AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

38 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
transformations of the “Catfish Blues” song complex from 1940s Mississippi juke joint to
1950s Chicago south side blues club to 1960s rock concert. The sexual boasts of the traditional
lyric stanzas in “Catfish Blues” are well suited to the artistic personae of both Waters and
Hendrix, and their various transformations of “Catfish Blues” reflect their respective cultural
milieux as well as their ground-breaking innovations in shaping the future of American popular
music.
FROM THE LOWER EAST SIDE TO CATFISH ROW: “STRAWBERRIES!”
AS CULTURAL MEDIATION IN Porgy ANd BeSS AND Street SCeNe
bruce d. mcclung
University of Cincinnati
Scholars have drawn several parallels between Kurt Weill’s 1947 American opera, Street
Scene, and George Gershwin’s 1935 folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Most recently, Kim Kowalke
(2003) noted, “The off-stage vendor’s cry of ‘Strawberries, Strawberries,’ in Street Scene made
an explicit intertextual reference to Gershwin’s opera.” An examination of Porgy and Bess’s
sources, however, reveals no such character in either DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel or he and
his wife’s 1927 dramatization for the Theatre Guild. This paper unmasks the identity of Porgy
and Bess’s Strawberry Woman, decodes the strawberry’s symbolic meaning, and posits how the
fruit sellers mediate between Jewish and African American culture in both operas.
In Porgy and Bess, a strawberry seller arrives at a critical juncture as Bess recovers in Porgy’s
room after having been sexually overpowered by Crown on Kittiwah Island. The Strawberry
Woman’s entrance seems to defy the diegesis of the drama: why do none of Catfish Row’s residents
respond to her sales pitch? Gershwin borrowed the melody for her cry from Harriette
Kershaw Leiding’s Street Cries of an old Southern City (1910), as Elizabeth Sohler (1995) has
shown. Street Scene’s strawberry vendor appears in a similar dramatic place, at the moment
of sexual infidelity within the primary love triangle. Weill embedded the street cry in a web
of unmistakable references to Gershwin’s opera (e.g., identical tempo marking, soft dynamic,
pedal tones, and pendular thirds). As in Porgy, Street Scene’s strawberry vendor sings out, but
none of the residents of Building No. 346 “hear” the street cry.
Gershwin’s Strawberry Woman is both culturally and temporally incongruous. None of
the Gullah activities on South Carolina’s sandy coastal region and barrier islands included
fruit production, and hybrid strawberries are a spring crop, not a summer one. The Gershwin
brothers interpolated the character either from Ira’s favorite novel, Abraham Cahan’s The rise
of david Levinsky (1917), or from the Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Street Scene
(1929), which George knew in the King Vidor film version, as Christopher Reynolds (2007)
has recently demonstrated. Rice’s autobiography reveals that Street Scene’s strawberry seller
originated from the same milieu as the street crier in Cahan’s novel: as a Lower East Side
pushcart vendor.
These intertextual references explain the anachronisms of a Gullah woman selling strawberries
mid-summer and the otherworldliness of Gershwin’s setting. However out-of-place on
Catfish Row, the Strawberry Woman metaphorically linked the struggles of Jewish “greenhorns”
on the Lower East Side to those of Charleston’s Gullah community. Such cultural
mediation also suggests why Weill chose to borrow and combine the strawberry seller’s music
with accompaniment figures from Sam Kaplan’s number “Lonely House” over a blues ostinato.
In both operas, strawberries symbolize sexual transgression and recall Aschenbach’s