A Sage Looks at Swing

Last week Emporia, Kans. held a five-day Fiestaval to dedicate its new $613.000 Civic Auditorium. Jiving, jittering climax of the Fiestaval was a dance, to music supplied (at $1,100) by dapper Duke Ellington, greatest of black swing-sters, and his band. The Sage of Emporia, wise old William Allen White, watched the cavortings, went home and wrote a garrulous, kindly-shrewd editorial for his Emporia Gazette. Excerpts:

"Fifty-five years ago and more, the writer hereof earned his first dollar playing for dances in Butler county, a young boy in his middle teens. We make no boasts but our outfit, consisting of a blind fiddler, a competent cornetist and deponent at the cabinet organ or piano, as the case happened to be--used to go out in the country to farm dances. . . . Mostly we played square dances, though we had two or three waltzes--'The First Kiss Waltz,' 'The Cornflower Waltz,' 'The Skaters' and 'Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?' There wasn't a note in the lot. We all played by ear. . . .

"In those prehistoric days, dance music was tuneful, something you could whistle.

. . . And with a buxom armful of gently protesting but finally surrendering cornfed, Walnut Valley gal in your arms, to the slow and formal threnody of the waltz, a fellow kind of felt he was of some importance. . . . The tunes tangled in one's dreams for days; and the pressure of a warm hand--and even if it was a little sweaty and sticky it was young and ardent --might easily linger through life. . . .

"Now these details of the dance romantic ... were as different from the dance we saw last night and the music was as different from that which squawked and shrieked and roared and bellowed in syncopated savagery, as if the two--the music and the dance of the old days--had been threaded and heard upon another planet. Moreover --and here we take a long deep breath before saying it--if that noise last night in the Civic Auditorium ... is music, then the subscriber hereto is a trapeze performer. The point is, if you wish to know, that dance music today is merely syncopated, blood raw emotion, without harmony, without consistent rhythm, and with no more tune than the yearnful bellowing of a lonely yearning and romantic cow in the pastures or the raucous staccatic meditation of a bulldog barking in a barrel. . . .

"But it [the jitterbugging] was the same old showoff that mating animals have used far down the zoological line through the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air and the lightning bugs on a summer evening. At bottom it is deep calling unto the deep to keep the life stream flowing! How could it all be less than beautiful--this vast primeval panorama that flowed so slowly around the hall with its kaleidoscope of ever mingling colors and forms? . . . How could the slow, moving, billowy, syrupy music of the 'eighties fit into this new world picture? Youth had to construct its own rowdy modern music. ... So let Duke Ellington and his black boys blare and bleat and bawl with their saxophones and bull fiddles and muted trumpets syncopating the call of the wild. And it is all right. But it's the same old inner urge, the more we change the less we change."

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