THE STRYCHNINE BANJO-FEB 2017 Copy
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The Strychnine Banjo Jake Wallace, Charley Rhoades and “The Days of ‘49” © 2014 CW BAYER The term Bohemian has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gypsy, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or "littérateur" who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art. (Westminster Review, 1862 ) Harper, Douglas (November 2001). "Bohemian etymology". Online Etymology Dictionary. © 2014 CW BAYER nevadamusic.com Search: “nevadamusic” on Facebook, http://nevadamusic.ecwid.com for hard copy purchase. Cover photo: Jake Wallace, used by permission of The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin About the author: CW Bayer regularly holds forth on C. Street in Virginia City and the better saloons of Northern Nevada. His songs can be heard at Nevadamusic.com He is available for wakes, bankruptcies, foreclosures and the best situations. Also, for a slide show on this book. !2 Visit: nevadamusic.com ! PHOTO OF A LEGEND .............................................................................................................................4 SEEING THE ELEPHANT ........................................................................................................................5 MINSTRELS ................................................................................................................................................9 SONGS ........................................................................................................................................................13 JAKE WALLACE .....................................................................................................................................21 CHARLEY RHOADES .............................................................................................................................29 CALIFORNIA BANJOISTS..................................................................................................................... 35 CLEMENS AND THE STRYCHNINE BANJO ....................................................................................41 BALDY GREEN ........................................................................................................................................47 THE MUSIC HALL FIRE ........................................................................................................................55 ALF DOTEN ..............................................................................................................................................60 THE “GRASSHOPPER FEAST” ............................................................................................................66 THE DAYS OF ’49—ITS COMPOSITION ............................................................................................73 WOODWARD CONVEYS THE SONG ..................................................................................................80 WALLACE CAMPAIGNS THE SONG ..................................................................................................86 RHOADES’ LAST PERFORMANCES ..................................................................................................89 THE PACIFIC COAST PIONEER ASSOCIATION .............................................................................90 A DYING MAN AND HIS RACIST WORDS ........................................................................................97 TOO MUCH BENZINE ..........................................................................................................................100 WALLACE GOES ON AND ON ............................................................................................................101 THE ANTHEM ........................................................................................................................................107 THE 49ER MINING CAMP ...................................................................................................................109 THE FOLK MUSIC FOG .......................................................................................................................117 FAME AT LAST ......................................................................................................................................121 ABOUT THE MELODY .........................................................................................................................126 THE ROGUES’ REVEAL ......................................................................................................................129 ENDNOTES .............................................................................................................................................135 !3 Visit: nevadamusic.com ! PHOTO OF A LEGEND Like the wind rolling across the Sierra Nevada and up into the Sierra Wave above the eastern slope, like the stage coach, this is a ride, an adventure with prospectors long gone but whose ghosts still sing one song. That song comes in the wake of seeing the elephant. A song by two banjo players. On the cover, his photo long buried in an archive, one gazes into the distance, cradling his banjo he carried for decades across California and Nevada, into the mining camps, into the melodeon halls, teaching little Lotta, having fun. He inspired a play and an opera. He changed and sang the lyrics of a dead man everywhere he went, campaigning long after the song had become universal among miners. A self-avowed “bohemian”, he was famous up and down the west coast and then forgotten, except in opera. This is Jake Wallace’s story. And this is the story the story of another banjoist, Charley Rhoades. They larked from saloon to melodeon hall in the glory days of strychnine whiskey and minstrel mirth. They gambled. They drank. One killed a woman. The dangerous one died young. The like-able one went on forever. Separately, they created and promoted the song that became the anthem of western migration, its convoluted origins obscured until now. Around 1913, Jake Wallace posed with his five-string minstrel banjo and a fellow performer, Hank Mudge. Today, Mudge has disappeared from the shot—a blurred image stored in a vault. Wallace wears a heavy overcoat with his hat pulled down tightly over his head—the traveling gear of a man who rode in a wagon up and down California and sometimes over the mountains to that mecca of mining culture, Virginia City. In the East, banjoists gained renown for their complex instrumentals. In the West, a great banjoist was a grand entertainer. Campaigning a song by Charley Rhoades, “The Days of ‘49”, Jake Wallace became the archetypal pioneer voice, long welcomed by old-timers living wild and free in the mining towns. Today we remember Lotta and Twain. However, Wallace and Rhoades are the performing heroes at whose feet others sat. In the photo, Wallace’s eyes look out across time. About the time of this picture, he emerged from his western minstrel persona to reflect on himself as a wonder—a renowned survivor of a raucous mid-19th century western bohemian theater scene. He remarked, “I’ve been too fond of fun.” Forgotten in this cerebral age of angst and complexity, the ghost of the strychnine banjo sings of gold, silver, whiskey and theatrical energies. This book looks at two men and at the hugely popular anthem of the gold rush that they created—“The Days of ’49". !4 Visit: nevadamusic.com ! SEEING THE ELEPHANT By land or sea, during the early gold rush, young men coming to California exchanged the phrase, “see the elephant”. After about 1820, romanticism split between a high-brow English focus on castles and knights versus an Irish, Scottish and American focus on talismans or artifacts of nature—the rose, hawthorne, bucket in the well, old churchyard, etc.. The South embraced "chivalry." The North took the latter course and, derived from that, the culture of the rural West added in a sense of the absurd. The “elephant” came out of an America whose romantic frontier dreams of risk and fun seemed to be stagnant. In this, the song, “The Days of ’49” became both the climactic point and the denouement to the story of “seeing the elephant”. While that phrase, common during the early gold rush, is often described as a vague metaphor and gold rush song is often seen as a sort of folk music with bucolic origins, this book looks at both as self-aware expressions of a partial generation that embraced risk and improvisation at the height of the Victorian era. Today, folk and diversity oriented teaching of history—the energies of the people—inform many officially funded arts and humanities programs and publications. This book offers a different view—that there were specific individuals and specific cultural and political agendas informing a great quantity of the 49ers who went West. The phrase’s popularity among those young men stemmed from a song written for a show staged by P.T. Barnum during late 1849. In New York City, Pete Morris performed “California As It Is” at Barnum’s American Museum and then before thousands at the ! Hippodrome. Barnum was seeking to ally himself with the local temperance movement as it counseled young men against going to California. He titled his show “Gold Mania”, echoing the movements criticisms of the impending emigration as a mad and irresponsible endeavor. The effect of this gold mania, upon a multitude of minds, must be to create a distaste for patient, laborious industry, and for that