Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Cowboys & Indians. But Grandstaff was also a habitual musician. In the penitentiary library, he came across a book called Big Spring: the Casual Biography of a Prairie Town-a folksy history by Big Spring (Texas) Druggist Shine Philips. From his piano-selling days, Grandstaff remembered Big Spring: a prairie town of 20,000 which had sprung up around a spring where buffaloes, Indians, cowboys and finally the Texas and Pacific R.R. had come for water. He decided to write some music about Big Spring...
...Sunday he got a chance to show his cantata, Big Spring, to a visiting musician who was conducting a choral program for the prisoners. The visitor thought it was good, took it to a Nashville radio musician who declared it "definitely better than good." Grandstaff mailed off a copy to Big Spring Druggist-Historian Shine Philips...
That was two years ago. The Texas and Pacific's 34-voice chorus sang it, but Tennessee authorities refused to spring Composer Grandstaff long enough to come and hear it. Last week, with a head of pressure built up for a centennial celebration, Big Spring was doing better by its favorite composer...
Chromatics & Hash. The cantata itself had been whooped up, among others, by Composer Roy Harris ("a sense of strength ... I wonder where Grandstaff heard choral singing so brilliant"), and Big Spring bigwigs had watered down the Tennessee authorities. Last week, accompanied by a grim, 200-lb., two-gunned Big Spring sheriff, R. E. Wolf, and a smiling Shine Philips, Composer Grandstaff was flown to Texas by private plane to hear his cantata sung...
What Honored Guest Grandstaff and a packed audience in Big Spring Municipal Auditorium heard was a half hour of music which made up in lyrical lustiness what it lacked in originality: a kind of chuckwagon hash-sometimes tasty-made like every cowboy-and-plains song ever written. Composer Grandstaff himself admitted, "It's chaotic in places. There are times when I get lost . . . and I use chromatics ... to get back on the track...