Front Porch (2010)

Front Porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution "About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering 'The Sahara of the Bozart,' his famously blistering dismissal of 'Culture' in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of famed Italian opera stars Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci." Enrico Caruso, examining a bust of himself in 1914, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 1] I never knew my mother's mother, a woman so distant from me that I think of her as "Miss Lucy" rather than "Grandmamma." But I do know a lot about her. She was a college graduate, when that was still a rare thing for a country girl, from one of our very early state schools for women. She agonized that her schoolteacher's job (and then her marriage) had utterly exiled her from childhood and college haunts to the North Carolina boondocks. She fiercely believed in books and late-Victorian "High Culture," and passed her creed intact to my mother. One of her legacies was a tiny phonograph collection that Mom saved when the old house had to go. About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering "The Sahara of the Bozart," his famously blistering dismissal of "Culture" in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci, the famed Italian opera stars. It couldn't have been Granddaddy, whose tastes ran to string bands, so it must have been Miss Lucy, who could only have learned about opera in college. I listened to these records when they went off to an archive, and they were still very impressive, though well-worn. But the collection held other disks as well. The one I remember was "Golden Slippers," referring to the footwear of choice in Heaven. The artists were the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, composed of students from one of the South's oldest black colleges—older, in fact, than my grandmother's alma mater—and their earnings went to the college treasury. I don't want to make too much of my grandmother's taste in records. I can't imagine that she ever heard Caruso in person, for just as Mencken said, the nearest bona fide opera house might as well have been on the moon. And at the nadir in southern race relations, a taste for spirituals, and even a modest contribution to black education, could signify a well-intentioned paternalism but no more. After all, the Jubilee Singers performed "refined" black music for well-paying white audiences, not the gut-wrenching wails of laborers and sharecroppers. All the same, the articles in this issue remind me of Miss Lucy's diverse compilation. Just when H. L. Mencken was lambasting the South's dearth of poets, oboe-players, and the like, she and a few other southern audiophiles were attuned to the arias of La Scala and the Met. But unlike Mencken, Miss Lucy and her peers also had some appreciation for the South's other cultures, especially the spiritual tradition that the Jubilee singers repackaged for their benefit. To give the devil his due, Mencken did not completely ignore the arts of black southerners. He even said, "The only visible esthetic activity in the South is in their hands," a comment he intended as a put-down of whites. On the whole, "the Sahara of the Bozart" is unambiguous: the "South" is the white South, "culture" is European "High Culture," and never the twain shall meet. My grandmother's records offer a minor rebuttal, but they carry an even more important lesson. Contrary to Mencken, the South's diversity not only has room for "High Culture," but [End Page 2] even for ladies like her, it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of "southern cultures" is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others have recognized. The essays in this issue develop this proposition in detail. Hal Crowther begins by tackling Mencken's legacy head-on. He reminds us of Mencken's painful power to rile regional...