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Stylizing the Folk: Hall Johnson's Run, Little Chillun Photographed by Doris Ulmann
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The following photographs have been selected from a group of twenty-five prints by Doris Ulmann documenting the original Broadway production of Hall Johnson's musical drama Run, Little Chillun, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on March 1, 1933. The pictures provide an unusual record of the interest in regional American cultures and the resulting stylized revival of traditional regional customs characteristic of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Run, Little Chillun, named after a famous spiritual and based on the conflict between Christian and pagan religious forces in a small Southern town, was the most important black example of the folk-theater movement of the period. Doris Ulmann, a fashionable portrait photographer of New York's moneyed literary and scientific intelligentsia, was also—and more importantly—passionately devoted to documenting isolated rural communities and the efforts to preserve their cultural heritage. Despite her intense interest in the theater, this collection is probably her only extensive series based on a theatrical production that has been preserved, and it may be the only one she ever made. The collection derives from the estate of Oliver M. Sayler, the press representative for the production.
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References
NOTES
2. The photographs are published here by courtesy of the Lunn Gallery/Graphics International, Ltd., which brought the collection to the attention of the authors. A playbill accompanied the collection. The bank holiday decreed by the newly inaugurated President Roosevelt shortly after the production opened caused its managers considerable trouble. They found themselves with a bundle of checks they could not cash and no money to pay the salaries of the seventy-five members of the cast and chorus brought down from Harlem.
3. Ulmann made a few photographs based on performances by Anya Enters and the Shanker East Indian Dance Company. John Jacob Niles, who worked closely with her, reports that she also made several based on Green Pastures, A few portraits of theatrical persons survive, among them ones of Paul Robeson and members of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, taken during a visit of the company to New York. In an article on her portrait photography, Dale Warren states that Ulmann was uninterested in “theatrical people” as sitters because “for the most part [they] do not wish character to show in their faces.” Warren, Dale, “Doris Ulmann: Photographer-in-Waiting,” The Bookman, 72 (10 1930), 129–44Google Scholar. An anonymous article in Theatre Arts Monthly, 02 1930, pp. 132–41Google Scholar, compares her work to the new folk drama of the day.
4. Interview with Simon, Louis M., 01 10, 1980.Google Scholar
5. Alston Burleigh was the son of Harry C. Burleigh, baritone soloist of Saint George's Choir in New York and composer of “Deep River” and other spirituals.
6. The Dreamy Kid, The Emperor Jones, All God's Chillun Got Wings, and In Abraham's Bosom are examples.
7. Laurence Stallings and Frank Harling had also dramatized a single spiritual, “Deep River,” for Arthur Hopkins.
8. Letter to Walter White dated March 18, 1933, Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
9. From material prepared in the offices of Oliver M. Sayler for release to the Herald Tribune, Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
10. The original title of the play was Across the River.
11. Run, Little Chillun script signed by Hall Johnson, with supplement to act 2, scene 11, p. 22, Research Center for the Federal Theatre Project, George Mason University.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Ibid., p. 31.
14. Ibid., p. 34.
15. Ibid., p. 37.
16. Material prepared for release by Oliver M. Sayler, Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
17. Interview with Simon, Louis B., 01 10, 1980.Google Scholar
18. Johnson, , Run, Little Chillun, Act II, Scene 11, p. 15.Google Scholar
19. Ibid., p. 20
20. Ibid., p. 21.
21. Some variant Federal Theatre scripts ask the question at the end of the play: “Who is revenged, Jehovah or Elder Tongola?”
22. Press releases, Research Center for the Federal Theatre Project, George Mason University.
23. Burke, Kenneth, “The Negro Pattern of Life,” Saturday Review of Literature, 10 (07 27, 1933), 13.Google Scholar
24. Ibid., p. 13.
25. Ibid., p. 14.
26. We are grateful for the assistance of persons from all of these institutions, as well as for that of Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Niles of Lexington, Kentucky, and of a number of scholars of theatrical history. Lester Pross of the Art Department of Berea College was especially helpful in making the collection there available for extensive study.
27. See Warren, , “Doris Ulmann: Photographer-in-Waiting” (note 3 above), pp. 129–144Google Scholar. Hamlin Garland discusses her early rural portraits in “Doris Ullman's [sic] Photographs,” The Mentor, 07 1927, pp. 42–48.Google Scholar
28. The most informative accounts are John Jacob Niles's unpaginated introduction to The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann (Penland, North Carolina: Jargon Society, 1971)Google Scholar and William Cliffs preface to The Darkness and the Light: Photographs by Doris Ulmann (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1974), pp. 7–12Google Scholar. The latter book contains many of her Gullah photographs. There is also some biographical information in The Call Number, 19, No. 2 (Spring 1958), 4–12Google Scholar. This issue of the publication of the University of Oregon Library is devoted substantially to the Ulmann collection there.
29. There were two editions—one for general circulation with seventy-two photographs and one signed and limited to three hundred fifty copies with ninety gravures of very high quality. Both were published in New York by Ballou.
30. Coles, Robert, “A New Heaven and a New Earth,”Google Scholar in Clift, , The Darkness and the Light, p. 82Google Scholar. Coles's extensive essay, which is appended to this collection, is a perceptive account of Ulmann's response to the South by an eminent contemporary sociologist. For more sympathetic recent discussions of Peterkin, see Landess, Thomas H., Julia Peterkin (Boston: Twayne, 1976)Google Scholar, and Shealy, Ann, “Julia Peterkin,” in The Passionate Mind (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1976)Google Scholar. Lang Syne was the family plantation of Peterkin's husband, but she herself was raised by a Gullah, and she spoke Gullah before she spoke standard white American.
31. Eaton, Allen, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1937)Google Scholar. This work, reprinted by Dover in 1973, contains fiftyeight illustrations by Ulmann.
32. These are preserved at the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
33. Introduction to The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann (n.p.).