Recently we took a look at the 1950 songbook The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs. We began with this post focused a bit on the illustrations. The next post in this series, which you can find right here, featured YouTube videos of some of the old songs from the book. This week, a look at a couple of the people involved in making the book happen.
Looking quickly at the figures on the back flap of the dust jacket, it would be easy to mistake them for the editorial, musical, and art staff, but if you look a little more closely you see it's a barbershop quartet.
Besides the bowler hats and open singing mouths, another hint is that this is a quartet, but here were actually five people who contributed to this book, with four of them listed in this next illustration: Margaret Bradford Boni, Norman Lloyd, Aurelius Battaglia, and Anne Brooks.
There are four names on the fence, but then if you look at the bottom of the page, you see a fifth name.
Carl Van Doren's name also appears on the dedication page. He'd written the foreword for the volume, and then passed away before the book went into production.
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Carl Van Doren was part of a famous family. Carl's bother Mark was a prize-winning poet, while Mark's wife Dorothy was a novelist. Mark and Dorothy's son, Charles, was the figure at the center of the scandal involving the television show "Twenty-One." Charles Van Doren's testimony at public hearings on game shows was the subject of the 1994 film "Quiz Show," directed by Robert Redford.
If all that's not complex enough for you, there's another family connection which comes up in relation (as it were) to The Fireside Book. We'll come back to that in a bit.
While Carl Van Doren did have famous family, he was definitely well-known for his own achievements. You can tell that just from the art on this book cover, right? (The swirling hair also evokes mental caricatures of an unpleasant fellow in the political world.)
Hr was a historian and biographer. He's best known for thee things. First, his book Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) helped bring Herman Melville's work back into favor after Melville's writing had been devalued by some critics. Second, Van Doren won
the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his book on Benjamin
Franklin. His third claim to fame was digging up the story of Benedict Arnold in a book he wrote with fellow scholar Howard Henry Peckham, called Secret History of the American Revolution.
Since Carl Van Doren was so well-established as a a specialist in American history, it was a big deal that he'd written a foreword for The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs. Van Doren ended his foreward with this sentence: "Whenever men, women, or children sing a nation's songs the singers are a part of the history of the nation." I like that. A lot.
Of the other Fireside contributors whose names we see written on the cartoon fence (above Carl Van Doren's), we see the illustrator Aurelius Battaglia, whose biography and work we looked at in the first post in this series. We also see the name Anne Brooks. She wrote introductions for each of the book's four sections.
So far, I have not been able to track down anything about Brooks, whose back-flap author bio is very vague. There's mention of a publishing house she did editorial work at, but it's not named. Brooks also wrote books, apparently, but none of the titles are supplied. Virginia Woolf said "Anonymous was a woman." I'm afraid Anne Brooks' anonymity lies in how common her name is. I'll keep looking and add more information here if I find it.
That leaves music arranger Norman Lloyd -- who I'll profile in next week's post -- and the editor of the The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs, Margaret Bradford Boni. You might be surprised at how hard it was to find out much about her, because MBB did a lot of interesting things during her long life, and knew a lot of interesting people, too.
Some time ago, I wrote a post for Year 2 of this blog about who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. Seems to me that being a female human before about 1970 made one more likely to be forgotten than to be remembered,
The only way I was able to dig up any real information on Margaret Bradford Boni was by doing a dual search on Google, using MBB's name and that of her husband.
I began with this 1931wedding announcement in the New York Times.
Charles Boni and his brother Albert were booksellers and publishers in Greenwich Village. Within/near the Village, there is Washington Square Village, which is where the original bookshop owned by the brothers was located. Here's a modern map of the area:
The Washington Square Bookshop, owned by the Boni brothers, was on MacDougal when the street looked like this.
The shop was sold between 1910 and 1920 and it moved to 8th. Here's a look at the interior:
This is the world Margaret Bradford Boni was immersed in, before and after marrying her husband Charles. Margaret Bradford was not just any teacher, as she's called in the wedding announcement, but well-known as a music expert who specialized in the recorder. She co-authored some instructional manuals in the 1930s, and I have the one for the soprano recorder.
MBB also had a long association with The City and Country School,
an experimental school located in Manhattan, which is listed as an LGBT
historic site because of the female couple who ran the school.
After
getting some basic information based on Margaret Bradford Boni's
marriage announcement, I got some genealogy information. This type of
research has served me well in the past while find out stuff other
people for the blog. I do not know which secret skills people learn when
they set up ancestry research websites, but some of them are very good at it.
Thus, at the free version of an ancestry site, I found this photo of Margaret Bradford Boni. True, it's just
a piece of a photo cropped from some larger one. It shows just the side of her head, but
it's something.
MBB was clearly proud of her association with her subset of Greenwich Village life. I noted the fact that her address of "2 Washington Square Village" is given in the first paragraph of her 1974 obituary in the New York Times. The prestigious address appears above the sales estimate for her folk song book, which had sold, at that time, more than a quarter-million copies. This book came out two or three years before the Favorite American Songs volume.
If "Washington Square" sets off bells in your head, by the way, you may be remembering Henry James' 1880 novel Washington Square, which was once often a staple of college lit courses. Two film versions, 1949's "The Heiress," and 1997's "Washington Square" have been made, and it looks like there's a new version that came out or is coming out this year.
There was also a 1963 hit song with the title "Washington Square" which was once all over the radio. The artists were The Village Stompers, and the record had a memorable banjo solo intro, celebrating the folk music boom of the early 1960s.
So back to that other family connection with Carl Van Doren, the one I mentioned earlier. I had a very hard time finding a photo of MBB, and the only way anything at all came up was to enter her name along with that of her husband. Then I checked genealogy sites, where I found MBB's photo, and then a little about her family.
Suddenly, a light bulb came on over my head. I'd figured out all this stuff about these New York bohemian folks and
I was trying to fit together the fact that they've got noted historian
Carl Van Doren doing the foreword for this songbook. I
looked at the genealogy site, and with a little bit of clocking, I
discover that MBB had a sister, Irita Bradford Van Doren, who was once married to Carl Van Doren. Aha!
Margaret Bradford Boni's sister Irita, it turns out to have lived an intriguing and colorful life. Also, Dorothy, who was Carl Van Doren's sister-in-law, was a prolific writer and editor, so she'll also get some attention in upcoming posts.
We'll finish for this week with the cover of another of several songbooks edited by Margaret Bradford Boni.
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