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227 LOG CABIN COMPOSER “Born in a log cabin on Lincoln’s birthday in Lincoln County, Oklahoma”—this is the inevitable and emblematic opening of any biography of Roy Harris. From the beginning of his career until the present, these phrases have encapsulated crucial aspects of the composer’s life: his humble but self-sufficient beginnings, his association with the rural West, and his almost magical ability to represent anything and everything genuinely American. This was indeed the stuff that myths were made of, and in Harris’s case, fact and fancy were quickly entangled in a journalistic and autobiographical web. Even before Harris returned from his Parisian studies in 1929, he was the subject of intense critical activity. The eagerness with which his efforts were received in print allowed characterizations about his life and works to crystallize rapidly. By 1935, Aaron Copland could accurately report that “a considerable legend has already grown up around his log-cabin origins and early life as a truck driver,” and in the same year, Time magazine could include under the heading “Log Cabin Composer” a concise restatement of virtually all the components of the Harris myth. John Tasker Howard looked back at the impressive expectations Harris faced: “When he first appeared on the scene, in the late ’twenties, he seemed the answer to all our prayers. Here was a genuine American, born in a log cabin in Oklahoma, like Lincoln, tall, lanky, rawboned, untouched by the artificial refinements of Europe or even the stultifying commercialism of cosmopolitan New York; a prophet from the Southwest who thought in terms of our raciest folktunes . Small wonder that we called him the white hope of American music.” 8 How Roy Harris Became Western 228 Roy Harris All the familiar ingredients are present here: a pinch of American history, a respect for geographic generalization, a healthy dose of physical masculinity, a dash of good humor, and a significant statement of racial identity with pronounced religious overtones. It would take a special kind of man to undertake this messianic mission: together, Harris and his critics made sure he fit the bill. They were successful during the 1930s. But in the end, the critical conviction required to sustain this mythmaking enterprise faltered. Already in 1941, Copland preferred to present the Harris myth in a more questioning light: “One has been conscious of a persistent attempt to relate the Harris personality to the open prairies and the wooly West—to picture him as a kind of boy-pioneer composer.” Copland repeated almost verbatim his earlier assertion about Harris’s legendary “log-cabin origins and his early life as a backwoodsman,” but he now felt compelled to add, “Actually, Harris grew up in a small town in the environs of Los Angeles.” Of all the individuals treated in this study, Harris was the most profoundly affected by his association with the American West. And, as Copland’s evocation of an urban Los Angeles suggests, the meanings of this association changed over time. Along with the prominent composers of his generation, Harris went questing for musical Americanness, and for many years he seemed uniquely equipped to tackle the task at hand. First and foremost, Harris truly was a Westerner. No matter how the fluid boundaries of the West were construed, Harris’s Oklahoman birth and Californian childhood placed him safely within its wide open spaces and gave him particularly easy access to certain wellsprings of American self-identification. During the decades after World War I, when the measure of artistic Americanness was still calculated as a function of one’s distance from European models, Harris had special symbolic connections to that mainstay of American exceptionalism, the western frontier. In addition, because his father was a farmer, Harris could and did invoke agrarian ideals. Harris thus had biographical access to two of this country’s most powerful national myths: the United States as a confederation founded upon self-sufficient agricultural enterprise and America as the triumphant realization of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Invocations of the American West are so common in Harris’s music, writings, and critical reception that even attributes not necessarily attached to his westernness took on a vaguely western glow, helping him turn potential professional liabilities into assets. Harris’s isolation from East Coast musical centers became symbolic of his distance from cosmopolitan and commercial forces. His late start in formal composition and his rocky relationship with Nadia Boulanger bolstered his subsequent claims to artistic independence. Furthermore, Harris’s...

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