Meet Gumbo Chaff, The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, etc., etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1848, a curious little volume of "negro melodies of the day," The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, was published in Boston. Containing ninety-one songs for the flute, including Band of Niggers, Get Along Home Yaller Gals, Jim Crack Corn, Carry Me Back to Old Virginia, Happy Are We Darkies, Jim Crow Polka, De Old Jaw Bone, My Pretty Yaller Gal, Old Zip Coon, Stop Dat Knocking, and many more, it was written by one "Gumbo Chaff."

Who was Gumbo Chaff? He's credited as A. M. A. First Banjo Player to the King of Congo, and author of the Ethiopian Glee Book, Ethiopian Accordeon Instructor, Ethiopian Violin Instructor, Ethiopian Flute Instructor, &c., &.

He wasn't Ethiopian, an upscale American euphemism for a black man. Gumbo Chaff wasn't even a man. He was a folk character who became a song which became a pseudonym.

Gumbo Chaff was one of the earliest black-face characters in America, based upon characters found in tall tales told by river boatmen and frontiersmen during the Jacksonian era. The song Gumbo Chaff merged these frontier elements with stereotypes of black slaves, creating a new character who lived

On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana,
Dere's where I live, chock up to de Habbana,
Eb'ry mornin early Massa gib me likker,
I take my net and paddle and I put out de quicker,
I jump into my kiff and I down the river driff,
And I cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff.

Gumbo Chaff, the song, was first performed in the early 1830s. It became a standard in the repertoire of early black-face performers such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon. Because of the song's popularity, the contemporary black riverboatman became a popular character in minstrel shows, and black-face singers routinely performed "Gumbo Chaff" with a mock flatboat on stage.  

So it made sense for a publisher in Boston to ascribe authorship of a collection of minstrel songs to Gumbo Chaff. The author was actually Elias Howe Jr., the book's publisher and also author of minstrel song collections for banjo, accordion, voice, and violin. He was - no surprise - a white man.

The Elias Howe Company was a 19th and early 20th century musical firm located in Boston and founded by Elias Howe, Jr. (1820–1895), a fiddler. This Howe was not that Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, but a contemporary and possibly a distant relative. How many Howes of the same name at the same time could there have been in Massachusetts, one fiddling in Boston, the other sewing across the river in Cambridge? What, you were expecting Minstrel Songs For The Sewing Machine? Tote that barge, lift that bale, sew that hem, mend that seam!

Howe's first collection of songs, for the fiddle, appeared in 1840 as The Musician's Companion. By 1850, Howe had published several other song collections and musical instruction books as noted above. In the same year he sold his copyrights to the Oliver Ditson Company of Boston and, by agreement, refrained from publishing music for ten years, after which he returned to publishing and became one of the country's most prolific music publishers. During the American Civil War Howe expanded his business to include manufacturing drums for the military. He was offered the position of Director of Bands for the United States Army with the rank of Lt. Colonel by President Lincoln but he chose to continue manufacturing drums and fifes and publishing books on their performance by marching bands.

Of note to folk musicologists is that on page forty-two of this volume the music for Stephen Foster's  O! Susanna appears. This was not the first publication of O! Susanna - that occurred in the same year (Cinncinati: W.E. Peters, 1848) - but it seems to be the song's second appearance in print, and its first in a published collection. The first public performance of the song occurred on Saturday, September 11, 1847, when the Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, PA presented a "Grand Gala Concert." At that performance "Susanna - A new song, never before given to the public," was sung.

Here's a modern perfomance of Gumbo Chaff:

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CHAFF, Gumbo (pseud. of Elias Howe), The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, Containing Full and Complete Instructions, With All the Popular Negro Melodies of the Day, Including Those of the Christy Minstrels. Boston: Published and Sold by Elias Howe, 1848. First edition. Oblong 4to. 6 3/16 x 9 3/4 inches. 48 pp. Quarter cloth over printed wrappers.

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Images courtesy of John Howell For Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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John Ward And The "Infinite Variability Of Performance"

John Milton Ward "prefers to have a copy of every extant score of a work when possible, and never believes that a second copy of a published work is a duplicate until it has been compared measure for measure by measure. His conviction that publishers frequently made internal changes in scores has been validated repeatedly."

Ward, the internationally acclaimed musicologist, retired as the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University in 1985. In the twenty-five years since then he has amassed and curated, on behalf of the Harvard Libraries, what is now recognized as one of if not the most important and vast collections of original music and dance material in the world.

John Ward and His Magnificent Collection, which has just been published in an attractively produced limited edition, is a celebratory collection of appreciative essays about, and an interview with, this very special man who, now ninety-three, continues to be robustly passionate about the collection of music and related material.

Bibliophiles strive to collect every copy of a work of literature to track textural changes. John Ward insisted on the same careful attention to variation in musical scores. The difference is that, while an author may make a few minor or major changes to their text over time, a piece of music is different every time it is performed; it can be repeated note for note but can never replicate the performer's or conductor's mental state. Music changes through time, adaptation to cultural milieu, through the interpreter. Sometimes changes to a score occur simply to make it accessible to audiences. While he would surely never allow it, the operas of Wagner are routinely truncated so that an audience can enjoy them from beginning to end within their lifetimes.

 

John Ward at home, October 2009. Credit: Gordon Hollis.

 

This phenomenon is crystallized in Ward's dictum of "the infinite variability of performance." What it meant to him on a practical level was an insistence on collecting every score and piece of material associated with it for Harvard as keys to understanding music from the past. Ward was and remains one of the foremost historians of music and the history of a musical score is, to him, amongst other things, the history of the culture from which it was born.

Hence, the performer's or conductor's scribbled notes on a score offer crucial documentation to  a musical work's evolution.

The book, a warm and delightful festschrift, opens with editor Gordon Hollis' interview with Ward and then divides into three sections that encapsulate Ward's life, contributions, and accomplishments with appreciative essays by leading scholars and members of the rare book trade who have worked with Ward over the years to assist in his quest for scores and related anything that can shed light on a musical work.

1. Interview with John Ward by Gordon Hollis.

 

2. John Ward as Educator, Collector and Curator



 

Sir Curtis Price, Origins of the King’s Theatre Collection
.

 

Joseph G. Price, An Innocent Bystander.

 

.
John and Jude Lubrano, La Chasse et Le Professeur.


 

Carl B. Schmidt, A Personal Recollection - John Milton Ward as Educator
Christel Wallbaum, Letter to John Ward.



 

3. The Collections



 

Andrea Cawelti, Introduction to the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collections at Harvard University
.

 

Virginia Danielson, A Passage to India. John Ward and the Whole World of Music
.

 

Lisa Cox, A French Journey.

 



4. The Ward Collections at Work



 

Philip Gossett, Il barbiere di Siviglia and the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection
 at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

 


Morris S. Levy, From Vienna to Naples to Cambridge. The Ward Collection, Robert von Gallenberg, and Furio Camillo
.

 

Hugh MacDonald, Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth in Print and in Performance
.

 

Lowell Lindgren, Handel’s Significance within The King’s Theatre Collection of John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward
.

 

Richard MacNutt, The First Editions in Vocal Score of Weber’s Der Freischütz and Euryanthe
.

 

D. W. Krummel, Lutebooks on the Loose.

While this volume is a must-have for musicologists and collectors of music, its story of a particular collector in a particular field of collection should be of keen interest to book collectors no matter what their individual area of collection. Ward's philosophy of collecting can apply to all, and the fact of his philosophy highlights the importance to collectors of anything to form their own to guide and provide an overarching context to their efforts.

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John Ward and His Magnificent Collection. Edited by Gordon Hollis. Beverly Hills, CA: Golden Legend, 2010. Hardbound in cloth. 168 pp. Black and white photo-illustrations. Limited to 200 copies. $75. Exclusively distributed by Golden Legend.

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