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  • Simple Shaker Folk:Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring
  • David Vanderhamm (bio)

For a piece that was "born a celebrity," as one critic put it, Appalachian Spring received little of the press attention that we might expect to precede such an auspicious birth.1 There are many reasons for this, the first of which is that there was no need for the commissioning Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to push for publicity. The Coolidge Chamber Music Festival, where the work would be presented on October 30, 1944, was in its tenth successful year, and tickets for the 511-seat Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress were spoken for long before the performance. Additionally, the work was still in flux and without its final title until shortly before its premiere, making advance discussion of it difficult even for Martha Graham or Aaron Copland. Thus the only details to emerge prior to its premiere came from dance critic John Martin, who reported on October 8: "Rumor has it that the [ballet] for which Copland has written the music deals with the Shakers."2 Martin would have been in good company in maintaining this belief, considering that [End Page 507] Copland himself likely assumed the initial ballet scenario was set in a Shaker village, but two weeks later Martin issued a correction.3 In his last update before seeing the piece, he relayed the title of the work and noted that although it "employs a Shaker melody in the score," it did not otherwise concern the sect.4

It is both fitting and remarkable that this might have been all audience members would have known before first hearing Appalachian Spring. On the one hand, the Shaker melody referenced here, "Simple Gifts," has become one of the most recognizable melodies not simply in the piece but in the United States.5 Copland's adaptation of the tune in Appalachian Spring (plus stand-alone variations for band and orchestra and a setting in his Old American Songs) helped spread it across social and generic categories. As William Brooks argues, these varied settings and their long performance and recording histories transformed it simultaneously into a folk song, an art song, and a popular song.6 On the other hand, it is odd that a piece so widely taken as a musical icon of the nation might be based on the Shakers, who were a distrusted religious minority well into the twentieth century.

Martin was correct that neither the action of the ballet nor the accompanying text in the program made mention of the Shakers, but their role in Appalachian Spring goes beyond providing a musical theme. Elizabeth Crist identifies the group as "the imagined community at the heart of the ballet" and suggests that the choice of the Shakers was motivated by Copland's leftist politics, saying they were "not coincidentally . . . a communistic sect."7 And even for those who did not share these political affinities, the Shakers would have been widely intelligible as a source for formulating Copland and Graham's "legend of American living."8 For although "Simple Gifts" is Copland's "best-known appropriation," the appropriation of the Shakers was a collective, ongoing cultural practice, not a singular artistic act.9 Appalachian Spring is not about the Shakers, but the Shakers are central to the ways in which audiences—and not simply Copland or Graham—understood the piece, its aesthetic of simplicity, and its expression of American identity.

My primary argument is that much of the power of Appalachian Spring's myth about American identity should be located in the context of the twentieth-century interest in the Shakers, particularly in the ongoing appropriation and commodification of their material culture. By framing the Shakers as a segment of "folk culture"—alternating between portrayals of the group as intranational Others and as quintessentially American ancestors—both scholarly and popular discourse cleared the way for an appropriation of the Shakers in the formation of a national myth. If the Great Depression made the Shakers an attractive source for a "sentimental, idealized" American past, the dark days of World War II provided a context in which the identity of Shakers as simple, virtuous, and free [End...

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