The Man From Vermont is a simple chronicle of one Charles Ross Taggart (1871-1953), a musical humorist who traveled the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits during the early-twentieth century. Through it we glimpse a time in American life when the automobile, elevator, and light bulb were the latest things. As an itinerant entertainer traveling by auto, train, and foot, Taggart experienced America’s dynamic expansion westward while maintaining his eastern roots, in part through his portrayal of the taciturn Vermonter. His most well-known portrait, The Old Country Fiddler, was a folk character devised by Taggart to extol a somewhat mythic, rural East.
Author and native Vermonter Adam R. Boyce discovered Taggart through an Internet search after taking up country fiddling and its history in Vermont. A family collection of old Vermonter magazines from 1890-1945 provided him with a long interview with Taggart dated 1927. He also relied on letters to and from Taggart regarding his cross-country tours along with publicity ephemera, editorials, and reviews found through historical societies. And, after re-enacting Taggart’s “Fiddler” as a “living history” act, he began to think about organizing his research into a book.
As an academic, I would like to have had more in the way of social and historical context and a deeper discussion of the place of Chautauqua/Lyceum circuits in the westward expansion of America and of the consequent isolation of small, widespread populations. But that was not Boyce’s intention. He is simply an aficionado who felt that Taggart’s story deserved chronicling.
Taggart was a man of many talents and he put them to work in his performances. In addition to his fiddle music, he sang, recited monologues, told stories, and “threw his voice” via ventriloquism. His musical performances were often interrupted with humorous remarks, a la Victor Borge or the Smothers Brothers of more recent times.
Taggart was also fascinated with new technologies and early on tinkered with photography, creating his own self-portraits, often with twin images of himself on one photo. He made audio recordings for Victor Talking Machines, Columbia, and Edison. In 1924, he made talking pictures of his Old Country Fiddler with Phonofilms. These are available today online, a fact I wish Boyce had mentioned. They reveal and preserve the style, rhythm, and intonations of a past population. Boyce does include, however, three appendices of Taggart’s letters, poems, and monologues, in which he waxes poetic about America, Yankees, and especially Vermonters.
We should read The Man from Vermont as a collection of primary sources regarding Taggart himself but also as a history of American humor and theater in the early-twentieth century and how emerging technologies aided and hindered the traveling shows. Examples of the specific expression of New England-style humor—sarcasm, and wit— and language-use—with its hard “r” and dropped “g”—can also be garnered. Taggart himself—his livelihood, his home life, and his artistic voice—reflects the historic Vermonter. While Boyce brings no analysis to the table, he has made this material readily available for researchers, and that in itself is admirable.
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[Review length: 498 words • Review posted on October 29, 2014]