Life and Times of William Christopher O'Hare

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  • Home
  • Washington, D.C.
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      • Early Ancestors
      • Paternal Grandparents
      • Ancestral Home: Linden Grove
      • Parents
      • Siblings
  • Shreveport
    • City Background & O'Hare Activities
    • Music Director >
      • Grand Opera House
      • Choral Societies
      • Community Productions
      • Churches
    • Music Teacher
    • Composer--Before Levee Revels
    • Composer-- Levee Revels and after
    • Changes & Problems at the Opera House
  • Marriage & Sons
    • Lottie Slater
    • Wm. Crockett O'Hare
    • Vincent Slater O'Hare
  • NYC
    • Arrival & Background
    • Arranger >
      • Rags & Other Instrumentals
      • Pop/Patriotic Songs 1901-1908
      • Pop/Patriotic Songs, 1909-1931
      • Medleys
      • Misc. Shows, 1902-1905
      • Misc. Shows, 1906-1909
      • Misc. Shows, 1910-1914
      • Hippodrome Background & O'Hare's First Tunes
      • Hippodrome Shows
      • Vocal Arrangements, Secular and Sacred
      • Misc. Arrangements
      • An Orchestrator's Prank
    • Composer >
      • Instrumentals, 1901-1902
      • Instrumentals, 1903-1909
      • Early NY Songs
      • Sacred Music/Organist
      • Silent Films
      • Misc Compositions, 1905-1914
      • Misc Compositions, 1917-1934
    • Letter to the Editor
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This and That:
A Cultural Blog

"Every Little Movement" Anecdote

3/24/2018

 
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On November 21, 1911, the San Francisco Call published an an amusing anecdote about a performance simultaneously unbefitting the venue and calculatingly effective:
Chico, Nov. 20.  --Every little movement of the orchestra and the ushers of the Chico Baptist church had a meaning all its own when the collection was taken at the regular services.  Also, a modern musical comedy tune, it as found, could be successfully grafted on the church organ pipes and bear good fruit.  Furthermore, there was something like vindication for those leaders of Protestant churches who insist that the old hymn tunes may with profit be relegated to the basement while the choir loft devotes itself to something more modern.

While the contribution box was being passed at the church the congregation was electrified by a new air played by the excellent orchestra.  There was a secular lilt to the tune that carried the hand of the parishioner into his deepest pocket and brought it forth in waltz time, jingling with coin.  The ushers, as they passed the plate, stepped more lightly than their wont.

Most of those in the church were benignly innocent of the name of the air that was being played, though they knew that Moody and Sankey never composed anything like it.  Younger members of the flock recognized that the orchestra was playing the popular waltz number from Madame Sherry, "Every Little Movement has a Meaning All Its Own."

O'Hare's piano roll arrangement

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"We Ought to Have a Leader":  The Hampton-Tuskegee Ideology, Part 3

3/3/2018

 
With Parson Altalk’s failure to address his parishioners’ earthly needs, such as overcoming superstition and dealing with the conjurors, Treemonisha’s neighbors need a leader, someone capable of guiding them forward.  Long before introducing his failed leader, Joplin had set the scene for his true leader’s arrival.  In the opera’s preface, he explained that whites had left the plantation after the Civil War, leaving it to be run by Ned, a trustworthy servant. Living in dense ignorance, symbolized by the dense forest surrounding the plantation, the freedmen were left “with no one to guide them as they struggled to adapt to unaccustomed freedom.  Childless Ned and Monisha prayed for an infant who could grow up educated and able to “teach the people around them to aspire to something better and higher than superstition and conjuring.” 
Having had their prayers answered in 1866 when Monisha found a newborn under a tree near their cabin, the couple later traded labor to a white woman in exchange for her educating their daughter. Because the nearest school was too far for Treemonisha and neighboring children to attend, she became the first literate member of her community.  Perhaps Joplin had a similarly educated young teacher in mind, but when he decided to make her future role Ned and Monisha's dream, I can't help wondering if he may have been familiar with Samuel Chapman Armstrong's mission, which was sometimes quoted by Booker T. Washington:   “The thing to be done was clear;  To train selected negro youth who would go out at once and teach and lead their people” (Armstrong, "In the Beginning," Twenty-Two Years Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Normal School Press, 1893; qtd. in A New Negro for a New Century, American Publishing House, 1900, 83).
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In the opera’s opening number, Treemonisha reprimands the conjuror Zodzetrick for having “caused superstition and many sad tears,” and viewers and listeners recognize her potential to realize Ned and Monisha’s dream.  Indeed, before the opera’s opening, Treemonisha had achieved small scale teaching success.  She had taught Remus to read, enabling him to chide Zodzetrick, not only by arguing that the conjuror cannot fool the level-headed Treemonisha, but that he can no longer fool Remus:
To read and write she has taught me, and I am very grateful,
I have more sense now, you can see, and to her I’m very thankful.             
You’d better quit our foolish ways and all this useless strife,
You’d better change your ways today and live a better life.
Although education might initially come from whites, Joplin shows that a black with basic education could become the educator, as did Booker T. Washington and so many graduates of schools such as Hampton and Tuskegee.  Speaking of Tuskegee, Samuel Chapman Armstrong had once written, "It is a proof that the Negro can raise the Negro"  (Qtd. by Washington in The Story of My Live and Work, J. L. Nichols & Co., 1901, 372).  Washington attributed much of this success to his people's desire to learn from their teachers as he had learned from Armstrong:  "Often hungry and in rags, making sacrifices of which you little dream, the Negro youth has been determined to annihilate his mental darkness.  With all the disadvantages the Negro, according to official records, has blotted out 55.5 per cent of his illiteracy since he became a free man" ("Negro Education Not a Failure," Booker T. Washington Papers.  Univ. if IL Press, 1972, II: 431).   

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    Author

    I am a retired community college professor and the great-granddaughter of composer, orchestrator,  arranger, organist, and teacher William Christopher O'Hare.

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                                                                    2018  copyright on research content,  Sue Attalla