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Before Seattle Rocked: A City and its Music by Kurt E. Armbruster

2012; Oregon Historical Society; Volume: 113; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ohq.2012.0001

2329-3780

Sarah Dougher,

American Environmental and Regional History

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 Atkinson made eight trips to New England to gain support for churches and schools, to recruit teachers and missionaries, and to promote Oregon.Sevetson might have mentioned thatAtkinson’s first trip had much in common with those made by Rev. Jason Lee and Dr. MarcusWhitman for similar purposes.Eastern church organizations who sent both Whitman and Atkinson as missionaries also expressed concern about the excesses of missionary Rev. Henry Spalding. Atkinson failed to raise the money he sought,but he recruited Sydney Harper Marsh for Tualatin Academy. As the first president of Pacific University,Marsh became an important regional educator. On his return to Oregon, Atkinson served as superintendent of Clackamas County Schools and attempted to finance a girls’ seminary in Oregon City. Atkinson faced other difficulties during his time in Oregon, including quarrels over theology and personal issues by fellow clergymen, the death of two children, and the devastating Willamette River flood of 1861.In 1863, he took up permanent residence in Portland,becoming pastorof itsCongregationalChurchandSuperintendent of Multnomah County Schools, a position that the author stresses. Some issues Atkinson addressed seem modern, including minority education, funding, family support, and orderly school grounds. Sevetson summarizes Atkinson’s difficulties with Marsh over church and school issues and his noted debate with Oregonian editor Harvey Scott over the value of public schools. He helped establish seminaries in Oregon and Washington, and played a critical role in launching Whitman College as a Congregational institution. Involved in various public affairs, he frequently presented his views in the Oregonian. He visited many state prisons seeking details that would help the state legislature establish a humane institution,and he faulted the nation’s Indian policy and the use of the term“squaw.” Atkinson won public support for advocating for the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose service, he insisted, would strengthen the region’s economy. A standard Pacific Northwest history,Dorothy O. Johansen’s Empire of the Columbia, provides little detail about Atkinson or his more famous AHMS colleague, Thomas Condon. Robert Clark’s The Odyssey of Thomas Condon summarizesAtkinson’s career.Although Sevetson ’s much shorter biography is more modestly published, it fills a long-standing need and is an important addition to the growing emphasis on Oregon’s cultural history. While the biography has a few organizational problems and many lengthy quotations that will bother some readers, everyone will appreciate the author’s solid research and useful coverage of Oregon’s history, especially the state’s educational developments, during the last half of the nineteenth century. G. Thomas Edwards Whitman College Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music by Kurt E. Armbruster University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2011. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 384 pages. $26.95 paper. Before Seattle Rocked documents the role of music in the transformation of Seattle’s social and cultural life, beginning with the establishment of the first non-Native cultures on the shores of Puget Sound. The first brief chapter, “Song of the Duwamish,”outlines Native music traditions, tracing the forced eradication of the culture from the city limits in the late nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters pick up around 1890 and tell the colorful stories of music performers and performance contexts — from saloons to concert halls — from a city that has endured many cycles of boom and  Reviews bust, tracing the diverse popular genres of the early days (Tin Pan Alley,workers’songs,brass bands, classical music) through the growth of jazz and big band styles dominant through the midtwentieth century. Armbruster draws portraits of music performance contexts,and as often as possible,lets the voices of their original players speak,paying particularly good attention to the perspectives of women in the generally male-dominated field. Archival photos enhance the text. The survey stops in 1979, and as the title suggests, does not cover rock genres except as they are peripherally connected to rhythm and blues and the lives of working musicians during the 1960s and 1970s. Although connecting rock cultures to traditional players and scenes in the city would have been useful and made the book more appealing to younger readers, the history of rock in Seattle does not...