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  • Funeral Music and the Transformation of Southern Musical and Religious Cultures, 1935-1945
  • Kristine M. McCusker (bio)

William Leonard Bivens was a thirty-year-old foreman at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Memphis when he suffered a heart attack and died in June 1944. Bivens left a wife and son who chose the National Funeral Home, a funeral home for whites, to provide the funeral service and then bury him. On its ledger, the funeral home listed the music to be played. During the service, the organist was to play two hymns, "Sunrise Tomorrow" and "God Will Take Care of Thee." The prelude was to be "Old Rugged Cross," a Broadman Hymnal (Southern Baptist) standard made famous in the early twentieth century by evangelist Billy Sunday, and the postlude was Brahms's "Lullaby."1

The musical program performed at Bivens's funeral was emblematic of fundamental changes in Southern funeral music: from 1935 (the beginning of the funeral home's records) to about 1943, customers who buried their kin from the National Funeral Home requested rural hymns, songs such as "Old Rugged Cross" and "Sunrise Tomorrow."2 But in 1943, a shift began that became far more pronounced in 1944 when the funeral home's organists began to perform western art music such as Brahms's "Lullaby," Chopin's famous death march from his Piano Sonata no. 2, and Massenet's "Meditation" from Thais. Intriguingly, organists did not stop performing "Old Rugged Cross"; instead, they mixed European music from the cultivated [End Page 426] tradition together with Southern funeral hymnody to sanctify the burials of the deceased. Not every funeral featured this mix, but the pattern was common enough to indicate a significant change in funeral music specifically and in Southern musical and religious cultures in general.

This shift is a startling one, given the relative lack of classical music venues in the South. One could find a fiddler or a guitarist on any street corner, at least according to legend and stereotype, but a symphony orchestra playing nineteenth-century art music near that corner seemed wildly improbable.3 Moreover, the more rural South was less likely to hear the traveling European musicians who exposed Northern fans to classical music in the late nineteenth century.4 Although New Orleans claimed the first permanent opera company in the United States in the 1830s and an English traveling opera company regaled Southern audiences of all classes in Louisville, New Orleans, Mobile, and Richmond in 1855, the post-Civil War South did not emerge from its postwar depression until well into the 1890s.5 Wary of that depression, Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein played eight cities in Illinois (as well as multiple other Northern cities) during his 1872-73 American tour, but only performed in four Southern cities: Nashville, Memphis, Mobile, and New Orleans. The only Southern city German pianist Hans von Bülow visited during his 1875-76 national tour was New Orleans.6

Not only did virtuosos typically bypass the South, but so too did broader distinctions between elite highbrow and working-class lowbrow art.7 Symphonic music and operas helped distinguish Northern middle-class and elite whites from working-class immigrants, distinctions that tended to bypass the South until the twentieth century. Cultural hierarchies that used classical music to distinguish the elite did arrive with Southern industrialization by the twentieth century, but even as they embraced them, Southerners refused to give up their hymn-singing traditions.8 Cultural hierarchies were eagerly embraced by some because the racial and class assumptions implicit in them were quite useful to an emergent white middle class seeking to claim status, or place in Southern vernacular, in a racially-segregated Southern society. They were not hillbillies who listened to the latest barn dance or sharecroppers who listened to the Delta blues. They listened to Brahms and "Old Rugged Cross," and their funerals were the outcome of these changes, reaffirming the deceased's family's status at a moment when death potentially could challenge that status because a principal income earner had died or the expense of a funeral might bring financial distress to a family.

At the cutting edge of this general shift were the...

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