The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age

Chapter Eight: Interlude: The Wizard and The Grand Lady

- 138 - - Chapter Eight 0 INTERLUDE The Wizard and The Grand Lady S ince the 1960s popular guitar players have regularly become cultural icons, with musicians such as Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton achieving the status of pop music divinities. As seen in chapter 4, the BMG movement also had its share of acclaimed guitarists, some of whom achieved local and regional distinction, while others including Johnson Bane, Jennie Durkee, and C. W. F. Jansen became national figures. None, however, garnered the notoriety heaped on Vahdah Olcott-Bickford and William Foden as performers , teachers, composer/arrangers, historians, and musical authorities. And while their acclaim seems miniscule when compared to that given later pop figures, these two players—The Grand Lady of the Guitar and The Wizard of the Guitar—dominated America’s guitar community from the end of the nineteenth century until they were squeezed out in the late 1920s by pop and jazz guitarists on the one hand and European classical players on the other. Their stories offer insights into the attitudes and values of America’s guitar community in the important transitional period between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the late 1920s. Born in St. Louis, William Foden (1860–1947) came to music as a young child, playing first harmonica, then classical accordion, hurdy-gurdy, and drum. At age seven, he began formal studies of the violin, turning to the guitar in his teens under the tutelage of William O. Bateman (1825–1883), a local attorney and skilled amateur player. Foden’s earliest performing activities focused on ensemble work; by his mid-teens he was directing a professional ensemble that played parties and other entertainments in the St. Louis area. In columns for Crescendo magazine thirty years later, he described some of his early work as a mandolinist as well as the evolution of his Beethoven Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra from an impromptu quartet of two mandolins, guitar, and harp organized in 1887. Reflecting his growing reputation, in the 1890s the ensemble INTERLUDE: THE WIZARD AND THE GRAND LADY - 139 became the Foden Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra. Foden remained actively involved in the group until 1904 and it continued performing until August 1910. Anticipating the late-twentieth-century popularity of ensembles comprised of guitars only, Foden also created a short-lived guitar quintet whose members included his student George C. Krick as well as Foden himself. Early in his career as a guitarist (Foden offered no specific dates), he designed and commissioned a six-string bass guitar, tuned a sixth below the standard instrument , which he used in ensemble performances.1 Like most BMG professionals of the day, Foden played banjo and mandolin as well as guitar, achieving considerable skill on all three. Also like other music professionals, Foden made his living primarily as a teacher. He and his brother followed the music business model so popular in the BMG movement, opening a retail store in the late 1880s. Its demands on his time took Foden from his teaching activities and the two brothers parted ways in 1890. Foden opened his own store shortly thereafter, but once again abandoned the retail business to concentrate on teaching and performing. Foden’s name first surfaced in BMG journals in the mid-1880s and appeared regularly through the 1890s. Despite his focus on teaching (and later on composing and publishing), Foden’s reputation rested on his performance skills. From the beginning he was revered with a mythic awe: in an early BMG notice, several guitar enthusiasts described how they had traveled from Chicago to St. Louis for a private audience, enthusing about his overwhelming William Foden from his Grand Method of 1921. (courtesy of Gaylord Music Library, Washington University in St. Louis) INTERLUDE: THE WIZARD AND THE GRAND LADY - 140 skills with the guitar. In a poem cited in chapter 6, Ole Bull, Paganini, and Rubenstein represent their instruments while Foden, described as an “unrivalled star,” is the only guitarist mentioned. Although an aversion to travel limited his public appearances to the Midwest, through the 1890s he was consistently rumored to be America’s premiere guitarist.2 Foden’s first concert appearance outside the Midwest, a watershed event for the classical guitar in America, took place in 1904, when Clarence Partee brought him from St. Louis to New York’s Carnegie Hall for the convention concert of the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists and Guitarists. Partee, a...