By the early 20th Century, the American West had been won. Officially.
The US Census Bureau even said so. For 100 years, starting with their first census, the Census Bureau had tracked the western frontier of the United States. In 1790, that frontier line was drawn south from New York, along the Appalachian Mountains, and finally reached Georgia.
Over the next century, the frontier worked its way west until, in 1890, the Bureau found so many settlements, shanty villages and cow towns scattered out to the Pacific that it could no longer draw a line. The frontier, it announced, was closed. And with that closing, Americans did what we do best: pine for the good ol’ days.
A boom in appreciation for America’s natural wonders — the “frontier” of yore — soon took hold, and helped the National Parks movement gain steam. Eventually, Arizona’s Grand Canyon became one of its protected sites.
Who knows whether any of this was on the mind of Ferde Grofé when he visited the Grand Canyon in 1916, but in interviews years later, he talked about his experience waking up one camping trip to see the canyon bathed in morning sun and feel the world around him come to life. It was a feeling, Grofé said, he couldn’t put into words. Thankfully, he was able to put it into music a few years later.
Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite premiered in 1931, hot off the heels of the premiere of his successful arrangement of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The suite is, essentially, a day at the canyon. Its five movements take us from “Sunrise,” through the “Painted Desert,” out “On the Trail,” to “Sunset,” and finally, through a “Cloudburst” rain storm. This canyon that Grofé evokes is filled with awe, wonder, and even a bit of whimsy, as you’ll hear in the clip-clop of donkey hooves throughout “On the Trail.”
Maybe these were the feelings that hit him back in 1916, but this suite isn’t exactly his Grand Canyon experience writ musical. For two of the movements, Grofé has admitted to finding alternative inspiration. The tune for “On the Trail” comes from a lullaby he sang to his infant son. And, while “Cloudburst” was inspired by a real storm, it was a storm that raged while he was visiting Wisconsin.
Regardless, for a generation of Americans, Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite described perfectly the experience of visiting one of America’s most famous wonders, and became the musical shorthand for “the West.” The suite also won Disney an Oscar, as it was the soundtrack for Disney’s 1958 short documentary Grand Canyon. And today, you can still hear a bit of the “On the Trail” movement every Christmas. It’s the music you hear when Ralphie clip-clops through the kitchen to save his family while daydreaming at the table in A Christmas Story.
The Grand Canyon Suite wasn’t Grofé’s first musical postcard of America's natural wonders, and it wouldn’t be his last. But nothing else he wrote got closer to the wonder and magic of that fateful 1916 sunrise.
Plus, there’s donkeys.
