

Newspaper and radio coverage preceded the band in Sikeston yet most folks were clueless about the act, publicized as cowboy guitarists and yodelers. Then the Blue Moon Boys came out on the armory stage and broke into song. Presley was billed as a “country music star,” but he strutted a pink suit bought on Beale Street. He’d bust loose in a circle, strumming guitar, swinging hips and knees, dancing on toes in white shoes. At the microphone he wailed familiar lyrics but to beats faster, louder. Moore banged out rock riffs on electric guitar and amplifier, while Black hit bass notes and slapped wood. And now the sidemen dressed snazzy themselves, in black shirts and pants with pink vests, white ties.

Mouths had to hang open in the audience. This wasn’t country music. Armory guardsman Barney Cardwell hardly knew what to think. Later at home, his wife asked about the show. “Well, he was a man named Elvis Presley and I’ve never heard of him, but I’ll say one thing, he’s different,” Cardwell said. “We’re transitioning into something different.”

Others applauded Presley led by Wheeler, who had interviewed the budding showman on radio. After the Sikeston show the Opry performer raved over Presley as “absolutely the most talented and different entertainer I had ever seen,” Wheeler later recalled. “And I think I was one of the first to tell him so.” The performance was a qualified success and Elvis stuck around afterward, following people to Wheeler’s show at Lakeview Inn in Sikeston. Presley joined his new friend on stage at the nightspot, even playing drums as Wheeler sang.

The rocker’s departure from town was emblematic of the local Elvis among everyday folk, a persona on short time. Presley had a new car at home but still drove beaters on road trips, logging thousands of miles. He was prone to leave a broken-down heap where it sat—and Sikeston almost inherited a souvenir.

“He was here in an older car that didn’t run good and he parked it behind the armory,” Caldwell later told The Daily Standard. “When he left, some of the fellows had to push him to get him started, and I remember him turning back and waving to us as he drove out of town.”

Select References

Appear at Leachville. (1955, Jan. 19). Blytheville Courier News AR, p. 14.

Blackwell, B. (2008, Sept. 11). Memories of Elvis’ show in Cape remain strong as Tribute to the King takes grandstand at SEMO District Fair. Southeast Missourian, Cape Girardeau MO [online].

Cp. Onie D. Wheeler. (1944, Oct. 12). Sikeston Herald MO, p. 6.

Elvis Presley Gang Of Western Entertainers To Perform at Armory. (1955, Jan. 20). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, see www.elvisconcerts.com.

Editor’s Note. (1977, Aug. 18). Blytheville Courier News AR, p. 6.

Fans Mourn Elvis. (1977, Aug. 17). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, pp. 1, 16.

Guralnick, P. (1977, Aug. 20). Lonely days in high school left their mark on the man who changed history of rock. Ottawa JournalCanada, p.34.

Guralnick, P. (1977, Aug. 28). A prisoner of rock & roll. Mansfield News-Journal OH, p.2.

Guralnick, P. (1977, Aug. 30). ‘Rocker’ launched skyrocket career. Mansfield News-Journal OH, p.7.

Guralnick, P. (1977, Sept. 1). Saga ends with ‘perfect deline.’ Mansfield News-Journal OH, p.39.

Guralnick, P. (1994). Last train to Memphis: The rise of Elvis Presley. Little, Brown and Company: New York.

Heuring, L. (2005, Jan. 21). Elvis visited Sikeston in 1955. Sikeston Daily Standard MO [online].

Jennings, C.R. (1968, Feb. 18). Elvis Lives! Los Angeles Times, p. M28.

Morrison, C.R. (1984, June). Rockabilly Music and Musicians [MA thesis]. York University: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Onie Wheeler to appear on Grand Ole Opry. (1954, Jan. 11). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, p. 6.

Payne, S.E. (1977, Oct. 5). Country Music Star Remembers King of Rock as ‘Greatest.’ Sikeston Daily Standard MO, p. 1.

Presley’s Record Sales Jump Here. (1977, Aug. 17). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, pp. 1, 16.

“Run ’Em Off” Wheeler Attends Convention. (1954, Nov. 29). Sikeston Daily Standard MO, p. 3.

Matt Chaney is compiling companion books on Southern music, tentatively titled River Shows, Jazz, Blues and Country Music and, the sequel, Rockabillies in the Missouri Delta. See the page Stories from River Music to Rock in the Northern Delta. For more information, including Chaney’s previous books, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.  Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.