“Mother said to me, ‘I’ve met your teacher and you’re going to like her. She loves Robin Hood.’”
The teacher was a young woman named Carol Preston. She told Jack later that he had been so shy when they first met that when all the children were told to put their galoshes in the closet, he went into the closet and stayed there. She had to go and pull him out. The rescue was a lovely metaphor for the effect she was to have on the rest of his life; he had met another mentor. The choirboy was about to acquire another of the talents that would lead him to the making of the Revels.
Meredith Langstaff had a lively, inquiring mind and the instincts of a collector; as a result he accumulated an extensive library during his long life. When he died, he bequeathed it to the Houghton Library at Harvard, to which he had already given his collection of Andrew Lang manuscripts and letters. His fascination with Lang, the prolific mythologist and author known most widely for his collections of fairy tales (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on through the rainbow), was part of an overall interest in folktale and folk song. Both Meredith and Esther admired Cecil Sharp, the legendary English musicologist who had rescued his native folk dance and folk song from extinction, and Sharp’s folk song collections were not only in the library but often on the piano. There was more than oratorio and opera in Jack Langstaff’s family background.
Cecil Sharp, born in 1859, had studied law at Cambridge, but then emigrated to Australia and switched to his true love, music. He came back to England at thirty-three as an accomplished music teacher, and is said to have had one of those life-changing moments on Boxing Day 1899, when he saw the Morris men dance in the village of Headington, Oxfordshire. Another one came four years later when he overheard his gardener singing the folk song “The Seeds of Love.” Realizing that all the traditional songs and dances of his homeland were probably doomed to extinction by social change, he spent the rest of his life seeking and preserving them — not only in Britain but among American families with British roots. Eventually he became known as the founding father of England’s early twentieth-century folklore revival, and he was a major influence in the creation of the English Folk Dance Society in London and the Country Dance Society in New York — both of which were later to attract Jack Langstaff.
Sharp came three times to clamber for months around remote parts of the Appalachian Mountains with his collaborator Maud Karpeles, collecting songs from the descendants of English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers. They were following in the footsteps of the American folklorist Olive Dame Campbell, and they were just in time, before the tunes of radio and television came creeping in like invasive plants to smother inherited music. “It would often happen that we would hear a voice in the distance,” wrote Maud Karpeles afterward, “and then, following it up, we would find, perhaps, a man singing as he hoed his corn patch, or a girl milking a cow, or a woman nursing her baby.” They found more than 1,600 songs, some of them early versions that had not only crossed the Atlantic with their immigrant singers, but had already died out in the parts of Britain from which they came.
Whether or not Jack had taken Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians from his father’s bookshelves, he was about to have a life-changing folk song moment of his own. His young teacher Carol Preston was not only a member of the Country Dance Society but was living with two other country dancers, one of them an English-born dancing teacher, May Gadd, who would shortly become the society’s national director. May Gadd, often known simply as “Gay,” was more interested in dance than song, but both she and Carol were steeped in the old tunes inherited from the British Isles. It’s possible that these two enlisted Jack for a CDS performance in New York while he was still a soprano; he had a vague memory of having first played and sung the part of St. George in a Mummers’ Play when he was thirteen. At any rate, in the summer of 1936 Carol convinced Esther and Meredith to let her take Jack down to a major folk song event, the White Top Folk Festival in Marion, Virginia. Jack was fifteen. His voice was changing, his choirboy days were over; this year, Ken and Dave would be the only Langstaff sopranos at Bretton Woods.
So off went Jack with Miss Preston, in a car with problems; they had frequent flat tires and very dim lights, as Jack reported home, “so we have to go slow at night.” He found that you could get a driver’s license in Virginia if you were over fourteen, and he contemplated doing that, but not for long.
The car is very funny, we are going along smooth and nicely, when all of a sudden it just splutters and stops! And in a few minutes it starts up again; we don’t know what it is. . . . I don’t think I will try to get a license (I am a bit slow on shifting gears and remembering about putting on and off the clutch when doing so).
For a fifteen-year-old New Englander the trip southward was full of discovery; he saw his first Civil War battleground and found himself soloist at a Virginia church service, singing an unaccompanied solo of “Abide with Me” just before the Benediction. He also did so much horseback riding that for a while he had to eat all his meals, and write his letters home, standing up.
We have been staying at a very big old place called Gaymont, the beds are great big four-posters and are made of hard, heavy wood but they have no mattresses so it is very uncomfortable. It is so old that there are no bathtubs or any running water, so we fetch water from the well and wash in china basins. What a life! I am as red as a beet. What a sunburn. The milk I drink is just like our thick cream in the city. Miss Preston bought me two swell pairs of white ducks as a present, I didn’t want her to do it but you know her. I have met a lot of nice boys and girls. (In fact we are going to spend a whole week in a girls’ camp. That’s pretty bad.) Boy, is my derriere sore from riding on a horse!
Carol Preston had bought the white pants for Jack because she was about to introduce him to Morris dancing. Once they arrived in Marion, Virginia, he was suddenly in the world of folk song and folk dance.
I am taking the dancing course free from Richard Chase (a swell young man) because one of the young men on the Marion dancing team has died and so Richard wants me to take his place for the big Festival on White Top. Boy! It’s hard but it is loads of fun. We do a sword dance and two Morris dances; the Morris dances are the hardest but I think they are swell. I want to show you when I get back home.
I am taking John Powell’s course on folk music which is fascinating. I have learned all the “Singing Games,” “Country Dances,” “Reels,” and lots more.
And at White Top he was astounded by some aged Appalachian singers performing folk songs passed on from their forebears — a few of them perhaps the same singers that Cecil Sharp had heard. His friend Jerry Epstein quoted him later as saying, “At first I could not imagine that someone with an old cracked voice could get up in front of people and sing like that. But by the second or third verse I was hooked.”
After White Top, Jack went to a local high school for the next year. He lived at home in Brooklyn, marinated in other kinds of music than folk song.
We didn’t have any money but my mother was amazing; all these musicians would come to the house. The whole renaissance of early music was starting then. I remember Dolmetsch came to New York, and the English singers the Friends of Music sang madrigals at Town Hall — they came to the house. . . . Wanda Landowska the great harpsichordist . . . Thurston Dart . . . And sometimes, Carol Preston would say, “Let’s go and hear some Wagner,” and we heard Flagstad at the Met, and Richard Crooks, and Björling . . . we never bought a ticket, we’d stand, and wait until there was an empty seat.
By June of 1937 he was back with folk music, working as a waiter — and singing and dancing — on his first visit to Pinewoods Camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Country Dance Society had thriving summer programs. Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Dance Society in the U.K., the parent organization of the American CDS, was now run by Douglas Kennedy; he had not only taken it over from Sharp and merged song with dance (turning it into the English Folk Dance and Song Socie
ty) but was married to Helen Karpeles, sister of Sharp’s fellow collector Maud. Kennedy visited Pinewoods regularly.
Into this small, ebullient world came sixteen-year-old Jack Langstaff, talented, enthusiastic, lean, dark, and handsome, and met someone who was later to become an even closer mentor than Carol Preston. “Douglas Kennedy arrived today,” he wrote home. “He is a grand person and knows his stuff!” And the next day, as he wrote decades later for an English folk song magazine, he heard Kennedy sing.
I heard him sing English folk songs and ballads, informally and unaccompanied, which made a lasting impression on me. . . . Douglas Kennedy’s way with a song was to become my model for the “revival” singer of folk song.
From this point on, folk song had a permanent place in Jack’s musical life, though his classical training took precedence. Back at home in the fall, he reported in a letter to Ken — now in his second year at Choate — that he was off for his first madrigal night with their parents (“I will sing bass!”), and that he was about to start lessons with their uncle Arthur, the Wagnerian tenor. Arthur Geary had been keeping a wary eye on the development of Jack’s vocal cords; when the voice had begun changing from soprano to alto, he had advised Esther that Jack’s lucrative appearances as a boy soloist should stop.
In the winter of 1937, the Langstaff parents went to Palm Beach, leaving Jack, at seventeen, in nominal charge of the household. He wrote to them that he was “good and sore” at twelve-year-old David for putting on a loud jazz record while the radio was playing Parsifal, and added cheerfully that “the first night you weren’t here I left all the lights on in the halls overnight! Well! Live and Learn.”
At the same time, fifteen-year-old Ken wrote to his parents from Choate.
I only wish I could be home when you’re away, because with Jack in charge (only) anything in this world may happen. Do tell him to be careful and all.
Esther’s letter books record no warnings or reports of disaster, however, probably because she and Meredith knew very well that affairs at 39 Garden Place were actually run by their indispensable cook-housekeeper, Albertine, known as Allie.
Eventually, after a crash course at summer school, Jack joined his younger brother at Choate. Now he was singing the baritone parts in the headmaster’s beloved Gilbert and Sullivan: the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, Roderic in Ruddigore. Choate was a markedly conservative Yankee school, with no Jews and not many Catholics (though the Kennedy boys made it, and JFK graduated in 1935). But Jack admired the headmaster, George St. John:
He was a remarkable man, he had a sense of the things that were important. He’d say grace to all five hundred of us at breakfast, and on some gorgeous spring day he would then say, “I will lift up mine eyes —” and a great shout would go up, because it meant that the whole school would go outdoors to the top of the hill, and there would be trucks up there waiting with our food.
Finding that he was in theory thirty pounds underweight for his height, Jack went out for crew, though this didn’t last. Ken reported home that his brother was “doing surprisingly well in his studies.” Jack himself reported, “We are all run like a machine and there is too damn much organization!” But if Esther’s letter books are to be trusted (she kept, after all, only the letters she wanted to keep), he had a remarkably sunny adolescence, both at Choate and out of it. He sang, he acted, he worked, he played, and by the time he was writing home with plans for a benefit concert his mother was organizing for April 1939, he was edging toward the shape of the recitals he was to give years later as a professional singer.
If I don’t try to do a program “over my head” it might work out well enough. I will go ahead, at any rate, with working on some G and S, some oratorio, folk songs, and light concert material here at school, so as to have some kind of a ready repertoire from which you can pick when I get back home. . . . I should like to keep my end of the concert a bit informal, at least to be able to say a few words here and there explaining the lighter folk songs.
And although both boys frequently acknowledged the need to be frugal, their life can’t have lacked for much. In one letter Ken, after assuring his mother that money from home was spent on “wholesome cookies, not the rich and filling kind,” wrote this:
What I especially want for my birthday! To have my tails coat refaced with the same kind of silk that is on it now. And also have the buttons that are on it now, taken off and buttons like Daddy’s put on. The present buttons are much too far out of date.
As Roderic in Ruddigore, Jack wore “an all bright, shimmering costume of gold with enormous dark-green cloak fastened to the length of my arm and legs in bat-like style.” Ken wrote, “Jack is sensational . . . he gives it a little grand opera with his gorgeous voice and tones and resonance.” Their parents came to the performance and — to Jack’s great pleasure — brought small Esther. “Now,” he wrote, “we’ll have to see if Allie can’t make it sometime.”
He never stopped performing. In the spring he went to visit Carol Preston, who had been made headmistress of the Potomac School, near Washington, D.C., and he shared a room with Douglas Kennedy and was taught the dances needed as demonstration for a lecture Kennedy gave on folk dance. As he told a folk song magazine later, this had the same mesmerizing effect on him as hearing Kennedy sing.
I shall never forget watching that tall lively man dance the Morris jigs with such marvelous lift and infectious rhythm. He taught us that movement stemmed from the dancer’s organic being, centered in the solar plexus and radiating out from that center of energy to the extremities of the limbs and to the top of one’s head. I remember thinking that Mr. Kennedy had an almost animalistic approach to movement. Although he could be aesthetically demanding of his dancers and singers in the display performances for which he was a master of “choreography” (as I remember so vividly in the Albert Hall productions he later directed), he had a way of encouraging us as novice dancers to be natural and spontaneous.
But folk song and folk dance were still only a part of Jack’s life. A month or two later he sang the bass /soprano duet from the Bach cantata Wachet Auf with a visiting soprano in the Choate Chapel. Ken turned the pages. “His recitative is gorgeous and his German beautiful, you’d have loved it,” he reported home.
An outstanding boy soprano does not necessarily find himself with a wonderful adult voice, but at eighteen Jack was drawing as much attention as he had at eight. When Choate joined forces with several other schools for a concert at the enormous Bushnell Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, he was the star of the evening. And his instincts as a performer took care of him even before a packed house of 2,800.
I was unusually nervous right up till the time I hit the stage. As soon as I stepped on the stage I felt the audience, and the voice came through for me in good style. My nervousness left me as I sensed the audience. They seemed to like it and I got three or four — I can’t remember it all now — lengthy curtain calls which was the most appreciative thing I heard that evening. It was after “Jeannie” that I let the voice out in the chorus numbers, much to the surprise of some of the boys from other schools about me.
He was drawing attention in other areas as well; later that term he wrote home from Choate:
It seems that Howard Hughes is going to return to films again as a promoter and producer in his own company; for he had a couple of scouts appear the other day to interview Elebash and me at Mr. Ryan’s recommendation. The man took about twenty-four pictures of me around the campus; I sang; he asked questions and I am still in the dark as to what it is all about. At any rate, don’t get excited. I’m not!
By summer of 1939 this hint of a Hollywood future had evaporated, mercifully, and all three Langstaff boys were back at Bretton Woods for the last time, helping to supervise the youngest boys and singing in all the concerts. They even still did the “Three Little Maids” trio from The Mikado, with Jack presumably singing falsetto. He still enjoyed the camp and its White Mountain audiences, but his tolerance for th
e concerts’ musical content was rapidly going downhill.
As the time draws near for you to hear the concert program, I get even more so disgusted with it. Some of the numbers are truly good, nearly all are done well, and the chorus sounds quite well; but some of the junk and slop that is done is downright embarrassing at times.
And while he sang, he was very much aware of what was happening across the Atlantic, as Hitler groped at Europe, and the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain desperately tried to avoid declaring war.
We had the biggest congregation at our church today. All the seats were taken, extra seats too; people lined the aisles, and sat on the lowest part of the altar. I even had two women sitting next to me in my choir pew! I suppose it was the war scare that brought them, and I think we can all understand that. I’ve made up my mind what I shall do in case the U.S. is drawn into the conflict, and I only hope K. and D. can join me if possible.
After the last summer at Bretton Woods, Jack had to make up some academic leeway; he was almost nineteen years old, but for most of those years he had spent more time singing than studying anything unrelated to song. Back he went to Choate as a sixth-former, struggling with subjects like biology (“the most impossible and boring of subjects to understand”) and making music with an unspecified “group,” which sounds like an early dry run for the Revels.