...that Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man, stepped off that Rock Island passenger train into the town of River City, Iowa the day before the Fourth of July. Or so the story of the 1957 Broadway musical has it. Meredith Wilson's story and the music he wrote for it is one of the great works of American culture. Already a talented musician and composer, Wilson came to greater prominence with what is his best known work. It has been restaged on Broadway in the years since and is a perennial favorite of American Theater. The 1962 Warner Brothers film version of the show has only enhanced its stature. According to the Wikipedia entry, the film was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
It qualifies on all three criteria in my book. Wilson did more than write a show with an engaging story line and some great music. He painted a picture of America that still has lots to show us about ourselves today. For progressives trying to get traction in the struggle for what vision of America is going to prevail, the show offers a lot of food for thought. Follow me past the Orange Omnilepticon, and I'll elucidate.
For purposes of this diary I'm going to refer mainly to the film version, specifically the special edition DVD with the introduction by Shirley Jones and reminiscences from many other members of the cast in a 30 minute mini-documentary. I actually saw the original Broadway show in a matinee in New York City, but my recollections are somewhat dimmed by time. (I remember being impressed by the fact that they had a real horse pull the Wells Fargo wagon on stage.)
Getting picked up by Hollywood for a film is sometimes the worst possible thing that can happen to a Broadway musical - cast changes, story changes, etc. The Music Man was unusually fortunate in that Robert Preston was retained for the role he'd created as Harold Hill; Morton DaCosta was brought in to direct and produce the film as he'd done with the play on Broadway. This made the translation from stage to film unusually faithful. Filmed on sound stages and the back lot at Warner Brothers, the story further benefitted from the greater possibilities for staging scenes. (Much of the back lot survives today.)
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the story of the show. The short version is, a salesman comes to town with the scam of getting them all to buy into setting up a boys band, making promises he can't keep since he's not really a professor of music, and getting out of town with their money before they realize they've been swindled. The show is all about how he cons the townspeople while trying to seduce the one person with enough musical knowledge to expose him, the town librarian.
Wikipedia's entry about the Broadway version has a good synopsis, as does the entry about the film version. (Compare casts while you're at it.) It's a clever romantic comedy at the most superficial level, with many memorable songs, spectacular dance numbers, and glorious visuals. The most famous is 76 Trombones - but it was the cover version the Beatles did of Till There Was You that really earned the big royalties for Wilson. But there's quite a bit more going on if you pay attention to details. Meredith Wilson seems to have been a pretty keen-eyed observer of his times, and those details still speak to us today - if you look.
Looking Back at 1912
Let's look at what America was like in 1912. The Civil War would still have been living memory to some folks. The Spanish-American War of 1898 had made America into an expansionist power with an empire; we'd begun to make an impression on the global stage. (It was also a war in which certain press moguls did more than a little rabble rousing to get the war rolling. Seem familiar?) In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet of the U.S. Navy on a tour round the world to show off our military might.
Also in America, bank panics were a recurring feature of the times, eventually leading to the Great Depression. The 19th Amendment would not give women the vote until 1920. (The U.S. would ban alcohol in the same year - prohibition.) Labor unrest was peaking as the country became more and more industrialized. The Federal Income Tax 16th Amendment proposed in 1909 would finally be ratified in 1913. On February 14, 1912, Arizona became the 48th state.
Technology was advancing relentlessly. The light bulb had been invented and the electrification of America was under way. Photography had been around for a while - the Brownie Camera would make Kodak an industrial giant. Besides the light bulb, Edison had also found time to turn out phonographs and moving pictures. Marconi's experiments with radio would lead to the commercial broadcasting industry. Bell's telephone was tying the country together. The net of steel rails across the country was at its peak - the Model T Ford was starting to put the horse and carriage on the run - the Wright Brothers had launched the air age.
In short, the people of the times were undergoing big changes. The foundations of where we are today as a country and a people were being laid down - we're still seeing the consequences. Meredith Wilson was born in 1902; the fictional Town of River City, Iowa in 1912 is drawn from the memories of a boy who grew up in Mason City, studied music in NYC, played with John Phillip Sousa and the NY Philharmonic, moved to Hollywood, and had a long career as a composer and performer. In short, he was an educated, well-traveled man with a lot of worldly experience for perspective. If you look at the Music Man and pay attention to the details, you'll find a lot of wry commentary on the America he knew. Let me pull up some examples.
Welcome to the Consumer Society
The opening number that sets up the story takes place aboard a passenger train headed for Iowa, filled with traveling salesmen. They're complaining about their livelihoods and how changes in the country are affecting their jobs. (It's also a brilliant piece of music that integrates speech with the sounds of a steam train.) I'm going to pull up a few lyrics (slightly different between Broadway and Hollywood.) Given the recurring financial panics of the time, it's not surprising they start out complaining that "Credit is no good for a traveling salesman."
Cash for the merchandise
Cash for the buttonhooks
Cash for the cotton goods
Cash for the hard goods
Cash for the fancy goods
Cash for the soft goods
Cash for the noggins - And the pickins - And the frickins
Cash for the hogshead - cask - And demijohn
Cash for the crackers - And the pickles - And the flypaper
If that weren't enough, the small stores they count on to market their wares are under a new kind of competitive pressure.
Why it's the Model T Ford
Made the trouble
Made the people wanna go
Wanna get, wanna get
Wanna get up and go
Seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, Fourteen, twenty-two,
Twenty-three miles
To the county seat
Yes sir, yes sir
Who's gonna patronize
A little bitty two by four
Kinda store anymore?
Youtube video
here.
In one version of the number, there's a reference to the Uneeda Biscuit and how it's killing off the traditional cracker barrel. It's an indication of the rise of national brands with mass marketing and packaging for individual consumers, a change we're still living with today.
Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble,
Uneeda Uneeda,
put the crackers in a package, in a package,
the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package,
made the cracker barrel
obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!
Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail
pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the
approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.
No it didn't, no it didn't but you gotta know the
territory.
Gone, gone
Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn,
Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan
Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce.
Later in the show is the rousing song about
the Wells Fargo Wagon - the people of River City, thanks to railroads, telegraphs, etc. are no longer limited to what goods can be grown or made in their locale. They now have a much wider market to draw from.
Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' down the street
Oh please let it be for me
Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' down the street
I wish, I wish I knew what it could be
I got a box of maple sugar on my birthday
In March I got a gray mackinaw
And once I got some grapefruit from Tampa
Montgomery Ward sent me a bathtub and a crosscut saw
Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' now
Is it a prepaid surprise or C.O.D.?
- - - - - - - -
I got some salmon from Seattle last September
And I expect a new rockin' chair
I hope I get my raisins from Fresno
The D.A.R. have sent a cannon for the courthouse square
Youtube video
here. It kind of puts a new perspective on the problems of coping with Big Box Stores versus local merchants, or Brick & Mortar businesses versus the Internet, doesn't it? It's from a time when Wells Fargo was something besides
an evil bank.
Sex, Sexism, Racism, Xenophobia and the Guardians of Morality
Wilson has some absolutely wicked riffs on the whole man-woman moral values thing. Not that we can laugh too hard - we're still struggling with those issues today. The character of Marian Paroo is a fascinating look at how life for a woman in 1912 could be constrained and frustrating. No vote for one thing - still a second class citizen. And it starts early; the show is all about a boys band - no girls need apply, unless they can twirl a baton.
For Marian Paroo it's even harder. The town librarian, she's educated and a primary breadwinner for the household of her widowed mother and younger brother (a very young Ron Howard!) at a time when there were few respectable job openings for women that paid any decent kind of money. (No Social Security survivors benefits; no food stamps or other assistance.) She's bright, perhaps too bright. While she has local 'suitors', their brief description is of men trying for a casual grope in the stacks. No one seems to be interested in her for herself or her abilities. In the song Piano Lesson/If You Don't Mind My Saying So she laments how little respect she seems to get, and her mother tells her the problem: without a man, she has no status.
Mrs. Paroo
There you go again with the same old comment
About the low mentality of River City people
And takin' it all too much to heart
Marian
Now, Mama
As long as the Madison Public Library was entrusted
to me for the purpose of improving River City's
cultural level, I can't help my concern that the
ladies of River City keep ignoring all my council and advice
Mrs. Paroo
But darlin':
When a woman's got a husband and you've got none
Why should she take advice for you?
Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare and
All them other high-falutin' Greeks?
She does get a chance to lay out what she wants in the song
My White Knight that was replaced by
Being In Love for the film version.
All I want is a plain man
All I want is a modest man
A quiet man, a gentle man
A straight forward and honest man
To sit with me in a cottage somewhere in the state of Iowa.
And I would like him to be more interested in me than he is in himself.
And more interested in us... than in me.
And if occasion'ly he'd ponder what makes
Shakespeare and Beethoven great,
Him I could love 'til I die. Him I could love 'til I die.
My white knight, not a lancelot, nor an angel with wings.
Just someone to love me, who is not ashamed of a few nice things.
My white knight, let me walk with him where others ride by;
Walk and love him 'til I die, 'til I die.
The 'respectable' women of the town have suspicions about the reason the late "Miser Madison" made her librarian. (Again with the sly humor - the man they call a miser left the town the library, the gymnasium, the hospital, the town park... Apparently that was all showing off to display his wealth, or so the small-minded would have it trying to explain his generosity.) They detail their complaints in
Pick a Little, Talk a Little.
Eulalie
Stop! I'll tell.
She made brazen overtures to a man who never had a friend
in this town till she came here.
Alma
Oh, yes
That woman made brazen overtures
With a gilt-edge guarantee
She had a golden glint in her eye
And a silver voice with a counterfeit ring
Just melt her down and you'll reveal
A lump of lead as cold as steel
Here!, where a woman's heart should be!
Eulalie, Alma, Maud, Ethel, Mrs Squires
He left River City the Library building
But he left all the books to her
Alma
Chaucer!
Ethel
Rabelais!
Eulalie
Balzac!
As it happens (as Marian later explains) Madison was a friend of her father's, who wanted to ensure the family would have some income after her father died. But, this sets up the misapprehension by Harold Hill about the woman who has been identified as the one person who might see through his schemes. He pursues Marian under the impression that she's
The Sadder But Wiser Girl. He uses the wrong set of tactics as a result. Much hilarity and misunderstanding ensues - also behavior that would be called stalking today.
No wide-eyed, eager, wholesome, innocent Sunday-school teacher for me
That kinda girl spins webs no spider ever...
Listen boy...
A girl who trades on all that purity
Merely wants to trade my independence for her security
The only affirmative she will file
refers to marching down the aisle
No golden, glorious, gleaming pristine goddess, no sir!
for no Diana do I play faun, I can tell you that right now
I snarl, I hiss, how can ignorance be compared to bliss?
I spark, I fizz, for the lady who knows what time it is
I cheer, I rave, for the virtue I'm too late to save
The sadder but wiser girl for me
The song
Shipoopi (Buddy Hackett's big song and dance number in the movie!!!) offers a somewhat more practical guide to navigating the treacherous waters of romance.
Marcellus
Well, a woman who'll kiss on the very first date
Is usually a hussy
And a woman who'll kiss on the second time out
Is anything but fussy
But a woman who'll wait till the third time around
Head in the clouds - feet on the ground
She's the girl you're glad you found
She's your Shipoopi!
Shipoopi! Shipoopi, Shipoopi
Boys
The girl who's hard to get!
Marcellus
Shipoopi. Shipoopi, Shipoopi
Girls
But you can win her yet.
There's a romantic subplot that brings in xenophobia as an issue. The Mayor's daughter has been seen in the company of one Tommy Djilas. The problem is, he's a young man from the wrong side of town, with ancestors from the wrong part of Europe. It shows the tensions around the hordes of immigrants coming into the country in that era; the local sheriff for example is expected to keep the young hooligans in line. As it happens, Djilas is a bright young lad with the talent and drive to become bandleader for Hill when given the chance - a mini morality play in itself.
One more thing. If there's any African Americans in River City, they're not to be seen anywhere.
Catapulting the Propaganda, Moving the Masses
If there is one problem in American politics that never changes, it's how to get enough people to line up on one side of an issue to get anything done. (Doesn't matter if it's a good thing or a bad thing - it's still a problem for those who want change.) One of the early numbers in the show is all about the townspeople of River City and their ability to be persuaded. Not for nothing did Wilson call it Iowa Stubborn.
There's an Iowa kind of special
Chip-on-the-shoulder attitude
We've never been without
That we recall.
We can be cold as a falling
Thermometer in December
If you ask about our weather in July
And we're so By-God stubborn
We can stand touchin' noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye.
But what the heck, you're welcome
Join us at the picnic,
You can have your fill
Of all the food you bring yourself.
You really ought to give Iowa a try.
(Provided you are contrary.)
Despite the rather close-minded, stingy attitudes on display here, there's also some redeeming character underneath it all - if you can tap it.
But...
We'll give you our shirt
And a back to go with it
If your crops should happen to die
So what the heck, you're welcome
Glad to have you with us
Even though we may not ever mention it again
You really ought to give Iowa a try.
Here's a link to
the Youtube clip of the number. The encounters with the townsfolk on the way in from the station are priceless - and the
Grant Wood American Gothic reference at about 3:15 in the clip is just too funny.
Professor Harold Hill needs to find a way to get around those set in stone attitudes and certainties if he's going to get them all to buy into the idea of a boys band. How he does it is a classic demonstration of using fear and anger to motivate people, while short-circuiting their critical faculties. All he needs is a target, and consultation with his local ally turns up the one new thing in town - the pool table.
Conventional wisdom hasn't solidified around it yet; it's new and unknown. It's possible to paint it into a threat to the very foundation of the River City way of life with the right framing. (Remind you of a certain country with its first ever black president?) Hill does it by painting a vivid picture in the song Ya Got Trouble that recontextualizes ordinary things in the town and gives them a sinister import: (Captain Billy's Whizbang! Words like Swell - and So's your old man!) He makes it a threat to the children and conventional morality with pop culture references too.
Libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime
Shameless music that'll grab your son, your daughter
into the arms of a jungle animal instinct- massteria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground, trouble!
Just as important, he throws in some 'dog whistle' sound bites to show he's on the same page as the rest of them, the better to suck them in.
Why, sure, I'm a billiard player
Certainly mighty proud to say,
I'm always mighty proud to say it
I consider the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden
Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye
'Jever take and try to give an iron clad leave
to yourself from a three-rail billiard shot?
But just as I say it takes judgement, brains and
maturity to score in a balk-line game
I say that any boob can take and shove a ball in a pocket
And I call that sloth,
the first big step on the road to the depths of degreda-
I say, first- medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle
I'm embedding the Youtube video for this song because it's too good a demonstration of how this is done to miss. While you're watching it, you might want to compare it to FOX or conservative talk radio. You can see/hear the same techniques at work. (The aspect ratio is off, but the sound quality is good.)
Another technique Hill uses is distraction; he gets people focused on other things so they don't see what's happening right under their noses. A running gag in the show is the efforts of the town's School Board to corner Hill and get him to show them his credentials. Hill has discovered they just happen to be a natural barbershop quartet (played by the Buffalo Bills) and he keeps suckering them into singing four part harmony so they forget all about him. It's even funnier because before he gets them singing, they're constantly at each other's throats, arguing. It's not so funny in real life when news reporting is turned into a celebrity gossip fest or a kerfuffle about some meaningless issue. (Seen any outrage about Libor over here lately?)
The counterpoint of Hill's efforts to get the town mobilized behind his agenda is to hit them with a powerful vision that promises to solve all the problems he's gotten them agitated about. He uses disruption at a town meeting (Tea party, anyone?) to take control of the agenda and drag everyone into his vision, sweeping them away with the vivid picture he paints. The song is the classic 76 trombones Despite there being no actual band at that point in the story, Hill gets the town on its feet in a big dance number where they all buy into his vision. (Youtube video from the recent broadway revival. The 62 film version is even more elaborate, but I haven't been able to find that version on the web.)
Seventy Six Trombones has taken on a life of its own over the years. It's not only a sales pitch, it's a tribute to a certain era in the musical life of America and a great piece of music. And, for the musically discerning, Wilson did a really clever trick by using the same basic melody with just a few changes in rhythm for one of the other songs in the show, Good Night My Someone. It allows him to stage a duet between Hill and Paroo where they each start with their own song while alternating verses, and then switch. It mirrors what's happening between them.
Points to Ponder
It may be a stretch to draw too many lessons from The Music Man - but there things worth thinking about. On one level, the show is about the power of having vision - both negative and positive - to engage people at an emotional level to motivate them. It's about more than facts. Paroo has a whole library of books at her disposal, yet she's had little luck changing the attitudes of the town.
Hill arrives in River City just hoping to sell a boys band to the town and get away with their money before they realize it's a scam. Yet he too is vulnerable to the vision - at one point he confesses "I always think there's a band." Paroo, at first determined to expose Hill, becomes his ally when she realizes his film-flammery is actually accomplishing something, opening the dour townsfolk to a wider world than they'd been willing to consider possible. She's been able to resist his flattery, but she can't ignore his effect on the town - or that he seems to be the only man around who begins to appreciate her.
For Hill, his cynicism is undercut by his own fantasies about really believing in a band. Add to that his fatal attraction to Paroo, who has come to believe in him despite knowing full well what he's really been up to, and he finds all of his defenses coming down which leaves him vulnerable and open to redemption. The greater redemption though comes when the town hears their children take those first struggling notes as a band, and they too realize a wider, better world is possible than they had imagined before Hill came along with that vision.
And there is this. Whatever one may believe about music and the power of a vision to transform lives, music is what took a young boy from an Iowa city to international acclaim, and gifted us with a portrait of ourselves that still has the power to entertain and inform. Here's the big finish to the movie for your entertainment.
Enjoy!