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“Bury Me Beneath the Willow”: Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932–1935
- University Press of Mississippi
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3 “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932–1935 KRISTINE M. MCCUSKER “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” My heart is sad and I am lonely Thinking of the one I love I know that I shall never more see him till we meet in heaven above Then bury me beneath the willow.1 On WLS Chicago’s National Barn Dance, Linda Parker seemed to be the image of tradition embodied. She was born in Kentucky and, like many in her audience , had migrated to the industrial areas around Chicago. But Linda was special : her knowledge of old Southern ballads from Kentucky and “the plaintive note, so typical of mountain music,” as WLS’s 1934 Family Album noted, seemed to be tradition in all its glory. She had learned to sing “just as her mother and her grandmother sang, artlessly, but from the heart,” and her repertoire included traditional old ballads and tunes such as “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight,” and her signature song, “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” Listeners latched onto her ability to sing traditional tunes and, perhaps, soothe their fears of living in the present. As one listener wrote: There is something poignantly appealing about Linda’s songs . . . something that takes us away from the cares of mundane strife and the daily chores of the big city . . . something that sweeps the smoke and the heat, Originally published in Southern Folklore (1999), v. 56, no. 3. 4 Kristine M. McCusker or intense cold away. . . . the worries and the cares of the day [disappear] when Linda begins to sing her songs in her own sweet, inimitable way.2 When Parker died young from peritonitis in August 1935 (she was twentythree ), the National Barn Dance cast and its audience were devastated. One listener wrote to Stand By!, WLS’s fan magazine, “It is with deep regret and sorrow that I write this letter concerning that beautiful little sunbonnet girl, Linda Parker, my favorite feminine performer.” Her manager, John Lair, told audiences that her pallbearers were her backup band, the Cumberland Ridge Runners and that, in a fitting tribute, she had been buried beneath a willow, which wept continuously over her early death.3 Linda Parker was clearly a moral, middle-class woman, but Jeanne Muenich, the woman who performed as Parker, does not seem to have been as wholesome or as virtuous as Parker was. It has been difficult to reconstruct Jeanne Muenich’s life or her experiences portraying Parker because she played the character so well. What is clear is that she was born in Indiana, not Kentucky, may have been an illegitimate child, may have been a juvenile delinquent , and was probably singing in nightclubs when Lair discovered her. And, most grievously, a weeping willow does not stand guard over her gravestone.4 The way that Jeanne Muenich and her manager, John Lair, outlined Parker and the ways the audience reacted to her suggest that there are significant problems with country music historians’ most cherished assumption: that Southern, commercial music was (and is) solely the language of workingclass men and women.5 In the heyday of the barn dance, an urban-based radio genre that broadcast constructed images of a rural past nationwide, characters and music attracted a much broader audience than a strictly working-class constituency. Stage performances that combined images and metaphors referring to both middle- and working-class experiences enticed a broad section of Americans to tune in from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. Indeed, if one especially examines the female images such as Linda Parker, one finds a distinctly middle-class presence on stage that fed into a large middle-class audience for the genre. It is crucial to understand the class differences on barn dance stages since it, first, fostered the growth of a mass audience, and second, hid the tensions implicit in unconventional women such as Jeanne Muenich, rewriting their [54.173.214.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:39 GMT) 5 Linda Parker and Tradition on National Barn Dance lives to be media’s idealized women such as Linda Parker. The barn dance genre is important to this discussion because broadcasters linked their construction of a traditional Southern past inextricably to women. They constructed a nostalgic, romanticized image of the Appalachian South as a place where tradition stood intact. At the center of that nostalgic image were women who performed as the sentimental mother (as Linda Parker did...