Carry Nation is the last of Douglas Moore's seven operas and it was commissioned for the centenary of the University of Kansas in 1966. After the premiere at Lawrence, Kansas, there were well received productions in San Francisco soon after and in New York City in 1968. Moore died in the following year—not, as the sleeve-note would have it, in 1983, which would have been his centenary. He studied in Paris with d'Indy and Boulanger, but the former seems to have had the stronger influence. Carry Nation is virtually a nineteenth-century opera improbably written in the 1960s.
With a reforming woman as heroine, it has some connections with Thomson's Mother of Us All, based on the suffragette campaigner Susan B. Anthony. But for Carry Nation herself the enemy was drink. William North Jackson based his libretto on a true story. After Carry's husband died of alcoholism she devoted her life to smashing up bars and joints in protest, anticipating the spirit of prohibition. The opera's prologue shows Carry and her girls at work but the two acts which follow are set in her youth and deal with trials of her unhappy marriage. The story has theatrical moments and plenty of colour, especially in crowd scenes. Moore's folksy style copes well with barn dances, ragtime (of sorts) and barbershop as well as the mainstream materials of French and Italian opera. The voices dominate and the orchestra, interludes apart, functions as accompaniment.
This recording, first released in 1968, is based on the original cast. Major opera singers such as Beverly Wolff, as Carry, and Ellen Faull, as her mother, made a strong impression and still do. The trouble is that the whole thing has to be perceived through a fog of poor sound-quality that would only just be acceptable if the transfer had been made from 78s. All this emphasizes that Moore's stodgy approach to American folk idioms—so different from Copland or Thomson—is irretrievably dated. The reissue is primarily of archival interest.'