Published in 1927, White Bottoms by SEM (Georges Goursat) is considered by many to be the most decorative, charming and electric work illustrating the joy and excess of the Jazz Age.; the title humorousy refers to the Black Bottom, the dance craze that overtook the Charleston as the era's trademark leg-play.
The figures almost dance off the plates and into your lap to le jazz hot you can almost hear from the cats laying out wild rhythms and frenzied riffs. Everyone cuts loose. The energy is palpable.
This is Parisian high society of Le Belle Epoch grown-up and co-opting the flaming youth culture of the Roaring Twenties before their own flame dies down and out. High society is slumming in safety here, embracing the thrills without the danger, the highly animated last gasp of forty-to-fifty-somethings, many of whom have gotten a bit thick around the middle. Matrons throw themselves into it with abandon while older gentlemen rev-up what's left of their engines in the company of young dolls or women of a certain age from the neck up trying to hold their own from the waist down. Everybody is having a great time.
Georges Goursat was born into comfortable circumstances. When he turned twenty-one he came into an inheritance that allowed him to indulge his youth. He could have been a wastrel but he had a natural gift as a caricaturist and worked to develop it.
He signed his first self-published albums, issued in the late 1880s, as SEM, reportedly in homage to CHAM, the 19th century French caricaturist born Amédée de Noé. During the 1890s, while living in Bordeaux, he began to contribute caricatures to magazines, and was influenced by graphic artist Leonetto Cappiello.
At the same time, while visiting Paris, he designed posters that were printed by the studio of master poster designer, Jules Chéret.
He moved to Paris in 1900 and entered its high society as a monied aficionado of the sport of kings. Firmly in the saddle of the horsey-set, Goursat, just three months after his Parisian debut, self-published Le Turf, featuring many of the city's socialites. It was a smash and its success brought him instant celebrity. Over the next thirteen years he self-published ten other albums caricaturing the Parisian upper-class.
The war years saw a different SEM. He was a war correspondent and issued two albums of war sketches, images far afield of his previous work.
The post-war years saw a return to his former style, his first album of the new era, Le Grande Monde à l'envers (High Society Upside-Down), published in 1919.
In his sixties during the 'Twenties he self-published Le Nouveau Monde (The New World), caricatures in three volumes. He was at this point an observer rather than participant in the devil-may-care culture that had swept Europe and America after World War I. In 1923 he became an officer in the Légion d'honneur.
By the time White Bottoms appeared toward the end of the decade he was tired; it was his last burst of energy. The financial crisis of 1929 impoverished him. He had a heart attack, and later died in 1934.
Note Josephine Baker at lower left.
White Bottoms remains the most pointed and illustrative depiction (and certainly the most gently humorous), of the aging Parisian upper-class of the era as it frantically pursues pleasure while it still can. It is, in retrospect, a fraught record of the last days of full sun in Paris before the cold eclipse of the 'Thirties darkened spirits, a depressing crash after a decade-long cocaine-like binge.
OCLC records only two complete copies in institutional holdings worldwide. It is of the utmost rarity compete with all of its forty-three pochoir plates present. Sets were very soon, alas, routinely broken-up to individually sell the images; incomplete copies are the norm, if you can find them. No copies in any state of completeness have come to auction within the last thirty-six years, per ABPC.
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SEM (pseud. of Georges Goursat 1863-1934).White Bottoms. Paris: n.p. [by the aritist], 1927. First edition. Folio (20 x 13 in; 51 x 33 cm). Forty-three plates in pochoir, loose in portfolio as issued. Illustrated wrappers.
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All images, except that of the wrapper, courtesy of Shapero Rare Books, currently offering the eight plates seen here from the album (excluding the upper wrapper).
Poor "Frankie Five Angels" Pentangeli. He schleps all the way from New York to the Corleone estate in Nevada for little Anthony's Communion celebration and is offered a "can o' peas," i.e. Ritz crackers with chopped liver. He wants the Rosato brothers dead; Michael Corleone tells him to baciarmi culo e affancul.
As if things could not get any worse, it's an Italian party and the band doesn't know the diff between a tarantella and Pop Goes the Weasel. É un incubo! A nightmare! I mean, everybody knows Zooma Zooma. It's like the national anthem. It comes automatic with a slice of pizza. Wha's a matta wich you? C'mon now, sing d'song!
C'e' la luna mezza 'o mare Mamma mia m'ho maritari Figlia mia a cu t' ho dare Mamma mia pensaci tu S'iddu nun e' lu musicante Iddu vai, iddu vene Sempe lu strumento a mano tene Se ci piglia 'a fantasia Lu strumento figlia mia
If Pentangeli had a copy of Gaetano Dura's Souvenir de la Tarantella Napolitaine(c. 1834)with him on that fateful day a travesty could have been avoided.It illustrates how to perform the tarantella in eighteen beautifully hand-colored lithographed plates as a fold-out panorama, with captions. As a bonus for bandleaders who haven't a clue, another plate contains the music of a typical tarantella in its traditional rhythm, triplets in 6/8.
"[Of note in] the trend of illustrating Neapolitan folklore... is the lithographic album titled Tarantella. Neapolitan Dance, drawn entirely by Dura [1805-1878], published in Naples in 1833, and lithographed by Gatti in 1834 [as Souvenir de la Tarantella Napolitaine].
"Dura's [Souvenir de la Tarantella Napolitaine], a very important document for the reconstruction of the Neapolitan tarantella, presents nineteen plates, accompanied by captions that explain, step by step, all the different phases of the dance.
"The style of the illustrations is basic: two dancers, drawn not without a certain grace and accuracy, move isolated on a white background completely devoid of any decoration or pittoresco.
"In the mid-1830s Dura became associated with Gatti, founding a lithographic establishment that soon became one of the most important in Naples. The brand of "Gatti and Dura" published prints, calendars, atlases, graphic novels and works of a popular nature, such as almanacs and miscellanies" (Encyclopedia Treccani.it, L'Enciclopedia Italiana).
This is an extremely rare book. ABPC records only one complete copy at auction since 1923; an incomplete copy with only ten plates was sold in 1955. OCLC/KVK note only three institutional copies, at Harvard, NYPL, and Austria State Library.
Poor Frankie Five Angels. If he'd known that not too far away, in '50s Las Vegas, an Über-Guido was bompin' 'n stompin', working The Strip like crazy, in the process becoming an Italian-American royal mixing classic tarantella, American pop, and jazz into a zesty zuppe de verdure, Frankie would have had Willy Cicci escort the man back to Casa de Corleone for a command performance of real, honest to goodness tarantella. Instead, he later slit his wrists.
Below, after paying tarantella tribute to Angelina, the girl who serves spumoni (and is ripe for matrimony), Il Redi Las Vegas, backed by Sam Butera and The Witnesses, sings Zooma Zooma better than anybody since Mama Corleone at Connie's wedding back in August '45, in the good old days, before, you know...
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DURA, Gaetano.Souvenir de la Tarantella Napolitaine dirigée par Louis Puccinelli Maitre de Danse dessinée par Gaetan Dura. Naples: Gatti et Dura, n.d. [c. 1834].
First edition. Oblong octavo (5 7/16 x 7 1/8 in; 138 x181 mm). Hand-colored lithographed frontispiece, engraved title, one plate of music notation, and seventeen hand-colored lithographed plates with captions, a total of twenty panels in panorama format unfolding to 142 1/2 inches.
This week, Sue Benny, a big-rig driver from Three Way, Arizona, gets terpsicorian with Old Scratch; Valerie City, a yoga instructor from Intercourse, PA, skips a light fandango in lotus position with Baal; Duke Lozier, an urologist from Fort Dick, CA, trips the light fantastic with dance-floor poison, Lucrezia Borgia; and Tailor Buoy, a seamster/old salt from Climax, CO, tries to keep his head after receiving seven veiled threats from his partner, Salomé.
It's Disco Inferno Night! Burn, baby, burn!
How did things come to this pas-de-diable? How did we get
FAULKNER, Thomas A. From Ballroom To Hell.
Chicago: The Henry Publishing Company, 1892.
Slash with me through the mists of time with Mr. Peabody's WABAC machete to 1581 when a strange little screed appeared on the scene that, while not the first such, is amongst the modern world's earliest prospective salutes to Studio 54, Dionysus, and depravity:
A Treatise of daunses, wherin it is shewed, that they are as it were accessories and depedants (or thinges annexed) to whoredome: where also by the way is touched and proved, that playes are joyned and knit together in a rancke or rowe with them. 1581; and of A godly exhortation by occasion of the late iudgement of God shewed at Parris-garden, the thirteenth day of Ianvarie ... by Iohn Field.((London, Printed by R. Walde-graue, for H. Carre, 1581. STC 10845).
Anti-dance sentiment dates back as far as the fourth century when St. Gregory advised Emperor Julian, the last Roman emperor to take an official stand against Christianity, that dance was okey-dokey if done in honor of God, but not when it mirrored the dissolute movements of the pagans. While early Christian fathers allowed dancing for sacred rituals, things began to get out of hand when the hands of men and women began to touch.
"The hierarchy of the Church warned that holy rites were corrupted by the inclusion of women who tempted male participants into licentious behavior. Matters were further complicated because early church members believed that because humans were created in the image of God, the devil was frightened away by the naked human body. In the midst of the dance, therefore, celebrants often ripped off their clothes. Church leaders grew increasingly concerned about the number of religious rituals that were deteriorating into sexual orgies" (Knowles, Mark. The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances, p. 3).
In short, when the physical nature of dance overshadowed its spiritual element it spelled damnation. Dancing was allowed - the third Council of Toledo ordered St. Isidore, the sixth-century Archbishop of Seville, to create choreographies for certain council events - but be careful.
The introduction of medieval dance music and the social dance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries created anxiety for the Church but it could not buck popular sentiment. Dance manuals began to appear through the fifteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the tension between the social and religious began to manifest itself with books like A Treatise of Daunces.
The seventeenth century struck up the band in 1606 with Jean Boiseul's Traitte contre les dances.
BOISEUL, Jean. Traitte contre les danses.
A la Rochelle: Les heritiers de Hierosme Havltin, 1606.
An early anti-dance treatise, this jolly manual provides a foundation for arguments that continued to the end of the nineteenth century, to wit, that dancing is a sin against God. Boiseul provides biblical chapter and verse, acknowledging that dance is mentioned in the Bible, yet he points out that the dances were "joyous and spontaneous" and very different from the seventeenth-century social dances of his day: the courante, branle, and galliard are specifically attacked. Boiseul is particularly incensed by the dances of non-Christian "savages." From the minuet to Mephistopheles is just a bow and curtsy away, the bop in the bop-shu-bop-shu-bop, and foreplay to fornication.
GAUTHIER, François Louis (1696-1780).
Traité contre les danses et les mauvaises chansons...
Paris: chez Antoine Boudet, 1769. Image courtesy of Michael R. Thompson Booksellers.
Fast-forward to 1769, and François Louis Gauthier writes not only against dancing but of mauvaises chansons (bad songs) that have a dire effect on morality:
Traité contre less danses et mauvaises chansons dans lequel le danger & le mal qui y sont renfermés sont démontrés par les témoignages multipliés des Saintes Ecritures, des ss. pp. des conciles, de plusieurs evêques du siécle passé & du nôtre, d'un nombre de théologiens moraux & de casuistes, de jurisconsultes, de plusieurs ministres protestans, & enfin des paiens même [Treatise against the dance and bad songs in which the danger and evil contained therein are shown multiplied by the testimony of Scripture, the SS. pp. councils, several bishops of the past century and of ours, a number of moral theologians and casuistry, of lawyers, several protestant ministers, and finally even the Gentiles].
Gauthier would have a conniption fit if he heard the current Billboard Top Ten; he'd gag on Lady Gaga.
A Solemn Warning to Dancers.
New York : Published by N. Bangs and J. Emory
for the Tract Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church,, c.1824-1832.
But it is when Victoria ascends to the British monarchy in the nineteenth century that hell breaks loose. And when Victorian attitudes about social conduct and sexual morality met the fundamentalist strains of American Protestantism, they begat a slew of anti-dance tracts, particularly as social dances began to assume a physical nature that raised questions and eyebrows, those eyebrows wiggling into leering overdrive ala Groucho Marx in the last quarter of the 19th through the first decades of the 20th centuries. The music was getting too wild, couples were getting too close, the movements too suggestive, and the dances too much...fun!
GARDNER, Rev. W.W. Modern Dancing: In Light of Scripture and Facts.
Louisville, KY: Baptist Book Concern, 1893.
DAVIS, Rev. George. An Account of the Trial of Social Dance.
Rondout, N.Y.: Kingston Freeman Printing House, 1899.
Rev. George Davis, a pastor of the Reformed Churches of Marbletown and North Marbletown as well as a lawyer, takes a novel approach in preaching his anti-dance position with An Account of the Trial of the Social Dance (1899). The jury for this trial is composed of The Public Conscience. Witnesses include Mr. Worldly Fun, Mr. Roman Catholic Bishop, Mr. Round Dancing Master, and Miss Chicago Barmaid. The trial proceeds and, in Davis' summary, the jury's verdict against the defendant, social dance, is GUILTY! You won't be seeing this procedural on Law & Order anytime soon.
Beryl and Assoc. (eds.). The Immorality of Modern Dances.
New York: Everitt and Frances Co., and F. McLean and Co., 1904.
In 1904, Beryl and Associates presented The Immorality of Modern Dances, declaring that "The vice of modern dancing has become so prevalent in all classes of society that it has begun to be looked upon as good form to dance on all possible occasions. To extirpate this vice will require not only the utmost exertion, but first the united power of those specially chosen by Divine Providence to watch over the flock of Christ to protect it, to defend it from all evil, and, as good shepherds, to lead it to God in holiness after the example of Jesus, who said, 'I am the good Shepherd' (John x. 2); secondly the united power of the laity.
"How, then, are the true shepherds of Christ's flock to be united in strong battle array against a vice which is causing such havoc in the flock? In a battle which, to many of them, seems to have but one end--their utter rout. They recognize the havoc caused by modern dancing to the souls of their flock, but they seem powerless to suppress the evil. They know full well that many men and women who pose as pillars of the church are at times very much interested in clubs and societies which give dances, and that to speak against dancing would cause them to be unpopular and would lessen their collections; and, rather than endure either the unpopularity or the decreased receipts, they allow their parishioners to dance wherever and whenever they see fit. Such pastors are cowards. They lack the courage of their convictions. They are not true shepherds, but are self-interested hirelings; and no wonder that the wolf of the Saturday night dance snatches and scatters the sheep which should be in their pews on Sundays, but are not" (The Immorality of Modern Dances, pp. 11-12).
LYTLE, H.W. & John Dillon. From Dance Hall to White Slavery.
The World's Greatest Tragedy.
Chicago: Charles C. Thompson, 1912.
No comment necessary on From Dance Hall to White Slavery. Ten-cents a dance, anyone? Half-and-Half and Around-the-World, extra. If she had only known...
KOVEN BOWEN de, Louise. The Public Dance Halls of Chicago.
Chicago: The Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1917.
The Public Dance Halls of Chicago is a revised edition of a work based on an investigation done in 1910 regarding the conditions of public dance halls in Chicago. The authoress complains about the late hours, liquor, and the low behavior of males noting, "... men wear their hats; they all smoke and expectorate freely." Koven Bowen accuses waiters and other dance hall employees of providing information on the location of "disreputable lodging houses." Finally, she delivers a condemnation against masquerade and fancy dress balls because many women are found "attending in male attire." Oh-oh. Look out below!
That social dancing since the 1920s has become a ritual of symbolic sexual activity is now a given; it is just too overt to ignore. Yet it is accepted by all but the most orthodox in their religious beliefs.
Anti-dance literature has faded from view and when media now portray anti-dance sentiment it is in movies in opposition to narrow fundamentalism, i.e. Footloose. Let the kids kick up their heels, it won't kill 'em.
And, of course, in the apotheosis of anti- anti-dance stories, Dirty Dancing, the tale of an impressionable ingenue who meets a slick but sincere Catskills resort dance instructor, is liberated, and then, after the credits have rolled and the stage is struck, gets a rhinoplasty that ends her career as an actress. The moral: Circumcise your ethnic nose at your eternal peril, girls; Yahweh is watching.
But the old and rare literature against dancing remains rich and collectible, and while we can laugh at the dire predictions espoused in it we cannot deny that the warnings were not without merit and that the Cassandras were correct. We're all headed to hell in a handbasket. Let's dance!
Which brings us up to date and anxiously awaiting the judges' decision.
And tonight's winner is...Tailor Buoy and Salomé! Head's up, Tailor!
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.
