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On the Fourth, Fairs, and Festivals
In my never ending search for a Grand Unified Field Theory of Show Business, I have been harping an awful lot the last several months on the topic of the ancient Pagan holidays that were absorbed into Saints Days by the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Midsummer/ St. John’s Day is one of these, and as I wrote in those posts, I believe that in the U.S., the Collective Unconscious adapted aspects of that festival into the national holiday, the Fourth of July. This was particularly true in New England in the early days, when bonfires were a huge part of the annual celebration. While many of the aspects of what we celebrate on Independence Day have to do with patriotism (flag decorations, parades, band and vocal concerts, fireworks, readings and speeches) other aspects have to do with a celebration of the season, especially the outdoor feasting and recreating at barbecues, picnics, and clambakes, as well as some very specifically American forms of amusement.
We’ll return to those forms of amusement in a moment, but first some notable factoids and links to relevant Travalanche material:
The oldest Fourth of July parade is in my home state of Rhode Island, in the town of Bristol. It has been going since 1785!
Mark Twain’sTom Sawyer (including its many screen adaptations) has one of the best Fourth of July set pieces in all of literature. It was published in 1876!
A section on march music
Here in New York, the massive fireworks display is the gift of Macy’s
And let’s not forget the instigator of the USA’s best known 4th of July BBQ Willie Nelson
I have many ancestors and relatives who took part in the American Revolution. This is the first year I’ve felt like celebrating the holiday in at least a decade — mostly because I felt most of those celebrating most loudly were traitors to the ideals that inspired the Revolution. Still true, but this year for the first time in a while it seems we can entertain the possibility that they haven’t won, and the country founded by the Constitution still exists. We shall see. if you’re in a negative mood, you can always watch Smash-Up on Interstate Five.
But we also promised something on fairs and festivals. For this is also the time of year for those things, and the topic dovetails nicely back to our ordinary content streams. I talked some about Medieval market days and feast days in my book No Applause, for those were occasions when many of type of performances we associate with vaudeville flourished. These were especially associated with cathedrals and cathedral towns across Europe. (Bartholomew Fair is an example). Some were massive, even international. Some (village fetes, parish ales, charter fairs) were modest and local.
In the 19th century, we get two overlapping modern phenomena, very much related to our customary subject matter: agricultural fairs and carnivals. As I wrote in my post on the musical State Fair, a local rural county fair was one of my first amusement experiences (it was this one, in fact). As a visitor, I vastly prefer a fairgrounds environment to that of, say, a Broadway theatre. Canvas tents in dusty fields for me! Local funfairs remained a tradition in Britain long past the Reformation. In the U.S., in the early 19th century, local agricultural societies in New England and Ohio (which was populated by many emigres from New England) began holding local exhibitions and contests showing off their prize floral and faunal specimens, farm skills, original recipes and so forth. As the century went on, these began to aggregate into the county and state fairs that continue to exist until this day. Band concerts, entertainment (clowns, puppet shows, equestrianism, etc) became a part of the tradition in both the U.S. and the U.K., as did food vendors and mechanical rides.
At the same time international expositions were becoming popular. The world’s fairs in Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893) were especially influential upon American fairs, and several features from the latter one were adopted both by amusement parks like Coney Island as they came into being, as well as travelling funfairs. This included the “midway plaisance”, or simply “midway”, the part of the fair with games of chance and rides and a sideshow and sometimes even a cooch (burlesque) tent.
While these became expected amenities at fairs, they could also travel by themselves without the local agricultural aspect. These traveling shows became known as carnivals, the name obviously adopted from the annual Christian festival. (Indeed I’m quite certain I learned about the original Carnival as a kid, by looking up the more modern American institution in an encyclopedia or something). We recently wrote about one of these shows, the Skerbecks’, out of Wisconsin.
The heyday of fairs and carnivals was surely the early part of the 20th century. It was once very special for an outfit like that to come to town once a year, especially in a time when many more people were agriculturalists and never traveled very far from their own farms. As time went on there was increasing competition from year-round amusement parks, movies, television, and skads of other modern inventions, and the tradition, while far from dead, is much reduced in importance. At the same time, a much smaller percentage of the population is involved in farm work anymore, and more people live in cities. Still, if ya stumble across one in your travels, take full advantage of the opportunity. You’ll be helping keep a tradition alive in the funnest way possible!
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