Word: catfish
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...idea on arriving at Jefferson City was merely to do the history of Huckleberry Finn, but the sight of all that wall space, 1,000 sq. ft. of it, got the better of him. An emaciated Huckleberry Finn is there all right, watching a giant Negro land a fat catfish, but there are in addition Frankie & Johnnie and most of the history of Missouri. A slave trader is lashing a Negro, a buckskinned trapper in a fur cap is shooting his rifle. Mormons are being ridden out of town. There are also a country political meeting, a stenographer drinking...
...cheese until we elected him to the Senate with a salary of $10,000 a year and immediately he took up his abode in a fine hotel in Washington and he got to eating caviar, cav-eh-ah. It ain't a thing in the world but Russian catfish eggs, and it upset him and disordered him. What is the cure? . . . Take him across our specked and checkered aprons and give him a first class political spanking and presently he will be all right, sitting up and taking his milk as usual...
With DuBose Heyward as his librettist, Composer Gershwin kept his work faithful to the play. The Negroes of Charleston's Catfish Row live in the same rickety tenements. They still quarrel and kill over their crap games, still shout their religion, their love and fear of ''Lawd Jesus." Porgy, the crippled beggar, appears driving his seedy goat. The simple love story is his. Bess belongs to the murderer Crown. According to the neighbors she is "a liquor-guzzlin' slut," a "Happy Dust" addict. Porgy gives her shelter, buys her a divorce although she never has been...
...play Porgy left impressions which presented a stiff challenge for a Broadway-bred composer. With music frequently inspired, Mr. Gershwin manages to give new life and importance to the Negroes of Catfish Row. Conductor Alexander Smallens raises his baton and an overture sounds out like a brisk command for attention. It is Saturday night in Charleston. A shrill trumpet sets the pitch. A peppery xylophone suggests the dice, rolling to trouble...
...crap game big drunken Crown kills Robbins and over the corpse all Catfish Row bows before death, keening and shrieking its laments, tossing coins into a saucer to assure a burial safe from medical students. Gershwin's choruses are richly eloquent then, as they are later on when a hurricane shivers the tenements and the Negroes herd together like terror-stricken savages, hearing what they think is God. knocking at the door. Critics roundly approved such moments which had the surge of a powerful musical drama. But :here were bristling arguments over many of the set songs for which...