This week's post is brought to you by Edgar Winter. No, not the musician; I'm hanging out with my parents' cat this afternoon. He is a very unusual cat, who wags his tail when he's happy and loves to be vacuumed. I'm supposed to also say that he is exceptionally handsome and intelligent. He wants you all to know that he actually has his own Facebook account now, so if you'd like to enjoy his antics, you can find him at Edgar Winter the Cat. (Yes, I am his social media manager. The price of being one of his favorite humans is feeding his ego.)
Of course, this post is not about the cat. I'll let him think it is, since one thing he can't do is read - at least as far as I know - but in fact we're going to talk about someone who was born a couple centuries before him. This Lancaster native has the very interesting distinction of being remembered as George Washington's favorite entertainer, and his performances were as varied as they were memorable.
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| The marker stands at 126 North Water Street. |
John's story begins in the Alsace region of northeastern France, near the German border, which is where his parents were born and grew up and married. Jacob Durang and the former Catherine Arten immigrated to William Penn's colony in 1767, and settled in York County. Their first child was already on the way, and John was born on January 6, 1768 not in York but in Lancaster, where his mother was visiting her sister. He was followed by six siblings, and they were all raised in the city of York (or Yorktown, as it was known then). They attended a school run by Christ Lutheran Church, where the teachers spoke German and also taught them some English and French. They were not taught dancing. In fact, John never received any sort of formal dance instruction in his life, but his natural talent was immense.
He was twelve when his informal education began, thanks to a French dancer visiting the area. By that point he had already developed a love of the hornpipe, which is the name of both a dance and the instrument on which the music for that dance was originally played. A hornpipe instrument is part of the woodwind family, so named because it's made at least partially from an animal's horn. The dance named for it, which later became more commonly played on a fiddle, is a sort of sprightly jig performed by a single dancer. The French dancer taught John what he described in his memoirs as "the correct style of dancing a hornpipe," and it became his specialty.
At the age of fifteen, John left home and moved to Boston, where he joined a performance troupe called Lewis Hallam's Old American Company. At the time, it was illegal to perform plays and ballets (no, I don't know why), so the company advertised what it did as "lectures," and they particularly put on a lot of patriotic shows. John often danced a hornpipe for the audience between acts, and learned to play the violin under the tutelage of a composer remembered only by his surname, Hoffmaster. Hoffmaster actually composed a piece specifically for John's dancing, and it became his signature tune. It's still known as Durang's Hornpipe, and bluegrass fiddlers still consider it a favorite to this day. The image seen here of the sheet music, courtesy of WikiCommons, was published in Boston in the 19th century and intended specifically for piano.
Happily for John and his fellow performers, the federal anti-theater laws relaxed around 1790, so they were able to be more open about what they were really doing. They also began to receive visits from their European counterparts, and John was able to learn many new skills from these tourists. He became skilled in dramatic and comedic acting, acrobatics, puppeteering, tightrope walking, clowning, fencing, and pantomime. This led to him performing in Tammany: The Indian Chief, which is the earliest known drama about Native Americans and one of the first operas written in the United States, and danced a lead role in La Forêt Noire, the first serious ballet performed here. He was also one of the first American actors, if not the first, to wear blackface, while playing Friday in a stage production of Robinson Crusoe, though it wasn't something he did often and of course we do not approve of that nowadays.
In 1795, John left the Hallam troupe and moved to Philadelphia, where he joined a circus operated by John Bill Ricketts. The circus focused on horses and horse-related performances, but there were also clowns and dancers and rope walkers, plus acting in pantomimes and small plays. John wrote, acted, danced, and helped stage management. Among the circus's patrons was George Washington, which makes sense when you remember that the then-retired President loved horses and horseback riding. They have records confirming that he attended the circus more than once, and became an admirer of John's. After the circus closed, John became a managing partner in the Southwark Theater of Philadelphia, as well as an actor, producer, and director, and Washington came to many of the performances. John remained with this theater for almost twenty years, until his retirement in 1819.
In private life, John married a dancer, Mary McEwen, in 1787. All six of their children - Charles, Ferdinand, Augustus, Charlotte, Julia, and Mary Ann - were taught to act and dance, and joined their talented father when he would put on performances in the Philadelphia suburbs throughout the summers. Julia and Charlotte were both well regarded as actresses and dancers, though Charlotte didn't pursue the stage through her adult life. Julia did, however, and even after marriage she continued to perform in ballets, operas, and plays in the New York theater district. Augustus turned sailor and was lost at sea. Charles became a performer and stage manager like his father and also an author. Of Mary Ann, little is known and she may have died relatively young. Ferdinand was arguably the most famous of the children, as he is the one credited with having set Francis Scott Key's epic poem to music and thus created "The Star-Spangled Banner." (Ferdinand's descendants include the late playwright and author Christopher Durang, who was also born and made his home in Pennsylvania.) Their mother Mary died of tuberculosis in 1812 and is buried in the Harrisburg Cemetery in Dauphin County. Many sources indicate that John took a second wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was married until his own death, but no one seems to know anything about her.
John considered himself retired from performing after Mary's death, though he did teach dancing according to his memoirs. He died on March 29, 1822, and is buried in the Old Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Churchyard in Philadelphia, on the German side, allegedly at his own specific request.
The house at 126 North Water Street in Lancaster, where the historical marker stands, is not the home where John was born, though it's fairly close to it. That home probably no longer stands. Instead, the building is the John Durang Puppet Museum, formerly the Lancaster Marionette Theatre. As far as I can tell from extensive web searching, the museum no longer provides tours (or anything else), but there are still puppets in the windows. Maybe it's just waiting for someone to breathe some new life into the world that John Durang loved so much.
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| Image courtesy of Claud K. |
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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