THOMAS HART BENTON [1889 –1975] The Sources of Country Music, c.1975

THOMAS HART BENTON [1889 –1975]

The Sources of Country Music, c.1975

• Thomas Hart Benton was a major

American artist from Missouri. • His paintings are famous for showing

ordinary people doing common things.• He drew and painted portraits,

landscapes, and scenes of people at work in farms, factories, and busy cities.

• His best-known works are public murals, or scenes on the inside walls of buildings.

• Benton’s murals are lively records of life in America from pioneer times onward.

• Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist.

• Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement.

• Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, into an influential clan of politicians and powerbrokers.

• Benton's father, Maecenas Benton, was a lawyer and United States congressman,

• Named after his great-uncle Thomas Hart Benton who was one of the first two United States Senators from Missouri.

• Benton spent his childhood shuttling between Washington D.C. and Missouri.

• Benton rebelled against his grooming for a future political career, preferring to develop his interest in art.

• As a teenager, he worked as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper, in Joplin, Missouri.

Benton, holding a walking stick, as a young man in Neosho, around 1911. He is pictured with his sisters, Mary and

Florence, and their companions.

Benton and companions posing near a barbed wire fence

• Benton met and married Rita Piacenza, an Italian immigrant, in 1922.

• They met while Benton was teaching art classes for a neighborhood organization in New York City and she was one of his students.

• They were married for 53 years until Thomas's death in 1975.

• Rita died ten weeks after her husband.

• The couple had a son, Thomas Piacenza Benton, born in 1926, and a daughter, Jessie Benton, born in 1939.

• On December 24, 1934, Benton was featured on one of the earliest color covers of Time magazine.

• Benton’s work was featured along with fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry in an article titled “The U.S. Scene”.

• The article portrayed the trio as the new heroes of American art and cemented Regionalism as a significant art movement.

Regionalism

• Is also known as American scene painting.

• American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States.

• After World War I many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris.

• Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes.

• American scene painting conveys a sense of nationalism and romanticism in depictions of everyday American life.

• During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American cities, small towns, and rural landscapes;

• Some did so as a way to return to a simpler time away from industrialization whereas others sought to make a political statement and lent their art to revolutionary and radical causes.

• His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States.

• Though his work is perhaps best associated with the Midwest, he created scores of paintings of New York, where he lived for over 20 years;

• Martha’s Vineyard, where he summered for much of his adult life;

• The American South; • And the American West.

• Thomas Hart Benton was eighty-four in 1973, when he came out of retirement to paint a mural for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

• His assignment was to describe the regional sources of the musical style known as “country,” and Benton couldn’t resist the opportunity to paint one last celebration of homegrown American traditions.

• Benton himself was a skilled harmonica player who had been raised on the old-time music of the Missouri Ozarks.

• It was during his lifetime that the multimillion-dollar country-music industry in Nashville had replaced the community-based music of rural America.

• As an artist, he had gained a popular following in the 1930s with works that spoke to ordinary people.

• Along with other Midwestern Regionalists such as Grant Wood (Paul Revere’s Ride)

• Benton rejected “Parisian aesthetics,” the European influence on American art, and scorned abstract art as “an academic world of empty pattern.”

• His ambition was to paint meaningful, intelligible subjects—“the living world of active men and women”—that would hold broad, popular appeal.

• By virtue of its subject and its setting, the Nashville mural was to be a painting, Benton said, “aimed at persons who do not ordinarily visit art museums.”

• The Sources of Country Music is currently on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame Rotunda and is part of the exhibit tour.

• On January 18, 1975, in his carriage-house studio in Kansas City, Thomas Hart Benton put the last brushstrokes on his painting The Sources of Country Music.

• The mural had been commissioned the year before by Nashville's Country Music Foundation to be displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum. 

• Its completion, in less than a year, by an eighty-five year-old-artist, was an impressive physical achievement.

• The canvas measures six by ten feet and contains seventeen nearly life-sized figures.

• The subject was very dear to him. Tom's interest in country music was that of a man actively involved with it;

• He was himself a gifted musician, as well as a collector of American folk tunes.

• In The Sources of Country Music he distilled the study and hard work of a lifetime.

• "I remember from my childhood," Tom remarked of country music, shortly after he was commissioned to make the Nashville mural. "I was raised down in southwest Missouri, and the only music we had was country music. So I was pretty familiar with it.I was familiar with the songs and with a good deal of literature on the subject."

• The Sources of Country Music presents five distinct scenes to survey the music of ordinary Americans.

• The central subject of a barn dance, with a pair of fiddlers calling out sets to a group of square dancers, describes the dominant music of the frontier.

• A comparatively calm scene shows three women in their Sunday best with hymnals in their hands, suggesting the importance of church music in Protestant America.

• In the foreground, two barefoot mountain women sing to the sounds of a lap dulcimer, an old instrument associated with Appalachian ballads.

• In the opposite corner an armed cowboy, one foot on his saddle, accompanies himself with a guitar.

• An African American man, apparently a cotton picker in the Deep South, strums a tune on a banjo, an instrument slaves brought with them to the New World.

• Beyond him, on the other side of the railroad tracks, a group of black women dances on the distant riverbank.

• Despite the range of regional styles, instruments, and customs, the mural seems to pulsate to a single beat, as if Benton took care to ensure that all the musicians played the same note and sang their varied American songs in tune.

• The mural preserves an image of American folkways that were rapidly disappearing.

• Benton’s characteristically dynamic style expresses the powerful rhythms of music while suggesting the inevitability of change.

• Many of the robust, nearly life-size figures balance on uneven, shifting ground.

• The fiddlers look liable to fall into the mysteriously bowed floor, and the log on which the banjo player sits threatens to roll down the steep slope of the red-clay landscape.

• Even the telephone poles seem to sway in the background.

• The steam engine, an indication of change, represents the end of an agrarian life and the homogenization of American culture, which necessarily entailed the loss of regional customs.

• The mural pays homage to the country music singer and movie star Tex Ritter, who had helped to persuade Benton to accept the Nashville commission but died before it was completed.

• Benton represents Ritter as the singing cowboy who turns to face the coal-black engine steaming along the horizon.

Tex Ritter

• The most well-versed western singer of any of Hollywood’s singing cowboys was Tex Ritter.

• Born Woodward Maurice Ritter in Panola County, Texas (the same county where Jim Reeves was born), Ritter was raised with a deep love of western music.

• When he entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1922 he met J. Frank Dobie, Oscar J. Fox, and John Lomax—three of the most noted authorities on cowboy songs, who added further to his knowledge of western music.

• While studying law in college Ritter had his own weekly radio program, singing cowboy songs. on KPRC in Houston.

• He worked briefly in a Broadway musical production. • Returning to college, he entered Northwestern University in

Chicago.• The enormous success of Gene Autry’s films led other studios to

look for their own singing cowboy- Tex Ritter was discovered. • He soon began scoring major hits records• In 1952, when he was asked to sing the title song of the Gary

Cooper–Grace Kelly western High Noon. The song was used as a narrative throughout the film and became Ritter’s signature song.

• Ritter became involved with the formation of the Country Music Association (CMA) and was elected its president in 1963.

• He co-hosted the late night country music radio program on WSM with Ralph Emery and joined the Grand Ole Opry.

• In 1970 Ritter ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination to the U. S. Senate.

• Ritter’s death on January 2, 1974 marked the passing of one of c&w music’s finest and most respected talents.

• His son John Ritter became a successful TV actor.

• The train itself was modeled on the Cannonball Special, driven and wrecked by Casey Jones, the hero of an American ballad;

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03jwHrO7ubI

• It also calls to mind “The Wabash Cannonball,” a popular folk song about a mythical train that glides through the country, then rumbles off to heaven.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMiU_aknPDA

• The engine, which may signify the positive as well as the negative aspects of American progress

• (remember Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad),

• is the only element of the complex composition that Benton felt he couldn’t get quite right.

• He did a lot of research on the engine.

• One of the elements which caused him most concern was the train. The image of a train appears in country music in many well known songs, such as "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The Wabash Cannonball," and "Casey Jones." Benton was particularly concerned that the train be represented accurately. He decided to use as his model Engine No. 382, the "Cannonball Express," the train in which Casey Jones perished in his famous wreck, a fast passenger train which ran from Chicago to New Orleans. As late as December of 1974 he was still doing research on this question. He asked his friend Lyle S. Woodcock in St. Louis to help him out, and on December 19, 1975, Woodcock wrote back:

• According to the Transport Museum records, and the Norfolk and Western Railroad (successor to the Illinois Central), Engine No. 382, the one driven by Casey Jones, was scrapped many years ago. The Museum of Transport in St. Louis has an engine which they say is identical to No. 382. It is a "Ten Wheeler" with a wooden cab, and is No. 635. It was a Missouri Pacific Engine, built by Baldwin Locomotive Co. in 1889. This engine is easily accessible in St. Louis.

• The railroad museum in Jackson, Tennessee is the home of Casey Jones.

• They have an engine like the one in St. Louis and have numbered it 282 although it is not the original engine of which Casey Jones was engineer.

• In closing, Woodcock enclosed photographs of the St. Louis engine.

• Tom was dissatisfied with the first set of photographs, so Woodcock went back to take detailed photographs of the working gears.

• Benton based the train in his painting on these photographs, and finished the canvas on January 18, a little bit ahead of his schedule.

• On the afternoon of January 19, when he had drinks with his young friend John Callison, he suggested that they should drive to St. Louis together someday soon to look at the actual train.

• Unfortunately, however, he was not able to make this trip.

• That same evening after dinner, Tom walked out to his studio, wearing the same old hat John Callison had posed in while turning a windlass for the 1972 mural of "Turn of the Century Joplin." (Located in the Municipal Building of Joplin, Missouri.)

• He announced to his wife, Rita, that he wanted to look over his mural; if he decided it was completed he was going to sign it.

• Around 8:30 Rita went out to fetch him, and chide him for staying out so late. She found Tom lying on the floor with his spectacles on, directly in front of the Nashville mural, which was still unsigned.

• Stricken by a massive heart attack, he had fallen on his wristwatch, which stopped at the exact moment of his death: five minutes past seven o'clock.

Thomas Hart Benton’s other works

• “Different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river,” an illustration created by Thomas Hart Benton to accompany the 1944 edition of Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical book, Life on the Mississippi

The Music Lesson, 1943

The Kentuckian

c. 1954

Plowing it Under, 1935

She’s Off c. 1944

Down the Lower Mississippi c. 1943

The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934

Kansas City,

from Politics,

Farming, and

the Law

c. 1934

Washington Square Park c. 1945

• June Morning depicts a view from his mother's house on Martha's Vineyard. Painted one month after Germany's surrender in World War II, it is Benton's patriotic testament to the strength of the American spirit facing the destructive powers of war. The neighbor milking the cow symbolizes Benton's vision of the American way of life, the departing storm clouds suggest the passing of war, and the lush foliage contrasting with the dead tree represent the cycle of life.

Essay Question 1

• What things and people are making music and sound in this scene?

• Benton wanted all the musicians to play the same note and sing their varied music in tune. Do you think this painting

seems like noisy confusion or are all the parts in harmony?

Essay Question 2

• What does the steam engine represent?

Essay Question 3

• Why did Benton include in the painting a homage to Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy?

• Why did Benton not sign this painting?

• http://countrymusichalloffame.org/thomas-hart-benton