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University Daily Kansan
Monday, Nov. 19, 1962
Hillbilly Revolt
Down with hillbillies!
Sentimentality must not enter into this issue! If we are to preserve our phonies, we must put down this threat to the culture-vultures and ingrown intellectuals of this nation!
THE HILLBILLIES ARE on the verge of writing the only new poetry and music we have had since the birth of the Blues, and they are challenging the very foundations of our culture. Most horrible of all, they do this without a sense of social responsibility and with never a worry about nuclear war, foreign policy and a balanced budget.
If this movement is allowed to grow it may pervert the creative talents lying dormant in our junior beatniks and our social-climbing subdivision dolls.
Arrogantly, they pluck and twang and stamp their feet and have a hell of a good time while the rest of the world wrings its hands.
NOT ONLY DO THESE ingrates maunder over the woes and glories of illicit love in no uncertain terms, they also decorate their works with understandable titles such as "You Ain't Givin' Me Nothin' But Left Over Kisses and Warmed-Over Love," and simply "Furthermore!" They show a blatant disregard for erudite titles and fourth-level symbolism.
And they are gathering in numbers. Ray Charles, a sometimes jazzman, has come out with an album of "country and western music." (The difference between "country and western music," and "hillbilly" music is closely paralleled by the
difference between a "Republican" and a "Conservative.") Connie Francis, a successful pop singer, has also gone the same road. Most shocking of all is the fact that old Burl Ives, the granddaddy of American folk singers, sometimes called "Big Daddy," is now wooing the masses with such things as "I Walk the Line," and "A Little Bitty Tear." However, foxy old Burl is hedging his bets. His album includes such things as "Royal Telephone" for the Fundamentalists, and "Mama Don't Want No Peas An' Rice and Cocoanut Oil" (she wants gin—she's an alcoholic woman) for the other end of the philosophical scale.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. This decadent trend must be halted before it is too late. The scholarly mutual-admiration society and the Saturday Afternoon Ladies Literary Club may not survive unless we act! A Congressional investigation is in order!
The hillbillies have been quite firmly entrenched in this country since the days of "Old Hickory," but never before have they displayed such strength. They now have a hit parade of their own and an annual hillbilly disc-jockey convention in Nashville, Tenn.
The hillbillies are utterly irresponsible, and completely unconcerned that they may not be contributing to "art." This minority is oppressing the right of the majority not to be disturbed in its dejectedness, and it may eventually cause the laity to question our hallowed and soundly established concept of music and art in this great society of carefully conditioned, cultural sheep-herders. —Bob Hoyt
Theatre Director Answers Comment
Sound and Fury
The Daily Kansan's "Sound and Fury" letter of Nov. 7 was sent to the Theatre staff some weeks ago. Far from "signifying nothing," these comments caught our interest as do the numerous letters we receive each year either criticizing or praising our work. We welcome these reactions. It means that our theatre is alive. Only rarely does one of these letters get into print, providing us with the welcome opportunity of discussing a subject which we live with morning, noon, and night—theatre.
University Theatre is a strange and exciting animal. I should know, having been intimately involved with it as both student and faculty member for a decade and a half. I have also viewed it from the perspective of distance during three European trips. The hard cold fact is that in the United States professional theatre is confined to ten square blocks in Manhattan with only sproutings of professional companies and road shows to service a theatre-hungry nation.
YOUR THEATRE at KU must always contribute in a vital way to the intellectual and cultural life of the campus. But it must also recognize an audience which stretches from the townspeople of Lawrence to ever broader reaches of the state. We are delighted when busloads of high school student attend our productions "as a lark." If theatre is not a heightening of the experiences of life, if it is not joy, it is nothing.
I somehow receive the vague impression that Mr. Ruhe feels we are not concerned about the KU student. Nothing could be further from the truth. When some of us arrived on "the Hill," lo these many years ago, faculty and townspeople had been doing much of the performing. Dr. Goff (Director of the University Theatre now on leave) was determined that this would be a student's theatre, and thus it has been ever since. The decision that three permanent faculty members of the Theatre Division would perform in productions this year was made only when we were convinced that worthy students were not being deprived of acting opportunities. We have long been encouraged by the active student interest in theatre at KU, both as participants and members of the audience. Many university theatres are not so lucky. This has made it possible for us to expand the number of productions and the length of runs.
OUR PERMANENT full time faculty numbers eight. A bulk of the responsibility for our 16 productions this year thus rests in the hands of a large number of talented and dedicated students from all areas of the campus. Of course, these students are "stage struck," if the term means that they are willing to undergo the attendant pressures and weeks of hard work in order to help breathe life into the printed page so it moves through time and space for its "brief hour upon the stage." This fall a record number of 165 students attended the open try-outs. Each year more volunteers find their way into the various technical areas, expressing a desire to learn more about the theatre by working in it.
Frankly, I am disappointed that anyone should express such disdain for a group of talented students who, during their college careers, choose to work within a particular creative framework. We live in a harried era where the days pass all too quickly and time is precious. If the scripts, the core and impulse for our efforts, are not worthwhile, how does one explain this increased interest and participation?
The selection of a season's bill for the major, experimental, and children's theatre series is indeed a problem. Each spring, requests roll in from students, townspeople, members of the English and language departments, and from the School of Fine Arts. We are always open to suggestions.
Certainly the audience wants to see colorful and spectacular productions—if that is what the script calls for. Through numerous production conferences we strive to find the right mold for each given
BUT THE FACT of life remains that we cannot produce everything in a given year. We strive for a balanced program. In recent years we have put on the boards works by Anouilh, Goldoni, Claudel, Bizet, Shakespeare, Sherwood, Euripedes, Ben Johnson, Chekhov, menotti, Kafka, Lerner and Loewe, O'Casey, Wilder, Brecht, MacLeish, and Moliere, to mention only a few. No two people will view each of these names with the same degree of enthusiasm, but one who dismisses the lot as "third-raters" must simply admit that theatre is not his cup of tea and seek his diversions elsewhere. After all, the university is the place for exposure to ideas, both new and time-proven.
play, working from the demands of the script outward to its technical and visual requirements. Personally, I am delighted to see "The Egg" presented with two charturees sofas and a hank of draped cord; I am enchanted with "Under Milk Wood" with no scenery at all. But neither approach seems quite right to achieve the total impact of "Carmen" or "The King and I." It is our duty to our audiences and to our students to explore all of the forms of visual expression. Lack of capitalization and punctuation might be an effective technique for E. E. Cummings, but should all writers be limited to it?
THE UNIVERSITY THEATRE has no reason for existing if it does not make its productions available on a fair basis to students and nonstudents alike. Operating and production costs are high—and rising. We are a self-supporting unit, yet our only financial concern is to break even at the end of the year. A student has never been refused admission unless the house is sold out. On any given night, the students are seated in the best seats available in the auditorium. Since this often works to the advantage of the late-comer, our box office will clarify our existing policy so that the earlier demands for tickets will receive this consideration.
We welcome you all, your families, and your friends, to the coming productions of "Alice in Wonderland," "The Fantasticks," and "The Cherry Orchard," as well as to the lecture-discussions and guest attractions which are an integral part of the KU Theatre's program.
Dr. Jack Brooking Acting Director, University Theatre
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newsletter
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
tristweek 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service and the Newspapers Society. MAY News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the weekdays of Sunday, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
FIRST, LET ME SAY THAT I APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT MOST OF YOU CAN MANAGE TO MAKE THIS BOOCLOCK CLASS.
Letters to the Editor
Editor:
Unfathomable Sin
Clayton Keller is dead.
He committed the unfathomable sin at the University of Kansas. He recognized ("Criticism from Wichita," Daily Kansan, Nov. 15) that the state has a minimum of three good universities. Heretical statements of this nature are not sounded in Lawrence — everyone within a two-mile radius of the University Relations in Strong Hall knows that there is only one truly good and great state university in this country. For the first time in the last four years, someone in Lawrence has had the courage to admit that the barbarians in the state's most important city have a university of good standing.
Yes, Clayton Keller is dead; he was attacked by an angry mob on the streets of Lawrence. The faces of the mob reflected the Journal-World's "indoctrination of non-reality" — the complete lack of ability to accept reality where concerned with the existence of other universities within our state's borders or where concerned with the relative merits of the University at Lawrence compared to schools across the nation.
Kansans of the future will admire Mr. Keller's attempt to bring to light the need for an honest appraisal of our universities. May he rest in peace.
James Hesser Wichita senior
ROUGHING IT, by Mark Twain (Harper Classics).
Here, available in hardback, is one of the best books ever written about the West. It is not top-rung Mark Twain, but even low-rung Mark Twain is ahead of most writing.
"Roughing It" is kind of in-between fiction and non-fiction. Much of the forepart is fiction, for Twain had no real recollections of the trip to Nevada with his brother. And the writer's considerable propensity for exaggeration and comic incident casts much doubt on the later parts as well.
Not that this all matters. Mark Twain had a way of achieving truth even in his most obviously fictional fiction. The accounts of silver mining, of newspaper reporting, of traveling in the Sandwich islands, of deciphering Horace Greeley letters, of living with the Mormons remain vivid, delightful reading. And as a story of an eastern tenderfoot offered up to the tough characters of Nevada and California of 100 years ago, this book has no peer.—CMP
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THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS," by Joseph Conrad (Harner Classics).
Supreme as a psychological story of the sea is this famed work by Conrad. There is little plot, but there are splendid and believable characterizations, there is a storm at sea which for incident and description is almost unrivaled in literature, and there is that fatalism which marks so many of Conrad's novels.
The "Nigger" of the title is a handsome, noble West Indies man who comes aboard the Narcissus at Bombay and soon is revealed to be dying from tuberculosis. Though his petulance and his demands wear on many of the crew, he becomes the focus of attention, and he is pitted against the ignoble Cockney, Donkin. Also standing out in bold relief is the old man Singleton, reading Bulwer-Lytton as tobacco juice drips into his white beard.-CMP
☆ ☆ ☆
I PROMESSI SPOSI (THE BETROTHED, by Alessandro Manzoni (Premier, 95 cents)—the famous Italian classic of 100 years ago, in abridged form. The London Times calls this story of 17th century Milan the greatest Italian novel, and critics have classed it with "Don Quixote" and "War and Peace."