USA 1939: Something in the Fallingwater In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy always wakes up in Kansas. But when the public first clapped eyes on her it was for some reason in a different state - Wisconsin. Oconomowoc Wisconsin in fact, at the movie´s 1939 off-Hollywood premiere. Both "Kansas" and Oconomowoc are now as much part of the confused dream of The Wizard of Oz as the Emerald City. They´re part of an idealised America forever fixed in celluloid time and space. 1939 was a particularly good year for US cinema - and as it happens, a vintage year for the manufacture of American Myth, one of the beguiling scents that intoxicate Park Planet.
It was in 1939 that architect Frank Lloyd Wright took another dream of America - transcendentalism - and set it in concrete in western Pennsylvania, completing his monumental Fallingwater, the White House of the reimagined America he called Usonia.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, composer Aaron Copland was mapping the tonescapes of "Appalachia" and concocting a musical futurology for The Old West in his "historical" ballet Billy the Kid. Down the road apiece, Disney songwriters inadvertently set the soundstage for the space programme when they came up with When You Wish Upon a Star as theme song both for Pinocchio and the eventual Disneyfication of the planet. At Warner, Bugs Bunny popped up - with Carl Stalling in charge of plunderphonics - reshaping music to the new demands of cartoon miniatures set in a loose US where everything really was possible.
Over on the east coast, as Batman first loomed in DC comics and New York pictured itself as the darker Gotham, the quirky Raymond Scott Quintette played their conventional instruments for the last time before their leader switched on the future and started inventing electronic music at Manhattan Research.
Nearby, thousands of Americans were busy discovering tomorrow for themselves at the New York 1939 World Fair (motto: "Dawn of a New Day"). Here, the first bakelite Viewmasters were launched, offering a colour-enhanced 3D version of - you guessed it: America - by superimposing two versions of reality simultaneously. And in a defining act of retro-futurism, history was literally buried at Flushing Meadow in the form of the first Westinghouse Time Capsule.
Coincidentally, while the public focus was firmly on the future, the lone American surrealist Joseph Cornell was painstakingly compiling his memory dossiers less than a mile away on Utopia Parkway, sealing up his own personal found-America alongside his fantasies in a series of obsessive boxes. More about Cornell in future posts.Over the course of this remarkable year, a reimagined, rose-tinted American past became its destiny - and ours. 1939 made tomorrow winningly optimistic - and American, which amounted to the same thing.
So that year, when craftsmen on one of the production lines at the vast Harmony musical instrument factory in Chicago, Illinois glued a sycamore back and ebony fingerboard onto a small, inexpensive archtop guitar carcass they were, whether they knew it or not, creating another intoxicating whiff of American Myth.
Guitars like this made everyone hip and would fuel the teenage revolution two decades hence. They would become the American symbol to end them all - more affordable than a Cadillac and more exportable than the Empire State.
Simultaneously redolent of "Appalachia", Chicago blues and big band jazz with its f-holes and metal tailpiece, they called this particular instrument the Columbian Minor - Columbia being a poetic name for the United States. They bound the body in mythical ivorine and fitted a "tortoiseshell" finger rest. They strung it, lovingly fingered a few half-chords on its frets and sprinkled on some additional dream dust before sending it to the depot for despatch.
Sold first via mail order through a Sears catalogue now lost in sepia, the Columbian Minor mysteriously began to plot its course across the Atlantic to modern day Park Planet via a magical appearance on Greenwich Market. It´s here beside me now. And when it´s not being played, it sits on a bend in the stairs, quietly oozing Oz, Fallingwater, Copland, Disney, Westinghouse and 1939-vintage American Myth.
Miles Early
