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 “Therefore I entered the portals of dust”

Two years after the appearance of Spoon River Anthology, America would enter World War I. Although cities on the prairie had already blossomed, and Chicago had been rebuilt out of the ashes and celebrated with a global exposition, the war years that followed the book’s publication would bring their own form of disillusionment. Urbanization, which had already been growing steadily in the States would speed up with industrialization and war. Masters’s work must have served as a piercing poetic commentary in the developments that followed, destabilizing a sense of an idyllic agrarian past, and confronting readers with a more honest looking, modern realism. His choice of free verse no doubt embodies this spirit.

Buckner’s musical adaptation of Spoon River Anthology reprises the effect of undercutting that romantic vision of the past, developing creaking, feedback-laden, occasionally dissonant renderings of tales from that earlier life. No sappy nostalgia here, but rather an unflinching look at the lives lived under the surface.

Richard Buckner, performing at Mud and Water, Baton Rouge, 2013 (photo by captainsdead)

Coda

Over its century-long history, Spoon River Anthology has inspired numerous adaptations and creative works, in music, theater, film, and photography. The work it most evoked for me was Sherwood Anderson’s novel (or collection of interrelated short stories), Winesburg, Ohio, which emerged a year after the publication of Spoon River Anthology. Although it is not an adaptation, Anderson did read Masters’s work prior to the appearance of Winesburg, and its influence is difficult to deny. You can see it as well in the work of Sinclair Lewis.

I’ll refer you to the Wikipedia entry to explore other adaptations of Spoon River, but will lift up a couple that are particularly worthy of attention.

First is Anders Gustafsson’s 1999 short film of “Tom Merritt,” starring David Bateson, Diana Axelsen, and Mads Mikkelsen. Presented starkly in black and white, its feel is slightly more Western than Spoon River’s Illinois setting, but it’s quite well done:

“Spoon River” was recorded by Steve Goodman long before the release of Smith’s eponymous album. It has been well covered since, standing with “The Dutchman” among Smith’s signal contributions to American songcraft.

Smith reprises “Spoon River” on his duet album with Anne Hills, Paradise Lost & Found. Hills served as producer on Michael Smith.

Lyrics. Listen to a live version on YouTube here.

I knew of Smith’s “Spoon River” long before I heard Buckner’s work, and long before I had read Spoon River Anthology. I had always heard it as a song about reconciliation at the end of the Civil War, and I had difficulty squaring it with Masters’s book, which emerged 50 years after the end of the Civil War. As John Hallwas makes clear, though, Masters’s book is in one of its many aspects a sustained conversation about the cultural divisions that made up his early life on the prairie, even though Masters himself was born three years after the end of the war.

Throughout the 19th century, far downstate Illinois primarily drew new settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia with an agrarian ethos, and slightly more easy-going piety and morals (around drinking, at least). Further upstate was populated more by settlers from New England, bringing with them Yankee notions of propriety and sobriety. Hallwas notes that these cultures influenced the characters of the towns of Petersburg and Lewistown. Petersburg was more Southern, and Lewistown more Yankee, but the manners and mores of both towns were contested along these lines. In this respect, Smith is thematically on-target with the notion of “all of our lives were entwined to begin with,” and his song is a fitting legacy not only to the themes of the book but the context of its creation.

Thanks for reading, folks. We’ll be back next week with another post about adapting poetry to music – at least that’s the plan.