Since a people’s artistic expression, and what they choose from the art of others, is determined largely by their way of life, it is best for understanding to look first at the Mississippian, then at his creative efforts. A brief survey of his traditions and environment will reveal the Mississippian’s capacity for enjoyment, his humors, and his philosophy; and it is these, going beyond externals, that strike the notes of his character as it is revealed in the records he has left.
Of the two million individuals who are now Mississippians, slightly more than half are Negroes. The remainder, to an extent greater than in any other State, are native-born descendants of English, Scotch, and Irish stock. The minority peoples—French, Spanish, and Indian—did not infuse their blood in any appreciable quantity, neither did they leave any indelible impression on Mississippi tradition, custom, or temperament. With the possible exception of southwest Mississippi’s architectural tradition, established by the Spanish from the West Indies, there is little Indian, French, or Spanish art influence evident in the present culture. French settlement along the coast left traces of the mother tongue and established the Catholic religion, but this influence is slight compared with the British and Negro heritage of the State as a whole.
The Negro, bringing with him to Mississippi remnants of his African tribal culture, was placed in the position of a slave performing the heavy manual labor on which a civilization rested. Generally he dwelt apart from white associations, lived in the field and in segregated cabins. He received no schooling in languages or indigenous art forms. If he showed originality, he sometimes was allowed to express himself in wood and iron working—carving stair rails, cabinets, and mantels for his white master’s home—but, generally, as long as he performed his menial task of cultivating the fields he was left to his own devices. The simpler beliefs of Protestant Christianity were taught him and were learned readily by him; but these were assimilated in his own way. Hence his emotions and inherent sense of rhythm found expression in song, the only external expression, other than the handicrafts, that could surmount his paucity of tools.
This handicap, twisted by changing circumstances into almost completely economic form, has lingered with the Negro. Since emancipation, the Negro has been too occupied with economic problems and too busy assimilating the culture of the society about him to have the time for creative expression. That he is still deeply imaginative is evidenced by his song, anecdotes, and cabin gardens. But even these, like his religion, emotions, and physical appearance, have become subjects for the white artist. Instead of expressing himself creatively, the Negro has been placed in the position of being an almost inexhaustible reservoir of material for the creative efforts of others. The young Syrian sculptor, Leon Koury of Greenville, first won recognition for his modeling of a Negro’s head, and has since devoted much of his time to portraiture of Negro subjects. The painter, John McCrady, has found his best material in the Negro. His painting, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, recognized as his greatest work to date, interprets the Negro’s idea of death and ascension to heaven.
The culture of white Mississippians has been more complex, composed of Scotch, Irish, and English influences, with the last predominating. There has always been a close relationship between the Englishman’s life and his creative efforts. This makes it possible, to a degree, to explain the white Mississippian’s external expressions in connection with his more or less material existence. His financial status, the amount of leisure he has had, and his purpose in life have greatly influenced his creative efforts, if not his temperament.
There were three migrations of English, Scotch, and Irish stock to Mississippi. The first was the migration of Tory families to the Natchez country during and immediately following the American Revolution. The second was the migration from the Piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia into the Mississippi hills and Piney Woods regions immediately after the War of 1812. The third was the “flush times” migration that brought settlers from all classes of the older South, and even from the East and North, into Indian lands opened by the treaty of 1832.
These three groups, though all of one racial stock, came with different backgrounds and purposes. The Tories were comparatively wealthy and by habit were accustomed to a certain amount of ease and gracious living. Their ideal was the English country squire. They placed emphasis on permanency, family background, and conservatism in arts and politics. They built homes that would endure, filled the homes with accepted objets d’art, planted formal gardens, and wherever possible preserved in detail the code they had brought with them. Fortunately for their continued peace of mind the cotton culture supported them in their accepted way of life. It gave them money to spend and a plantation to rule. It enabled them to buy Negro slaves, hire private tutors for their children, buy harps and pianos for their music rooms, and engage itinerant painters to do the family portraits. Unfortunately, it shielded them from emotional crises and left them contented to express themselves as patrons of art and literature rather than as painters and writers.
The hill people were in many ways quite different from the Tory group. They did not come to Mississippi to reestablish an empire. Instead, they came from King’s Mountain to escape a world that was too much for them. Preferring the alternative of independent isolation, they purposely forsook hope of wealth and leisure to hide themselves in the hilly retreats of northeastern Mississippi or in the great stretches of the Piney Woods. Here, scattered on small farms with their trading centers hardly more than crossroad stores, these people retained with remarkable purity their traditions. Folk songs and stories were their literature, and because they had no financial means with which to supply their domestic needs, their artistic urge found expression in such utilitarian handicrafts as quilt-making and woodwork.
The people who came to Mississippi on the crest of the “flush times” had purposes more nearly like what are considered “American” today. They moved to Mississippi in order “to get ahead.” They meant to begin a tradition, not to continue one. Temperamentally, they were not contemplative or contented men; rather they were men of action, fired by hope of gain and believing that all things were within their grasp. This belief in progress held in temporary abeyance their desire for leisure.
But if they had some of the so-called failings attributed to Americans, they also had, to an exceptional degree, American strength. They were plungers, men with initiative, pioneers, fighters. They cared little for tradition but demanded that each man prove his worth. They acknowledged no upper class and were more willing to trust their own opinions than accept the standards of others. To them external expression was utilitarian even more than it was to the Piney Woods farmer, for it was propaganda, a means to an end. They had no wish to seek an escape. Even life’s amenities, it would seem from the houses they built, were sought not so much for their intrinsic value as for the fact that the amenities would be tangible proof that they had “arrived.”
Of the three groups, Tory, yeoman, and speculator, placed temporarily on Mississippi’s frontier stage of civilization, the yeoman remained on the frontier, while the other two groups rose for a brief period, then were plunged into the frontier once more by the devastations of the War between the States. Even in the twentieth century the Mississippi environment is, by and large, agrarian in character. It is here that the Industrial Revolution is said to be finding its last frontier. This agrarian character of the State and the people illustrates itself in Mississippi’s literature.
The chief characteristic of the ante-bellum literati was their manner of taking literature in their stride. It was for them but one facet of exceedingly busy lives; and as such it held the positivism of the frontier rather than the somewhat negative protest and escape elements of more settled contemporary New England. Their literature, taken with light good-humor, was divided into five classes: lyrics dashed off by hearty, well-read men; travel books and journals that shrewdly caught the significant details of the country; reminiscences and lusty anecdotes, whose humor was akin to the spaciousness of a frontier; the oratory of men of action; and the histories and diaries of men stirred enough to feel that their own and their contemporaries’ debates needed preservation.
Lyric poetry was too delicate a medium to receive more than a passing glance, and this from the Tory element alone. Unfortunately, the Tory poets were neither strong enough nor good enough to create a literature of their own. In the same manner as that in which other members of their class became patrons rather than producers of art, the poetically inclined preferred losing themselves in the lyrical expressions of classic Greece and Rome, and of Elizabethan England.
It was in tale-telling and oratory that the Mississippian’s interest in literature was centered. Even semi-historical and social analyses were tied together by stories. For instance, the first book of the type of humor that later reached its peak in Mark Twain was written by A. B. Longstreet, a Georgian who came to Mississippi in 1848 to assume the chancellorship of the new State university. In his Georgia Scenes Longstreet set the pattern later followed by Joseph G. Baldwin’s Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, Joseph B. Cobb’s Mississippi Scenes, Henry Clay Lewis’s The Swamp Doctor’s Adventures in the Southwest, and T. W. Caskey’s Seventy Years in Dixie. These books are histories and social analyses that find common ground in their vast anecdotal humor. They are as full of stories as a local politician’s campaign speech or a country minister’s sermon.
Unfortunately, the greatest stories of the ante-bellum period have been preserved only by word of mouth. A few, however, found their way into the magazine, The Spirit of the Times, and have since been seined out for the contemporary reader in Arthur Palmer Hudson’s Humor of the Old Deep South. Yet as excellent as some of these stories are, they are insignificant compared to those that never have been put on paper.
The stories always were tied to known persons or events. In place of being “Pat” and “Mike” the characters were Cousin Ephie or “Old Man” McWillie, and were about the bear fight last spring in that canebrake just south of Sandy Hill. They were intended for a close-knit audience who could appreciate, because they knew, all the humor inherent in the personalities and occasions exaggerated by the stories. These tales were later penalized because of their dated and localized character, but they nevertheless had, for their time, the unmistakable stamp of living literature.
It has been said that the Mississippian would much prefer “hearing a book” to reading it. They always have preferred speaking to writing. In oratory, “the literature of action,” Mississippi has the sustained excellence that began with Pushmataha (the Choctaw chieftain who matched words with the great Tecumseh and won), and continued through a century to another chieftain, James K. Vardaman, the “Great White Chief” of the so-called common man. Orators ranged from the great Whig, George Poindexter, to Mississippi’s first great political ranter, Franklin Plummer. With these came a score or more of matchless orators, men who made themselves and their audiences drunk with the wine of eloquence. Perhaps no other State has sent as many able and fluent speakers to the National Congress. The dynamic force of Robert J. Walker, the sonorous apostrophes of Seargent S. Prentiss, Henry S. Foote, Albert G. Brown, and Jefferson Davis, the quiet, human dignity of L. Q. C. Lamar, Edward Gary Walthall, James Z. George, and John Sharp Williams, as well as the barbed humor of “Private John Allen,” have distinguished the Congresses of which they were members. The most polished orator of them all, Alexander K. McClung, never reached Congress; and two others, James L. Alcorn and William L. Sharkey, elected to the United States Senate, were refused seats because of reconstruction policies.
The reason for this superlative oratory is contained in the training and background of the orators. The conflicting legal claims to land during the “flush times” attracted to the State some of the Nation’s ablest lawyers. They had their fortunes to make, everything to gain and nothing to lose. They were schooled in and anxious for debates; forcible in argument; reckless and brilliant. For them it was but a short and natural step from swaying juries in courtroom battles over the ownership of land to swaying constituents in contests for office. For the lawyer, oratory was the escalator that could lift a political candidate to higher ground.
The orator was necessarily dramatist, philosopher, author, and speaker rolled into one. Yet the greatest of the speeches, as the greatest of the anecdotes, have never been reduced to writing. Nor can they be. The speaker was in rapport with an audience whose emotional response, denied outlet in other forms of art, lifted him to constantly greater heights. A frenzied enthusiasm, partaking of mob spirit, rose in a continuous interplay of complementing appreciation between orator and listeners. There has seldom been such an example of the moving power of speech.
Yet some of the force of the ante-bellum debates can be gained from the accounts of participants in the contests who, retiring from the actual field of battle, carried on the fight in their memoirs. Examples are the journal of Andrew Ellicott, the memoirs of General James Wilkinson, and the histories of J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi’s Herodotus.
Ante-bellum Mississippiana is seldom prosaic. A part of its vividness is due to the contagion of the material. The travel books, first written by visitors, are absorbing narratives of life in a strange country. The Travels of William Bartram; the notebooks of John Pope, Fortescue Cuming, Christian Schultz, and Francis Baily; descriptions, ornithological and otherwise, of Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon; the journal of Lorenzo Dow; the autobiography of Gideon Lincecum; the retrospect of Miss Harriet Martineau; and the journeys of Frederick Law Olmsted are fascinating accounts of early days on the great river and in the heart of the cotton kingdom.
Consequently, when native Mississippians turned to chronicling the events of their State’s history or to describing the life they saw about them, they did not need to pad their stories to make them dramatic. John W. Monette’s masterful History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Mississippi Valley was among the first accounts of the early eighteenth century colonization of the lower valley by the French. Standard source books for the early nineteenth century drama of cotton culture are Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The Southwest by a Yankee, W. H. Sparks’ The Memories of Fifty Years; and Reuben Davis’ Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians, which gives clear brief summaries of outstanding Mississippi personalities.
Henry Stuart Foote’s Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest, an informal legal history, written by one of the greatest criminal lawyers in the State, is indispensable in a reconstruction of the life and spirit of the time.
Even the most scholarly historians, inclined to a stately rotund style, often relieved their pedantic conclusions by flashes of bright humor or lapses into violent personal opinion that made them almost poetic. The zestful joie de vivre of the chroniclers can not escape notice.
The almost complete absence of introspective literature shows the influence of an extremely hearty and gregarious life. Miss Sherwood Bonner of Holly Springs, looking at Mississippians in retrospect, told her friend, Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that “they had the immense dignity of those who live in inherited homes, with the simplicity of manner that comes of an assured social position. They were handsome, healthy, full of physical force as all people must be who ride horseback and do not lie awake at night to wonder why they were born.” Her description gives an excellent basis for understanding the literature they produced. Instead of distilling their experiences into a more individualized art, Mississippians have been ballad-makers.
The War between the States, in place of making an essential break in their literary tradition, only gave fresh incidents from which tale-tellers could fashion their anecdotes. There is no Mississippian of the present generation who has not been reared on stories of the fighting. And there are few Mississippians who, having heard the tales, have not wondered how it was possible that the Confederacy lost.
However, after 1865, unless the world-troubled souls could express themselves in speech, they were hard put to it to make a living at literature. Hence, Mississippi since the War between the States has had her share of émigré writers. Miss Bonner herself was one of these, though she regretted the necessity of leaving what she always considered her home. Mississippiana continued to be her special province, and Suwanee River Tales is an interesting revelation of where her heart lay.
In the same period with Miss Bonner was Irwin Russell, the genius whose work was cut short by his death in New Orleans in 1879—when he was but 26 years old. As the first Southern writer to master Negro dialect in verse, Russell has won national recognition with his long poem “Christmas Night in the Quarters.” His influence has endured in the work of Joel Chandler Harris, and in a more subtle way in all present-day Mississippi literature. He was the first Mississippi writer of rank to keep his art free from propaganda. He labored for no cause in his portrayal of Mississippi Negro life. He sang instead of sermonizing; and the charm and catholicity of art is patent in all that he has done.
Russell, as an individual artist, is one of a handful of Mississippi writers who have been able to break with the powerful tradition of raconteur prose and unspeculative verse. S. Newton Berryhill, the “backwoods poet,” introduced unusual themes into his verse, but even such a poem as “My Castle” is marred by his weakness for rhyme.
Among contemporaries, Stark Young, William Faulkner, and William Alexander Percy stand out. But, for the average Mississippian, Harris Dickson’s Old Reliable Tales, The Story of King Cotton, and his tales of the Mississippi are more satisfying than the highly subjective work of Young and Faulkner. In the same way, the poems of David Guyton or such a good rouser as Walter N. Malone’s “Opportunity” are more widely read than the poetry of Percy.
In Young and Faulkner, Mississippi can boast of outstanding exponents of both the romantic and realistic schools of regional literature. Born near each other, reared in the same town (though at slightly different periods), these two artists have drawn accurate pictures of Southern life: one, the most charming; the other, the most revolting. It is again an indication of the wide field covered by Mississippi material that these two men can both work in it without contradiction.
Young’s novels are less novels than descriptive essays of Mississippi life hung on the convenient framework of the McGehee family and its “cudns” (cousins). He has not stuck exclusively to the ante-bellum period; both River House and The Torches Flare are as modern in time and as penetrating in analysis as his essays in defense of agrarianism. Because Mr. Young has taken his stand on the near perfection of life as expressed in the ante-bellum period, Heaven Trees and So Red the Rose are more representative of his work than the two novels first named.
It is unfortunate that hill-born William Faulkner is most widely known for a novel, Sanctuary. Even though it is a part of the “Jefferson” set, Sanctuary is different from such books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom. An aviator himself, Faulkner occasionally deserts “Jefferson” in his short stories and in such a novel as Pylon, but this desertion can itself be traced to his boyhood and to watching the flight of eagles from an Oxford hill. There is little of the émigré about Faulkner even though his most enthusiastic audience may be international. When the “Jefferson” saga is completed—and if the short stories of the “Snopeses” are ever fused in a novel—America may see its finest bit of regional interpretation.
There is much about William Alexander Percy that is in the best Mississippi literary tradition. He is a lawyer, and literature is an absorbing but not a paying interest with him. Almost his whole work is lyric poetry; and he finds his métier in the fifteenth instead of in the present century. No typical Mississippi singer, however, could have produced such thoughtful work as Percy’s Sappho in Levkas and Enzio’s Kingdom. Nor in their best nostalgic moments could the traditional Mississippi lyricists have written so fine a piece as Percy’s “Home” which, in its implications, is as persuasive an interpretation of the Delta as any of Stark Young’s pronouncements.
Young, Faulkner, and Percy have won an established audience. A younger group, now fighting for recognition, is obviously more difficult to appraise: Robert Rylee, David Cohn, and James Street. Street is a news-paperman and was brought up hearing priceless old Mississippi stories; his Look Away is the result. Cohn seems to be in the tradition of the Mississippi analyzers and debaters. His God Shakes Creation is a fine piece of analysis of Mississippi Delta society. His Picking America’s Pockets does the same thing in writing that Mississippi’s cotton statesmen have done in speeches in the halls of Congress. Robert Rylee has shown exceptional promise in his Deep Dark River and St. George of Weldon. Deep Dark River’s “Mose Southwick” is a Negro character worthy of a permanent place in Southern literature. In St. George of Weldon Mr. Rylee limns the man overlooked in the contemporary labelling of all Mississippians as either planters or tenants. He finds in the Delta—of all places—a bourgeois family; and his description of this family may influence a literature which, for the sake of truth, needs to put less emphasis on the two poles of society.
Just as transportation lines form the skeleton of the social organism, so architecture reveals its character. In Mississippi’s homes the student may recreate the pattern of the State’s everyday existence; and enough remains of its early architecture to evoke a period of romance that has had few equals. French voyageur, English Tory, Spanish Don, and Southern planter have crossed the great stage of the State, and each has left the color of his drama in his architecture.
The French were the first to settle. On the Coast, a locale rich in lore, their impress remains in the thick squat masonry and solid shipshape timbers of the old fort on Krebs Lake at Pascagoula, built by Sieur Joseph de la Point in 1718, before the founding of New Orleans.
Following the French, in 1763 Great Britain took over the empire west of the Alleghanies; into the Natchez region English colonists pushed even while the Atlantic seaboard was cutting its bonds with the mother country. No structure like the Krebs Fort remains as a monument to English settlement. Instead, the English built log cabins and rough-hewn blockhouses indistinguishable in type from those in the eastern half of the Continent.
But if the English left little that was distinctive, the dandified ideas of the Spanish, brought in with the last score years of the eighteenth century, made a profound impression. Swinging up from the Coast as far as the Natchez bluffs, the Dons left as distinct and as civilized an architecture as could be wrung from the wilderness. It is recognizable in the pleasantly-canted roof, the strong concentration of ornament, and the flair for flamboyant, if rare, color of the type known as “Spanish Provincial.”
At the close of the eighteenth century Virginia and Carolina emigrants pushed into the region about and to the south of Natchez. The effect of this mixture of Old World and New was a fusion of significance. The grand staircases, spacious rooms, and haughty colonnades of the newcomers combined admirably with the delicate spindling work and fluid lines of their predecessors to produce homes in the “Grand Manner.”
The Americans who came after the Spanish, settled themselves on the Natchez bluffs and, separated by wooded ravines, built homes of a type close to the Grand Manner yet distinctively rural. They made use of the same motives, but their adaptation of it was rangy, more open. Fronted by long single or double recessed galleries, the roof forming a transverse ridge, the homes were one-story, story-and-a-half, or two-story; and their simple, unflaunted dignity marked them for what their name implies, the “Southern Planter.”
At a later date the Mississippi “hill-billy” made his home north and east of the Natchez country. One to every ridge, the houses were of logs (later clapboarded) with a wide wind-swept hall, known as the “dog-trot,” running through the center, and with the cook house in the rear. As the people became wealthier and more prosperous, they closed in the center hall, often decoratively, and added long front porches. The dog-trot houses were so natural and traditional to these pioneers who had migrated from Tennessee, the Piedmont of Georgia, and the Carolinas, they constitute a contribution to American architectural types. A log cabin was an indivisible unit; in order to expand, another had to be built. That the hill-billy should lay his two cabins parallel and roof the open space between to make a hallway was natural. To keep the cook shack separate was dictated by fire hazard and the desire to keep the heat from the living room—time and saving steps for his wife were no part of the frontiersman’s considerations. To sheathe the logs with clapboards was the first evidence of the end of the frontier. To wall in the dog-trot and add a porch was the last.
North of the hill-billy country, in the Central Hills and especially in the Black Prairie region during the “flush times” of the 1830’s, a Greek Revival type of home was introduced, known locally as the “Black Belt” from the geographic region that produced it. The Black Belt home, contrasted with the house of the Grand Manner type, placed emphasis on sheer refinement of ornament and attenuation of proportions—a trait apparently common to all architectural cycles toward their wane. The Shields home at Macon best expresses the characteristics of this form, though many examples may be found between Macon and Aberdeen, and, less concentrated, in the Northern Hills. The Georgia emigrants who built this type were evidently remembering their native models.
MCGAHEY HOUSE, A BLACK PRAIRIE HOME, COLUMBUS
A number of ante-bellum homes were “imported,” a term derived from having either the builder or the architect from England, France, Scotland, or Germany. Lochinvar at Pontotoc is typical, but the best examples are in Madison County, around Canton. The Delta, too, has many imported homes in this sense of the term, distinguishable by rubbed brick forms and asymmetrical planning, considered a sin in earlier times. The Delta, last settled, was peopled by luxury-loving Kentuckians and Carolinians who built from designs more often seen in the Ohio Valley.
The character, tastes, and economy of early Mississippians left their effect also upon church architecture. Along the Coast, in the Natchez district, and, following the flush times of the 1830’s, in Holly Springs, Oxford, and Columbus, the wealthy planter and professional class built many churches with slave labor. Constructed usually of home-burned brick, the churches were, as a rule, Gothic Revival in design, with tall spires and stained glass windows. St. Mary’s Cathedral, Natchez, completed in 1851, the Christian Church, Columbus, and the Episcopal Church, Holly Springs, built in 1858, are examples. The windows often were imported and unmatched. Interiors expressed good taste and a touch of luxury in open beams, delicate hand-carved decorations, and solid comfortable pews. More often than not a gallery extended across the front of the auditorium for the use of slaves who were prevented by law from having a church of their own.
But as the dog-trot type of house of the Piney Woods and Central Hills differed from the planter’s mansions so did the plain and straightforward churches of these sections differ from those of the older and wealthier districts. These churches were, and to a large extent are, of a type colloquially called “shotgun.” Comparatively small, oblong or box-like shells, they had frame side walls and V-shaped, split-shingle roofs. Without porches or an approach of any kind other than simple wood steps, they had single entrances front and rear. Windows were of plain unstained glass. The interiors offered the plainness of open rafters, unpainted walls and floors, and pine pews—the latter as stern and temperate as the people who worshipped in them. Hundreds of these churches dot the rural sections today, but the Toxish Baptist Church is a good example of their simple box-like construction.
What is more important to the layman than architectural types, however, is the life that determined them. This story must, of course, remain conjectural, but nothing could be more intriguing than to speculate upon its varied development. An examination of the timbers in the attic of the fort at Pascagoula reveals them to be so remarkably like the ribs of a ship that it is not farfetched to ascribe them to French ship carpenters. Indeed, the crews of the vessels loading on the Coast were the only artisans, their passengers being unskilled, or else preoccupied in a fruitless search for wealth. A building with walls as thick as the fort was needed for protection from Indians, not from the elements. Oyster shells, limitless in number, and the misty swaying drapery of Spanish moss were obvious and happy materials. The moss made an ideal binding element for the cement, such masonry improving with age and becoming rock-like with the passage of centuries. The life that could be wrung from the sterile sand of the Coast was as plain and as austere as the fort’s outline. The lot of the French colonists was, if romantic, not luxurious. This much the fort makes plain.
As intimated, Spanish influence was strong in southwest Mississippi architecture. The Spaniard, though a pioneer, did not abandon his traditions. His was the first in Mississippi to warrant the name of a civilized society. Before him, the path along the river was nameless; after him, it had become El Camino Real—The King’s Highway—and the change was indicative of what he brought. His materials were the same the French and English had access to—logs from the forest or timber from dismantled flatboats—but in his particular use of them he displayed a Castilian taste that is expressed in works of art such as Ellicott’s Inn at Natchez. Balance, refinement, and grace are revealed in the slope of the roofs, and in the toothpick colonnettes and ironwork of the slender galleries.
The Castilian’s taste lingered after him. The styles of three nationalities—the Georgian style, traveling southwest with the planter, and the Creole mixture of French and Spanish coming up from New Orleans—met at Natchez. The search for a type or fusion of types that would be best adapted to the region led for a time into several blind alleys. The Regency, an in-between style that originated in England under George, Prince of Wales (1810–20), left Vancourt and the back portion of Hope Villa among its few examples. More significant was the Greek Revival. Started in England at the end of the eighteenth century, this style, now closely associated with ante-bellum plantation architecture, was spontaneously accepted in this country by the Southerner because of his wealth, his wide travel, and his classic, country-gentleman tastes. The revival in the South was a facile thing. The Mississippian created his own architecture; his slave labor was unskilled, his models no more than pictures or memories; his real pattern was the Spanish. The result was the fusion of styles found at Natchez, predominantly Georgian in character, with columns and pediments relieved by the sloping roofs and galleries that broke across the classic fronts. In Concord, the former home of the Spanish governors at Natchez, which burned in 1901, this fusion probably reached its finest expression. The great columns that gave distinction to the building sprang from the earth itself. The lower story was extended to the face of the upper verandah, whose slender balustrade and smaller piazza posts were deeply recessed under the eaves of the light roof. The effect was Spanish West Indian as much as Greek. Though Dunleith at Natchez is the best remaining example of the adaptation of the classic order to planter comfort, Arlington and Auburn are better compositions and are truer to Natchez in their grandiose conception.
The Southern Planter type of home, while not as impressive as that of the Grand Manner, was more representative. Its use of the classic formula was as easy and as unconventional as the planter’s life. The gallery was the prominent feature, as well it might have been when most of the owner’s life was spent either on horseback or on his porch. Though the proportions were generous, they did not overawe. The stranger stopping by must have felt he was not so much “calling” as “visiting.” In the Natchez area the best remaining Planter example is The Briars. On the Coast the best example is Beauvoir. Beauvoir shows the West Indian influence in the balanced arrangement of the pavilions at each side of, and entirely separate from, the big house. Also West Indian was the custom of devoting the ground floor to the service quarters and using the breezy main or second floor, reached by a number of exterior stairways, as the center of domestic life.
The materials for construction and the kind of workman available resulted in a crudity of detail in contrast to the conception of the exterior design. Though there were notable exceptions in the interiors of some of the Grand Manner homes at Natchez—the spiral stairway at Auburn, for instance—the detail that could not be imported was often unfinished. The scattered faced brick found in the homes may have come as ballast in the one-sided export cotton trade; but where wealth was not sufficient to import brick, the builders fired their own. Around Liberty, axe and adze marks on foundation timbers and sills hewn from the forest are visible in many sturdy homes. Beams were fastened with wooden pegs or with home-forged, wrought-iron nails. Heart yellow pine, though stout, was not easily worked—another reason for the lack of finish in the interiors.
The Black Prairie and the Central Hills show the Georgian free from Spanish influences. The slender proportions characteristic of these homes may be explained partly by the fact that they were frame, not brick; the builders saw no necessity for having too thick a column as support for the light roof. The homes were two-story; the planter wanted his second story to be as much shaded as the lower story; yet to have a thirty-foot column with the Grecian-prescribed three-foot diameter would have been an absurdity. The result was the beautifully slender column which distinguishes the Black Belt portico. This break from Grecian simplicity was carried further in the ornament, especially in the bric-a-brac that later was strung between the columns just under the roof line. This was feminine, the planter evidently considering a woman’s taste important, and the architects have concurred in his judgment.
Adding to the undeniable charm of many of the Delta ante-bellum homes were the piers on which they rested, dictated by the necessity of letting the periodic flood run free beneath their floors. The first of these homes on stilts were unsightly, but for a people to whom beauty was a necessity, there soon evolved such combinations as Longwood and Swiftwater.
To look upon all ante-bellum homes in Mississippi, therefore, as alike in a type loosely called Southern Colonial, is to destroy half the charm. The nuances—reactions to sectional and climatic restrictions, inherited customs and variations of pioneer life—provided great individuality within the type. (At Vicksburg, for instance, homes had to be built despite the inhospitable looking bluffs. On these promontories, the houses naturally and correctly assumed features less warm, more military, more disciplined.) The crudity of interior detail, the lack of compactness, and the wasted space, as compared with the architecture of other States, mean little; the Mississippian of the period was a generous outdoor man with plenty of land and servants. The classic, white-columned house pleasingly fulfilled its function—always the chief criterion of what is good.
The architecture developed since the War between the States, however, reflects only too well Mississippi’s social and economic adjustments. Out of the war and reconstruction arose a merchant-banker society that supplanted the leadership of the planter. There was a transposition of social and economic prestige from rural districts to urban centers, and with the transposition were lost the qualities that had nourished individuality in design. The urban dweller does not possess the remoteness of broad acres and wooded groves; he lives in a comparatively crowded space; his tastes are conventionalized; his land is measured in lineal feet; and his servants are paid each Saturday at noon. To fit this new locale of conveniences, customs, and tastes, the builders adopted new methods and, recently, new materials. Unfortunately, the result is often neither distinctive nor, by comparison with Natchez, especially noteworthy.
The story of the plantation’s decline and continued dependence is held fast in the planter’s contemporary architecture. Impoverished and faced with the immediate task of reconstruction, the landowner was left at first with little time in which to build. When he finally had gained the time, he was no longer the dictator of his tastes, for under the new system capital was not on the farm but in the towns. Within a decade rural construction reached the level of barren necessity.
The influence of urban merchant-bankers on rural building, through the power of extended credit, has reduced what was once the “big house” on the farm to a questionably comfortable frame dwelling of indefinite plan and parentage. Tenant houses, by their number, catch the eye, but they hardly warrant architectural description. They are Delta, 01 Piney Woods, or “southern shacks”—local color in architecture. In the Tennessee Hills, in the Central Hills, and in the Piney Woods, the poorer homes with their mud-wattle chimneys, sagging roofs, and vertical weather-boarding are as bare and stark as the poverty they represent; the bright corrugated tin roofs covering weather-beaten walls of barns represent a false economy. Many of the richer homes are uncertain in design and lacking in taste.
With the exception of Natchez, Vicksburg, Columbus, and Holly Springs, the towns, submerged both socially and economically before the war, gained from the Reconstruction Period an importance that was in direct ratio to the rural districts’ decline. And, again as in the rural districts, the change developed an architecture that almost defies classification. As if hastily discarding traditional rags for costumes that better expressed their new station in life, the towns followed the North into a building boom that has lasted from the 1880’s to the present (1938). Paradoxically, the late economic depression rather than the boom proved an architectural blessing.
The period between 1880 and 1914 belonged to a generation of newly empowered urban persons who expressed themselves, not in the simpler classic styles adhered to by the planter, but in elaborate display. Volume was preferred to refinement of detail; and an exterior trim of jigsaw decorations matched a gaudy interior that has come to characterize the period. (This exhibitionism sometimes resulted in houses vaguely reminiscent of the grandiose homes of the 1850’s—Longwood at Natchez and the Walter place at Holly Springs). Contractors and carpenters, as much without benefit of architectural advice as had been the slaves, reproduced in their busy practice the styles made popular in the North by the boom of 1873. The Victorian Gothic, the Romanesque, and the American version of the Queen Anne were architectural types accepted as representative of wealth. In the cities these three types marked the better-class residential section. In the smaller towns, where the wealthier families usually occupied the first tree-shaded block north of the business district, the preference was for the local carpenter’s version of Victorian Gothic. Such homespun variations sacrificed convenience for false splendor, and in a determination to achieve volume obliterated the lines that originally gave the design a name. The houses were of frame construction and, usually, two stories in height. With their elaborate gingerbread trimmings, bulging bay windows, and pointed turrets they remain to mark the home of the banker or merchant in a majority of Mississippi towns today. The Rowan home, with its unstudied massiveness, its twenty-three rooms, and its gingerbread exterior treatment, is an example (see Tour 5, Sec. b). The elder types remain as criteria of good taste, and to these models latter-day designers return for inspiration.
The abandonment of tradition for massiveness found expression in the building of the New Capitol at Jackson in 1903. Designed by Theodore C. Link in the manner of the National Capitol and built of gray sandstone and marble, it faces the business district from ten landscaped acres (see JACKSON).
The rise of the lumber industry, the establishment of railroad shops, and the building of a few cotton mills gave to the Piney Woods, to Meridian, and to Stonewall what were perhaps the first grouped, standardized houses for the working class. These houses, small frame buildings one-story high, were erected by the company and grouped close to the commissary—a barnlike frame structure raised from the ground and fronted with a narrow shed porch. Lean-to porches extend across the front and rear of the houses, and thin bisecting partitions divide the interiors into four rooms of equal size. At Quitman, once the site of the State’s largest sawmill, and D’Lo, a typical sawmill ghost town, are examples of grouped, company-owned houses.
At Laurel and at Electric Mills, however, the lumber industry placed emphasis upon housing almost from the start. Here the policy of encouraging home ownership and individuality of taste has resulted in the white millworkers’ building neat cottages suited to the size and needs of their families. These low-priced cottages have enhanced in a modest way Mississippi’s architectural and social scene, and have supplied an example of economical housing reform.
The World War and its aftermath of inflation brought to an end the merchant-banker era of exaggerated architectural design. Rural people, attracted by urban prosperity, migrated from farm to town, swelling the population and creating demands that the urban centers, with pre-war physical equipment, were not able to meet. A decade of unrest, the 1920’s brought along a fundamental alteration in Mississippi’s urban architecture. A variety of types appeared. French Provincial, Dutch Colonial, and the half-timbered manor house of Elizabethan England, subject, as always, to the contractor’s conception, became the popular types. These houses, the homes of business and professional families, were developed, remote from the business districts, in new residential areas called subdivisions. The Florida version of the Spanish style was adopted by a few builders on the Coast during the boom of 1925–27, but in Mississippi as a whole, this style is too conspicuously incongruous for popularity.
When the business and professional families deserted the residential area traditionally allotted to them, skilled laborers and white-collar workers moved in. Here, between the “best family” section left untouched since pre-war days and the traditional outer fringe of Negro houses, the skilled laborers and middlemen built their bungalows. These bungalows, constituting the majority of urban dwellings in Mississippi today, vary in material—wood, stucco, or brick—but they do not vary essentially in design. They are squat, low-roof houses of from four to six rooms. Sitting close to the earth, half protected by the shade of chinaberry trees, they indicate the workingman’s somewhat raised standard of living; but their low ceilings, thin walls, and lack of basements show no regard either for the Mississippi climate or its traditions.
The greatest architectural change of the 1920’s, however, was the advent of the skyscraper. Prior to the war the demands for office space had been comparatively light. The second and third floors of thick-walled, brick structures with cornices, built for the purpose of housing retail establishments on the ground floor, had been partitioned into a number of offices. But post-war prosperity and the subsequent migration to urban centers increased the need for more modern buildings. Architectural advice was sought—a procedure as new to Mississippi as were the resultant buildings—and for the first time skyscraper methods of construction were employed in commercial buildings.
STAIRWAY AT COTTAGE GARDEN, NATCHEZ
At Jackson, the Tower Building (reputedly the tallest reenforced concrete building in the South: 18 stories high with a penthouse and a two-story tower) and, at Meridian, the Threefoot Building are the State’s best examples of set-back design. C. H. Lindsley was architect for both buildings. Wyatt C. Hedrick, employing the same type of construction in designing the Lamar Life Insurance Building, Jackson, adorned it with Gothic motifs and a decorative treatment of the top. The thin rectangular New Merchants Bank Building, Jackson, emphasizes its 17 stories by a perpendicular treatment.
With modern designs in commercial building came also for the first time engineering methods for industrial building. The best examples of these are the buildings of the Reliance Manufacturing Company, Columbia, the Pioneer Hosiery Mill, Hattiesburg, and Meridian Garment Factory, Meridian.
In this period higher standards were gained in institutional and religious architecture. The 78 buildings of the Mississippi Insane Hospital are grouped with village-like informality on spreading, landscaped acres. The buildings, not over two stories in height, are designed in the manner of Colonial Williamsburg. The exterior walls are of red brick with white trim, and the roofs of the larger buildings are crowned with white cupolas. N. W. Overstreet and A. H. Town were the architects. At Laurel, the Presbyterian Church, designed by Rathbone DeBuys, consists of two buildings joined by a tower. The architecture of the church proper is based upon twelfth century English Gothic precedent; the other building, the church school, is Collegiate Gothic in type.
As indicated, the depression proved an architectural advantage to Mississippi. Prior to the Government’s policy of extending financial aid to builders through housing agencies, a majority of Mississippi’s buildings were constructed without architectural advice or planning. They were not only of indefinite design but ill-fitted to the owner’s needs. But the Government, wielding the power of extended credit more intelligently than the merchant-banker, demanded that engineering principles be applied. Each applicant for a building loan was required to have the plans of his building approved by a competent staff of architects. Fortunately, the architects accepted from the beginning the hitherto ignored fact that, tradition notwithstanding, the urban Missisippian does not live out of doors; he lives and works indoors, and he has need for compactness and modern conveniences. This simple acceptance of fact is the outstanding characteristic of recent building trends.
Supervision of planning and construction brought to the State tangible evidences of two recently developed schools in architecture. The Howle home, Meridian, is typical of the school which follows traditional designs, with stress on Colonial types. The home is smaller than those of classic conception in the past, but the size does not remove the classical stamp. One story in height, with seven rooms, it is carefully detailed with a finely proportioned entrance and well-spaced windows. The exterior is of wood siding, while the interior has wood-paneled wainscoting, with wallpaper above that reproduces nicely an early pattern. The design of the R. F. Reed home, Tupelo, replaces the architectural doctrine of “balanced symmetry” with that of “utility.” Built for comfortable living, it is of a flat-roof design with sun and recreational decks. The exterior walls are white reenforced concrete with steel frame and metal casement windows.
The Government, in addition to aiding in the building of dwelling houses, has placed a new Federal building, modern in design, in every town of importance, and has aided financially in the construction of municipal buildings. The Jones County jail and New Albany city hall, the latter designed as a monolithic concrete structure by E. L. Malvaney, are examples of municipal buildings, while the Meridian post office, designed by Frank Fort, is perhaps the State’s outstanding Federal building. Modern in design, with fluted pilasters and no cornices, the post office building is noted for its mass and proportion rather than for its detail.
These modern buildings are both too new and too few to do more than hint that Mississippi is entering upon a new era of building that may equal if not surpass the classic period of ante-bellum days. In the meanwhile, its architecture remains a confused picture of classic mansions, vertical weatherboarded houses, tenant shacks, bungalows, voluminous gingerbread displays, and thick-walled two- and three-story commercial buildings. The integrated character of life in the ante-bellum period, reflected in an architecture of spaciousness and dignity, is lacking.
If Mississippi is judged by its singing folk, rather than by the number of its symphony orchestras, truly it can be called a musical State. The Negro folk, traditionally musical, comprise more than half of Mississippi’s population. The white folk, for the most part, are descendants of those early settlers who, in their westward trek, stopped in the hills of northeast Mississippi or in the Piney Woods. Living on and close to the soil, they have retained the lore, customs, and songs of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
The songs of the Negro fall into three groups—spirituals, work songs, and social songs. The spirituals are America’s most distinctive and artistic contribution to folk music. Expressing strong emotions and simple faith, they have a beauty, power, and sincerity that are irresistible. Such songs as “Jesus the Man I’m Lookin’ For,” “Judgment Day is Rollin’ Round,” “Angels All Waitin’ for Me,” and “They Crucified My Lawd” show the religious fervor of the Negro spiritual. These and many others may be heard in their purest and most impressive form in the Negro churches, especially the rural ones. The white visitor who comes in a spirit of sympathetic interest is welcome, and if especially interested in folk music he will find authentic expression here. The school choruses have won international recognition for their interpretation of the spirituals (see EDUCATION).
In the second group of songs are those of the levee, the railroad, the river, and the field, best of which possibly are the cotton-picking songs. The work songs are improvised, growing out of one phrase or line, with the repeated whack of the hoe or the stroke of hammer or pick setting the rhythm. An old Negro, asked to repeat a song, said, “I ain’t got no reg’lar words, I jes say what my mind tells me.” For this reason and because the Negro’s intonations as well as the words vary with his feelings, his songs are difficult to reproduce in written form. The following improvisation heard in a cotton field near Columbia is a good example of the field song:
Old voice singing bass:
I know it was th’ blood
High soprano in another part of field:
I know it was th’ blood
Thirty or more voices together:
I know it was th’ blood,
I know it was th’ blood,
I know it was th’ blood for me.
Second Stanza
Young tenor: One day when I was lost,
Young soprano: One day when I was lost,
All: One day when I was lost,
He died upon the cross,
I know it was th’ blood for me.
Each solo singer held his last note until it was picked up by the next singer or group of singers. The workers continued for half an hour singing variations of this song as they picked the cotton.
The social songs of the Negro run the gamut of his social activities and range from the coarse song of the roustabout to the sentimental message of the lover. This group includes nursery songs, play, dance, and animal songs, as well as the “blues” and more sophisticated jazz-band and swing tunes. One of the most popular of the animal songs and one rich in personification is about “de co’tin frog:”
De frog went a co’tin, he did ride. Uh-huh! Uh-huh!
De frog went a co’tin, he did ride.
Wid a sword an’ a pistol by his side. Uh-huh! Uh-huh!
Contrasting with the gayety and homeliness of this song is a long line of melancholy “blues” developed from the “Memphis Blues” and the “St. Louis Blues.” Because of the increasing influence of the city upon the Negro and the resulting departure from the simple life, the number of social songs has increased with a proportionate decrease in the number of spirituals and work songs. Present-day conditions are not conducive to creation of the latter—the laundry is fast supplanting the wash tub under the trees, and the modern white mother objects to having her baby sung to sleep with such a typical Negro lullaby as the following:
Don’t talk. Go to sleep!
Eyes shet and don’t you peep!
Keep still, or he jes moans:
“Raw Head and Bloody Bones!”
The most characteristic musical expression of Mississippi white folk is in their group singing of hymns, many of which are from the “Sacred Harp,” a hymnal published in 1844. From shortly after spring planting until cotton-picking time, regular “singings” are held, reaching a height in midsummer (see WHITE FOLKWAYS). Besides hymns, these folk sing the English, Scotch, and Irish ballads of their ancestors, often in modified form, and songs of American origin—cowboy and Western songs, Civil War songs, ballads of outlaws and “bad men,” and those inspired by local events such as the Casey Jones tragedy. Equally as popular as the community singings are the “sociables,” at which Old Fiddlers Contests are held, and singing games are played by old and young (see Tour 17).
Although there is no State supervisor of music, there is music in the schools, and the larger cities have full-time supervisors of public school music. In the spring of 1926 the State High School Accrediting Commission ruled that credits be granted for high school piano and violin, and for public school music, which might include sight singing, ear training, theory of music, rhythm band, and music appreciation. Since 1935 members of high school bands and orchestras have received these credits. All licenses to teach music are issued and all credits approved by the State Board of Music Examiners, a group appointed by the State Superintendent of Education from among members of the various college faculties. Spring field meets and band contests have brought about a vast improvement in school music by provoking a greater interest in it.
The Federation of Music Clubs holds an annual contest in voice, violin, piano, organ, choral music, hymn singing, and memory. Organized in 1916, the federation has a membership approximating 3,000, with 33 senior and 70 junior groups. Scattered in towns over the State and in many of the colleges, these federated clubs serve as a great musical stimulus.
Mississippi colleges, especially those for girls, have from earliest times included music in their courses of study. Records of Elizabeth Female Academy in 1840 mention “the performance of a very fine class in music.” A report on the Female Institute of Holly Springs shows “two pianos purchased in 1838,” and “yearly tuition for Piano or Guitar $50, Harp $60.” Old yearbooks of Hillman College, organized in 1853, give a curriculum with music included. Whitworth College, established in 1858, always has placed emphasis on music; its spring concerts once were so widely attended that special trains were run to accommodate the crowds. The burning of Amite Female Academy by the Federals caused the destruction at the same time of its 13 highly prized pianos—pianos transported with great effort and cost through the wilderness to Liberty.
In Natchez are substantial reminders that there was music of the highest type in ante-bellum Mississippi. The violin presented by Ole Bull, the famous Norwegian violinist, to his young friend, Gustave Joseph Bahin, when Bull played in Natchez in 1851, is treasured by the Bahin family. The piano played when Jenny Lind sang in Natchez the same year is at Richmond. Other famous musical instruments in Natchez are the silver-stringed Palyel-Wolfe piano at Windy Hill Manor; the century-old spinet at Arlington; the harp at Rosalie; the harpischord at Hope Farm; the piano at Longwood, which legend says was the first grand piano brought into Mississippi; the quaint square piano at Clover Nook, which was played at the Lafayette ball.
Today in the colleges for women are found most of the State’s outstanding music departments. Mississippi State College for Women, organized in 1885 with music as a part of its first curriculum, has continually played an important part in the development of the higher type of music in Mississippi. It is the only college in the State with membership in the National Association of Schools of Music; its music department is the only one housed in a music hall built especially for and dedicated to this art. Here in 1904 Paderewski gave his first concert in Mississippi, and was the first artist of international fame since the War between the States to appear in concert on a Mississippi college campus. This concert was made possible by Weenonah Poindexter, the young director of the department, who signed the $1,000 contract, equal in amount to her yearly salary. An extra $1,000 from the proceeds of the concert was the beginning of a fund creating for the college an artist series which has brought to it many of the world’s best musicians.
Although the University of Mississippi had no regular music department until 1930, its Glee Club has been active since 1900, and the new department gives promise of being one of major importance. State Teachers College, with an excellent music department, is best known for its Vesper Choir, which sang before the National Federation of Music Clubs in Philadelphia in 1935, and the Louisiana Federation in 1936. The Mississippi Woman’s College has received special recognition for its choral and chamber music. Belhaven College, Jackson, places especial emphasis on music. Each of the above colleges confers the degree of Bachelor of Music. Delta State Teachers College and Blue Mountain College have active choral groups and offer courses in piano, voice, and violin. Mississippi State College has no music department, but has an excellent military band.
The following are among the musicians born in Mississippi who have received national recognition: Chalmers Clifton, Jackson, is State Director of New York’s Federal Music Project under the Works Progress Administration, and teaches conducting at Columbia University; William Grant Still, Woodville, is best known for his Afro-American Symphony (1930), an idealization of his heritage, the spiritual, and for his Symphony in G Minor—“Song of a New Race,” which was performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in December 1937; A. Lehman Engle, Jackson, a pianist, composer, and critic, directs the Madrigal Singers, one of the most popular of the New York WPA music groups; Walter Chapman, Clarksdale, is a pianist, composer, and teacher; Creighton Allen, Macon, is a pianist and composer. Although born in Alabama, the Negro composer, William C. Handy, nationally known as the “granddaddy of the blues,” lived in Clarksdale for a number of years. He has said that his chief inspiration for the “blues” that made Beale Street famous came from his experiences in Mississippi. Mississippi’s own pioneer in jazz, Bud Scott, born in Natchez, has attained more than State-wide fame. His orchestra, which may be heard at the Pilgrimage Balls, has played for three Presidents—McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Taft.
No hotel or cafe in the State employs a full-time orchestra, except on the Coast during an unusually good season. The largest night clubs are along the Gulf Coast, and many of these operate only during summer tourist season. Their orchestras are imported through the American Music Association, as proprietors find that the big-name orchestras draw the crowds and local orchestras lack popular appeal. Though there is little demand for orchestral musicians, there is an active chapter of the Musicians Union, which regulates wages and insists that none but union members be employed locally. Their chief competition is from college orchestras, which, with the exception of the one from University of Mississippi, are non-union and can afford to play for lower wages than professional musicians.
The greatest single impetus toward more and better music in the State (1937) is coming from the Federal Music Project under the direction of Jerome Sage. With few unemployed symphony orchestra musicians in the State, the program is largely one of musical education. Approximately 20,000 persons are receiving musical training either in quartets, choruses, piano and violin classes, small orchestras, or listening groups. The music appreciation classes, brought to the children of the rural homes where radios have been made possible by the rural electrification program, have created a new listening group with vast musical potentialities.