 The Cavalcade of America, presented by DuPont. This evening, the DuPont Cavalcade of America presents a tribute to National Music Week. All over the country, orchestras, choruses, and smaller groups are honoring music in general and American music in particular. Probably no part of our country has inspired a greater wealth of melody than the South, and its music is sung, played, and enjoyed by all America. Ask a DuPont research chemist about the South, and he will tell you that from the Southern states come a great many materials which he uses in his work. For America's agricultural Southland is indeed a true partner of research chemistry. In its efforts to reach the goal described in the DuPont pledge, better things for better living, through chemistry. The singers heard on this evening's program are Maria Silvera Soprano, Abbey Mitchell Contralto, and the Southern heirs. The DuPont Cavalcade moves forward. Songs of the South, songs of the land of cotton, of big plantations, of magnolia trees, of moonlight, of marking birds. It was in the South that the first permanent settlement in America was established. At Jamestown on Jamestown Island in Virginia in 1607. Tobacco brought good prices in England, and the broad fertile fields of the new colony yielded a rich harvest. But more hands were needed to work the fields. On a sunny spring morning in 1619, twelve years after the first settlement was established, a sailing ship makes its way towards an anchorage in the James River, a ship laden with a valuable cargo. On the shore a group of settlers watch its progress. There, they've come about. They'll make the anchorage on this tack. The breeze is freshening. The ship is moving faster. We'll be letting go of anchor in a few moments. The first shipload of African slaves. They'll sell for a good price, Thomas. Aye, and they'll be worth it if the stories are true. Big men, strong and good temper. Yes, men who can stand the sun and work all day long. We need them in the tobacco fields. Will you be bidding at the slave market tomorrow? Of course. And so will every other landowner in the colony. Listen, that booming sound. Is it an Indian drum? A drum, but not an Indian drum. Strange sound. I've never heard the like of it. But that sound comes from the ship. The breeze is carrying it to us from the ship. Yes, it is. I don't understand. A drum on a slave ship. Do you hear that, Thomas? They're singing. The slaves are singing. The slaves are singing. But it is. Listen to them. You can't understand it. They've been taken from their homes in Africa and put on a ship. They've had a long, hard voyage without knowing where they were going. And now they sing. But when we come to know them better, we may understand it. But the settlers soon learned that these slaves sang no matter what they were doing. They created their own music to fit the rhythm of all kinds of physical labor. They learned to speak English. And from their African tribal chants, they fashioned many work songs. The cotton blossomed and ripened. And when it came time to harvest the snowy white crop, the slaves tackled the work with another song. When the cotton had been picked and cleaned and ginned, it was bales. The bales were carted to the nearest wharf to await the arrival of a boat on its way to market. Watching the heavy bales on the boat was a job that involved plenty of hard work and therefore plenty of singing. Watching and listening to such a scene, Stephen Foster was inspired to write one of his immortal songs. Roll out heave that cotton. Roll out heave that cotton. Roll out. Roll out heave that cotton. Ring that long stick. Roll out. In Memphis, Tennessee, the annual cotton carnival will be celebrated with the crowning of King Cotton and many other festivities which have made the event famous. In honor of the cotton carnival, Don Voorhees and the DuPont Cavalcade Orchestra present a special setting of the daddy of all blues songs, Memphis Blues, the tune which transformed the dance rhythms of the world. And we have a special surprise for you. W.C. Handy, famous Negro composer of Memphis Blues, is here with us. You know his music, not only Memphis Blues which came first, Neil Street Blues, St. Louis Blues, and many other compositions. Professor Handy, won't you say a few words? Well, I'll say a very few words. I bought my trumpet along with me, and if you'll let me, I'll try to stay mine with music. That's fine. Here is Memphis Blues with the composer playing a trumpet solo. Anton Vorzach chose a Negro spiritual melody as the dominant theme of his new world symphony. Let's go back about 80 years and try to discover what life was like on a typical Southern plantation. Long winding driveway to the broad front porch of the big house. It's a bright moonlit night. The air is heavy with the scent of flowers. Let's tiptoe across the porch, into the front hall, and into the drawing room. A young man is seated at the piano. Standing beside him is a young girl singing. Well, I'm not sure Daddy would like it, my going out walking with a man. But come on, we'll go softly. No, no, not that way. Out the back way. Come along. Oh, hey. Hey, it's dark here. Wait, now, don't miss that step. Oh, now we can see. Oh, that moon is as bright as day. Come along, Henry. I want to stop at the first cabin and say how to do to my old man. All right. Is that the cabin, Melissa? Yes. Listen to her. No, you ain't why I worked mammy's baby. Worked mammy wouldn't take a billion dollars for it. And she wouldn't give one sense to have another one this much. Is y'all coming down to the church this evening, Miss Melissa? That'll get along now. If I don't see you no more, good evening to y'all. Good evening, Mama Kelly. Shall we go down to that church, Henry? It's the old barn right over there. Daddy gave it to them to you. Yes. Let's walk over. Come along, Melissa. They're singing. And I always like to hear them. We just go in and stand at the back. All right. Come on. It was distinctly American, and it was to become popular all over the world. The minstrel show. In 1889, Haverly's minstrels were playing an engagement in London. This was for the most part a negro troupe. And the performers were homesick. In the mornings, they haunted the theater, waiting for letters and packages from home. Among them was a famous minstrel-end man named James A. Bland. One morning, he arrives at the theater and finds two of his companions. The theater is early in the morning. Same thing you are, Ruth. I'm looking for some letters from home. Well, you ain't gonna find them. Not yet a while. It's too early for the male to be in. How do you happen to be up so early, Ike? I've been walking my legs off, out there in all that rain. Trying to find somebody. Man, I had a square moustache we landed in this London. Well, look at us. Does we look well as fat, Jim and me? Do you think we've been eating greens and cornbread along with nice big hunks of fat meat? I can't even find a place where they soft the meat they do, sir. And in the meantime, it keeps all rain. So, man, it's just rather awful. Certainly is. We know it don't never rain like this in Virginia. Boy, I seen it rain cats and dogs in Virginia in phase two. But not all day, every day like it does, yes. What you doing, Jim? Playing the piano. It cheers me up, sort of. Nothing could cheer me up in London. Well, who don't? In Virginia. They say it's a nice place. Jim, it's hell. It sure is long side of this town. I wish a chatter fire would come along and pick me up and carry me back to Virginia. Wait. Say that again, Ruth. I didn't say nothing, except I wish a chatter would carry me back to Virginia. Hmm. Start like this. The Negro menstrual man in London wrote Carry Me Back to Old Virginia, a southern song that will live through the ages. Many composers have been inspired by the rhythms and harmonies of the Southland. The score of that great musical comedy showboat is only a few years old, and yet, in some of its selections, we find the spirit of the Old South. The melodies are new, all of them. But when he wrote Old Man River, Jerome Kern gave the world a new composition which combines the spirit of the Old Negro work songs and the Negro spirituals. Old Man River. King Cotton in the carnival to be celebrated next week in Memphis. And DuPont joins the whole world of chemistry in acknowledging the debt it owes the South for giving us cotton. Last year alone, DuPont used over 63 million pounds of cotton and cotton lenders in making scores of useful products developed through chemical research. Cotton, you know, is one of chemistry's principal sources of cellulose. From cotton cellulose, DuPont chemists created durable, glossy duco finish which cut the time required to finish an automobile from days to hours. And when you look through the shatterproof windshield or window of your car, you're looking through cotton. For safety glass is really a sandwich, two pieces of plate glass with a sheet of transparent cellulose plastic made from cotton in between. Among the dozens of products made of DuPont cellulose plastics are fountain pen barrels, pyriline toiletware, combs, scuffless heel coverings for women's shoes and boxes of all kinds, decorative costume jewelry, translucent lampshades and many more articles including the humble toothbrush handle. Additional products that cotton and DuPont chemists have made possible include a seal, acetate rayon yarn, fabricoid, textile fabrics coated with cotton cellulose solution and widely used for book bindings of holstery, handbags and luggage, tontine washable window shades, cleanable tablecloths and household mending cement. And when you go to the movies or enjoy a day with your camera, you owe a debt to cotton chemistry too. For all photographic films including x-ray, employs a base made from cotton cellulose. These useful products and many more come to us from the cotton field through the chemical laboratory. Even this doesn't tell the full story of cotton and chemistry by any means, but it gives some idea of how important cotton with the help of chemistry is to you. DuPont chemists are constantly carrying on cotton cellulose research, thereby promising still more interesting and diversified uses for cotton in the future and added sources of income for the cotton grower. Thus cotton will continue to play an important part in the research chemist's constant efforts to provide, as DuPont expresses it, better things for better living through chemistry. Dynamite. Incidents in the life of its inventor Alfred Nobel and its development in America will be the subject of our broadcast when next week, at the same time, DuPont again presents the Cavalcade of America. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.