Several recent listenings to North's score have left me with a nagging question.
Has anyone else noticed North using fragments of the folksong "Jimmy Crack Corn" as, I suspect, a secondary character motif in his score? I hear it in Track 1 following the Main Title constructed around North's Indian music and fragments of The Maple Leaf Forever (about 1:24), and again in Track 11 (approximately 3:04) and restated in the Finale, prior to the martial statement of Maple Leaf. I have considered, in my mind, that this is North modernistically abstracting fragments of Maple Leaf, but I am not comfortable reaching this conclusion, at least not yet. I do not have the technical knowledge that would able me to notate what I am hearing. Can anyone help?
Julie Kirgo's excellent notes do draw attention to North learning from Alfred Newman about using traditional tunes (the Maple Leaf Forever, specifically) but no reference to "Jimmy Crack Corn."
(One minor correction in the notes. Kirgo refers to the film as a "tale of a 19th Century Royal Canadian Mountie." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not become a formal entitly until 1920. In 1876, the time setting of the film, this newly constituted force designed to manage immigration into our Prairies, was called The Northwest Mounted Police. The word "Royal" was not associated with that force until about 1907. To maintain the integrity of my country's history, I felt compelled to respond. Important to me. (I know - I can be anal. But so what.
) Kirgo's mistake is a common one in the limited number of reviews of this film on the Net. )
Speaking of Julie Kirgo, it is my opinion that she is near the apex of the current crop of filmmusic journalists. I always look forward to reading her notes and do read them carefully, whereas others I might skim, or read not at all. Her notes on LURE OF THE WILDERNESS are brilliant.
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