Elizabeth Cadwell works with the Friends of the Mad River. She attended the Warren concert (no. 37), which benefited FotMR, and subsequently invited us to the Waitsfield Village Meeting House.

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Waitsfield native Henry Whitaker joined for several pieces. He played Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, composed in 1796, the year the Waitsfield church was organized, the first major piece for the newly invented valve trumpet. He also played Herbert Clarke’s viruouso cornet showpiece “The Maid of the Mist” and made an unannounced appearance in the second of Chopin’s first two Polonaises, written in 1817, when the village was founded.

Henry also performed on what was for me the piece with the most exciting local connection. Though this is little known outside the region, if indeed within it, Ralph Ellison began Invisible Man, the landmark coming-of-age novel about the trials and tribulations of a young Black man navigating the political landscape of the South and of Harlem, in a barn here in the state with the fewest Black people in the nation. In the town of Waitsfield, as a matter of not-quite-fact (more on that in a moment).

Ellison was also a trumpeter, composer, and music critic, and the novel begins with the protagonist secreted in his underground, unnumbered Harlem apartment, listening to Louis Armstong’s recording of Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue”:

Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue”—all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin.

I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.

From the moment the concert was scheduled, I knew we had to do this song. When it turned out my local collaborator played the trumpet, I felt the project blessed with yet another remarkably fortuitous coincidence.

Except for one little detail…the novel was not begun in Waitsfield, as I discovered just after the concert:

The woman of Ellison’s host couple, Amelia Bates, had deep family roots in Vermont, and I had read that her grandson Gamal Buhaina still lived in the main house by the since demolished writing barn. So after the concert, I asked our concert hosts if they could point us to the house for a little pilgrimage. They were happy to do so, while politely pointing out that the house is on German Flats Road, which lies entirely in the adjoining town of Fayston. “Like, on the Waitsfield line?” I asked hopefully. Nope, not even. It turns out that people put the Invisible Man barn in “Waitsfield”, home to the nearest post office, the same way a resident of Skokie might say they’re from Chicago. In fact virtually all sources do this, including Wikipedia (only recently corrected) and, multiple times, Ellison himself.

The good news was, my Waitsfield contacts told me that Gamal was a fantastic singer and would be a great collaborator for my eventual [LINK] Fayston concert—which in fact he was, two years later.

Incidentally, Ellison, who was something of a citified cultural snob, had some choice observations about rural Vermont culture in private letters, from square dances with music that “demanded a stethoscope to find its pulse” while the dancers “for the most part…simply hopped about uncouthly” to less easily dismissed concerns about racist stage stereotypes:

I had seen, in a nearby Vermont village, a poster announcing the performance of a “Tom Show,” that forgotten term for blackface minstrel versions of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I had thought such entertainment a thing of the past, but there, in a quiet northern village it was alive and kicking, with Eliza, frantically slipping and sliding on the ice, still trying – and that during World War II! – to escape the slavering hounds. What is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.” (from the 1980 introduction to Invisible Man)

That was in 1945. I wonder what his thoughts were, if he knew, about the continuation of UVM’s annual blackface “Kakewalk” through 1969—about which, more in the forthcoming Norwich concert writeup.

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