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The Curses: Part II: The Curse of the Dreamer

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 125; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2017.0025

1934-421X

John J. Sullivan,

Race, History, and American Society

The CursesPart II: The Curse of the Dreamer John Jeremiah Sullivan (bio) in the last issue and frst part of this essay, readers were introduced to the seminal African American arts critic Columbus Bragg, who contributed a short-lived column to the Chicago Defender in and around 1914. Bragg's was an obscure and in its own way grand American life. In St. Louis and Arkansas, he had risen through the lost world of the first black vaudeville theaters, becoming a champion cakewalker, but once re-established up north with his wife and daughter he began to dream of a higher art. Over many years, he worked on plans for a stage play, a historical drama with music, titled The Ahjah. It was to be "Ethiopian," not in the ironic sense used by and about the blackface minstrels among whom Bragg had worked down South, but truly so, telling the story of the African race in its dignity and wonder. He started writing his Defender column, "On and Off the Stroll," largely as a way of advertising The Ahjah. As the show's production drew near, however, his hearing began to fail (complications from an old injury). Two separate benefits were organized for him by the black entertainment community in Chicago to raise funds for a medical device. Both events seem to have been quite well attended. In November, announcing the upcoming second concert, Bragg writes an interesting and, for us, fateful sentence. It represents, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time that anyone had ever used the two-word combination "the blues" to designate specifically "a song, melody, etc., performed in a blues style, as blues ballad, blues riff, blues song, etc." He reports that his friend William Abel, the "director of amusement" at the city's Mineral Springs Café, is to appear on the benefit program, and that Abel "will sing the first Blues song, entitled 'Curses,' by Mr. Paul Dresser." In hopes, therefore, of understanding who and what Bragg meant, the following has been attempted................ [End Page 243] Mr. William Abel, the race's greatest descriptive singer, will sing the first Blues song, entitled 'Curses,' by Mr. Paul Dresser. —Columbus Bragg, The Chicago Defender, Nov. 7, 1914 Click for larger view View full resolution Birthplace of Paul Dresser, Fairbanks Park, Terre Haute, Indiana. Photograph by Floyd Mitchell. Collection of the author. [End Page 244] This is the house where the boy was born, and where he played on the floor as a toddler while the Civil War began. The house was not where it is today, in a small park on the banks of the Wabash. It stood about a half mile farther north, at 318 South Second Street in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana, a couple of blocks from the river, in a row of similar-looking structures that precisely one hundred years later were scheduled to undergo demolition as part of a "slum clearance program." But the citizens proved unwilling to let this particular house be destroyed, since it had briefly belonged to a favorite son of Indiana, or to his family. People mailed in donations as small as a dollar to the county historical society, a couple of area businesses pitched in, and a government grant came through. Finally, moving day arrived: June 5, 1963. The number-one song on the radio was "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore, a first big American hit for a young producer named Quincy Jones. In Terre Haute, a reporter watched workmen wrap the two-story Federal house in "cables and metal strapping, as though it were a large box." A crowd cheered. A new foundation waited at the park, where fifty-three years later a person can still visit. Look up from the floor where he's sprawled in his rag diaper with his crude toys at the family as it existed at the start of the 1860s. The boy's mother, Sarah Maria, had grown up in Ohio, but her parents were Pennsylvania Dutch, that term "Dutch" being in this case not our surviving word meaning Hollanders but a corruption of "Deutsch"—Germans who had left the homeland, settling among their own far...