“My private and particular memory of the summer, though, was the Fourth of July—Independence Day—which was celebrated by a major opening-time hoo-ha down at the Lincoln Memorial. A crowd of important speakers was supposed to herald the occasion, and major press coverage was predicted. I had been to such affairs before, so I kept to my usual routine of festival program-visiting, starting at the less crowded end, the Regional America area, where that week the traditional arts of the southern states were being presented. I walked up to its outdoor stage and saw nobody on the stage or in the audience, but then I began to hear a thin piping and a couple of drums. I had heard this distinctive homemade music before on several Caribbean islands and in some southern states.

From Sing it pretty: a memoir by Bess Lomax Hawes, 1921-2009. University of Illinois Press, 2008.

The book is full of great stories. I recommend it to anybody interested in folklore,  children, singing, or feisty women.

And here’s a letter from my father to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, March 3, 1954.

Dear Sir:

    With the emphasis on statistics that is the rage today in some of our journals--so many tons of steel, so many bathtubs, telephones, kilowatts and so forth--to elevate us by comparison with the “lesser breeds’ of earth, it might be well to take a second look at our history with relation to these gadgets.

    Before our first ton of steel was produced in 1887, we had pretty well hammered out our national philosophy, established our traditions, produced nearly all of our saints and some of our very best sinners, and established our nation as one of the most loved and respected among those who enjoyed or cherished liberty and democracy. At this benighted time in our history there were no phones, kilowatts, movies, refrigerators, radios, television sets, airplanes or deep freezes, and plumbing was very scarce, and very, very primitive.

    I lived at the edge of this disappearing hardy America a half century ago, and have always treasured our early American history. So it occurs to me, reasoning from our national experience, that some of the poeple now struggling, without benefit of bathtubs, against endless oppression and abysmal want, may be reenacting those episodes in our own history by which we established our nation with revolutionary action, and hammered out our concepts of freedom and law with internal strife sometimes mounting to civil war.

    And Mr. Dulles notwithstanding, these peoples may be in that grand age in which nations produce their Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Lincolns.

    Consecration may not be, in 1954, as much an America monopoly as are deep freezes and television.

        Yours sincerely

©2010 by Nancy Schimmel