Petroleum Nasby to Taylor Swift

You had to be there

Taylor Swift just completed a music tour that lasted 18 months, included performances in 21 countries, and grossed over $2 billion. Music technology has changed dramatically since the late nineteenth century. Early recordings scratched squiggly lines on wax cylinders. These gave way to vinyl platters, magnetic tape, digital discs and finally bits in computer clouds. Most people have relied on recordings for most of their music consumption for many decades. But the Swift tour demonstrates the continuing pull of live performances.

The rest of us who make part of our living performing before live audiences have no reason to be envious, unless we can write enormously popular songs and sing them the way Taylor Swift does. Yet there is a lesson even for history lecturers. In this day of audiobooks, podcasts and videos, people still like the personal touch.

In America, the golden age of lectures was in the late nineteenth century. Mark Twain was a regular. He described the lecture circuit in small communities outside Boston. “These lay within an hour of town, and we usually started at six or thereabouts, and returned to the city in the morning. It took about a month to do these Boston annexes, and that was the easiest and pleasantest month of the four or five which constituted the ‘lecture season.’”

Each town, and not just near Boston, had its lyceum, which brought in paid lecturers. “The ‘lyceum system’ was in full flower in those days, and James Redpath’s bureau in School Street, Boston, had the management of it throughout the northern states and Canada,” Twain wrote. “Redpath farmed out the lectures in groups of six or eight to the lyceums all over the country at an average of about $100 a night for each lecture. His commission was 10 percent; each lecture appeared about 110 nights in the season.”

Redpath’s speakers included some of the most popular figures in America. Besides Twain were Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Anna Dickinson and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. This last name was a nom de plume, as was Twain’s. Nasby grew famous during the Civil War pretending to be a Confederate sympathizer in the North—a Copperhead—and championing the Confederate cause in ludicrous terms. After the war he went on the lecture circuit.

“I saw him first when I was on a visit to Hartford; I think it was three or four years after the war,” Twain recalled. “The opera house was packed and jammed with people to hear him deliver his lecture on ‘Cussed be Canaan.’” Nasby riffed here on a verse from Genesis. “He had been on the platform with that same lecture—and no other—during two or three years, and it had passed his lips several hundred times.”

Repeat performances were a key to the success of the lecture circuit. In the era before recording technology, Nasby’s lecture was new to every new audience.

“I was all curiosity to hear him begin,” Twain continued. “His appearance on the stage was welcomed with a prodigious burst of applause, but he did not stop to bow or in any other way acknowledge the greeting, but strode straight to the reading desk, spread his portfolio open upon it, and immediately petrified himself into an attitude which he never changed during the hour and a half occupied by his performance, except to turn his leaves—his body bent over the desk, rigidly supported by his left arm, as by a stake, the right arm lying across his back. About once in two minutes his right arm swung forward, turned a leaf, then swung to its resting-place on his back again—just the action of a machine, and suggestive of one: regular, recurrent prompt, exact. You might imagine you heard it clash. He was a great, burly figure, uncouthly and provincially clothed, and he looked like a simple old farmer.”

Nasby’s rustic appearance gave way to a compelling yet puzzling performance. “The moment he had crutched himself upon his left arm, lodged his right upon his back, and bent himself over his manuscript, he raised his face slightly, flashed a glance upon the audience, and bellowed this remark in a thundering bull-voice: ‘We are all descended from grandfathers!’ Then he went right on roaring to the end, tearing his ruthless way through the continuous applause and laughter, and taking no sort of account of it.” Nasby never did acknowledge the audience. “The moment he had finished his piece he turned his back and marched off the stage with the seeming of being not personally concerned with the applause that was booming behind him.”

Petroleum Nasby was doing at his lectures essentially what Taylor Swift does at her shows. He was entertaining audiences. Those audiences had other ways to appreciate Nasby’s humor, chiefly through his writings, just as Swift’s audiences have other ways to hear her music, through recordings. Yet they came out in person, just as Swifties do. There’s something about the experience of being there: the proximity of the artist, the camaraderie of fellow fans.

We humans were wired to value live performance long before we learned to accept recorded writing and music. The wiring is still there. Artists still know how to tap it.