Thomas Hart Benton: Musical Evenings

T.P. on flute, Rita on guitar, Thomas Hart Benton on harmonica

"On the tenth of July in the year that Rita and I bought and settled ourselves in our new Kansas City house, 1939 it was, we had a new baby girl born to us. We named her Jessie. Her coming stopped our annual trip to Martha's Vineyard, but she was so welcome that it made no difference. Our boy, T.P. [Thomas Piacenza] and I slipped off into Arkansas for a little river floating and fishing, but we didn't stay long. The new baby and the new house drew us back. My new studio also was an invitation to work. I stuck close to home and for a longer time that I had in many years.

T.P., now thirteen, had given up his childhood recorders and was now playing the flute. To while away the evenings, I picked up the harmonica again, and we worked together on duets, old duets by Samartini, Handel and others by little-known German and Italian composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The craze for trying to make music came back to me and I bought a virginal, a little pre-harpsichord type of instrument. Soon others joined us.

They would come to dinner, and after dinner we played. Rita fixed up big dinners. This and the chance to play unusual scores drew more players and pretty soon our Saturday nights became musical events. We'd have twenty or twenty-five people for dinner and maybe fifty or more afterwards. We never knew who'd be sleeping on the living room couch when morning came. 

(There is a recording of 'Saturday Night at Tom Benton's' by the group for Decca at this link.)

Rita began to have enough. Besides, wartime restrictions, now beginning to come, made all things more difficult to manage. When T.P. reached his eighteenth year and was called out of the University into the Army, they ceased altogether. I dropped the harmonica and have not played now for years."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)