Marshall, Gordon

English

Iowa Research Online

A Midwestern Welcome to Marriage
by Gordon Marshall
Tor many Iowans earlier in this century, the melodious echo of wedding bells was later drowned out by the irrever­
ent cacophony of a shivaree
A shivaree is a discordant, 
noisy procession and serenade by 
which neighbors and friends greet 
a newly married couple, and 
which commonly continues until 
the husband pays the group to 
stop or offers refreshments. The 
custom, with many variations, was 
still practiced in the rural Midwest 
at least through the 1950s.
Historian Loretta Burns has 
studied the shivaree's European 
roots; the word comes from the 
French word charivari. In Europe in 
earlier centuries, the charivari was 
often punitive, its victims widows 
or widowers who remarried. The 
community expressed its unoffi­
cial disapproval of the upsetting of 
local tradition by raucously prom­
enading the bride and groom on a 
donkey through the village to hu­
miliate them. (In Britain, the 
charivari was called "rough mu­
sic" or "mock serenades"; the don­
key procession, a "skimmington.")
Charivaris did not fo­
cus only on those 
who remarried, but 
also on adulterers 
or "anyone who 
challenged the so­
cial order," Burns 
explains. Euro­
pean charivaris
served both as rites of passage and 
as public censorship, reflecting the 
community's belief "that it had the 
right and even the responsibility to 
reinforce custom, or at least to re­
mind the community of custom."
As the charivari immigrated to 
America and became the shivaree, 
it gradually lost its punitive and 
sometimes violent overtones and 
focused only on newlyweds, but it 
could still be crude and rough. 
Banging on pots and pans or 
shooting a shotgun blast could be 
just the opening gambit for friends 
and neighbors. Making the groom 
wheelbarrow the bride down Main 
Street, or short-sheeting or salting 
the marriage bed (amidst the con­
fusion of a surprise shivaree) were 
typical pranks.
Shivarees varied from commu­
nity to community and changed 
over time. Yet the shivarees in Ida 
County, where I grew up, shared 
several common elements with 
shivarees recalled in 1978 by 
northwestern Iowans in oral his­
tory interviews (from which I 
quote excerpts). One of the main 
elements in most shivarees was to 
catch the couple off guard.
"It was a game, a surprise," ex­
plained Gerald Goodwin, who 
married Fay Utesch in 1933. 
"They'd even stop their cars or 
horse and buggy at a neighbor's 
place and walk in. Maybe you 
could guess, maybe you couldn't. 
Sometimes, if you got wind of it,
you'd trick them and leave home, 
and they'd have to hunt you up 
again."
"Usually it was within two 
weeks to a month [of the wedding] 
that they tried to shivaree you," 
Fay added. "Sometimes they liked 
to catch you in bed. Sometimes it 
was earlier. Probably never before 
eight."
Brownie L. MacVey agreed 
that a shivaree happened "when­
ever they could catch up with the 
couple." He and his wife, Florence, 
explained, "See, you weren't safe 
until after the shivaree was over. It 
could happen six months after you 
were married—even a year if they 
hadn't caught you yet." The 
MacVeys were married in Poca­
hontas in 1944.
When my parents, William and 
Mabel Marshall, married in 1922, 
they anticipated that high jinks 
were in order. After the wedding 
in the bride's home, Dad worried 
that a gang of friends would be 
waiting at the Battle Creek depot 
for them. He had his new brother- 
in-law drive them to a town far­
ther down the rail line to catch the 
train to Chicago for their honey­
moon. For the time being they had 
evaded any pranks, and by March 
1 the newlyweds were back from 
their honeymoon and had moved 
to a farm in a new neighborhood. 
Still, from their first night, my 
folks kept their clothes very handy 
when they went to bed. Within a 
couple of nights, the expected 
shivaree came off. They were al­
ready in bed when their new 
neighbors arrived banging on pots 
and pans. Since Mom's hair was in 
disarray, she shoved it under a hat. 
Later in the evening her new 
neighbor, Hertha, who would 
become her great friend, 
suggested that she take 
off her hat and stay 
awhile. My par-
SH
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O u ts m a r t in g  the shivaree crowd in Wellman, Iowa, I 904, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Ward 
announce in the Wards Drug Store window that  “We got married on the sly. We 
did. Cigars on the house” and “We keep things to our self. We do. Will not p rom ­
ise to open today.” Cigars and candy were customary treats from the newlyweds.
ents provided the usual treats—ci­
gars and candy bars. All in all, it 
was a very sedate shivaree.
My aunt and uncle's shivaree, 
however, was not so sedate and 
perhaps reflected more of its Euro­
pean roots. In 1933 Ed Campbell 
made his second marriage, to my 
aunt, Mary Marshall, who was 25 
years younger. When they re­
turned to Battle Creek from their 
wedding trip, his cronies on Main 
Street tried to capture him. Camp­
bell was a big fellow and he easily 
broke away and ran down the 
street. A newcomer to the area saw 
the town worthies in pursuit of 
Campbell and obliged by tackling 
him.
Now captured, Campbell was 
locked up in a railroad boxcar on a 
sidetrack for nearly a half­
day (the bride was
teel quarters). Despite this prank, 
there was no monkeying with their 
home or marriage bed, thanks to 
Ed Campbell's elderly next-door 
neighbor. Furious about how these 
"hoodlums" were mistreating his 
pal and political hero (Campbell 
had been speaker of the Iowa 
House of Representatives and a 
U.S. congressman), the neighbor 
had guarded the house.
This urge to capture the groom 
had not died out by my own time. 
When I was in high school in the 
early 1940s and living in Battle 
Creek in Ida County, I joined a 
gang of young people organizing a 
shivaree of a young couple. Riding 
in a half-dozen cars, with head­
lights off, we rolled quietly into 
their farmstead one night, all hot 
to capture the newly married 
couple for some now-forgotten 
prank.
Not the passive type, the
couple started running away from 
their house. As one of the pursu­
ers, I, a gangly youth, was sprint­
ing along in the cattle yard when I 
tripped and fell. Not hurt, I 
brushed off the cow manure and 
resumed the chase. We soon had 
the couple back in their house for 
the usual treats. I was the butt of 
some coarse humor, however, and 
nobody would sit very close to me. 
Although I scarcely knew the 
groom or the bride, for years after, 
whenever she and I met on the 
street, I thought I detected a 
smirk.
What happened at tl 
actual shivaree often de 
pended on how many 
other couples the groom 
"had made life miserable 
for," explained Brownie 
MacVey. "Generally nothing 
real serious," he noted, "but they'd 
tear up the house a little bit," hide 
the couple's clothes, or rearrange 
furniture. "After they got through 
raising the dickens," Florence 
MacVey added, "they all got to­
gether and had lunch or dinner or 
[would] play cards the rest of the 
night."
Agnes Dunham, who married 
in Crawford County in 1933, re- 
called that her neighbors arrived 
armed with horns or "anything 
that'd make a racket." They would 
"hammer 'til you come out and 
then they usually have a captain 
and after about so much jazzing 
around and candy bars—you bet­
ter have plenty of candy bars and 
cigars and what have you on hand 
because you know they're going to 
come—and then they'll sit and 
visit for awhile."
I tell you what they used to 
do," she elaborated. "They come in 
your house, they just come in and 
say, 'We'll have a little party.' They 
just pick up your furniture. . . . 
They roll the rug up, take your
Summer 1996 67
dining room furni­
ture, living room fur­
niture, everything out 
and set it in the yard.
Bring in the orchestra
and have a dance. In your house."
Like many couples, Gerald 
and Fay Goodwin handed out 
candy and cigars, but only after 
the revelers had earned it. Gerald 
explained: "They surround the 
house and make noise and when 
you figure they've made enough to 
earn their treats, you open the 
door and let them in. You intro­
duce your wife and you'd better 
have some treats or they made it 
rough for you."
Goodwin recalled a shivaree of 
an elderly couple in his neighbor­
hood when he was a child: "It was 
the second marriage for both of 
them. I went along with my dad. 
That was back in the cob and wood 
stove days and they used to shoot 
black powder shells and it was 
very customary for lots of guns [to 
be] a-booming. There were cow­
bells and they carried one of these 
big saw blades that you could
pound on. That was noisemak-
//ing.
"Well," Goodwin continued, 
"this old couple, it was very cold 
that night, and they decided they 
wouldn't even let them in. Back in 
those days they lots of times 
loaded their own shells and we 
didn't put shot in, to save money, 
but it made a lot of noise. I remem­
ber a great uncle, Mother's uncle, 
and he was a lightweight man— 
they shoved him up on the roof. 
And up he went and he shoved a 
double-barrel ten-gauge shotgun 
down the chimney as far as he 
could and pulled the trigger. The 
lids came off the cook stove and 
fired into the room," Goodwin re­
counted, "and they were glad to 
invite people in to help put the fire
out.n
In our town in 1941, a lead­
ing farmer named Calvin, mar­
ried Elizabeth, a high school 
teacher. Aware of which night 
the shivaree would happen, the 
newlywed Goodenows locked the 
doors, turned out the lights, and 
went to bed. Their friends, includ­
ing some schoolteachers, made a 
little racket around the farmstead 
but went away—temporarily de­
feated. In a couple of weeks the 
gang returned, and they painted a 
few slogans on Calvin's car. Al­
though Calvin was very proud of 
his Ford V-8, he wasn't particu­
larly distressed about the graffiti 
and didn't wash it off right away. 
Eventually he realized that the 
group had mixed lime in their 
paint, and the finish on the car was 
ruined. Although the insurance 
company paid for the repainting, 
the moral of the story was: Don't 
try to outfox the shivaree crowd.
Fitting the definition of a 
shivaree as a community celebra­
tion but lacking the raucous spirit 
or element of surprise was the 
daytime shivaree of my country 
schoolteacher, Gertrude Gottberg 
Knoke, who had married into a 
well-known area family who 
owned a grain elevator at Knoke. 
Her father-in-law set the date and 
paid the bills for their daytime 
shivaree. Perhaps a thousand peo­
ple came from all over the area, 
and cars were parked all over the 
tiny town. Plank benches were set 
up around the newlyweds' house, 
and barrels of ice cream and beer 
were served to an orderly crowd. 
As kids ran all about, adults vis­
ited under the trees.
Sometimes other planned 
events substituted for a shiv­
aree. "We got married at 
eight in the morning,
Ethel Tiefenthaler re­
called about her 
1941 wedding in
68 Iowa Heritage Illustrated
Carroll County. "Big wedding, big 
dinner, and a dance at night. If you 
didn't have something like that, 
then you got shivareed."
On the other hand, Myrne and 
Elmer Bogh hadn't expected a 
shivaree "because we had given 
the dance," Myrne recalled, "and 
we thought they'd be satisfied, but 
they came just for fun." The neigh­
bors brought cake and sand­
wiches. "I remember I got so 
scared—all these people coming 
in," Myrne recounted. "I didn't 
have that much lunch on hand. I 
didn't know then they were bring­
ing their own."
Whatever happened to the 
shivaree custom? In our area, one 
of its informal rules was that you 
could only shivaree the married 
couple if you weren't invited to the 
wedding. As the mid-century 
economy improved and weddings 
got larger, shivarees died out. Af­
ter World War II, wedding dances 
sponsored by the married couple 
became very popular. This social 
event replaced the shivaree, be­
cause the desire for a party was 
met.
"Nowadays, things have 
changed considerably," remarked 
Gerald Goodwin in a 1978 inter­
view. "Very seldom you'll hear of 
any noisemaking."
"It's more or less of a kind of 
open house now," Fay Goodwin 
added. "Years ago, they came, fin­
ished the treats and visited and 
smoked their cigars and the house 
was full of smoke and [we all] just 
had a good neighborhood visit."
Historian Loretta Burns as­
sures us the shivaree is not com­
pletely a custom of the past. She 
has learned of a few genuine shiv­
arees since the 1970s 
and notes that some 
amateur and pro­
fessional histori­
ans have been
known to celebrate a colleague's 
wedding in this traditional way. In 
rural areas a wedding anniversary 
is occasionally observed by repris­
ing the shivaree with the original 
participants.
For as much mischief or dam­
age as a shivaree did, it was never­
theless a community ritual not to 
be ignored. When asked what 
would happen if newlyweds 
didn't open their door to a shiv­
aree, Alma Pauline Langer, who 
was married in Denison in 1913, 
replied, "Oh, that wouldn't look 
very nice, would it?"
"You really were insulted if 
you didn't get shivareed," Agnes 
Dunham confided, "because then
you knew nobody cared about 
you."
When rural and small-town Io- 
wans were more physically iso­
lated and financially limited in so­
cial activity, a sense of belonging 
was conferred by shivareeing a 
newly married couple. Certainly 
the gathering could be corny, 
crude, or even rough, but it was a 
memorable welcome to married 
life in the community. ❖
Gordon Marshall now lives in Milwau­
kee, Wisconsin, and enjoys writing about 
Iowa's rural past.
NOTE ON SOURCES 
Secondary sources are Loretta T. Johnson, 
"Charivari/Shivaree: A European Folk 
Ritual on the American Plains," Journal of 
Interdisciplinary History 20:3 (Winter 1990); 
Loretta T. Burns, "Memories of the Past: 
Minnesota Shivarees," lecture, May 5, 
1991, Mankato State University; and John 
T. Flanagan, "Note on 'Shivaree,'" Ameri­
can Speech 15 (1940), 110.
The author interviewed or corre­
sponded with Esther Fowler Shotwell, 
Stanley P. Marshall, Calvin Goodenow, and 
Gertrude G. Knoke. The excerpts quoting 
Gerald and Fay Goodwin, Brownie and 
Florence MacVey, Agnes Dunham, Ethel 
Tiefenthaler, Myrne Bogh, and Alma 
Pauline Langer are from oral history inter­
views conducted with rural northwestern 
Iowans for the 1978 Earthwatch Project, co­
ordinated by Rebecca Conard. Earthwatch 
interviews are archived at the State His­
torical Society of Iowa (Iowa City), as is 
the Barney diary (see below). Some ex­
cerpts were edited slightly for publication.
A Dubuque charivari in 1846
“The custom to make night hideous ”
A century ago, attorney William Joshua Barney described a shivaree in Dubuque that echoed the more punitive overtones of earlier Euro­pean charivaris. On May 20, 1846, Barney wrote in his 
diary: "Tonight hearing a tremendous noise going on 
up street which sounded like tin pans being beaten, 
bells ringing crackers being fired occasionally varied 
by the report [of] a cannon, 1 went to the place where 
the racket proceeded to ascertain its cause. I was told 
that it was a Charivari (pronounced Chivree) and that 
it was the custom thus to make night hideous under 
the windows of a newly married person when the 
match met with popular disapprobation. The Bride­
groom can rid himself of this annoyance if he consents 
to treat the party who cause it. The present match was 
of a recently widowed woman to a man who stands in 
bad odour here. The marriage has been greatly disap­
proved by the family of the Bride and some members 
of it were among the performers of the Charivari. I 
staid near the house for a while listening to the noise 
which to say the truth was Infernal. The Bridegroom 
was obstinate, he would not treat, and his tormentors 
exercised every means of annoyance in the shape of 
noise that they could invent. Sleigh & Cowbells, tin 
pans, horns drums, fifes, firecrackers and even a can­
non which they fired every few minutes. The concus­
sion of the frequent reports must have broken every 
window in the house. 1 heard one pane crack while I 
was [a] listener. Every now and then the mob raised 
t eir voices aloud in such a yell that it surpassed in 
hideousness all their instruments. This practice of 
Charivaring is common here though not peculiar to 
the West. Sanford & Crawford who were listeners with 
me told me that they had often heard them in some of 
the Atlantic States. In some cases the serenaders (if I 
may thus prostitute the term) have proceeded to 
unwarrantable lengths in their efforts to extort a treat. 
They have gone so far as to break open a house and 
drag the Bridegroom from his bed. Such provocation 
as this would, in my opinion justify a man in shooting
some of the rioters. If 1 should marry here and be so
•/
unfortunate as to be Charivaried, no man shall enter 
my room without peril of his life. I should however, 
yield with as good a grace as possible to the compro­
mise of a treat before the performance had com­
menced unless peculiar circumstances made me deter­
mined not to yield."
The next day Barney wrote in his diary: "I heard 
tonight that the man who was charivaried last night 
yielded to the necessity of the case and treated his [tor­
mentors?]. He ought to have succumbed sooner or 
continued obstinate. // « 
❖
Summer 1996 69


Shivaree: A Midwestern Welcome to Marriage

Iowa Heritage Illustrated

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&amp;context=ihi

Shivaree: A Midwestern Welcome to Marriage

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