Crawford's Comedians remembered

Some artifacts lately donated to the Bushwhacker Museum brought on a spate of curiosity about a venerable Nevada institution: Crawford's Comedians.

With the artifacts came a huge pile of old thermifax copies of Nevada Daily Mail entries on the subject, accumulated by the donor. Not only were the news items wearyingly hard to read, however, most were little more than unedifying little three- or four-line social notes. It looked as though teasing out the whole Crawford story might be a daunting task.

Fortunately, the Museum found itself already in possession of a long typescript "review," or reminiscence, by "R.D. Crawford," presumably Raymond, one of the four Crawford brothers; plus a full-page newspaper history of the enterprise written by William R. Keller in 1947, based on an interview with Rush W. Crawford, just then poised to open the 50th season of Saturday night concerts of Crawford's Band on the south courthouse lawn.

"The musical organization began at Altona, Mo. [in Bates County]," Keller wrote, "when B.R. (Professor) Crawford, the local postmaster and music director, put his kids into the band before they were out of their knee-pants. Ed Stepman was then manager of Moore's Opera House at Nevada, and hearing of the Crawfords in Bates County in 1897, he invited them on down to Vernon County, which was in need of a good musical group.

"A test concert proved Nevada to the Professor, who moved band and baggage in April, 1898. His boys were growing out of their knee-pants, though, and with the new century the next to oldest son, Raymond, as he himself describes it, 'shouldered a helicon brass horn viol under one arm and a grip under the other, a derby hat over the left eye, and hit the road.'"

By 1902 the road fever had infected brother Rush, and the next year brother Emil joined them. Theirs was a hard-luck kind of life, playing town after town and hoping to get paid, not reflected in the famous 1904 photo taken as "the boys headed for the World's Fair as members of their dad's Second Regiment National Guard Band." The prosperous-looking 35 band members pose in their military uniforms on their way to St. Louis by train. About this time the last of the brothers, Talmadge (Dutch), joined the family ensemble with his trombone.

The group took many forms and names over the years: Crawford Brothers, Crawford's Band, Crawford's Orchestra, Crawford's Comedians, even Crawford's Colonial Minstrels. The items received by the Museum are three mounted playbills showing Crawford troupers in blackface, the first we'd heard of the Crawfords engaging in minstrel shows. Good white liberals are expected to recoil in horror from such "politically incorrect'' objects in these enlightened times, of course, though it's said blacks themselves actually collect them.

The term "Comedians" came into use when the Crawfords branched out into stage shows and other "variety" presentations, often even including a strongman, according to Ray Crawford. At first the performances took place in "opera houses," not really opera houses, of course, in the sense of grand opera, though every self-respecting town had to have one.

The evening entertainment (admission 15 to 25 cents) began with a musical "concert" and climaxed with a stage show, usually of a heavily melodramatic nature.

Civil War or Southern themes were ever-popular, and in 1908 Moore's Opera House saw the Crawfords staging "The Clansman," based on the bestselling novel by Thomas Dixon, which would make history as the landmark D.W. Griffith movie "The Birth of a Nation."

It was a "hit," according to reports. Mass audiences found nothing controversial about its portrayal of Southern Reconstruction (running-amuck blacks, longsuffering whites). Yet recent performances of the play had outraged eastern liberals, and even led to a race riot in Springfield. Nevada's National Guard was among units sent there to restore order.

The 1905 season saw the company first "opening under canvas," "the first great dramatic show ever playing repertoire under canvas," according to R.D. Crawford. Putting up and taking down the tent, on time, became a major headache. According to Ray Crawford, this became the responsibility of his father, Wagner Crawford, once he joined the concern.

In 1910 the company must have been experiencing prosperity, for it purchased an 80-foot Pullman observation railroad car, which boasted room for the tent, a kitchen, and private quarters for married troupers. Three Crawfords took the hint and got married, and there were soon "four babes in arms at one time," R.D. Crawford remembered.

Through the 1920s Crawford's went from strength to strength. 1927 was called the best or second best year on record. Ominously, though, that wasn't only two years short of the great Wall Street crash but the year of Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer," the first talking movie. In 1932, the Kansas City Star wrote a sort of obituary of the fading tent show:

"The tent show season is in full swing in rural Missouri and those who have never had the opportunity to enjoy one cannot appreciate the thrills that go with melodrammer' and chiggers."

Twenty years ago, the article went on, the traveling troupe known as Crawford's comedians "made towns" throughout Missouri and Kansas and beyond. "That, of course, was before the days of good roads, small town movie theatres, and the radio."

The once eight Missouri troupes were down to a handful, the paper reported. Crawford's abandoned stage or variety shows; the Comedians simply reverted to their original incarnation as a band. In both 1937 and 1947 the Daily Mail reported Rush Crawford, the durable conductor and factotum, busily preparing for yet another summer concert season.

The concerts had always depended on the merchant community for support, he reminded readers. The present writer well remembers Rush, by then a very old man, making the rounds of businesses collecting the modest sums to keep the attraction going. Salaries were a joke. Many players got by on $5 a week. Sometime Nevada policeman Sterling Janes stuck with the band from beginning to end, R.D. Crawford said, and didn't care whether he got paid or not.

The "band concerts," a Saturday night landmark for generations of Nevadans, came to an end in the early 1950s, just as Saturday itself was ceasing to be the week's big day.

"Today," concluded Bill Keller, "there is a loft where stacks of show bills from Crawford's Comedians are collecting dust." Would that those stacks were still to be found! Those donated to the Museum were acquired, in rather sad condition, from the late Billy Bob Crawford.