by Samuel Chalupka
In February 1903, the US Copyright Office in St. Louis received this letter:
Dear Sir,
please find enclosed with this letter one dollar and application for coppyright [sic]. The title of the musical composition is in type writing in the blanck [sic] space on the application.
Yours truly, Scott Joplin (Berlin 119)
The application itself has been lost, as has been all the sheet music, making this accompanying letter one of the few traces left after Joplin’s first opera, A Guest of Honor. Very little information has been uncovered about this piece, but its theme has been established as the celebration of African-American achievement: A Guest of Honor was conceived as a fictionalized reconstruction of Booker T. Washington’s visit to the White House in 1901. In a fashion similar to the songs of slaves, the opera counts the blessings of a community that has endured numerous hardships over the course of its history. A Guest of Honor was not composed by an enslaved person, but it can be viewed as a continuation of the tradition of the so-called Sorrow Songs: by accentuating accomplishments, it augurs a better future for the black community.
The term Sorrow Songs was coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in one of his seminal works, The Souls of Black Folk. In the essay he dedicated to this concept, he not only defines it, but also provides examples and analyzes the circumstances in which they came to exist and how they have traveled in time. According to Du Bois, “[t]hey are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways” (Du Bois 169). Sorrow Songs were a means of mediation between the grim reality of living the life of a slave and the intrinsic human longing for purpose and resolution. Over time, these melodies assumed an almost sacred status among the people who sang them, and when the director of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers choir George White suggested they add them into their repertoire, there was hesitation to expose them to the general public. Nevertheless, “the greatest gift of the Negro people” (168) eventually found its way to the world, as the spirituals rang all across the US and beyond, making their way as far as South Africa.
Let us now go to St. Louis, which is where home was for Joplin and where he most likely composed the opera. The city is infamous for its history of racial tensions and the situation was no different at the beginning of the twentieth century, with “Deep South-style discriminatory cultural institutions” still in place long after the end of the Civil War (Bourgois 108). Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to Missouri slaves, rendering the blacks powerless not only in the democratic process, but also in the economic one, as they faced abject poverty and were unable to find jobs that would provide them with resources beyond basic sustenance. Additionally, St. Louis was one of the main destinations of both black and white immigrants who fled the ruins of the post-Civil War Deep South; from 1860 to 1900, the population of the city almost quadrupled, with the black population being “surpassed in absolute number only by those in New York and Baltimore” (108). The already cutthroat state of the economic environment was therefore further exacerbated by increased demand, and that even in the entertainment field, as it is said that Joplin himself sometimes struggled to find a free piano to play (Johnson 198). These ramifications of the Deep South exodus and the widespread rancor against black people often resulted in open conflict, with the 1917 East St. Louis Massacre being one of the bloodiest riots in the history of the United States.
In these hostile circumstances, Joplin was working on something that seemed to be oxymoronic in nature, but nevertheless an attempt to reconcile the factions – a ragtime opera. Although the idea was dismissed even by black critics (Berlin 116), sources indicate that Joplin was prepared to transcend the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, which he pioneered and popularized in the US, to more ambitious endeavors, as he longed for “more arduous work” (122). The contradictory nature of the effort, however, was working against him: while “most of Joplin’s compositions combined ‘black’ and ‘white’ idioms” (Gross 395), emphasizing the “black” in this duality was simply going a step too far; white music with black elements was perfectly acceptable, but not vice versa. It was a problem of ideology, and Paul Gilroy’s analysis of black music against the backdrop of modernity helps illuminate why A Guest of Honor failed to gather ground. Gilroy recognizes that music, among other means of artistic expression, is “inescapably both inside and outside the dubious protection modernity offers” and that it “can be examined in relation to modern forms, themes, and ideas but carries its own distinct critique of modernity” (Gilroy 58). Simply put, “opera” was representative of modernity, “ragtime” and the theme of the piece were the critique. A Guest of Honor celebrated black achievement, which was a theme largely excluded from the self-aggrandizing narrative of modernity. If anything, it was the exploitation of the black community that modernity mandated; the rugged rationalism of Western thinking justified slavery, with the contentment of the majority being put above the fundamental rights of the minority. A Guest of Honor was therefore alien, something unfathomable and far-removed from the reality of the white population, which in turn had very little interest in the opera and its preservation.
Why did Joplin’s other opera Treemonisha succeed, then? It is no less an inquiry into black identity and its dynamics with the majority culture: the story revolves around a black community and the motifs also indicate a hopeful outlook for African-Americans. The difference lies in what problems the later opera presents and how it aims to resolve them. In Treemonisha, the paramount issue is lack of reason: the educated young black girl Treemonisha stands in stark contrast to the community plagued by charlatanism she finds herself part of. She typifies the black leader, “the talented tenth,” that will finally deliver the African-Americans from the limbo of ignorance to the normative values of modernist society. Everyone benefits – the blacks are endowed with the gift of ratio and are thus able to be integrated into the modernist framework which has always favored expansion. Treemonisha is not ragtime musically (Gross 399) nor ideologically; it pandered to the white audience by giving in to its paternalist tendencies towards the communities that were (and often still are) considered less civilized by the standards of Western thinking. This is by no means a criticism of Joplin – Treemonisha might not have enjoyed the plaudits it did if it had not been compliant to some degree – but it certainly sheds light on the potential explanations of the dismissal of A Guest of Honor. Joplin’s passion project of marrying his hallmark style with high modernist art could have failed because of his propensity for the former and the lack of understanding of the implications of the latter: the desire to improve was not sufficient; there also was a prescribed standard according to which the improvements were to be made.
Much like A Guest of Honor, Sorrow Songs were not concerned with the superimposed rules of the establishment; they were the expressions of a tormented people that looked for solace in the narrow margins that slave life allowed. The lyrics of one of the most famous African-American spirituals “Down by the Riverside” manifests hope for the future while surrounded by desperation: “Gonna lay down my burden, / down by the riverside, […] / I ain’t gonna study war no more.” There is no indication of a specific goal or a method; the slave simply envisions that there will come a day when discrimination and violence will not be commonplace and they will find unconditional peace. A plethora of other Sorrow Songs follow the same pattern of modest pleas: there are no ulterior motives or elaborate schemes, only the wish to be allowed to exist without ubiquitous fear. Based on the scant information available, A Guest of Honor was equally simple in its premise, as it attempted to immortalize a landmark event of joy for the community. As mentioned above, however, Joplin strived for much more with A Guest of Honor formally, which was most likely the crux of the opera’s unfortunate fate: his attempt to put black culture on the pedestal occupied by modernist art was misunderstood and jettisoned. Failing to garner any support and encountering several hindrances during the course of its tour, such as the box office tickets being stolen, Joplin completely abandoned the project and never returned to it – to the extent that he publicly claimed Treemonisha ashis first opera. It met the same end as many of the Sorrow Songs that were not recorded and died with the last people who remembered them. Nevertheless, while it will never be known if A Guest of Honor was a successful piece of art on its own merits, the facts that have been ascertained point to it being a continuation of a long line of creative African-American efforts to assert an identity in an environment that relentlessly dictates how it ought to be done.
Works Cited
Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Bourgois, Philippe. “If You’re Not Black You’re White: A History of Ethnic Relations in St. Louis.” City & Society 3 (1989): 106-131.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Gross, Klaus-Dieter. “The Politics of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 45.3 (2000): 387-404. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157951>.
Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.