Crawford-Seeger: Rissolty Rissolty
I married my wife in the month of June
Rissolty Rossolty now, now, now.
I carried her home in a silver spoon,
Rissolty rossolty
Hey born bossolty
Nickelty nackelty
Rustical quality
Willowby wallaby now, now, now!She swept the floor but once a year,
She swore the brooms, they cost too dear…
She combed her hair but once a year
At every rake she shed a tear.
Rissolty rossolty
Hey born bossolty
Nickelty nackelty
Rustical quality
Willowby wallaby now, now, now!
The life and the winding career of Ruth Crawford Seeger could hardly be more emblematic of the concerns of liberal intellectuals and the challenges facing female musicians in the 20th Century – even, in fact, facing many working women even now. It’s no coincidence that her one orchestral work is inspired by an old American folksong that makes light of the challenges of domesticity.
When young Ruth Crawford travelled from Jacksonville to Chicago to enroll at the American Conservatory in 1921, her family’s ambitions were simple enough: that she learn, as many women did, to be a successful piano teacher. But her talent and love for composing changed all that, and by 1929 she was living at the home of a wealthy patroness in New York City and studying with Charles Seeger, an illustrious theorist of the avant-garde and a man who had once been dismissed from the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley for being too liberal.
In 1930 Crawford became the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and spent the next two years traveling Europe, soaking in the flavors of the modernist music then ascendant and making innovative contributions of her own to the genre. In 1932 she married Seeger, who, while nominally supportive of his wife’s composing, also assumed that she’d raise her new stepchildren as well as the three children of their own that quickly followed.
The Depression inspired the Seegers, like many artists, to turn away from the avant-garde and towards the folk music of everyday Americans, and when Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA added a musical branch in 1935 the Seegers moved to Washington to work in it. Charles helped to oversee a team of researchers traveling through the countryside recording folksong; Ruth stayed at home and transcribed the recordings, producing the seminal folksong collections America Sings! and American Folk Songs for Children.
So in 1939, when she finally had a commission to compose for orchestra, it’s hardly surprising that chose as inspiration the nonsense song Rissolty Rossolty, which turns marriage and domesticity into a rollicking goofaround. Crawford Seeger breaks the song’s tune into little bits and hurls them willy-nilly around the instruments of the orchestra, stirring in for good measure fragments of the children’s playsong My Sister Phoebe. The short, footstomping hoedown captures all the chaotic good spirits of American frontier gatherings at their most joyous; even its surprising ending, which feels for all the world like a car breaking down and coasting to a halt beside the road, portrays what the composer called the “great going on-ness” of a folksinger winding down one tune only in order to gear up for another one that will be even more boisterous.
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Chris Vaneman is the Dean of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse University. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.