The Bigger Picture

The Best Record of the Year is 100 Years Old: Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette

by Nathan Salsburg

Recently nominated for a Grammy award for Best Historical Album...
“I not only commend him to your intelligent notice but personally endorse him.” — Mark Twain.

At the risk of seeming aggressively anachronistic or even atavistic, I’d like to suggest that I’d like to suggest that you call off your slobbering dogs of insatiable aesthetic appetite and spend the rest of the year relishing an album by Polk Miller and his Old South Quartette. Recently released on the Tompkins Square label, the CD represents the complete recordings made by Miller and his group, comprising their 1909 Edison cylinders and the Quartette’s reappearance on 78 in 1928, fifteen years after Miller’s death.

An introduction: Polk Miller was decidedly both anachronistic and atavistic. He was the son of a Virginia plantation owner who grew up serenaded by the music of his family’s slaves — spirituals, work songs, dance tunes — and who later, as a pharmacist and a veteran soldier of the Confederacy, made his name as the impresario behind “Old Times in the South.” This traveling show (though Miller hated the term “show”) consisted of a lecture, recitations in Southern black dialect, and a performance by Miller (vocal and banjo) with a rotating cast of black male singers of religious material, sentimental Dixie chestnuts, and a serving of minstrel songs. The anachronism is that Miller never trafficked in blackface, he dressed “his men” in suits, and as the show increased in popularity, touring elite clubs in New York, Boston, and Cleveland, it earned derision and threats of violence due to the semblance of “brotherhood” that it presented on stage. While the contemporary music publishers were pumping out such popular white-composed “coon songs” as “If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon” and “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” “Old Times in the South” was presenting “authentic” Southern black song performed by a racially mixed ensemble.
Polk's "men"
Granted, this ensemble — of course barring Miller and his friend Colonel Tom Booker, who occasionally joined the troupe on banjo — was often billed as a representation of, as one program had it, “the real Southern Darkey.” And there’s the issue of Miller’s discomfiting motive behind the show: “I do try to give the older people something that would take them back to their childhood, and to give to the younger generation an insight to the happy past under the old regime in Dixie.” Miller made it clear to reporters that the members of the Quartette were not his collaborative equals but, like the “men who are in my employ at my home,” his “servants.” “Old Times in the South” was a romantic trip down Miller’s memory lane, when slaves loved their masters, the South was unspoiled by Yankee imposition, and the weeping willow was in bloom.