The Charm of the Grift: River City and Prof. Harold Hill

“The Music Man.” It opened on Broadway in 1957 and closed three years later after 1,375 performances. It won 5 Tony awards, including Best Musical, beating out “West Side Story” and “Most Happy Fella.” Its original cast album “won the first Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and spent 245 weeks on the Billboard charts.”¹

The 1962 film adaptation was nominated for 6 Academy Awards. It has never become dated and to this day amazes the discerning listener or viewer with its genius.

Among many enthralling things in “The Music Man,” the sheer audacity of Harold Hill’s grift stands out, but that’s not all. Hill’s gifts as a story-weaver and entertainer go well beyond his promised boy’s band of 76 Trombones and 110 cornets.

The brilliance of “The Music Man” as a depiction of midwestern life is not a simple thing. Meredith Willson’s story is a slice of the life of an Iowa town in 1912, a time when he himself was 10 years old. Willson pokes very affectionate fun at the townspeople of “River City” for their stubborn stodginess, but by the end of the musical has lifted them out of their apparently workaday, quiet lives into a joyful dancing and marching ensemble in the middle of rural America.

But there’s far more going on in that town’s life and we get to see snapshots of the town experience of 1912 in what likely are characters and occurrences sharply remembered 45 years later, when Willson was working on the story.

The show opens on a train car full of drummers and bagmen – manufacturers’ traveling salespeople in “Rock Island,” in which they tell us what they’re all about: collecting “cash” for every sort of item they sell, with details of the items: cash for the soft goods, the fancy goods, the firkins, the hogsheads, pickles – even anvils. By 1912 the life of the town-to-town salesman was changing, as the drummers lament.

Why are they going to the county seat? To go to the new department stores and other places where they can shop for themselves, never mind that catalog shopping had arisen in the late 19^th century.

But the talk, talk, talk turns quickly to Harold Hill, whom they openly condemn for giving their profession a bad name “He’s a fake and he doesn’t know the territory.” They are, though, puzzled by what Hill is selling:

A salesman:
“He’s a music man and he sells clarinets
To the kids in the town with the big trombones
And the rat-a-tat drums, big brass bass, big brass bass
And the piccolo, the piccolo with uniforms, too
With a shiny gold braid on the coat and a big red stripe runnin’…”

Response:
Well, I don’t know much about bands but I do know
You can’t make a living selling big trombones, no sir
Mandolin picks, perhaps and here and there a Jew’s harp…”

Other salesman:
“No, the fellow sells bands, Boys’ bands
I don’t know how he does it but he lives like a king
And he dallies and he gathers and he plucks and he shines
And when the man dances certainly, boys, what else?
The piper pays him! Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir, yes sir
When the man dances, certainly, boys, what else?
The piper pays him!”³

Thus is the stage set for the big con by the fast-talking “Professor” Harold Hill.

Meredith Willson said he had based Harold Hill on a combination of people from his childhood. That may well be, but the way Harold Hill tells the River City citizens of the “trouble” they have comes from some deep well of chicanery. Living inside the great patter song “Ya Got Trouble” is the living rhythm of a most accomplished fast talker who isn’t just Harold Hill – it’s Willson too. The pitch is a brilliant outlay of bent sales technique: create a previously unperceived problem, describe that problem in dire terms with ample consequences if it isn’t resolved, and present a solution to that problem. And that’s just part of the genius of the sales pitch, because by the end of it Hill has the town singing about “trouble” along with him!

Drummers and bagmen of the late 19^th and early 20^th century traveled from rural town to town selling all sorts of things, powerfully depicted in the lyrics of “Rock Island.” The salesmen of the time carried goods and samples in heavy leather-covered boxes or in large sturdy bags (thus, “bagmen”). Some of them would announce their presence by banging on their large valises to “drum up” business.

Harold Hill is a drummer without box or bag. He carries nothing other than fantasy: the promise of a boy’s band, curing the town’s youth problem. The litany of symptoms of the kids’ ills is like a gathered compendium of the endless diseases for which we see remedies on TV and in streaming pharmaceutical ads. With Hill, though, there’s another component: entertainment. Some traveling salesfolk of the time supplemented their sales income with cash they earned for singing, reciting, or playing instruments they carried with their sales kits. Harold Hill is a consummate, well-rehearsed (he’s done this in many towns) and talented showman, with an irresistible and, of course, highly rhythmic song and dance that captivates his audience. “Ya got trouble” is the American equivalent of the Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, raised to a different pitch, so to speak, a patter song purely based on conversational speech but with an infectious and insistent beat, as Meredith Willson himself explained (watch from 2:44 – 5:30):

But as Peter Royston pointed out, “Like a reverse Pied Piper, Hill gives the adults of River City back their childhood by introducing them to music and dance: bickering men become the best of friends when formed into a barbershop quartet; a boy too shy to speak breaks out of his shell when Hill teaches him a song. Willson’s breathless and full-of-life music creates a joyous parade of everyday life.”⁴

“Ya Got Trouble” isn’t the only brilliant Harold Hill sales pitch. In fact it’s the lead-in to the best of Hill’s pitches: the exaggerations of the possible in the boys’ band and the wonders of it are superb visions of unheard of grandeur, with trombones galore, not fifty, not a hundred, but a hundred and ten cornets and a thousand reeds, copper bottom tympani in horse platoons, euphoniums and bassoons and every size of clarinet, with trumpeters improvising “a full octave higher than the score,” never mind that the trombones themselves could “hit the counterpoint.”

If you had your doubts that Hill is Meredith Willson talking, this inside-the-band-room disquisition on how a band plays is a dead giveaway. Who but a true musician (which Hill is not) could throw in knowing references to hitting the counterpoint (one of Willson’s favorite compositional devices). Oh sure, it’s all part of the con, a grifter’s embellishment.  But the ideas of playing the trumpet a full octave higher than the score and trombones “hitting the counterpoint” are the talk of a knowledgeable musician. Hill waxes nostalgic at the “electric thrill” of having heard, all on “the very same historic day,” the bands of “Gillmore, Liberati, Pat Conway, The Great Creatore, W.C. Handy, and John Phillip Sousa,” all of them famed band directors, composers and, in some cases, instrument virtuosos. Unless we wish to believe that Harold Hill actually would know such arcana, we’re hearing a loving reminiscence of Meredith Willson himself.

For a number of years I was a high-end software salesperson. I didn’t sell door to door or jump off a train in Keokuk, Iowa with anvils in my pockets. I realized early on that relationships made a huge difference, as did reading the room and listening between the words. I was very good at prepared presentations and at altering them at a moment’s notice to fit the circumstances, which is one strong reason I so appreciate Harold Hill’s initial pitch. It’s simply one of the greatest sales pitches ever, and it, along with Hill’s canny encouragements of the quartet and of Winthrop Paroo and many others does, indeed, change the lives of River City’s residents, no matter that up until the end there’s nothing behind the scrim.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_Man
2. From Meredith Willson, The Music Man
3. From Meredith Willson, The Music Man
4. Peter Royston, MEREDITH WILLSON: THE REAL MUSIC MAN, Center Stage Magazine, Winter/Spring 2002 (Center Stage Magazine, Winter/Spring 2002 (https://www.portwashington.com/moveweb/Guidewrite/willson.html)

Edmund J McDevitt
©July 2025

Postscript

My friend Ron Solberg reminded me of a couple of things I forgot: that he’d published a book in 2008 on early 20th century traveling salesmen, The Whizbangs of Oohs and Ahs: America’s Salesmen: Their Lore, Lives and Laughs (Seaboard Press, 2008; ISBN 978-1596635456); and in the book he expands on Harold Hill’s warning about “Captain Billy’s Whizbang,” which was a real thing! Here’s what Ron said about it:

” Meredith Wilson in his 1957 musical Music Man has Professor Hill rap:  ‘Is your son memorizing jokes out of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang?’ as he tries to convince the town’s people that they should invest in band instruments to distract their ‘wayward’ sons.  An American humor magazine by that name, featuring many salesmen jokes and anecdotes, (I’ve collected several copies of the magazine) was actually published in the early 20th century (making the Wilson Music Man reference anachronistic)  Publisher Captain Billy Fawcett, a WWI  veteran,  came up with the “whiz bang” name, recalling the sound that artillery shells  made as they “whizzed” through air and “banged” into the ground.

As an aside, Fawcett would go on to publish the risque Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang magazine (similar in nature to the later Esquire)  for several years making him enough money to introduce several other publications including TrueConfessions, and Modern Mechanics and Inventions. After his death in 1940, his sons  continued the publishing tradition by introducing the Captain Marvel comic book series with money from their dad’s estate. For more about Fawcett see Fawcett, Wilford Hamilton “Captain Billy” (1885–1940) | MNopedial.”

Thanks to Ron for this cool information.

EJM
July 27, 2025