Scoring The Vanishing American (1925) in the American West

On January 28, 1926, the Longmont Theatre in Longmont, Colorado, featured The Vanishing American, an unusual western meant to serve as an exposé of the U.S. government's treatment of American Indians in the Southwest. At the keyboard was Della Sullivan, a skilled musician who had accompanied moving pictures for nearly twenty years in theaters from Colorado to Arizona. To aid her score for The Vanishing American, Sullivan used a commercial cue sheet compiled by James C. Bradford, a New York music director who had worked primarily in Broadway theaters. She did not use Bradford's cue sheet in its original form, however. Instead, she combined his suggestions with music she had in her personal library, a sheet music collection that reflected not only national trends in "silent" film accompaniment but also the regional music culture of the Southwest and the Rocky Mountain West where she lived.¹ As a result, her score for The Vanishing American featured music that white westerners and some prominent Native American activists considered authentic Indian music in the 1920s, music that focused on the "noble savage" and largely avoided "savage" stereotypes.

Sullivan's accompaniment offers a case study for how theater musicians working outside of first-run theaters in major urban areas utilized cue sheets in their practice. Throughout the 1920s, commercial cue sheets played a large role in shaping approaches to silent film music. But scholars of both film music and silent film have noted that the existence of cue sheets does not guarantee that the suggested music was actually purchased and rehearsed: they were practical only when a music director had access to the pieces specified. Moreover, given that most film theaters did not employ a full orchestra, pianists and organists were far more likely to adapt cue sheets for their own needs.² This localized nature of silent film accompaniment invites research on how individual musicians modified cue sheet suggestions in their everyday practice and, in doing so, how they shaped reception of silent films in their communities.

Below, I first provide an overview of The Vanishing American, which is based on a Zane Grey novel of the same name, and outline available scoring options in the 1920s for films that featured indigenous characters. In Colorado and other parts of the West, Tsianina Redfeather and the short-lived American-Indian Film Company promoted the Indianist works of Charles Wakefield Cadman as authentic; his music would prove influential in the region and on Sullivan's score. To clarify Sullivan's general understanding of film accompaniment, I turn to her personal correspondence, which confirms her dedication to musical accompaniment carefully matched to moving pictures and sets the stage for her scoring of The Vanishing American. Finally, using Sullivan's annotations on Bradford's cue sheet and her music collection held at the American Music Research Center, I reconstruct parts of her score for the film, comparing her musical selections with those recommended by Bradford. Her choices deepened the emotional life of the Indian characters, tapping into the noble savage stereotype that motivates much of the film's narrative.

The Vanishing American

Zane Grey's The Vanishing American was a story conceived for film from its very inception. Two studio men associated with Paramount's Zane Grey Productions, Jesse Lasky and Lucien Hubbard, visited the western author in northern Arizona and requested a story from him set in the area. Grey wrote The Vanishing American in response, which was serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal starting in November 1922 and then was published as a novel in 1925 to coincide with the release of the film.³ For Grey, the story was meant to expose the harsh truths of reservation life and to critique the missionaries who sought to evangelize indigenous people. Grey explained in a letter to William H. Briggs, "I would want [religious people] to read what I wrote as the truth about missionaries and their wrongs to the Indian. If it offended them—no matter. If it aroused a controversy—well and good. But in any event it was my record of a certain phase...