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This text message is used to keep the image from rotating in ocr process. Be sure to crop the top .25" off after the ocr process. CHAPTER 27 Music-Choral and Operatic Music, the first cousin of the drama, also had an interesting development in Dixie. From the beginnings in most of the settlements the man with the fiddle was important. There were no bulky instruments like the organ or :)iano available in those days, but the smaller instruments such as the clarinet, the flute, and the violin were carried along as necessary equipment. As early as 1860 we hear of group instrumental music at the first Washington County Fair held at Washington on September 6 of that year. John D. Lee recorded in his diary on September 5th that "About 3 P.M. some 15 of my family arrived from Harmony bringing with them some stock for the Fair. They were escorted by Music consisting of 4 violins, bass drum & c., drawn by 4 horses with the American colors floating in the breeze."l Next day he again noted the music present at the celebration: "At sunrise the flag was unfurled at my mansion. The marshal music drawn by 4 horses surnaded the city... :'2 The month of arrival. December 1861, had not passed before a choir had been organized in St. George. Its leader was James Keate. William McIntyre with his violin and Harrison Pearce with his clarinet furnished an accompaniment." This choir furnished the music for Sunday Sacrament Meetings and other gatherings such as conferences after the first bowery was built. While the rains descended as a curtain-raiser to the great storm of 1861-1862, the campers at St. George, both children and adults, helped keep up their spirits by dancing on the wire-grass bottoms during and between showers.' It is related that Joe Fordham, a boy of 16 or 17, played for the children's dance. He lacked strings for his fiddle, but this deficiency was remedied when one of the sisters produced from her treasures a spool of silk thread which was twisted and made into violin strings. 5 lRobert G. Cleland and Juanita Brooks, A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, vol. 1 p. 271. 21bid. 3Reed Paul Thompson, op. cit., p. 14 f. <Diary of Robert Gardner. 5Grace Miller Bullock, "The First Christmas in St. George," MS. (Quoted in Thompson, op. cit.)