The Improbable Era: The South since World War II

IX. Music & the Visual Arts

IX. Music < S L the Visual Arts The South after World War II was the scene of an unprecedented stirring of interest and activity in the fine arts. A combination of increased prosperity, expanded programs of formal education in the arts, and the aesthetic stimulation of broader travel and improved communications brought an awakening in this field that was as widespread if not as profound as that of the southern literary renaissance. Also, southern arts received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency created in the 1960s to provide money to the states by more or less matching funds appropriated locally. Every state established an arts commission to use these federal and state funds. By the early 1970s the state commissions were sponsoring hundreds of performances and exhibits annually throughout the South.1 The region teemed with artists and art consumers of one kind or another. The affinity between southern drama and southern literature remained close. The three southern dramatists whose works most vividly illustrated this kinship were Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams, a native of Mississippi; Lillian Hellman, born and reared in New Orleans ; and Paul Green of North Carolina. Williams was possibly the most celebrated American playwright of the era. He became famous with the production of The Class Menagerie (1945), the drama of an emotionally fragile girl who sought escape from reality through her assortment of animal figurines. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) Williams portrayed an encounter between a lusty young Polish-American laborer of New Orleans and a neurotic woman of the decayed plantation aristocracy. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) told a story of parental aspiration and marital felicity threatened by the protagonist's sense of guilt and resort to alcohol. The script for the film Baby Doll Music and the Visual Arts 151 (1956), combining two of Williams's earlier short pieces, examined the infantile behavior of a young wife with unawakened but powerful appetites. Williams's underlying theme was that of people seeking withdrawal from life in romantic fantasy, but forced by brutal experiences to abandon their illusions. His concern for love and beauty in a materialistic world was, like Faulkner's, often obscured by the violence and degradation of his characters and situations. In his later works, many of them set outside the South, Williams became even more sensational. Critics came to believe that he partly admired the very forces of evil that his victims cried out against. Lillian Hellman was also one of the most respected figures in American theater and was perhaps without peer among women dramatists . The Children's Hour (1934), a tragedy concerned with juvenile malice, established Miss Hellman in the New York theater. Among the best of her numerous works was a triad on her native region. The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1947) portrayed the repudiation by the New South's moneymakers of the Old South's code of valor and honor. Toys in the Attic (1958) exposed the destructive forces sometimes generated by love through the experience of an affluent young southerner whose affections were torn between his elder maiden sisters and his insecure child bride. All of Miss Hellman's pieces, many of which were on nonsouthern themes, were moving studies of human failings. Paul Green, the acknowledged master of the outdoor drama, was the most eminent southern playwright who lived and worked in his native region. His first major open-air production, The Lost Colony (1937), told the story of Sir Walter Raleigh's vanished settlement on Roanoke Island. The Common Glory (1947) presented Jefferson's fight for democracy during the birth of the republic. In the next years Green wrote numerous comparable works for historic places throughout the South, including Wilderness Road, The Confederacy, Texas, and Trumpet in the Land. He looked upon the South as a uniquely favorable place for this kind of presentation, because, he explained, "Our very existence as a people here in the South has been something of an epic tragic drama—a sort of huge and terrifying Job story, if the truth were acknowledged."2 Theater in the South continued to depend strongly upon the drama departments of the universities and colleges. The schools most active 152 Music and the Visual Arts in this field at the beginning of the era were the universities of North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisville, and the Northwestern State College of Louisiana. All of them emphasized native folklore in their productions. By the early 1970s most of the region's institutions of higher learning offered courses of instruction in acting, producing, directing, and designing for the stage. Despite an increased interest in universal dramatic themes and techniques , the most distinguished southern programs still turned to local history and lore. North Carolina maintained its prewar standing in this endeavor. The Carolina Playmakers of the University of North Carolina were the leading collegiate theater company of the region. Paul Green was a product of the early Playmakers. In the 1960s the university theater program added the Institute of Outdoor Drama. Under the direction of Mark Sumner it conducted research on outdoor drama, published bulletins, and supervised productions throughout the country. An estimated 4 million spectators attended outdoor dramas between 1937 and 1970.3 North Carolina also took the lead in state-sponsored dramatic enterprises . In 1961 the legislature designated the Flat Rock Playhouse as the state theater of North Carolina. This theater was the base of the Vagabond Players, an experimental group that had been brought down from New York by the director, Robroy Farquhar, before World War II. Under the new arrangement, the state supported the actors in making tours under the name Vagabond Touring Company and in providing instruction and other services for drama teachers and drama clubs throughout North Carolina. In 1965 the state opened in WinstonSalem the North Carolina School of the Arts, the first state-supported institution in the nation devoted exclusively to training professional talent in drama, music, and dance. By the 1970s most of the major cities of the South had professional theater companies. Dallas kept its prewar reputation for dramatic endeavor with the success of Margo Jones's Theater, until her death in 1954, and with the development in 1959 of the Dallas Theater Center. Under Paul Baker's direction, the center by 1970 was presenting more than 440 performances annually, with a selection that ranged from musical comedy to Shakespeare. The center also operated in connection with Trinity University of San Antonio a graduate program in the fine arts and conducted numerous courses in drama for the children, Music and the Visual Arts 153 teachers, and citizens of the area. A point of special pride for the center was its Kalita Humphreys Theater, the only public theater building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Houston's Alley Theater, founded in 1947 by Nina Vance and later directed by William Trotman, was considered by some critics the best performing arts institution in the South. During the 1960s it attracted national recognition and a subsidy of $3.5 million from the Ford Foundation. Other noteworthy professional theaters included Theatre Atlanta, Repertory Theater in New Orleans, Actors Theatre in Louisville, Front Street Theater in Memphis, Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, and Asolo Theater in Sarasota. The Free Southern Theater of New Orleans represented a commendable achievement in black theater. Under black direction and drawing upon local black talent, it received some municipal and private support, but depended primarily on box office receipts. Architecture was the one southern art form with a tradition as old and rich as that of southern literature, if not older and richer. But architecture in the postwar South too often surrendered unconditionally to the demands of technology. This was especially true of residential architecture, which in the Old South had been distinguished by its gracious style and sensible adaptation to climate, terrain, and vegetation but now tended to become monotonously utilitarian and dull. Cooled and heated as units by air conditioners and gas or electric furnaces and heavily insulated against both outside heat and cold, most of the dwellings built after World War II had low ceilings and few and miniature windows. Family rooms and "dens," which were almost always equipped with television sets and record players, and often with bars, replaced spacious hallways and verandahs as the centers of family conversation and informal social activity in the hot season. The new dwellings were more efficient and, throughout most of the year, more comfortable than the grandest mansion of an antebellum planter. Southern lawns still boasted a distinctive appearance given by the stately pines of the hill and coastal country, the dense groves of hardwood and the rich grass of the river valleys, and the majestic live oaks, Spanish moss, and profusion of semitropical flowers of the lower South. But the houses now were so perennially closed and the occupants so habitually inside them that the grounds lost much of 154 Music and the Visual Arts their original purpose as living space. Increasingly they became merely ornamental settings to be admired from passing automobiles or from the "picture windows" of the houses they surrounded. This may have been a perverse representation of the architectural dictum that form follows function. Or possibly it was proof that in practice function more often follows form. Despite its functional uniformity, recent southern residential architecture displayed a great variety of modes and appearances. In the new subdivisions, especially in the affluent ones, houses reflecting Frank Lloyd Wrights influence, with bold intersecting planes and ingenious cantilevers, were artfully blended into hillsides, ravines, or woods. These stood side by side with white-columned "traditionals" reminiscent of Tara in Gone with the Wind. Except for the surroundings and the proportion of plantation-house imitations, most of the houses were quite similar to those in other parts of the country. But the early 1970s brought hints of impending change. The threat of fuel and power shortages caused one student of southern domestic architecture to anticipate hopefully a return to earlier principles of adaptation to the weather in the design of southern homes.4 It would be ironic if the southern climate, once the chief influence in the growth of a regional consciousness and culture but later somewhat neutralized by technology, should again oblige the South to create a truly regional domestic architecture. The new southern urban business architecture was symbolic of the South's recently acquired prosperity and self-confidence. Towering, functional, glittering, it was perfectly designed to attract the rural and small-town population away from their less exciting dwellings, shops, and offices even as it also beckoned to tourists and newcomers to the area. Atlanta in the Southeast and Houston in the Southwest were leaders in this architecture, though Dallas, New Orleans, Miami, Memphis, and various other cities within the region could claim primacy in one aspect or another of it. Perhaps the single most important figure contributing to the new architecture was John Portman of Atlanta. Born in South Carolina but reared in Atlanta and trained professionally at the Georgia Tech school of architecture, Portman fully reflected the spirit and personality bequeathed to his city by the great nineteenth-century New South advocate Henry W. Grady. Asked why he chose Atlanta for Music and the Visual Arts 155 his work, Portman replied: "It's my home. Its surge forward has corresponded with my career. Primarily, it's the people here/'5 Also, he explained, Atlanta is favored with rolling hills, luxuriant trees and other vegetation, and abundant rainfall. Influenced by the earlier architecture and living arrangements of his native region and by his observation of Scandinavian city design, he sought to create environments that attract gatherings of people. He especially admired the Tivoli Gardens of Copenhagen, where he said he had never seen anyone without a smile; he compared them in principle with the southern porches of yesterday where everyone sat and talked.6 Portman's Peachtree Center, located on and named for the city's most celebrated street, made a major contribution toward keeping downtown Atlanta alive and vibrant. The twenty-two-floor Merchandise Mart, completed in 1961, was the commercial heart of the center, but the Hyatt Regency hotel across the street from the mart was the showplace that drew the crowds. Opened in 1967, the hotel had 1,000 rooms, arranged around the outer walls of the building. The rooms were reached through ivy-hung terraces surrounding a spacious interior courtyard that rose breathtakingly from the lobby at ground level to the translucent roof twenty-three stories above. Streamlined glass elevators flashed up and down like silent rockets in full view of lobby and terraces. An unenclosed lobby restaurant created something of the atmosphere of a French sidewalk cafe; a lobby cocktail lounge shaped like a parasol, and so named, rested on its access stem but appeared to hang by a slender cable from the distant ceiling. On the roof of the building revolved a circular restaurant and cocktail lounge that seemed to hover like a flying saucer over the hotel and the city. Attached to the main structure was the hotel tower, a gleaming cylindrical annex of equal height containing 200 additional rooms. The Hyatt Regency represented a spectacular blend of technological ingenuity , aesthetic aspiration, and downright ostentatiousness. It was so popular that many other southern cities, including Houston, built similar hotels. The Peachtree Center in 1974 embraced some twenty acres and was still expanding. It included three office buildings in addition to the structures already described. Some of the buildings were connected by pedestrian bridges at great heights; one of them spanned Peachtree Street at twenty-three stories. Between two of the office towers was 156 Music and the Visual Arts a plaza with trees and shrubs growing in planters. Like a Charleston or New Orleans courtyard or a Savannah square, it offered relief from the bustle and tension of the street. In the middle of the plaza was a sunken restaurant connected with the basements of the adjacent buildings. Massive sculpture of abstract or mechanistic design complemented the buildings and grounds of the center. Portman hoped that his architecture would lead the way in reviving the inner city of Atlanta. If the emphasis in Atlanta's new commercial architecture was on downtown concentration, that of Houston was on a modified dispersal, or "nodal" pattern. True, within the past ten years downtown Houston had built a score or more steel and glass skyscrapers, and the immense Houston Center under construction was expected ultimately to cover thirty-four city blocks. The center's master architect, William Pereira of Los Angeles, likened his projected creation to an ancient Mayan city with promenades, greenery, and fountains at upper levels among a warren of hotels, office towers, and apartment buildings soaring to great heights. Already most of the major structures of downtown Houston were connected by underground pedestrian tunnels and by walkways far above the streets. So complete was the tunnel system that one authority on urban planning said the entire complex ought to be treated as an architectural unit.7 But Houston's extensive net of expressways built in the 1960s led to a scattering of its business centers and commercial architecture into clusters somewhat in the manner of Los Angeles. Many of the striking new office towers were located away from the downtown area. Perhaps nothing better illustrated the spirit of the perennial Texas boom city and its vast hinterland than the Galleria, a shopping center near the city's most affluent residential suburb. The Galleria was a superarcade three levels high and connected with well over a hundred business establishments, including the Houston branch of the famous Neiman-Marcus department store of Dallas. A luxury hotel catered to out-of-town customers who came to buy from the adjoining stores. The middle of the arcade was a great concourse, open from the bottom level to the vaulted skylight at the top and partly occupied by an ice-skating rink visible from all levels. Here one might sit in airconditioned comfort sipping a beverage at a balcony restaurant and Music and the Visual Arts 157 watch pretty girls cutting figures on artificial ice while outside the summer temperature stood at 100 degrees. Some of the most noteworthy architecture created in the South in the postwar years was built on college and university campuses to accommodate their great expansion and to satisfy the demand for physical surroundings to stimulate student minds. Borrowing from the practices of commercial architecture in the conservation of ground space, many of the educational institutions built high-rise dormitories, libraries, and office towers that differed little in appearance from the downtown skyscrapers. One of the most distinctive pieces of regional campus architecture was the massive and fortresslike LBJ Library on the University of Texas grounds in Austin. Opened in 1971, the $18.6 million structure housed Johnson's presidential papers. Among the aesthetically satisfying and functional buildings on southern campuses were the student center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Advanced Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Attractively placed in a grove of live oak trees, the Louisiana State University student center was thoroughly modern in its use of steel and glass walls; yet it retained a strong element of the North Italian Renaissance style featured in the older buildings on the campus. It contained a theater and a display hall in addition to the customary cafeteria, bookstore, ballroom, and meeting rooms. The Emory University library was a handsome tenstory building supported by slender concrete arches that went up to the roof, with walls of black steel panels. It was surrounded by a broad concrete plaza reached by a bridge spanning the wooded ravine beside the building. A terrace outside the glass walls on the top floor offered a view of the Atlanta skyline. Virtually every college and university in the region had new buildings that would compare favorably with these few examples. Many of the buildings for public assembly and diversion could be included among the more spectacular pieces of southern architecture during the postwar era. The Atlanta Memorial Arts Center, a colonnaded structure opened in 1968, was the home of the High Museum, the Atlanta School of Art, the Alliance Theater Company, and the Children 's Theater. The Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, which opened in 1972, was perhaps the most unusual building of its kind in 158 Music and the Visual Arts the region. Designed in the shape of a parallelogram to accommodate exceptionally lengthy exhibits along its main diagonal, the building had outer walls of vertical steel strips; its interior supports, concrete floors, and heating and cooling pipes were exposed so as to be in harmony with the experimental and improvisational nature of the exhibits and activities. So casual was the entire scene that an uninformed visitor might have had difficulty knowing whether a tall metal frame in one corner of the museum was a repairman's scaffold, a building truss, or an art object on display. Yet in southern architecture as in all other forms of southern expression , a strong nostalgia for the old persisted in the midst of a yearning for the new. The building of many residences to resemble plantation mansions was one evidence of this enchantment with forms out of the past. More significant were the region's efforts to preserve or restore houses actually built in the past. Every southern city had some kind of program for accomplishing this purpose, though unfortunately they often were countered by the American urge to tear down and build afresh. For example, admirers of the French Quarter of New Orleans were appalled at the encroachment of motels on that historic site; the construction in the 1960s of an expressway along its front was only narrowly averted by citizen protest and court action. In spite of all hazards, numerous southern cities, including Charleston , Savannah, New Orleans, Beaufort (South Carolina), Natchez, and Macon, still contained scores of houses, churches, and public buildings representing the grandeur of an earlier age. Also, hundreds of genuine antebellum plantation mansions throughout the region yet survived the elements and human vandalism though, sad to say, one by one they were falling. In 1961, for instance, Greenwood mansion at St. Francisville, Louisiana—said to have been the most photographed house in a state rich in such showplaces—was destroyed by lightning. Some of the great old houses were kept up by local associations formed for this purpose; others were turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Most of them were preserved by individual owners, who frequently met the expense by opening them to the public and charging admission fees. Possibly the most notable example of an individual undertaking of this sort was the restoration of the Rosedown mansion and grounds at St. Francisville, with its marvelous collection of shrubs and flowers from all over the world. A wealthy Texas Music and the Visual Arts 159 couple purchased the place in the 1950s and devoted themselves to its revival. The restoration of Williamsburg, capital of colonial Virginia, was the most publicized undertaking of this nature in the entire United States. Supported liberally with funds donated by John D. Rockefeller, the work was well under way before World War II and was largely complete by i960. Many of the most important buildings, including the Capitol and the Governor's Palace, had long since disappeared and had to be entirely reproduced. Painstaking research assured restorations and reconstructions of remarkable fidelity to the original buildings. Colonial Williamsburg was a major historical and architectural accomplishment and throughout the postwar era one of the most popular tourist attractions in the South. Savannah's program of revival compared most favorably with that of Williamsburg. Neglected, frayed, and altered as it was, more of old Savannah than of old Williamsburg was yet standing; hence in Savannah the emphasis was on preservation rather than reproduction. Historic Savannah Foundation was formed in 1955 to save the old city from further decay and to adapt its configuration and architecture to the needs of the present. The foundation's aim was to restore and preserve both the historic buildings of Savannah and the essence of the city plan used in 1733 by the founder, General James Oglethorpe. Developed around a system of twenty-four open public squares dotted with live oak trees, flowers, and occasional pieces of statuary, the old city provided elbow room for its inhabitants. The restoration plan, nearing completion in 1974, was exceptionally practical as well as aesthetically appealing, because the increased population density made elbow room more important than ever. In observing the businessmen, secretaries, laborers, and other city dwellers relaxing on benches under the trees and chatting or eating sandwich lunches, one had the conviction that the squares were more than pretty little parks; they were an organic part of the city's living space. Identifying 1,100 buildings of historical and architectural significance and arming itself with an effective zoning ordinance, the Savannah organization carried out its object through the purchase and resale of selected properties to individuals who agreed under covenant to restore them according to rules approved by an official Architectural Review Board. Where the initial building had already been destroyed, i6o Music and the Visual Arts new construction had to be compatible with the surrounding architecture though not necessarily a copy of the original. By 1973 more than 70 percent of the designated houses were restored and occupied. So successful was the Savannah project that it became a model for other cities. It made General Oglethorpe a hero of today's urbanologists. One of them said: 'The great tragedy is that Savannah was not on the main line for immigrants who headed west. Otherwise, they might well have imitated this sort of urban plan elsewhere, and other cities wouldn't have the urban sprawl that we are all so concerned about now."8 The visual arts were traditionally the South's weakest form of aesthetic outlet. The most distinguished painting and sculpture in the region were done by nonsoutherners; to achieve excellence or fame in these fields, southerners usually had to leave the South and adopt techniques developed elsewhere. Among the epithets fixed upon the South by Henry L. Mencken was "The Sahara of the Bozart" (1920). He of course exaggerated in saying the South had no art galleries, that no artist ever gave an exhibition, and no one was interested in such things. A few of the major cities had art museums of varying size and quality. But a southern critic and museum director said that as late as 1950 the Southeast, by and large, was lamentably short in the creative arts; a museum, he explained whimsically, "was a place where the family put things that were not good enough to keep and too good to throw away."9 Probably the visual arts in the 1970s were still the South's weakest form of aesthetic outlet. Certainly they continued to receive less recognition than southern literature and perhaps less than southern architecture, theater, or music. For example, most of the sculpture used by John Portman to enhance his Atlanta architecture was imported from Europe. Yet the visual arts in the South experienced something of a renaissance of their own after World War II. All the major art museums of the region, including those of Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston , and Dallas, either moved into new and larger buildings or made significant additions to their original space and holdings. By the 1970s all had collections containing works by the world's masters. Through improved communications and an interest generated in the schools and Music and the Visual Arts 161 colleges, and through their enlarged programs of activities, the museums established a degree of contact with the public that was unprecedented for the South. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a state-supported institution located in Richmond, offered an outstanding example of such services. In addition to its permanent and special exhibitions, it sponsored dramatic productions, professional dance events, chamber music concerts, films, and courses in art, acting, directing , and voice.10 Its "art-mobiles" carried exhibits throughout the state. It published nine bulletins annually, and it maintained an art reading and research library of better than 20,000 volumes. By 1973 the museum's various activities together attracted almost 1.3 million visitors annually. The other leading museums of the region had comparable if less extensive programs and recorded annual attendances in the hundreds of thousands. Interest in art and support for the development of museums and galleries reached beyond the larger cities. Assisted by federal subsidies and by local business subscriptions, many of the smaller cities built museums and stocked them with collections. In 1956 the state of North Carolina opened the North Carolina Museum of Art at Raleigh, thus following the lead of Virginia, the only other state with a statesupported museum. By the early 1970s the states of the former Confederacy had more than 170 museums and galleries of all sizes and grades. Art departments in the colleges and universities along with institutions devoted exclusively to the arts helped to bring qualified artists into the region, to train southern artists, and to awaken a segment of the population to the importance of art in improving their lives. The college and university art programs grew along with the general expansion of the educational institutions. All the leading museums offered art training. Among the more important institutions engaged wholly in art education were the Memphis Academy of Art, the Atlanta School of Art, and, in a folksier medium, the Penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina. More than 160 programs of art instruction were active in the region. Hundreds, even thousands, of painters and sculptors plied their arts in the postwar South. An estimated 200 or more artists practiced permanently in the one state of North Carolina; the number in other southern states appeared to be comparable. In quality and technique i62 Music and the Visual Arts they ranged from the highly trained independent professionals and members of university staffs to the folk artists and "primitives" who relied chiefly on self-education or on an intuitive sense of design and color. Lamar Dodd of Georgia exemplified the teacher-artist in southern life. He was believed by some to be the most important figure in postwar art in the South. Trained as a painter at the Art Students League of New York, he returned to his native region in the mid-i93os and soon became head of the art department of the University of Georgia. During the next thirty years he developed there one of the most extensive and most active art programs in the nation. He also continued to paint: at first local scenes and landscapes; later, European settings. In 1963 he was one of seven painters invited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to record the manned orbital flight of Astronaut Gordon Cooper; six years later Dodd was among the artists who recorded the Apollo 11 moon mission. His work was represented in more than a score of the leading museums and galleries of the country; he received the acclaim of the nation's critics and was honored with countless awards and citations. His career illustrated a virtually unexceptional tendency among southern university artists: that of shedding their regionalism in favor of universalism and abstraction . Yet, said a perceptive commentator, Dodd seldom painted in pure abstraction; his style was fundamentally graphic. Certainly his perception of color, space, and design was influenced by his life in the South.11 John McCrady of Oxford, Mississippi, and New Orleans was one southern artist whose work remained explicitly southern. He tried his brush in New York in the early 1930s, but he was unable to shut the vision of Oxford out of his mind. Returning there he painted the city's public buildings and the houses and churches of the surrounding countryside . On the eve of World War II he was acclaimed by critics as one of the nation's outstanding regionalists. He established an art school in New Orleans where he painted scenes of the coast and of Louisiana life. In the 1960s he turned back to Oxford as the source of his inspiration. He died in 1969. McCrady's expressed ambition was to portray "an order that ennobled the humblest scenes, recasting mere realism into what we call Art." Measured by the works of the abstractionists, his paintings appeared almost photographic. Yet he Music and the Visual Arts 163 succeeded in capturing the spirit behind the commonplace objects of his native state. A visiting journalist observed that his paintings illuminated the "enduring verities" of the country darkened by the shadows conjured by Faulkner's pen.12 Southern primitive painters were to the visual arts what the folk singers, players, and dancers were to music. Clementine Hunter of the Cane River country of Louisiana may have been the most remarkable member of this group of artists. An elderly and illiterate black woman who said she was born in 1883, Mrs. Hunter picked up a discarded brush in the early 1950s and began to paint scenes of weddings, baptisms, funerals, cotton picking, and many other activities among the rural blacks of the state. She worked by sheer intuition. She said she could not paint a tree by looking at one; she had to do it as she imagined it, or as the Lord told her to do it.13 Her paintings were hung in museums throughout the country. One of them served the photographer Edward Steichen to illustrate the meaning of a picture, its inner vision distinguishing it as a work of art. Needless to say, Clementine Hunter became known as a black Grandma Moses. Every state had its primitives, white and black, who recorded life as they saw it, remembered it, or imagined it. Music after World War II, as before, was the most popular of the fine arts in the South. Along with the other arts it received unprecedented support in money and enthusiasm. Television, record players, and tape players now joined radio as means of bringing all kinds of music into southern homes. The music departments of all regional colleges and universities expanded their programs to include opera and symphony in addition to the assorted vocal and instrumental ensembles. The public schools greatly increased their musical instruction ; even most elementary schools now had bands, orchestras, and choruses trained by professional teachers. All the major southern cities improved their symphony orchestras; five cities of the former Confederacy—Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and San Antonio —had orchestras included among the twenty-nine "major orchestras " so designated by the American Symphony Orchestra League. Another nineteen southern orchestras were in the less distinguished "metropolitan orchestra" classification. Through the rise of local concert associations that sold season %64 Music and the Visual Arts tickets, all the larger southern cities and many smaller ones were able to enjoy performances by major artists, orchestras, and ballet troupes of the North and of Europe. The regional metropolises attracted visits also by the opera companies of Chicago and New York. Southern cities with distinguished opera companies of their own were New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Mobile, and Miami. By 1974 the region supported nineteen local opera companies. The Southeastern Regional Ballet Association, largely under the inspiration of the Atlanta Ballet, included scores of private ballet schools throughout the area. Despite these substantial gains in formal musical instruction and classical performance, folk music and its offshoots were still the South's most vigorous and most original kind of musical expression. Except for literature, they were the region's most spontaneous and distinctive form of cultural outlet. Black spirituals and freedom songs took on a renewed interest from the civil rights movement. Old-fashioned jazz by both black and white musicians remained popular, especially in cities such as New Orleans, traditionally the birthplace of this music, where groups of black musicians could still be heard nightly in the French Quarter's Preservation Hall and almost daily in the black funeral processions. A number of prominent early jazz figures were yet alive and active. Louis Armstrong, the great trumpeter, was a favorite entertainer until his death in 1971. The mountainous and isolated rural areas of the South continued to preserve a tradition of white spirituals through the sacred harp groups, so called because they sang from shaped notes derived from the Sacred Harp hymnal of the early nineteenth century, and of white secular folk music through balladry and self-taught // hillbilly,/ singing and playing. Sunday afternoon "singings" of traditional Protestant hymns were still held in many small towns and crossroads communities. The most noteworthy postwar developments in southern music were the rise of white gospel music and of country music. Gospel music was an adaptation of the old-fashioned church singings to the appetites of the masses of recently urbanized southerners of the laboring class and the lower middle class. Audiences of thousands met in municipal auditoriums to hear quartets and other small vocal and instrumental ensembles perform. Their themes were fundamentalist in theology and morals. A typical line went, "Build my mansion next door to Jesus and tell the angels I'm coming home." Tones ranged from spec- Music and the Visual Arts 165 tacularly low basses to soaring falsetto tenors; words were homey and familiar; rhythms were doleful one moment, jazzy the next. Singers were accompanied by pianos, electric basses and guitars, drums, and other instruments already popular in country music. Dozens of professional groups of gospel musicians sprang up. Perhaps the single most popular figure in the movement was J. D. Sumner of the Stamps Quartet. A native of Florida and a pioneer singer in gospel music, Sumner was called the world's deepest bass, a claim that may have been true. His voice was recorded down to contra C: three notes from the bottom of the piano keyboard! He helped to establish the Gospel Music Association with headquarters in Nashville, the capital of country music. By 1973 gospel music was estimated to be grossing about $50 million annually. One student of this mode called it "a truly ethnic music/714 The rise of country music after World War II was probably an unparalleled phenomenon in American cultural affairs. A sophisticated derivative of hillbilly music, country music during the war began to spread beyond the South in popularity. The song "You Are My Sunshine /7 by Jimmie Davis (soon to be elected governor of Louisiana) may have been the most frequently sung tune of the United States Army during the war. Troops arriving overseas after the initial American landings were astounded to hear it on the lips of French or Polynesian children. With the help of radio, television, and records, country music swept the entire nation in the postwar years. Earlier the national center of hillbilly music with its Grand Ole Opry, Nashville now became the major dispenser of country music; the expression "Nashville sound77 arose as a synonym of "country music/7 Singers such as Eddy Arnold of Tennessee, Ray Price of Texas, Johnny Cash of Arkansas, and Loretta Lynn of Kentucky were among the most popular entertainers of the era. The recording industry threatened to abandon Tin Pan Alley of New York in favor of Music Row in Nashville. By 1973 the seventy-four studios located there together made 90 percent of all country music records and brought in $200 million annually. Approximately 2,000 musicians performed in Nashville, and nine country music television shows originated in the city. A Country Music Association founded in 1958 became the Country Music Foundation six years later and erected a, Country Music Hall of Fame, a combination of 166 Music and the Visual Arts shrine and museum, which attracted 200,000 visitors a year. In 1973 it contained exhibits on twenty "immortals" of the hillbilly and country music genre.15 The sentimental lyrics and pleasing rhythms of country music suited the postwar mood. Despite its rural southern origins it appealed to multitudes of urban nonsoutherners also, because it affirmed traditional American virtues and values. It was a secular form of gospel music, upholding fundamentalist theological and moral views and lamenting instances of their decline. It expressed without inhibition the joys of love fulfilled, family unity, hard work, and clean living; it described with equal candor the pain of love unrequited, marital infidelity , divorce, crime, and poverty. It was the southern folk culture given aesthetic form: a lament against the mass culture, rootlessness, and alienation of modern urban America. The many southern achievements in the fine arts after World War II failed to give the region claims to national leadership except in those fields where it was already recognized: imaginative literature, the preservation of antebellum architecture, and folk drama and music. Of the 787 painters and sculptors selected for inclusion in the current Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists fewer than 50 were born in the South. Of almost 200 pictures in a Time-Life book on twentieth-century American paintings, none were by southerners. Most of the superior artists of southern birth practiced outside their native region and in styles not discernibly associated with the South. Virtually all the directors of southern symphony orchestras were nonsoutherners; the principal actors in the performances of the leading southern theaters were usually imported from the New York talent pool; the principal singers in most southern operatic productions were brought down from the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Perhaps an even greater weakness of the classical arts in the South was their failure to exercise a profound influence on the attitudes and behavior of society. Such a shortcoming was not new. Soon after World War II Francis Butler Simkins observed genteel Virginians discussing houses and livestock between dances by a distinguished ballet group on tour. His mind turned back to a pre-Civil War scene at the famous resort White Sulphur Springs, Virginia (now West Virginia). Bacon was the topic of a serious conversation Music and the Visual Arts 1.67 overheard here by an English writer. Believing the planters of the company to be as intellectual as Thomas Jefferson, he assumed their subject was Sir Francis Bacon. He discovered he was wrong; they were discussing pork.16 In the late 1960s a student of modern drama lamented the failure of the messages of the theater to "flow into the life of the [southern] community/'17 And Paul Green deplored the insistence of southerners upon military or other violent dramatic themes. The modern South was no more inclined to surrender its folkways to the fine arts than was the Old South to philosophy. ...