The Tale of John Brown

kansas city is hosting the world premiere of the operatic john brown this week telling the tale of one of our country's most famous abolitionists and one of our best known but little understood kansans today i'm katie are presented we'll talk to kirk meacham the composer of john brown professor jonathan earle whose book john brown's raid on harpers ferry was published earlier this year and a special guest i'll ask you see me call it john brown's a great great great granddaughter i'm kate mcintyre kirk welcome to the program and do we have a mental picture of john brown certainly those of us who live in kansas and it had seen the mural projects are currently are on the state capital rio has a mental picture of john brown composer how do you go about human i think this larger than life figure what is the first thing i should say is i really try to be historically accurate about him he was on a very complicated man very religious man a very

tender family man but he hated slavery and he was totally colorblind he had many friends who were blacks and they immediately saw that he in fact frederick douglass said in his soul he is a black man here of course he was white and there so to humanize him isn't all that hard when you really look at his letters and anne it is just since the year two thousand there've been four five excellent biographies of john brown who have done just that humanized image the main thing is to see him in context you can't understand any historical figures actions and unless you can see them in the way that they saw them at the time speaking of context but i'm thinking as a sense of what was that historical context and eighteen fifty five sure and then i and i agree you

have to understand where john brown come from him john brown inside all these larger national historical trends making fifty five basically there is a race on our between settlers from northern states and settlers from southern states too to populate the river valleys weston missouri and what's now kansas and so at the beginning of a territorial settlement after the kansas nebraska act you have a lot to offer misery coming in who not surprisingly on the pros they reside out but as a teen fifty four war on as eighteen fifty five began in iran when when john brown horizon in a territory in late eighteen fifty five you start to have more free state settlers then pro slavery settlers and and that's when you really start get the violence when when the numbers were about equal and the pro slavery so i felt like they were losing the numbers race two people from new england and northern states like indiana and ohio and illinois so how is jon bradford in it as well it's an important probably know that john brown sons three of them a dating thirty three hour migrated first

with the idea that they would both be soldiers for the free state an anti slavery cause but also i'll become farmers and own their own land which which was a difficult thing to do in the middle part of the century are john driver said he was enjoying his sons here in kansas he said famously that he i've felt called to act in another part of the field of the anti slavery battle but then he gets a letter from his oldest son john brown jr about conditions here in kansas territory and in eighteenth at five things were very very bad for the free state the settlers in kansas territory a very draconian slave coded in past it was against the law to speak against slavery to help a slave escape you could get hung by the neck until your dad for helping plan a slave insurrection so what i try to explain in my book is that and i reproduce a slave code and in full is that anti slavery thought and speech and action was was against the law of the territory so john brown hears about this from inside his sign any also hears that this group of pro slavery side has all the guns so john rowe

jr is begging his father not to come necessarily to kansas but to find a way to arm them anti slavery side and so that was exactly what john brown who at that time in his life is a failure of business he's he's named in a dozen lawsuits around the north and in england and he guesses call from his son for help help we need you in the war against slavery and at that moment he decided to pack his bags in and come to kansas speaking of those science kirk one of the first characters we meet in your copper it is not john browne and his son oliver and there's this lovely secondary story about oliver and his fiance you know an opera is not a good a good opera lee says not about historical events or even historical people it's about human beings and so i wanted to introduce a love story that is historically accurate as far as we can tell between oliver john brown's son who was an abolitionist

just like his father and a girl from a pacifist family and this is so i think everyone will immediately relate to her because everyone is a pacifist as hard we all rather settle or buy non violent means so do we all sympathize with her and she sees her aria that right at the beginning and being a passive as she's just want to get mixed up in india's political which he thinks are just political things that they came to farm to make broad trees and flowers to plant and he wants them to enjoy what god has given and at

age eighty eight ha ha our i used

to adrian use these areas throughout the whole course of the opera i think people will see things with her eyes gradually learns just how bad slavery is and then when her brother is

killed by the invaders a shiite she is just torn into whether to stay with oliver tomb she's engaged and they have a lovely duet that's the kind of thing which is a kind of an agonizing <unk> first and then finally he wins her over but she's also very in close when she comes in contact with the opponents of a freedom and that is when she becomes in contact with frederick douglass the greatest black leader in the nineteenth century who was a very good friend of john brown so when she when he she hears him make one of his wonderful speeches about what slavery really is that that kind of clinch as it for her and she's she sees you know it's not that and a lot of what a lot of people don't realize that even henry thoreau is probably the most famous pacifist we know henry thoreau changed when he threw slavery coming in contact with john brownlee said john brown is the greatest

transcendentalists of the mall and i can now see a time when i we could kill or be killed in the service of something larger than any of this desperate times calling for desperate measures yes right and it is true and when people say that when people pose the question well as violence or they were justified i say well look at world war two it was it wouldn't have been all right to just like let hitler gone with waves of the holocaust and taking over and tyre europe and the whole world if we could of course there are times and other just on a human scale if you saw somebody kidnapping your child no way to stop it was to shoot him that anyone would shoot you and an end would be expected to do so there are you know there are exceptional cases and slavery was a very eccentric sexual thing in our history the worst thing we were

guilty of them and the greatest crisis in our country of course let's get back to the very beginning of your opera the very first number let's listen to that for a second he's

been i'm really struck by how ominous it sounds those very first notes he had this sense of an impending struggle well that's what you have to do you know with an upper you you want to set the mood as you are you can end up so the first is is that shows a tragic thing coming but then it goes right into a cave and beautiful tune that i wrote to some words were i'm john brown's favorite him blow ye the trumpet i i want to add kind of a sure people right away that this was going to

be a lyric piece that there was going to be a lot of beauty in and as well as soon as the conflict of the struggle over slavery tell us about that piece blow ye the trumpet i understand the lyrics are your own that you didn't exactly right than yourself one of the hottest hits let me interview this way rossini once said that he could set a laundry list of music and i've done something even worse i've said a list of him titles to music without realizing it and it wasn't until about ten years ten years ago or maybe five years ago somebody found out just by accident that this wasn't the words weren't words that john brown knew as a single him and it happened this way one of the early biographers asked one of john brown's daughters to list john brown's favorite hymns so she made a list of them

and the first one was blow ye the trumpet and then the other ones were listed and it made its way into another biography later those got compressed and so instead of a list of titles it looked like it won him one line right after the other with no space between them so it appeared in the really the most reliable biography at that time of john brown as the final thing in the book and we've heard all through the book about how important really the trumpet with these words was and those words were inspiring and that those are the words that i said so i really set six or seven different hymn tunes but they really inspired me and saw not i'm not sorry that i didn't know but i didn't know the real tune that and the real words that he knew because what

i had i researched this in libraries that make a specialty of old in knots and i couldn't find any of the words that we have that were listed in this book that the job because they were built in a way john brown wrote his own costumes at a time as buyers became the pittsburgh he's been

the piece to play it's

been the power i published that him shortly after after i wrote it before the opera was finished so it's been it's been in a publication out of it has been available for about fifteen years and it's one of public things i ever wrote people use it

at funerals and many different kinds of things mean that words are a really inspiring and they they prophesied john brown's life had prophesied the jubilee you the day that he was waiting for the prophesies martyrs death they have they just that's why i wrote the music for that before anything else john brown really is a blend of americana a familiar sound of hands and a more traditional opera form kirk how difficult was it to meld these two very different styles but wasn't difficult all i didn't have to try and just just came naturally i'm you know composers probably like a lot of artists don't work from theories but at least i don't i just worked from intuition an ad these just seem natural that an opera that's about america and

a very crucial time in our history wouldn't would have to have music that toe was sounded as if that were from that period and in many cases and in but it i also tried or i think the kind of opposite i like i like the that tree shoppers have our ears and choruses pro this long i don't like them to interrupt the story but a good operas have always used arias and choruses to heighten the things are happening in the individuals or in the story itself and as i've tried to do john brown was very religious man and he lived in a time when america was going through a religious revival jonathan how did john brown fit or not fit in with this revival a lot of people call what word experiencing today a third great awakening there's a first grade awakening in the seventeen forties and a second one the john brown lived through in the teen

twenties and thirties and i think came a really good point he was not what i would call part of that awakening and then in the nineteenth century and that it was very much a time when pub people became much more emotionally and enthusiastically connected to their churches they had these emotive and memorable conversion experiences they started to worship god it was much more about compassion and love john brown's god was much more of an old style european crown well leonore calvinist a guard so john wrote live through this revival this bravado that remade american christianity that he kind of was it was a throwback he kicked it old school with this calvinism and i think he'd be out of the mainstream of our current christian revival of looked at him as well he'd be out there as an outlier and saying that we're doing everything wrong how we're not following the true message or not we're were morally lax more lax and

we should be and there's a there's a famous episode in his life and he's in his early middle age and he the guy kicked out of his car original church for escorting visiting african americans to the family pew and the church kicked him out supposedly pot for being absent without announcing his whereabouts and i'm not a churchgoer myself button on his urban together church for for that particular infraction and that's the last time john browne ever attended organized services he refused to go to a church after that unsteady when his own anti slavery way hand and mocked the the good christian american people who gathered and anti slavery societies and sewing circles and petition drives you know there were a lot of anti slavery circles going on then and yet none of them go as far as john brown goes in terms of really treating african americans as his equally true i mean the abolitionists in america where at

the far end of the spectrum on racial belief and believe in racial equality but even among abolitionists most most abolitionist would not have agreed that the races were were equal arm people in intelligence people in capacity equal socially or should be and john brown was again just this far not far out radical and that he believed it to the court as being that people were created equal so john brown really was i'm really unique because there must've been some other people but i can't think of too terribly many enough and i've gone looking are people that really got it about race in any way that we i hope aspired to at least in the twenty first century sleeve getting it about race on that isn't really unique relationship with frederick douglass yeah i guess i get asked this one i might speak in public about this book that frederick douglass and john brown not only have this long relationship that we're were close friends seems almost to good to be true but john browne first met frederick douglass when they're both fairly young man and john brown had

had read a copy of frederick douglass his paper called the north starts wonderful newspaper that k u r t u owens see can you read it there was a library a microphone or an actual paper but he loved what frederick douglass was doing in his paper and frederick douglass upon meeting john brown instantly were a note for the next issue that said i've met this gentleman and he he alone were almost alone among white people understands the suffering of blacks in the united states is is a very striking thing for further demonstrate that he in this very short amount of knowing john brown in there in the thirties and forties they believe that about him home john brown contribute art letters and pieces for the north star in later for dallas's new york newspaper frederick douglass is paper and he actually wrote the provisional constitution for this pie in the sky a free state that he wanted to establish in the mountains at bedford at his house art in the eighteen forties

and early fifties and then in the last week of his life he tried for douglas to join his raid on harpers ferry actually at this clandestine line tom mullett meeting at a quarry somewhere in western maryland have never been to figure out where the koreas and numb so john roll one to convince douglas to join him in and douglas' was was also a committed radical and the anti slavery circles but he didn't think the raid was a good idea he'd done john brown was was going to fail in his attempt to up arm the region slaves and create a massive slave insurrection that would spark civil war so he would he declined john brown's invitation but his arm close friend an aunt and body man i did so at that at that meeting john brown went home with with another recruit unfortunately died during the raid this recruit was dangerfield newbie and he provides a letter that's the basis for a poignant aria kirk tell us about that letter this is a rather famous letter or a couple of

letters that were written by have a wife harriet newbie of dangerfield newbie who will word had been freed but his wife was still out in slavery and his seven children than they were not very far from harper's ferry so dangerfield newbie decided to go with john brown in the hopes of being able to go to free his wife and children and in john brown's son over didn't know this and an essay why he had joined the true but it is very unusual for a former slave to go back into slavery knowing what could happen to them but it would be much worse than what happened to a white person so dangerfield movie takes out this letter that his wife had written him a very poignant letter

please put this is the one bright hope in my life that you will come please come soon because master is going to sell me and the children that's the worst thing of course could happen if your children were sold off and if you were sold down to some place it in the deep south where it was much worse for slaves and that's exactly what happened but we don't know that at the time but it's so we have them we have a martha this labor day and injury gives the letter tomorrow to really as she read it recently seeing singing ladies

in yet it's been a center

sally bruce a new painting eight

you know they asked again i'm i'm am

or awe days and i say oh or the mood or in the we're visiting with kirk meacham who wrote the opera john brown which premiered at the lyric opera last night end with professor jonathan earle of the university of kansas who wrote the book john brown's raid on harpers ferry take

us back from harper's ferry back to john brown's much younger years his devotion to abolition dates back to an incident that happened when he was just a kid trip can you tell us about that yeah that that you find that in all the history books it when john was twelve he was very precocious boy and he was entrusted by his father to drive cattle for about a hundred miles or so two to the army as a teen or eighteen toil and ali was very stayed in the home of a family that had some slaves and john browne made friends with a boy his own age a black boy and fs it found the boy a very smart and and the very good friend and played with him in many ways and then one day the master for very little reason be the boy with an irish novel and he

to label head and john browne realize that this war was a slave he had heard about slavery he realizes blows a slave he had no father he had no mother and there really never forgot james these are these

are chris's jeans or is dead it

roberts it's yours john brown later writes that this was a moment when he became the most determined abolitionist and it's a searing story and it's clearly when he remembered his entire life so a lot of us can recall

witnessing an injustice or two or five when we were young but john browne look at this as the formative moment his childhood when he decided to devote at least part of his life to two fighting slavery now in reality he didn't devote every minute of his life to fighting seven from age twelve on he he fathered twenty children and he started many businesses and he was a tenor and a shepherd traveler but he certainly wasn't a very determined opponent of slavery from that moment onward you just alluded to the fact that he i had a number of business ventures and listen which were not successful i don't think i can sing one that was so he was he was what we call a failure business and yet he's one of the most memorable characters in american history i think they're elated i think if john brown head down unable to be a successful international trader he was trying to sell a home fleeces sheep skins are in europe if he had been a

successful tanner if he had had ain't got real success monetarily animal the way we define success today he would've been the famous abolitionists he would have you know probably stick around home and they have been out more present father been a more present husband but i think part of the reason why he is able to pull up all of his roots and to vote his last five years to this this battle was because of his arm his checkered record as a breadwinner you know he was he was in business with some very successful man not the sky simon perkins of western massachusetts it was one of his business partners was very wealthy and john brown there is one these very strange characters who could who could mingle with the the dregs of society that the poorest of the poor om unit impoverished african american farmers but also go to the fanciest parlors are in cambridge massachusetts and philadelphia new york city an end and mingle and impress very cultured educated wealthy people you know that's what they make you presented in your book is that he had a number of business

partnerships and when it read that i was struck by why would people continue to partner with him you know i think it might be related to the answer to a somewhat russia's why do people follow him when some of his plans seen harebrained or like folly he was he was incredibly persuasive he could look people in the eye and convince people starting with his own family but then branching out to other people who were committed is being committed dotted is a people business partners that he was going and he was going to come through now uncensored business he certainly didn't eat but he had people investing in him and trusting him these up shepherds of of the western massachusetts two devoted and and gave him the trust of their best felice is you and jon ronson don't sell them here and was stirred up some in boston i mean to get too much better prices by putting them on a boat and sailing to london and the whole thing is crazy but they believed him and then when he came back with nothing they were angry and they sued

the lyric opera is premiering john brown to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary kirk i understand it's also the anniversary of a special year in john brown's life this is their one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a very important event in john brown's life that happened here in kansas john brown came back dee kansas after the eighteen fifty five fifty six troubles he can back and eighteen fifty eight and was down near us a water main and two slave families in missouri across a lion heard that they were soon to be broken up and sold further down south and then they they heard about john brown and they got word that this is going to happen as if it would be possible for them to help escape help them escape and i had to be very soon so john brown and some of his

sons and some of his followers won over and took a two families eleven slaves brought them to kansas had them for a couple of weeks and then took them all the way up to canada or they would be free and on the way to one of the wives gave birth to a child and they were so grateful that they named the child john brown and and this is in the beginning of the act two is a piece called daniel l and it's sung by the slave a father and i'm the mother's right they're holding the baby you might want to play that that's a great idea here's the pizza they knew well from kirk needs and opera john brown if know if an hour

nice but as bleak it has been it's been it's been weeks back there's

been as being nice boy any idea there's been the peak this is big he's been no

it's been to pass by it's been it's been it's been there's been the prime minister

he's big nico it's because there's been that was

daniel well from kirk me times opera john brown premiering this weekend in kansas city i'd like to turn now to a very special guest allison keyes the me call it the great great great granddaughter of john brown who's in town for the world premier alice is that great great granddaughter of john brown's daughter annie who is actually in the opera alice what was a like growing up as the descendant of this famous man that we know so little about well actually i knew little less than anyone that you do because on when i was sixteen years when i found out i was related to john brown my parents told me to come home from school on time the next day that there was a woman coming to take my picture to be in the book and i met gene would be a john brown historian and she is the one who told me of my family's connection it was not talked about buying in his descendants why the family was i'm embarrassed by the connection so once you learned

what i'm sorry obviously worse soft this world yeah i had the great reaction unrelated to that crazy guy that we are i i didn't really study him until after i had my children when i had my children i started getting more interested in it until that was to study on co sort of related john brown but it doesn't cut the conversation he was not something that you just like talk about on after i had my children i started researching descendants i figured there's enough work done on john brown himself i started with annie and her siblings and i'm working on descendants be homeward on an off for the past twenty years i now have made a change my career and i could spend a lot more time doing it my kids are out of college some working more on it and working on the artist and the location committee also for the cisco centennial of harpers ferry into thousand nine so what kinds of things have you found out that there's lots of us out there who probably don't know were related or don't acknowledge it and he had ten shoulder on and on and none of them discussed it from what i can tell what

their families are not much knew it wasn't like advertised in whatever things have you been able to piece together in terms of family no mentos or type of well we don't have a lot in my line on nine descendant through birth that yannis a second daughter after any passed away my great aunts and uncles for destroyed some of the stuff that we had around the house i did i immediately destroyed in the days it was a trunk that was burned arm i do have a bible that was oliver says that he carried that here in kansas during the kansas troubles we have had bridges bible that any gave her when brett that got married and has all her children were still innovating keep the family records and we also have a couple of pictures that had never been seen outside the family let me turn back to the historian in the room down and then one hundred and fifty years later why are we still so fascinated with john brown and what he represented i think because

you know you get to people who have heard of john brown and they probably have a slightly different opinion an end fights over john brown or are common are in our civilization our society people still really really disagree on my father in law who grew up in kansas when he found out i was researching john brown and you know he's an educator mr wylie research back and i thought that was so great at home someone who grew up in him and the very place where john brown made his bones became famous transformed i'm you know i thought why would you bother researching this figure and i think that exactly does make an interesting that everybody has an opinion and it's a different opinion everybody loves a rambling can you know i'm everybody hates benedict arnold but john brown there's a lot of very strong pro the use of a lot of very strong anti these not to stomach her father lot that every historian how did you get interested in john brown i you know i went to a fancy that it's cool i

came to my first job here at the ears of kansas know a lot about the antebellum period and anti slavery and all people want to talk to me about when i went out in public was john brown and finally i just decided you know what i didn't do it and an expanded its been a great experience for me because it's a place where where i'm my work as a historian seems to connect with people here in this place and i don't really true that was the nurse in minnesota or utah or or new jersey com it's so it's one of those great no kismet things where i i really feel like my special is specialization connect with with normal people and i'm lucky to be here and kirk i understand you came to your interest in john brown quite naturally you know my father who was head of the kansas historical society and i had written a play on about john brown in nineteen thirty eight one a national

contest with that and it was put on national got nbc the national hookup and that was given in my life so naturally when i became a composer later lived in vienna and for the first time or heard a lot of opera i thought that that would be an ad would be a perfect choice i couldn't do it first though my father was too old to write the libretto and i didn't feel i could do that yeah so i made a libretto of of one of my favorite plays more years tart truth and now that has had over three hundred and fifty performances in six countries so i felt ok this is what i should be doing so i thought i would our be all right for me or try my own libretto there's a great amount of excitement even among people who are not big opera fans that this is a cancer story and it's being performed in kansas city and its its a story that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with although it turns out we may not be as familiar with the

complexities of john brown of the ignorance about john brown has been staggering and the misinformation about him because for many many years the south and in many people in north tourists at the southern sympathizers propagandize the idea that jive that anybody who would give their life for black people who at that time were generally even by abolitionists considered to be an inferior species that they were just you know step between beasts and human beings that enable any any person who would be willing to give their life for them musty be either black or crazy so this certain idea was just came down book after book after book even the standard histories of the civil war some of them still have a lot of misinformation about john brown so hope this'll help set the record straight even though it's a it's an opera and

not a historical tract but sometimes you know people are more affected by it by the literary works or upper is or plays than they are by my history books because they represented in such a dramatic fashion so if they're really intent on telling the truth sometimes that's the best media i'm going back to my opera tour two of moliere said you know when people ask him why why he was and why he was having a religious hypocrite in appliance that he said well and the best way to change people's minds is to ridicule them no one wants to be laughed at and it's the same you know people really don't want to read a history book often but if they see if they see a dramatic work that is actually telling the truth there to learn and feel a lot more than they are from really is true we're going to

go out with one last selection from the operetta john brown but before we do kirk is there anything else you'd like to add about your opera pavia productions to receive really is great singers of wonderful chorus and the director and the conductor all i can ask for some people are going to see a great show i guarantee even if you have never seen an opera before you are not going to be bored and the music is accessible it's not a total music or anything that people are quite easily afraid who are these

guys nice nice these days

the same this area is a play date they were listening to the apotheosis of the new opera john brown we've been talking to john brown's composer kurt meacham professor jonathan earle at the university of kansas and alice cheesy mikal at the great great great granddaughter of john

brown i'm not bred john brown premiered last night at the lyric opera of kansas city additional performances are may fifth seven nine eleven more information is available at the lyric opera website casey opera doc oh archie i'm kay mcintyre keep your prisons is a presentation of kansas public radio at the university of kansas next time on katie our presents we celebrate mother's day with all mom radio a mother's day a special from hearing voices and timing may eighteenth she justice of the united states john roberts robert spoke april thirtieth at the university of kansas are two thousand eight vickers memorial lecture sponsored by the case for business chief justice john roberts eight o'clock may eighteenth on kansas

public radio