Making Messiah Swedish: Localities of Music and Identity in Ethnotourist America

Abstract

Rehearsals were under way for the 123rd annual performance of Messiah in the small town of Lindsborg, Kansas. Not only is the community of 3,500 home to one of the oldest continuous traditions of performing Handel’s famous oratorio, it is also known nationally for branding itself as an ethnotourism center—as “Little Sweden U.S.A.”—in recognition of its founding during the mid1800s by Swedish immigrants. When local journalist Marty Hardy published the above statement on the front page of the town’s newspaper in 2005, she was keeping to a pattern. A year earlier she described singing Messiah as “probably the most significant event in keeping the Swedish heritage alive in Lindsborg.”1 Two months later, she would again use her column to urge fellow community members to celebrate upcoming performances by flying Swedish flags outside their homes. And so it continued in her writings and communications until her retirement as a journalist in 2006 and passing in 2016. I first read these columns in 2004 when I was an undergraduate student at Bethany College in Lindsborg, the institution hosting the annual oratorio performances. I found the commentary provocative: I had come to Lindsborg and Bethany as an eighteenyearold because of its Swedish