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15 Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette
- University of Illinois Press
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215 outrageous statement was finally removed in the fourth edition (1997), and a discography added. Also in 1997 their early twentieth-century recordings were finally reissued, by Europe’s Document label. On a spring day in 1997 in Nashville, a select audience witnessed an unusual recreation of the scene when the Fisk Jubilee Singers had made recording history. The occasion was a session at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Following my talk on the history of the Singers, a quartet from the current student chorus stepped onto the stage, positioned themselves in front of an antique recording horn, and proceeded to make a new cylinder record, on original equipment. The faint sounds that poured forth when the small wax cylinder was played back were a fitting tribute to their predecessors, the pioneers who had first embraced recording almost a century earlier. The original Fisk University Jubilee Singers were pioneers in introducing black music into the American concert hall in the late nineteenth century, and their early and frequent use of recording in the early 1900s helped to spread that music to every corner of the country. It is unfortunate that their recorded legacy is so little recognized today. 15 Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette Why, you might ask, would a wealthy, white, southern businessman, former Confederate soldier, and apologist for slavery be the subject of a chapter in this book? Polk Miller was a remarkable man. He organized, toured with, and recorded with a black quartet. Those recordings, made in 1909 and very nearly not released, provide perhaps the most direct aural link we have with the music of black America in antebellum times. To appreciate Miller’s contribution, it is necessary to separate his music from the social beliefs he espoused. A successful businessman who entered show business late in life, he was one of a wave of turn-of-the-century entertainers who catered to white nostalgia for the pre–Civil War South. A Confederate Army veteran and confirmed “son of the Old South,” he used songs and stories to paint a rosy picture of “happy darkies” and banjos ringing ’round the old cabin door, as if slavery had been some beneficent, paternalistic system that even the slaves enjoyed. This version of history may seem repugnant today, but it was a major theme of American popular culture at the time. It was reflected in books and articles, minstrelsy, immensely popular traveling shows (e.g., South before the War), and songs (“Little Old Log Cabin in De Lane,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “I Want to See the Old Home”). Many blacks found employment singing these songs and appearing in these traveling shows. Miller’s presentation included a quartet of “genuine Negro singers ,” and his recordings with his group—from a rare early integrated recording session —represent a glimpse into a curious branch of American entertainment. Miller ’s career is particularly well documented, in part due to scrapbooks that he kept Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette 03.153-234_Broo 12/17/03, 1:45 PM 215 216 lost sounds in the 1890s which are now preserved in public archives.1 Much of the following information about Miller’s stage career is drawn from the clippings in these scrapbooks , augmented by new genealogical research into his background. Miller was, as his daughter later put it, “quite a character.”2 His real name was James A. Miller, and he was born on August 2, 1844, in Grape Lawn, Virginia, a tiny hamlet in Prince Edward County, near Burkeville. He was the fifth child of Giles A. Miller, a wealthy tobacco farmer, and his wife, Jane Webster Miller. Later publicity stressed that Polk was raised on a large plantation, and public records bear this out. Giles Miller owned extensive property stretching over several counties southwest of Richmond. According to the 1860 census, his Prince Edward County holdings consisted of nearly thirteen hundred acres, with a net value of more than $35,000. He owned dozens of slaves who worked his farms. He was a prominent local citizen and a member of the state legislature. Polk grew up surrounded by blacks in a setting of unquestioned white supremacy . An athletic youngster, he also had an ear for music and a curiosity about the songs he heard in the fields and around the slave cabins. He later reminisced, “I was raised on a plantation where niggers were thicker than hops, and...