James C. Johnson and the American Secular Cantata

Current scholarship generally credits George F. Root (1820–95), the renowned composer of Civil War songs, as the earliest American to write a successful secular cantata: The Flower Queen (1852), a work for teenage girls (scored for first and second soprano and alto), which would be a stepping stone to his acclaimed operatic-cantata, The Haymakers (1857).¹ But the truth is, Root began this aspect of his musical career indebted to four innovative and successful cantatas by James C. Johnson, whose reputation, which once seemed secure, has long since dwindled. So permit me to revisit Johnson's biography and accomplishments in order to give a clearer picture not only of his era, but of the colorful genre he helped develop and the exigencies of historiography that helped crowd him from the record.

Professionally and socially known either as James C., or J. C., Johnson, he was baptized in 1820 as James Johnson Jr. He had exceptional musical training for his day, beginning in the Congregational Church at his birthplace, the Green Mountain town of Middlebury, Vermont. Among worshippers were his parents, James Sr. and Anna (née Ward) Johnson, and their four surviving offspring. Because Middlebury did not yet provide elementary schooling, the church ran a Sabbath school that offered—in addition to Bible stories, reading, and writing—training in vocal music. Nearly two decades before the introduction of American public school music, James and the other children (not to mention adults) learned how to sing and to read music in the religious singing school tradition. Moreover, instruction in the latter was, in this case, in a just-invented German method called numeral notation, as in numbers (1–7) replacing Italian syllables (do-ti).²

Figure 1.

James C. Johnson [c. 1890]. Courtesy of the Winchester, Massachusetts, Archival Center.

In 1827 the Johnsons moved to the great seaport city of Boston. They arrived with their three youngest children, their oldest, seventeen-year-old Alonzo, having stayed behind. Seven-year-old James, ten-year-old Artemas, and fifteen-year-old Betsy enrolled in Boston's first-in-the-nation, free, three-tiered educational system (elementary, grammar, high school). While the schools were uniquely open to both boys and girls, attendance was voluntary, but many children had to work to help support their family. It should have been the case for the Johnson siblings, because their father, a saddler by trade but now a debt collector, struggled financially. So the family presumably received monetary help, with the most-likely source being Anna Ward Johnson's physician brother, Dr. Malthus Ward (1792–1863).

In 1832 twelve-year-old James not only attended grammar school but also sang in Lowell Mason's Juvenile Choir.³ A year later the chorus became known as the Juvenile Choir of the Boston Academy of Music, for the academy had hired Mason (1792–1872) to implement its program. The same year James entered Boston's still-extant English High School. Though majoring in business, James was also required to take courses in the liberal arts. He graduated in 1835—which made him among the 1 percent of Americans who then had a high school education.⁴ He promptly moved to Albany, New York. There he became a bookkeeper for an uncle (Chauncey Johnson) who owned a jewelry business. Two years later, illness (consumption?) forced a brief return home, then a move to Athens, Georgia, to be cared for by his physician uncle.⁵ A graduate of the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College, Dr. Ward had set up practice in Salem, Massachusetts, became the superintendent of the East India Marine Society (now, the Peabody Essex Museum), and by the 1830s had a new challenge: he was the first professor of medicine (then largely the study of herbs) at the University of Georgia.⁶

In 1839 James returned to Boston. With his health restored, he became an apprentice to a prominent local musician, his brother Artemas, but now known as A.N. Johnson (the name that would be engraved on his headstone...