How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford by Kathryn Kalinak (review)

3 2 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. By Kathryn Kalinak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 256 pages, $60.00/$24-95. Reviewed by David Fenimore University of Nevada, Reno “Generally, I hate music in pictures,” John Ford said (17). “But I’ve always used a great deal” (8). Kathryn Kalinak, who has published essays on Ford as well as Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (1992), argues that music is “a distinguishing feature of Ford’s westerns” (158). “Music,” she writes, “and especially song, may be the most powerful... marker” of authenticity, but it plays other roles as well (201). She refers to archival sources such as anno­ tated scripts, cue sheets, interviews, unpublished letters, and studio memos to systematically map the music in these fourteen films, locating it in the wider context of the American cultural and commercial landscape, and looking at the ways it creates and complicates meaning. Ford was not a musician or even a concertgoer, but he was probably the first (and only?) director to employ a personal accordion player. He is certainly one of the few to exert such dictatorial control over his scores. With an apol­ ogy for her necessary nod to unfashionable auteurism, Kalinak reconstructs Ford’s working methods, profiles his main musical sidekicks, and chronicles his constant seeking and shuffling of folk and period songs and hymns against the studios’ growing pressure for wall-to-wall orchestral scoring. She looks carefully at the music behind significant moments in the filmic narratives, identifies stray scraps of melody, and notes multiple appearances of Fordian favorites such as “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” In doing so, she furthers her case that music, and especially song, operates on multiple levels—from the literal to the subconscious to the visceral— as a privileged metanarrative where history, culture, geography, ethnicity, and ideology inter­ sect. Whether it is diegetic (heard by characters within the narrative frame) or nondiegetic (heard only by the audience), she suggests that music can no longer be ignored or sidelined in any further discussions of Ford’s films. The twenty-one images reproduced here include a sheet music cover fea­ turing choral schmaltzmeister Mitch Miller in a Confederate officer’s uniform. Kalinak explains that contemporary North American audiences who saw The Searchers (1956) would have known the pro-Southern connotations of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” thanks to Miller’s 1955 hit recording. However, the song’s obscure past as a minstrel song about a mixed-race seductress “may, in fact, be the most extreme example of buried ideological meaning in Ford’s westerns,” layering ambiguous racism and transgressive eroticism beneath the magnolia myth of Ethan’s mysterious origins, whether Ford was aware of it or not (177). Though Kalinak begins by listening to Ford’s silents, her book is structured around chapter-length discussions of three later works: Stagecoach (1939), with BOOK R E VIE W S 3 2 9 its soundtrack identified in the opening credits as “based on American folk songs” (49); The Searchers and its fusion of self-consciously American classical music derived from Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, and the guitar-strumming Sons of the Pioneers; and as conclusion, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), for which Ford insisted on researching authentic Cheyenne songs and chants. He seemed increasingly to resist the trend toward a symphonic West, hence his scores were often “something of a battlefield” (17); one studio executive notes in a letter to a perhaps miffed Mr. Miller that “Mr. Ford leans to not too professional singing, and would like to utilize colored voices” (191). But in the final cut, Cheyenne songs appeared in only six minutes of soundtrack. Late in his career, it seems, “studios ... [had] turned a deaf ear” to Ford and his music (196). Robert Laxalt: The Voice of the Basques in American Literature. By David Rio. Translated by Kristin Addis. Foreword by William A. Douglass. Reno: Center...