First Recording of Knoxville, Summer of 1915

Knoxville, Summer of 1915 is one of the high points of American music. It is a setting of a prose poem by composer Samuel Barber's exact contemporary, James Agee. Both the music and the words are inspired.

This is the first recording of the work, done by the distinguished American soprano Eleanor Steber, who commissioned it and first performed it with the Boston Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky in 1947. This November 1950 recording is of the revised version for smaller orchestra.

The modest LP above is also notable for including what I believe to be the first recording of Barber's Four Excursions, in a jaunty performance by Rudolf Firkusny. These items are based on familiar idioms, somewhat akin to the Copland and Gershwin piano pieces that are discussed below. Composed in 1944, they also were recorded in November 1950 in Columbia's 30th Street studio in New York.

Knoxville, Summer of 1915 is often considered a nostalgic idyll, but it is much more than that. in 1915, Agee was 5 years old, and the piece is a memory and meditation on an evening that summer, in the year before his father's death. Agee's words were set to music by Barber when his own father's death was near.

Agee places the themes of family, self, time, and place in a context that is at once extraordinarily specific and timeless, minute and cosmic; full of love for his family, the poem ends nonetheless with the remarkable observation that the members of his family "treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." This unusual, rapt, evocative piece is set to music that could not be more right.

Steber also recorded the Barber composition later for her own Stand label; an intense live version. This version is cooler, with Steber's ample soprano and cloudy diction making the interpretation seem a little distant.

For this post, I have taken the soprano item from the 12-inch LP below (which has an excellent line drawing of Steber on the cover) because the source is much less noisy than the original issue. True to the usual form, the transfer engineer for the reissue has apparently added reverb. The piano pieces are from the 10-inch LP.