The Hurdy-Gurdy Girls
I was scanning original illustrations of Robert Crumb for a
second extended edition of The Record Cover Collection for comic book publisher Oog &
Blik, for who I do most graphical work on their productions. I ran into an
image which was titled Hurdy-Gurdy Girls and saw this strange neckless violinesque
box. On Google I found out what Robert had actually drawn, text copied below.
The Hurdy-Gurdy Girls were Rockbitch avant la lettre. Forced sex without fancy
golden comdoms, so even more hardcore. A rough tale about the success of the
remarkable instrument during the early years of the 18th century.
The Hurdy-Gurdy Girls
Source: www.hotpipes.com/hggirls2.html
Over the years, the German hurdy-gurdy maker Kurt Reichmann
has assembled an astonishing collection of early graphic and historical
material, much of it original, depicting hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes; in 1995 he
opened a gallery in Frankfurt to display these works, a very few of which are
shown below.
Note that several of the graphics above depict beautiful
young women playing hurdy-gurdies. There's a fascinating if sad history behind
this that begins in the German state (then a principality) of Hessen in the
early 1800s and continues to gold-rush California. Kurt Reichmann researched
the associated events and circumstances extensively, and in 1998 mounted a
spectacular exhibition, titled "Hurdy-Gurdy Girls," in a Frankfurt
church founded in 1227 to minister to "fallen" women. The showing
included lectures, music, early graphics and a series of very large (life-size)
highly dramatic color photographs by Kurt (who along with everything else he
does is a graphics designer & photographer) of modern women with
hurdy-gurdies in interpretive poses, derived from the stories of the original
hurdy-gurdy girls.
The Hurdy-Gurdy Girls
In the beginning of the 1800's bitter poverty ruled in wide
areas of Hessen. This had several causes, including a population increase due
to families having many children and subsequent division by inheritance of the
land into ever-smaller pieces, to the extent that viable farming became
impossible.
To supplement their incomes, in the 1820s farmers and
farmworkers began to make wooden brooms and fly-whisks during the winter which
they, as itinerant peddlers, sold in the summers in the surrounding areas. This
trade soon expanded beyond the borders of Hessen and reached England, France
and even Russia.
It was soon discovered that the wares sold better when
accompanied by dancing, hurdy-gurdy playing girls. Quickly the dancing and
music became ever more important and the pretty girls became ever better known;
it was soon realized that there was a lot of easy money to be made.
The success of the hurdy-gurdy girls then began to attract
what in German are called "soul-merchants," who put the naive village
girls under contract while enticing the parents with tales of how much money
their children would be sending home; as a result, there were often no young
women to be found in many villages of the region. The soul-merchants took the
girls to dance halls and such, where the clientele was mostly sailors and
miners. Thus the girls of Hessen came to nearly all countries of Europe, especially
England (where they were called "Hurdy-Gurdy girls" and "Hessian
Broom Girls") and also to Australia, Cuba and North America - where
California was a particularly desirable destination, as the gold fields there
promised brisk business, and where, because of their origins, they were also
known as "Rhinelanders."
A very few young women, well-off through prostitution and
dressed in finery, returned to their villages and encouraged the stay-at-homes
to make the same journeys. But the life of most of the hurdy-gurdy girls was
hard and many returned home broken, penniless and sick. Often the girls were
forced into prostitution by their "agents" and from there slid into a
criminal milieu. Meanwhile, as the business intensified, it became something of
a community secret in many places - even mayors and teachers profited, by
brokering "contracts" between the girls and the "traders."
The first resistance to all of this came from the church.
Pastors preached against the situation from the pulpit and protested it in
newspapers. In 1848 a Pastor Schellenberg carried a petition against the
practice of the "sale of souls into foriegn lands" to the government,
but it was not acted upon. [The document was part of the exhibition]. In 1860
another pastor, Ottokar Schupp, brought public attention to the situation in
the villages with his novel, "Hurdy-Gurdy." Finally, in 1865 the
government issued a "most-highest prohibition" against the
"taking along of children for the purpose of the fly-whisk trade" and
so ended, eventually, because of public opinion and government edict, the time
of the fly-whisk merchants, the broom merchants, the "Hessian broom
girls" and the hurdy-gurdy girls.
In looking into all of this further, this writer finds it
interesting that something so once-notorious and spectacular as this lengthy
and widespread episode seems to have been largely overlooked or misunderstood
by modern historians. For example Susann Palmer, in her excellent reference
work "The Hurdy Gurdy" (David & Charles: London, 1980) bristles
at the suggestion of hurdy-gurdies in dance halls; she writes, "A
supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1976) humiliates the hurdy gurdy
further ... it gives as ... used in North America: 'hurdy-gurdy girl, a dance
hostess in a hurdy-gurdy house, being a disreputable type of cheap dance hall.'
... It is almost certain that these 'hurdy-gurdy houses' were places where
mechanical barrel-organs were installed." (pp. 41-42). Meanwhile, we find
the government of British Columbia, Canada exhibiting confusion on its web site
dedicated to the gold rush there, not about the presence and nature of the
hurdy-gurdy girls who came there during the 1850s, but about the meaning of the
term "hurdy-gurdy" and the womens' relationship to the instrument.
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