THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 30, 1997 TAG: 9701300362
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 59 lines
In a 50-year controversy touching ``Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,'' the saddest note concerns the black genius James A. Bland, who composed it in 1870.
It was the second, and the first hit, among 700 songs Bland wrote as an end man who danced, played banjo and sang in a minstrel show.
In 1940, urged by Lions Clubs, the General Assembly adopted it as the state song and, so doing, changed ``Virginny'' to ``Virginia,'' which angered Editor Louis Jaffe of The Virginian-Pilot.
Legislators had no right, he said, to ``improve'' an artist's work without his consent. They also changed ``taters'' to ``tatoes,'' which was silly. Nobody, white or black, eats tatoes.
It smacked of political correctness and ebonics before those terms surfaced.
In the 1880s and 1890s, even as Bland earned $12,000 yearly in addition to royalties for songs, he resented having to enact what audiences ``expect a Negro to be: a lazy, shiftless, chicken-stealing, razor-carrying, joke-book darkey.''
His sister Irene told an interviewer that he ``hated this kind of thing from the bottom of his heart. After all, he was an educated man.''
She recalled sitting in the kitchen of their Washington home one day, slicing tomatoes and making gravy, when visitors arrived from Virginia. A former slave, Mrs. Scotta Johnson, began talking of her love of Virginia in such tender words that James got out his notebook and started to write, moving into the parlor to finish.
His brother Ivanhoe swiped the manuscript and gave it to a girl friend who sang in a music hall. James could always write another song.
Bland's parents came from Charleston, S.C. His father, Allen, was an examiner in the U.S. Patent Office. James was a page in the U.S. House of Representatives. Later he attended Wilberforce University and Howard University.
He left to go on stage in a minstrel show touring Europe - including a command performance for Queen Victoria. Novelist William Thackeray wrote that Bland sang ``a Negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles. A vagabond with a corked face sings a little song and strikes a wild note which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity.''
Among whites with blackened faces, Bland corked his face for a uniform effect. Bowing to applause, he touched his head to the floor.
In 1901, after 20 years abroad, he returned to America. But he never saved money. Drifting among odd engagements, he died of tuberculosis at 57 in 1911 in Merion, Pa.
In 1948, Gov. Bill Tuck and officials from Richmond's Lions Club replaced a wooden marker with a granite one on his grave.
Among Bland's composing legacy: ``In the Evening by the Moonlight,'' ``O, Dem Golden Slippers'' and ``Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
James A. Bland's composing legacy included ``In the Evening by the
Moonlight,'' ``O, Dem Golden Slippers'' and ``Hand Me Down My
Walking Cane.''