‘All Music Comes from Everywhere’
- appalachianplaces
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The brief life and enduring contributions of Charles Faulkner Bryan of Tennessee
By Laura E. Clemons
On the bank of a wide creek, little Charlie Bryan spied a large snapping turtle sunning atop a dam built to corral water powering a nearby textile mill and saw an opportunity. Like many a country boy before him, Charlie was no stranger to guns. He shot the turtle and liberated it from its shell, which he set on hot coals for a few days to dry before adding a flat neck and strings, ultimately making something resembling a ukelele. He called this homely instrument his turtle-uke, and he’d carry it from place to place throughout the Southeast his entire adult life, using it as an example of how to improvise — how to adapt music-making to suit your needs.
We don’t often think of Southern Appalachia as home to classical music, but the songs we sing here have made their way into American symphonies, ballets, concertos and more. The first piece to come to mind is surely “Appalachian Spring,” but its composer, Aaron Copland, was a New Yorker through and through. There are, however, lesser-known writers inspired by the people’s music — composers born in the region who fashioned classical music on a framework of old-time hymns and ballads. In the mid-1900s, those composers included Charlie Bryan.
Born in 1911 on the southwest rim of Southern Appalachia in Tennessee’s Warren County, Charles Faulkner Bryan didn’t see a symphony performance until he was 17 years old, nor did he know any classical musicians. His mother said he was born singing and, indeed, he was a fine tenor and church soloist and directed a dance band. One of five Bryan children, he grew up in mill housing on Charles Creek, his father in management at Tennessee Woolen Mills and his mother an offshoot of a prosperous mill family, the Faulkners.
Charles graduated high school at the start of the Great Depression. When a preacher who had heard him sing recommended he attend the Nashville Conservatory of Music, his family cashed out an insurance policy to get him started, with Charles working odd jobs to help cover four years of study. In 1935, Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, a small public college near his hometown, gave him his first full-time gig as director of its music program. Charles started writing art songs, working his way up to a full-on operetta during his fourth year at TPI.
Along the way, he landed feetfirst into the Tennessee Folklore Society, meeting musicians who studied and performed traditional hymns and dance numbers popular since the 1700s. Two schoolteachers in the Caney Fork Valley transcribed many of these songs, which Charles remembered from childhood. They asked Charles, as a trained musician, if he would proofread the collection. He did, and the hook was set; from that day forward, if he wasn’t performing or arranging and publishing the old tunes, he was teaching them in classrooms and churches. He also began collecting old songs, which he too transcribed, believing he was saving something worthy and noble about his homeland.
It was only natural that those songs would find their way into his compositions, the most ambitious a three-movement symphony Charles was hoping would qualify as a master’s thesis from Peabody College in Nashville. He called it “White Spiritual Symphony.”
Music’s origins remain endlessly fascinating, a rich brew of adaptation and invention. In Charles’s day, while it was understood that the South sheltered a great deal of European folk music, a debate was bubbling up about African influences as well, given the presence of unwilling immigrants, America’s enslaved workers. A prominent musicologist and one of Charles’s mentors, George Pullen Jackson, coined the phrase “white spiritual” — his attempt at codifying the relationship between White religious music and Negro spirituals. He contended that many songs sung in Black churches had deep roots in England and colonial America; naturally, he found similarities and duplication, because folk music evolves over time and according to who sings it. All music comes from everywhere, Charles told his students; it accepts no continental boundaries, rejects no social influences. It also does not sit still. Another of Charles’s mentors, ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, said that collecting a performance of an old song was similar to photographing a bird in flight — capturing a moment never to be repeated.
In the second movement of “White Spiritual Symphony,” Charles quoted from two well-known folk hymns: “Goin’ Over Jordan” (also known as “Wayfaring Stranger”) and “Amazing Grace.” He said he wanted to honor the music of the South by imagining what it could sound like with the parts of a full orchestra wrapped around its melody.
The lyrics to “Amazing Grace” were written in 1772 by Englishman John Newton, a convert to Christianity who regretted his ill-spent time as a slave ship captain. The hymn reached our shores attached to a tune that failed to spark enthusiasm in congregations. Maybe it would have just faded away, had American songsmiths not kept fiddling around with it, trying this and that melody, searching for the sweet spot. In 1835, a Southern Appalachian out of Spartanburg, S.C., William “Singing Billy” Walker, found it. He paired the text with a new arrangement of an old melody and named the freshly assembled hymn “New Britain” — which the Thirteen Colonies was, or at least were thought to be, until roughly the same time Newton wrote his verses. Singing Billy published the song in his tune book “Southern Harmony.” Over all the previous (and subsequent) attempts to clothe the text with new music, this is the one that took, the one we still sing today.
So, a century later, yet another iteration emerged, this one arranged for the wind, brass and strings of a symphony orchestra. Charles’s adviser at Peabody encouraged him to find an ensemble to premiere it.
He worked on that, but his time at Peabody was interrupted when a new opportunity arose in 1940: directing the Tennessee Music Project, a spin-off of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Music Project. Charles Seeger was assistant director of that program, and with his guidance, Charles slipped into the WPA just before the doors slammed shut. Then suddenly, inevitably, America joined the Allied Forces of World War II. Born with a heart murmur, Charles would never go to war. Instead, he got handed off to the cause as director of a seven-state district for the Office of Civil Defense.
Meanwhile, in the midst of all this shuffling, the conductor of the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra, Londoner Eugene Goossens, snapped up “White Spiritual Symphony,” especially admiring its second movement. He premiered it during a CSO appearance in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1942 and then took it back to Cincinnati to perform again.
Toward the end of his time in government, Charles was desperate to return to music. He’d already been mulling over advanced study in composition — or better yet, a career break to compose full-time. One Sunday, he and his Civil Defense supervisor, Solace Mitchell, went bass fishing on the banks of the Crystal River in Florida. They had walked miles before seeing any signs of civilization when they chanced upon a small cottage. Charles stopped short, staring. He told Sol he’d give anything if he could live in a place like that and write undisturbed.
It turned out that Sol was well-connected. He pointed Charles toward the Guggenheim Foundation, which granted fellowships to creatives and scholars. Charles began meeting with notables in classical music, seeking advice, gathering letters of recommendation. He flew to New York to visit with three men, including Guggenheim administrator Henry Allan Moe and National Broadcasting Company conductor Frank Black, both of whom were enthusiastic about his work. Conductor Dmitri Mitropoulis, however, was less than keen and advised him to resume his studies. Perhaps Charles’s face betrayed his disappointment, and in a moment of kindness, Mitropoulis said he wouldn’t have bothered with him if he didn’t think Charles had potential — and he was only reinforcing what Charles had already been considering. Regardless, it was a hard pill to swallow. Charles went back South, dejected. He told Sol that he knew he was, at heart, just a country boy and unworthy. He was no Aaron Copland.
But he bucked up and buckled down. His ambition was boundless, his energy and capacity for hard work seemingly limitless. It took a year, but he landed both the Guggenheim and an astonishing invitation from German composer Paul Hindemith to study with him at Yale University. This young country boy, he’d tipped the scales.
Over a creative growth spurt of five years, Charles became the first Tennessean whose work was performed by a large professional symphony orchestra and the first Tennessee composer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, during which he wrote the secular cantata “Bell Witch,” a piece Robert Shaw premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947.
Charles had become Tennessee’s most distinguished composer. Offers poured in: joining the music faculties at a number of universities and institutes, commissions from the symphony orchestras of Nashville and Birmingham, Ala. He wrote an operetta based on the life of William Walker, “Singin’ Billy,” with Donald Davidson of Vanderbilt University and the scores of two musicals, “Strangers in this World” and “Florida Aflame.” And he did all this while teaching full-time at, first, Peabody College, followed by a position near Birmingham that promised more money and more time for composition.
His students loved him. In years to come, they would all remember Charles for the same characteristics: his talent, his affection for them … and his nervous energy. He would, they said, bounce on the heels of his feet while conducting rehearsals, skip from desk to desk to check their work, help them late at night on assignments. He was a session player for WSM in Nashville; directed church choirs; recorded folk songs; programmed operas at Peabody; adjudicated contests; toured ensembles; and wrote and wrote and wrote. He could not say no — not to churches asking for solos; civic groups asking for presentations; colleges asking for performances; commissions from churches, schools, ensembles; publishers needing arrangements; even scholarly research on the origins of the dulcimer (harkening back to his turtle-uke days).
Friends and colleagues said later that his quick and questing personality likely killed him; they said that the way you do in hindsight. But while he was alive his wife, siblings and closest friends viewed his ambition and relentless pace as a threat and pleaded with him to slow down. He could not.
Back in Tennessee for a visit during the summer of 1955, he received a telegram from NBC inviting him to consult on edits to “Singin’ Billy” for a live telecast. The family raced home so that Charles could pack a bag for New York. A few miles from Birmingham, he laid his head on his wife’s shoulder, his heart beating for the last time. He was not quite 44.
Charles Faulkner Bryan worked in America’s golden age of classical music, astute and passionate enough to understand that folk music could well express the soul of this young country. Yes, the folk music often derived from Europe, but evolved as our own, whether hymn or ballad or the uniquely and quintessentially American Negro spirituals. Aaron Copland knew that, as did scores of other composers from other parts of the country. All music comes from everywhere.
And yet Charles had so few contemporaries in Southern Appalachia. During the 40-plus years of his life and work, only a scattering of composers rose to prominence: Ezra Sims of Birmingham; William Levi Dawson of Anniston, Ala.; and John Wesley Work III of Tullahoma in Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland. Throughout Tennessee, Charles was one of only four widely recognized writers of classical music in the mid-20th century, the others being Weldon Hart of Bear Springs, Roy Harris (although he was an Oklahoman in-state only for a residency at Peabody) and Work.
We likely don’t know Charles Bryan today as a composer because he died young, his potential drifting away with his last breath. His life was as fleeting as an iteration of a folk song, leaving behind only the faintest and sweetest trace of the work that honored the people’s music.
Laura E. Clemons, an independent researcher and writer, has contributed essays to several University of Tennessee Press history collections and is a former executive with the Bryan Symphony Orchestra Association (named in Charles Bryan’s honor). www.lauraeclemons.com