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As a longtime lover and supporter of folk music, I have been hoping to compose a folk opera for some time now. I pitched the idea to our founder, Daniel Grambow, and soon learned of his own history touring the United States with a folk band and his love for the sound and history of folk music. Together, we decided to adapt the 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, the story of a Japanese geisha who marries an American naval officer and trusts him too deeply, following him to her demise. It has been adapted into other plays and the hit musical Miss Saigon, but we want to adapt it into a folk opera taking place in Pascagoula, Mississippi. There are many tall tales and legends along the Mississippi River, but while doing research I came across the legend of the Singing River. The legend goes that the Pascagoula tribe’s chieftain was in love with a Biloxi princess, who was betrothed to a Biloxi chieftain. The Biloxi and Pascagoula fought, and when it became clear that the Pascagoula tribe were going to lose, they were led by the women and children into the Pascagoula river, singing a death chant. As soon as I read this, I knew that I wanted to enrich the story of Madama Butterfly with the history of Mississippi’s indigenous people by making the heroine a native woman.
Now, all the research I have been able to do insofar cannot identify the Pascagoula tribe outside of their geography; to my knowledge there are no survived artifacts or written language. However, knowing that Pascagoula is a Choctaw word for “bread eater,” and that geographically, the Choctaw have such deep roots in Mississippi, I was hoping that the present-day Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians may have some insights as to what their life may have been like. If there is no further information on the Pascagoula tribe specifically, it would still be very important to our project to know what the culture of nearby tribes such as the Choctaw were like. Specifically, we hope to know what was revered, and what the dancing and social culture was like. We traveled to Pearl River in March of 2017 to meet with some folks over at the headquarters for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and discuss exactly this.
To return for a moment to the story of Madama Butterfly, it has themes of white ignorance and overconfidence, and of the reckless discarding of tradition. The history of America itself relies on this, and most recently, our new President of the United States has already made it clear that his only currency is self-gain. This story is a warning of the result of that selfishness, one in which we hope to promote the power, history, and suffering of indigenous peoples in the retelling of a heart wrenching narrative.
The research continues, the collaboration is in motion; we want to listen more than we talk and capture this very important story into an original folk opera.