The intent had been to kindle a flame of music appreciation, but now it seemed as if attendees at the North Carolina Symphony’s concert might sustain actual burns. The performers had rumbled into Franklin in mountainous Macon County by bus one February in the postwar ’40s. As was customary for the orchestra’s far-flung showcases, the entire region seemed to turn out. Some kids even arrived aboard cattle trucks.

But rather than file into a school auditorium, concertgoers huddled against the lashing cold in a sawdust-floored church warmed only by a blazing potbelly woodstove that pulsed heat through a scalding pipe. “We were all worried for the safety of the children and their parents and friends,” recalled the symphony’s longtime conductor Benjamin Swalin in his memoir, Hard Circus Road.

In addition to being worried, the performers were tired and, despite the overworked woodstove, still freezing. They played in their overcoats. But play, they did.

Symphony members board the bus to head to their next performance in 1949. Photography courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina

By this time, the musicians were used to rolling out the world’s most exquisite compositions amid North Carolina’s humblest environs. The NC Symphony had hit the highway so often that they’d become known as “the suitcase symphony.”

Over the decades, this roving carnival of concert musicians expanded the horizons of thousands of schoolkids while drawing ovations from the nation’s arts cognoscenti, who’d never seen anything like it. In 1955, a New York Times writer trumpeted the orchestra: “It takes music to communities that had never encountered the living art in this form. It plays for children as well as adults. It has made itself a spirited force in the state.”

A force unleashed by an often discordant body — the NC General Assembly — when it composed one of the oddest-named pieces of legislation in the state’s history: the Horn-Tootin’ Bill.

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As North Carolina’s first lady hurried to the legislature, she found the March air unseasonably frosty — which was appropriate considering that her mission would wind up sending musicians into the cold for decades to come. The year was 1943 — the anxious middle slog of World War II — and Alice Broughton had established a reputation in Raleigh as a woman of taste and determination.

A year earlier, Gov. Melville Broughton’s wife had yanked up the rubber tread from the service steps at the Executive Mansion to donate to the war effort. On this day, she set her sights on the state’s cultural landscape, where, at the time, around 40 percent of folks lived on farms, often without electricity or indoor plumbing.

When the symphony pulled into Marshall in 1949, people from all across Madison County showed up for the performance — fulfilling First Lady Alice Broughton’s dream of bringing music to the masses. Photography courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina

Conductor Swalin and his equally ardent wife, Maxine, had tuned up the active support of the first lady and other influential figures. While the symphony had existed since 1932, its fortunes had risen and fallen like a Wagnerian drama. What it needed, the Swalins argued, was stable, recurring funding.

The reception from at least one legislator, however, was chilly. A House member reportedly rose during the symphony-funding debate to describe his trek from his rural district and a woman whom he’d seen toiling in a farm field. “That poor soul could have a son in World War II,” the legislator protested. “What would she say if she heard I voted for this horn-tootin’ bill?”

The dissenting legislator’s derision expressed notions embedded like clay in the state’s political underpinning — namely, that lawmakers should guard the treasury against such upper-crust frivolities and, instead, dispense precious funds with the care and caution of a farm family.

First Lady Alice Broughton was instrumental in brining the NC Symphony’s world-class sounds to rural North Carolina.  Photography courtesy of The News & Observer collection, courtesy of the state archives of north carolina

Here, First Lady Broughton and her contingent were on solid ground. The symphony had long taken to North Carolina’s two-lane, pre-interstate highways to perform for local chapters and off-lying schools. Outreach and education, not glitzy galas, were the orchestra’s signature melody — and they would remain so.

“Backed by a powerful lobby of club women,” The Greensboro Record wrote, “the bill sailed through easily.” The symphony at last had the reliable revenue and institutional support that would help attract hefty grants and additional private donors. Now, it could toot its horns around the mostly agrarian, 48,600-square-mile North Carolina like never before.

• • •

The orchestra shifted into high gear. Packed into a pair of red-and-yellow buses, the musicians brought Mozart to the mountains, Bach to the beach. They performed Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” and Copland’s “Red Pony” alongside arrangements of down-home ditties like “Cripple Creek” and “Johnson’s Old Gray Mule.”

In Cape Hatteras, they stuffed into a one-room schoolhouse. In Elizabethtown, they devoured a lunch prepared by starstruck home-economics students. In the Brunswick County town of Supply, they performed inside a gym where the lights went out as a nor’easter thundered in, and enrapt audience members scurried for flashlights to illuminate the sheet music.

By the 1951 concert season, the symphony was logging 8,500 travel miles and saw the legislature up its annual Horn Tootin’ subsidy to $15,000. Come 1978, the miles had more than doubled as the state’s support swelled to nearly $1 million.

NC Symphony conductor Benjamin Swalin exposed them to the real deal. Photography courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina

Awaiting the buses, as always, were the wide eyes and attentive ears of schoolkids. Black-and-white photos in Hard Circus Road hint at the mood and magic. In one shot, pairs of bare feet emerge from beneath the rolled-up dungarees of boys standing on dirt and pebbles, waiting to get into a performance. In another photo from the State Archives of North Carolina, children in knickers grin like jack-o’-lanterns as they experience their first toot of a tuba and whisper of a harp.

The students’ enthusiasm could be infectious. In the ’50s, a girl intoxicated by the sonorous sensations dashed up and kissed a symphony staffer. Problem was, the girl had the measles, and soon, so did the staffer.

Among a crowd of New Bern students in the ’60s was a fourth grader named Jeff Corbett. Like his giddy classmates, he held tight to a plastic recorder. His music teacher had handed out the little flutes weeks before, and then, following the symphony’s instruction guide, prepared her charges to join the performers in a song.

Teachers across the state prepared their students for the concerts, introducing them to child-size instruments. Photography courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina

While Corbett’s uncles and his shipyard-working father regularly jammed on guitars and mandolins, the boy had never heard or seen anything as regal as a symphony orchestra. “It showed me things that didn’t exist in my community, in my own circle of experience,” he says now, a trill of wonder still in his voice.

Alive to new possibilities, Corbett eventually studied engineering and launched a successful career in the power industry. As soon as the possibility arose, he joined the symphony’s board and remains a stalwart supporter.

Jason Spencer went from fifth grader and budding clarinetist mesmerized by the NC Symphony during a Chapel Hill appearance in the spring of 2000 to the outfit’s director of education. Today, he coordinates 45 to 50 youth education concerts annually. Combined with a newfangled instrument — known as an ‘online curriculum’ — and a variety of other engagements, the North Carolina Symphony now reaches around 150,000 students every year.

The current NC Symphony is led by Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. photograph by North Carolina Symphony/John Hansen Photography

And the Horn Tootin’ Bill that stirred sniggers when it allotted the symphony $2,000 annually? It now provides more than $4 million for its statewide education programs.

Although the tempos and textures of life have changed since that chilly day in 1943 when the General Assembly approved the original bill, the high notes of the “suitcase symphony” remain essentially the same.

“You still see the magic as soon as the music starts; the kids’ eyes light up,” Spencer says. “In Windsor, we had a small group of students — around 500 — and they were so attentive. Then, in Burlington, we had 2,500 kids, screaming like [they were at] a rock concert. The roof just about blew off.”

For more information about the NC Symphony, call (919) 733-2750 or visit ncsymphony.org.

Seven Spectacular Symphonies: Orchestras make magnificent music across North Carolina. Click here to learn more about those in our state.