David Wendell Fentress Guion was born in Ballinger, Texas, on December 15, 1895. He received his musical training at the piano with local teachers and with Leopold Godowsky in Vienna. After returning to the United States he filled several posts as teacher of music in Texas, and from 1925 to 1928 taught piano at the Chicago Music College. Early in the 1930’s he appeared in a cowboy production featuring his own music at the Roxy Theater in New York and soon thereafter made weekly broadcasts over the National Broadcasting Company network. A David Guion Week was celebrated throughout Texas in 1950.
He is best known for his skilful arrangements and transcriptions of Western folk songs and Negro Spirituals, some of which first became famous in his versions. His orchestral adaptation of “The Arkansas Traveler” has long been a favorite on “pop” concerts. A familiar legend helped to dramatize this American folk song to many. A traveler caught in the rain stops outside an Arkansas hut where an old man is playing part of a folk tune on his fiddle. Upon questioning him the traveler learns that the old fiddler does not know the rest of the song, whereupon the stranger takes the fiddle from him and completes it. The two then become devoted friends.
Even more famous is David Guion’s arrangement of “Home on the Range,” in 1930. It is not quite clear who actually wrote this song. It was discovered by John A. Lomax who heard it sung by a Texan saloon keeper, recorded it, and published it in his 1910 edition of Cowboy Songs. Only after Guion had arranged it did it become a national favorite over the radio, its popularity no doubt immensely enhanced by the widely circulated story that this was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite song.
Guion’s concert arrangement for full orchestra of “Turkey in the Straw” is also of interest. This folk tune—sometimes known as “Zip Coon”—first achieved popularity on the American musical stage in the era before the minstrel show. It was published in Baltimore in 1834 and first made popular that year by Bob Farrell at the Bowery Theater. After that it was a familiar routine of the black-faced entertainer, George Washington Dixon. Several have laid claim to the song, but it is most likely derived from an English or Irish melody.
Other arrangements and transcriptions by Guion include “Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Ride Cowboy Ride,” “Short’nin’ Bread,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Guion has also written several compositions of his own in which the folk element is pronounced. One of these is named Alley Tunes, three musical scenes from the South. Its most famous movement is the last, “The Harmonica Player,” but the earlier two are equally appealing for their homespun melodies and vigorous national identity: “Brudder Sinkiller and His Flock of Sheep” and “The Lonesome Whistler.” Another pleasing orchestral composition by Guion is a waltz suite entitled Southern Nights.
Johan Halvorsen
Johan Halvorsen was born in Drammen, Norway, on March 15, 1864. After attending the Stockholm Conservatory he studied the violin with Adolf Brodsky in Leipzig and César Thomson in Belgium. In 1892 he returned to his native land. For many years he was the distinguished conductor of the Oslo National Theater. His admiration of Grieg (whose niece he married) directed him toward musical nationalism, a style in which many of his most ambitious works were written. He was the composer of three symphonies, two rhapsodies, a festival overture, several suites, and a number of peasant dances all for orchestra. He died in Oslo on December 4, 1935.
The Andante religioso, in G minor, for violin and orchestra, is a richly melodious and spiritual work which has gained recognition with semi-classical orchestras. But Halvorsen’s most popular composition is the Triumphant Entry of the Boyars, for orchestra. The boyar or boyard was a military aristocrat of ancient Russia, a tyrant as notorious for his cruelty as for his extravagant way of life. Halvorsen’s vigorous, colorful march has an Oriental personality. It opens with a stirring march subject for clarinet against a drone bass in cellos and double basses, and it highlights a fanfare for trumpets and trombones.