Comparative Video 101

"Salty Dog Blues"

2012-01-26T16:24:00.001-08:00

A fine line exists, perhaps, between songs and jokes and that are outright bawdy and those that are merely naughty. I would guess that to people of a certain degree of refinement, no such line exists because some topics are simply not fit material for either humor or tune-making. But refinement is not a quality that we ordinarily associate with folk music, or its makers for that matter, since the volk are, well, the volk, and that implies a view of life that the bluenoses might call vulgar but that we might more correctly and less pejoratively term earthy. A good many English language folk songs, the older ones especially, are unselfconsciously ribald, and why not? While the refined Norman nobility of England in the Middle Ages sat in their castles with troubadours strumming lutes and singing Provençal poems of romantic and courtly love, the Anglo-Saxon majority labored as subsistence farmers, raising pigs and chickens, oats and barley, fervently hoping that both their livestock and their children would mate successfully to produce another generation of both food from the former and laborers from the latter. Not much tolerance for flighty romance there, but plenty of interest in the mechanics and strategies of reproduction.

By the time many of those Saxon songs became rooted in America, alas, the pervasive influence of the puritanical theology of depravity and shame forced the often openly sexualized nature of the lyrics to go underground, sort of, and in the U.S. we have far more suggestively naughty numbers than we do outright bawdy ones. Even in the years of the folk revival, old English ditties like "Three Jolly Coachmen," "Blow The Candle Out," and "The Hunter" needed a certain degree of expurgation to be acceptable to record labels and radio stations - if you look back at those hyperlinked articles, you'll find some discussion in each of the original and saltier lyrics.

And the fact that I can use the word "salty" to mean "off-color, suggestive" takes us right to the double entendre behind this week's song selection, "Salty Dog Blues." There are all kinds of explanations for what a "salty dog" is - and none of them is even remotely respectable. They range from the elaborate (a heated, brined sausage worn in the underclothes in winter to ward off colds) to the obvious (a salted Coney Island hot dog on a stick, with all the phallic implications thereof). I can think of a couple of other rather literal possibilities as well, but no matter - in any and every event, the singer of the lyrics is expressing a very recognizable longing for the charms of the favored lady, with the lines "If I can't be your salty dog,I won't be your man at all/Honey, let me be your salty dog" or something very similar appearing in every version.

Though most of the modern bluegrass versions of "Salty Dog Blues" can be traced to the Morris Brothers' 1938 recording, older versions were waxed in the 1920s by the Allen Brothers, a white duo who may have been the first to adapt a black blues number that probably originated with Papa Charlie Jackson somewhere around 1910. There is a very old and very scratchy recording of Papa Charlie singing it, but the upload on YouTube is virtually unlistenable - so here is my favorite Delta blues musician, Mississippi John Hurt, with an arrangement pretty close to Jackson's:

Hurt was an amazing guitarist, and there is an impossibly fetching warmth to his vocals - along with some saucy suggestiveness - "please don't leave me in this fix..."

The Allen Brothers' combination of banjo, guitar, and kazoo gives the tune an almost ragtime sense of fun - from 1927:

I first heard the song from Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys (which is why they are pictured above) on the Vanguard Newport Folk Festival 1960 album. This TV performance (right after Johnny Cash) is from about the same time:

Flatt and Scruggs recorded "Salty Dog" in the studio several times - interestingly, here with fiddler Benny Sims singing the lead instead of guitarist Flatt, who is featured in the previous video:

Nobody has ever done bluegrass better than Flatt and Scruggs - and Earl just turned 88 and is still performing.

Slightly more countrified and with that classic Nashville sound, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos:

Pop folksingers also got into the act with the number. Here is Sylvia Fricker (at the time, soon to be Sylvia Tyson) on the ABC-TV Hootenanny in 1963:

We can overlook the oddity of a lady singing this particular lyric because of the back-up group. Even through the grain of the video, you can see Ian Tyson leading off, with Scott MacKenzie next on 6 string, Bob Gibson on 12, John Herald ("Four Rode By" and the great 12 string riff on I&S's original "You Were On My Mind") on the first banjo, Journeyman Dick Weissman on the next banjo, and what looks to be Bill Lee on bass. Wowsers, as my students are wont to say at times.

The Kingston Trio also stepped up to the plate with their version of "Salty Dog." Please note how this version differs instrumentally from the preceding. There will be a quiz immediately after the recording.

If you noticed that the band that did as much as or more than any other folk group to popularize the 5 string banjo with non-country, mainstream audiences in the 1950s is not using one on this number - you get +500 extra credit points and an automatic A for the day. The 12 string intro and rhythm (likely played by Glen Campbell, who sat in on this recording) interestingly takes the song back closer to its African-American roots than do the banjo-based bluegrass arrangements above. Not bad for a bunch of crass and commercial popularizers, I'd say.

It's a fine and tuneful bit of slightly naughty fun - and maybe now we can all tell Bob Shane of the KT "what the hell is a salty dog" the next time we see him.

John Stewart's America

2012-01-16T10:25:00.001-08:00

"Stewart's uncompromising lyrical vision....relates the past as if it were a living, breathing present..." -Thom Jurek, Allmusic
"You have achieved in music what I have attempted in painting."
-Andrew Wyeth To John Stewart
(L) Public Sale (detail) by Wyeth
John Coburn Stewart (1939-2008) was a quintessentially American songwriter, perhaps the quintessentially American songwriter in the decades following the incapacitation and finally the death of Woody Guthrie in 1967, which quite by accident happened to be the year that Stewart commenced his solo career as singer-songwriter and began to create record albums that would midwife into existence the musical genre we now call Americana. Look before '67 and you won't find much that could fairly be described by that term - but following Stewart's late '60s classic LPs Signals Through The Glass, California Bloodlines, and Willard, the genre blooms into a hundred flowers, intertwines itself around folk-rock, and finally morphs into the renascent "roots music" so popular today. Stewart was there at the creation, and his writing and vision influenced a generation of musicians who followed him far more than the public at large is aware or than he is often given credit for. Despite some flirtations with large-scale commercial success (he did, after all, write one of the enduring and all-time feel-good standards of American pop-rock, "Daydream Believer," and he had a number of high-charting singles hits like "Gold" in the late 70s), Stewart as an artist remained as much outside the mainstream of popular music as the characters he created in his songs seemed to exist outside the mainstream of U.S. society - characters like E.A. Stuart and Willard and The Razorback Woman, all of whom we will meet below, and scores, maybe hundreds of others.

For those unfamiliar with Stewart's life and work, a short intro is in order. Born in San Diego as World War II was breaking out in Europe, Stewart grew up mainly in Pomona, CA outside of Los Angeles, though the family moved around somewhat since his father was an accomplished trainer of race horses. In his mid-teens, Stewart fell under the spell of Elvis Presley and first-generation rock and roll, taught himself to play guitar, and started a band called Johnny Stewart and the Furies that released a record of a tune written by Stewart.

His musical direction, however, took a 90 degree turn in 1958 when he heard the acoustic sound of Kingston Trio, which was in the first stages of redirecting American pop into a folk-flavored sensibility that it had only known previously in the late 1940s during the brief run at the top of the charts of the eventually blacklisted Weavers. Stewart taught himself to play the five string banjo (whose sound was at the core of many KT recordings), eventually becoming an accomplished innovator with the instrument, and before he was 20 he had sold two songs to the Kingstons, who recorded both of them and named an album after one. A year and a half later, one of the original KT members left in a dispute with the other two, and both the remaining musicians and their manager felt that Stewart was ideally suited to step in because he knew the repertoire and was already an accomplished singer, instrumentalist, and songwriter. And so in the summer of 1961, a few weeks before his 22nd birthday, John Stewart joined what was at the time in those pre-Beatle days the most popular musical group in the U.S. and quite likely the world, selling as it had more than ten million recordings in the two years prior to Stewart's arrival - in a country with half the population of ours today.

Stewart spent the next six years with the group, singing on some of its biggest singles hits and honing his craft as a songwriter, at points with songs like "New Frontier" and "Road To Freedom" that prefigured his later fascination with American ideals and themes. But as the post-Beatles and electric Bob Dylan phenomena eclipsed acoustic folk music in popularity, Stewart began to chafe at the restrictions of working within a framework not of his own making, however high a platform that framework had given him, and he decided to strike out on his own at exactly the same time that the group decided to call it quits.

The Kingston Trio had sold about $200 million (in 2012 dollars) for Capitol Records, and it was hence not surprising that it was that label that released the first three solo Stewart albums cited above. Though all three recordings were praised lavishly by music critics, none sold well enough to justify to Capitol an extension of his contract, and Stewart began what would become a lifelong odyssey of moving from label to label, first to Warners, then RCA, then RSO, then Polydor, and then to a dozen or more smaller labels. Always - always - Stewart was producing first-rate songs and recordings, greatly respected but with only a few exceptions not charting especially well. Stewart's brush with the big time came during his years with the RSO label, whose Saturday Night Fever was the largest-selling album in history at the time of its release, though the label still managed to go bankrupt just when Stewart's commercial star was beginning to rise with a top 5 single,"Gold," two more top 20 singles, and a top 10 album.

Part of the problem for Stewart was his own maverick nature - he was doing country-rock, electric folk, synthesizer-based instrumentation, and a passel of other genres and styles well before they became mainstream, and his music was often even less understood by pop audiences of the time than it was appreciated. But there was more than a bit of bad luck or poor timing at work here. John Stewart's vision in his songs of America and its people was never in step with the self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, materialistic ethos that has come to characterize American values more in the last thirty years than had ever been the case at any other time since the 19th century. Stewart's compassion for - and identification with - the common folk, the people of the heartland, the people of the forgotten corners of the nation and world, especially those in travail and up against it all, was never going to resonate with a pop culture that celebrated The Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous and elevated minor talents and pathetically broken individuals to demigod status.

So John Stewart soldiered on in the shadow of Fame through the next four decades, ultimately releasing more than fifty complete albums worth of original material and performing in coffee houses, small theaters, folk clubs - anywhere that enough of the small coterie of his rabidly devoted following could be assembled to justify the expense of travel. Along the way, a significant number of his compositions found their way onto other artists' records, with several of those becoming hits. Following his death from an aneurysm on January 19th, 2008, there was finally an outpouring of published appreciation from critics, musicians, and music business people, with major memorial articles appearing internationally in publications like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Sunday Times Of London, Britain's The Independent and The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and dozens and dozens of others. "Folk Patriarch," those obits called him - "Trend-setting Singer-Songwriter," "Acclaimed Songwriter & Performer" - all the accolades now broadcast in the major print and online outlets that had too frequently ignored him while he was alive, in a final and probably fitting irony for an artist who had courted Fame but never cared enough for her to cut his hair, put on a tie - or ask her out for a second date.

What John Stewart has left behind him as a legacy is as remarkable a collection of folk-influenced songs as this nation has yet produced, and while his range as a songwriter extends into all the reaches of human experience (more on this at the end), his portrait of America as he knew it and cared for it remains likely the single most compelling element of that body of work. That America is the land of "front row dancers" and "cowboys in the distance," of "roses and canyons and night-blooming jasmine," "angels with guns," and yes, "daydream believers."So this retrospective will focus on three themes derived from that vision - American people, American places, and American promise. The songs in each of those categories presented here are wonderful compositions, though many Stewart fans (and my own preferences, in fact) might have nominated others in their places, there is a peculiarly democratic and populist nature to the selections - because these are the John Stewart songs that the people out there in the America of today have chosen to embed in videos and upload to the internet. I think that Stewart would have liked that aspect of it - John Stewart as remembered by the common folks of the country that he loved.

American People

"Willard" - we have all seen Willard Jefferson somewhere, some time:

"July, You're A Woman" - one of JS's most popular songs, covered several times by other groups, in a video created out of the love of Stewart's people and places:

"Razorback Woman" - Uploader CPS Ward describes this as "A difficult childhood recalled with dark, bitter humor" - which extends, as you'll see, to the video itself:

"Wind Dies Down" - A dry summer in the heartland and the memorable Miss Moonlight Albright:

"Mother Country" - a live performance from a few months before Stewart's death. There had been some internet chatter at the time about Stewart having lost his voice - which the choruses here emphatically disprove. One of Stewart's best and most enduring and most idiosyncratic songs with the unforgettable E.A. Stuart and The Old Campaigner:

American Places

"Missouri Birds" - "Go into the world while you're young":

"Kansas Rain" - "Ain't no change in Kansas Rain" - "I was standin' in line at that Bank of America/Nobody spoke they were in the house of god..."

"Let The Big Horse Run" - Kentucky, Virginia, and anywhere the horses race...

"The Pirates Of Stone County Road" - everywhere in America where people remember childhood:

"California Bloodlines" - A bright and uptempo live radio version of a song whose studio recording was rather more reflective; the title song from the album that Rolling Stone named one of the top 200 of all time:

American Promise

The very young John Stewart was imbued with a Kennedy-era idealism that was reflected in his ringingly patriotic compositions for the Kingston Trio, "New Frontier" (sung HERE by the current KT) and "Road To Freedom." As the years passed and the times changed, Stewart's optimism dimmed and darkened to a degree, in part because of his involvement as a kind of official campaign musician in Robert F. Kennedy's ill-starred and tragic run for the presidency in 1968. Kennedy's assassination affected Stewart profoundly, and he tried to come to terms with it in a number of songs, three of the best of which are here.

"Clack Clack" - referring to the clatter of the wheels of RFK's funeral train, an echo of Abraham Lincoln's, complete with Stewart's heartland imagery and very real sense of loss - this from the very early 1970s:

"The Last Hurrah" - a quiet reflection on what we now know was the passing of an era, but an admonition as well to "keep your dreams as clean as silver":

"Dreamers On The Rise" - decades after the fact, Stewart looks back on the idealism of the time in what is the favorite JS song for many of his fans:

"Armstrong" - Out of the darkness of the post-RFK period and the gathering storm of disasters yet to come, Stewart was always able to find a light and a hope:

"Survivors" - Once again, after the Watergate scandal, Stewart looks to the American character for hope in adversity. The high harmony here clearly is the late John Denver, and from the first chorus onward, the song becomes essentially a duet.

"I Remember America" - An early 90s reflection on all that had been lost from Stewart's younger years:

"Botswanna" - Though written in the late 1980s, the theme is as contemporary as the Occupy movement, and with the same sensibility in a general way. It is a song about California and America even more than it is about Africa - "I wonder if God cries"..."Every face you see is you and it is I..."

John Stewart had to the end of his life a trait that I especially admired, one that he shared in common with nearly all other truly great artists and that is conspicuously missing from the work in music of songwriters better-known than he is, many of whom pretend to a level of artistic accomplishment that they have not in fact achieved. Stewart never confused the strictly personal in his music with the universal, nor did he believe that merely setting thoughts and emotions to a tune would make them important. At the same time, he had the genuine artist's courage and hope to believe that he did have something of value to say that transcended the fashionable and the fleeting, that could both address and illuminate what was and remains the best of the country whose landscapes and people infused and permeated his art. It is a daring vision and hope, one that we will not see again from another artist in our lifetimes.

_______________________________________

Links to dozens of articles and websites related to John Stewart's life and work, as well as more videos of both Stewart and of other artists covering his songs, are available on The John Stewart Memorial Page.

Last year's Comparative Video 101 post on "Chilly Winds" can be accessed HERE.

The 2010 post reflecting on "July, You're A Woman" is HERE.

"The Old Maid's Song/Take Her Out Of Pity"

2012-01-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...

- Charles Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities, 1859

Probably no one ever expressed more succinctly the permanent and apparently unchanging nature of the human condition as did Dickens here in this justifiably famous opening to a marvelous and romantic novel (that, parenthetically, most of us were forced to read when we were much too young to appreciate or understand it). Consider: Dickens was writing in the middle of the 19th century about events late in the 18th, but here in the early reaches of the 21st the sentiment still rings true. We are as beset by war and economic woes and uncertainty and political madness in 2012 as we have been at any and every other time in our lives - and as in fact people have always been, everywhere.

Yet that sense that the world and its troubles always remains the same - plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say - is deceptive, perhaps even illusory. Things do change, and sometimes for the better. Consider again: while the state of race relations in the U.S. today may be abysmal, with frequent reminders of such in the media (for example, the recent stories of racist notes on meal recepits at fast food restaurants), would any of those of us old enough to remember the 1950s and 60s not agree that we live in a much better, more just, more equitable country now than we did fifty or sixty years ago? Have there not been very real and very significant gains made toward establishing the justice and insuring the domestic tranquility that have been our objectives since the beginning of the nation?

Likewise, a girl born in the United States today, or in fact at nearly any time over the last forty or so years, has a universe of greater choices available to her than virtually any of her female forbears did, even here in the land of the free. Traditional avenues of motherhood and domestic life are still open to her, but her direction, her sense of herself, her range of possibilities are not as completely circumscribed by those older roles as they once were. Prior to the mid-20th century, marriage was the only game in town for women - it was marriage, even a bad one, or poverty. In the U.S. and everywhere else, a woman could neither own real property nor inherit it, and the only guarantor of a good life for her children was the support of a financially stable man.

Women of my mother's or even my sisters' generations who wanted a career for themselves in addition to or in place of family life were often swimming against a current of resistance, sometimes obvious, perhaps more often passive or disguised, as in the proverbial glass ceiling. The young women of today, though, and here I am including the ladies grown into maturity during the thirty years I taught in all-girls schools, believe and live as though full equality with men in opportunity and achievement is their birthright, as of course we now recognize it to be.

All of this is what makes this week's song, known by many names but most commonly as "The Old Maid's Song" or "Take Her Out Of Pity," both clearly archaic in its situation yet still profoundly moving in its sentiments. It is, as with several other songs profiled here recently, very old - the first printed version called "The Poor Auld Maid" appeared in 1636, and like most really old songs, there are many variant versions. In some, it is the lady herself who is speaking, so the chorus (nearly always a variation on "Come a landsman, a pinsman..."*) climaxes with "take me out of pity"; more often, though, it is a melancholy and concerned brother who seeks for his sister a better fate than the poverty and scorn of old maid-hood. The song works better this way, I think, since the third verse extolling her virtues seems less like the bragging it would be were she singing it than it does like the high and sincere estimation of a loving sibling.

Some early versions have the girl eventually marrying a chimney sweep; others, like the related Scots reel "The Old Maid In The Garrett" with a verse virtually identical to our song's chorus, make bitter fun of the lonely and not-so-young lady. The likely author of the root song, 17th century London balladeer Martin Parker, called it "The Wooing Maid," had her singing it, and included eighteen verses. By the time the song crosses the Atlantic, though, it seems to have reduced itself to the three verses presented in the versions below as it burrowed its way into the folk culture of the southern mountains.

It seems as if the American folk revival singers who did the number heard it first in a recording by Peggy Seeger from 1955, a sample of which can be heard on Amazon HERE. The first version I heard was by the Kingston Trio in 1961. There were two video uploads of the song on YouTube (including one from me), but Capitol/EMI has been cracking down recently (a post on that upcoming) and these videos are now blocked in the U.S. However - my own folk group the Chilly Winds based our version instrumentally and vocally on the KT's, so this is a fair approximation of what I heard fifty years ago:

We moved the instrumental to the middle of the song and ended with the intro redux instead of on the V7th chord, but otherwise that's pretty much what the Trio did.

Another major pop folk group gave the song the other spin - here it is sung as "The Old Maid's Lament" by The Womenfolk:

The grainy video is annoying, but it is interesting to hear it sung in Martin Parker's originally-conceived feminine voice.

Clive Palmer is an English folkie, co-founder of The Incredible String Band, and just as his contemporary UK rock musicians like Eric Clapton made themselves masters of American rhythm and blues, Palmer became a 5-string banjo virtuoso:

Wonderful mountain frailing here, and Palmer's spare, unadorned accompaniment has an expressively authentic feel to it.

Ireland's Wolfe Tones, perhaps my favorite Celtic group after the Clancys and the Dubliners for their unabashedly radical Irish republican songs, give it an almost predictable gusto:

This is from a 1966 album; I was reminded of nothing other than the Clancys' delightful version of "Nancy Whiskey" in rhythm and harmonies.

The song has some legs, as we see now - because the next two versions are international. First, a semi-pro band from Madrid called Wenaives:

They sing better in English than I do in Spanish, for sure - it just strikes me as a curious song to cover for an Iberian band. Perhaps it is the simple C-Am-F-G7 chord pattern that is so characteristic of American '50s pop ballads.

That might equally be the case for this homage to the Kingstons' version (note the instrumental part) from Christine and Flora in China:

I always enjoy videos of people making folk music at home, and I think that the ladies do a fine job, again given the difficulty of singing in a language not their own.

It would be lovely if this song were merely a plaintive relic of a time long gone, and thank all the powers that be that it is so in the America of today. The sad fact is, though, that across the globe the desperate plaint of this song remains a stark reality for hundreds of millions of women, even in this century.

*No sources are quite sure what a "pinsman" is - some versions of the song say "tinsman" or "tinsmith," which are self-evident, and others suggest that the correct word is "pensman," or scribe or secretary.

Folk Royalty & "The Fox Went Out On A Chilly Night"

2012-01-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

The recently concluded holidays are probably what got me to thinking about children's songs, what with the powerful emotional pull of the carols and more modern songs that flooded radio airwaves and shopping mall muzak machines for the last couple of months (really, way too long, but that's another story). Celebrating holidays is, after all, about maintaining traditions, and the music is more than merely a background for those - it is, coupled with the scents of holiday cooking permeating one's home, the absolutely most emotionally evocative of all the elements of our winter festivals.

When Art Podell (formerly of Art and Paul and the New Christy Minstrels) and I did a program of Christmas music for Mary Katherine Aldin's KPFK-FM "Alive And Picking" radio show (of happy memory) a month ago, Art noted that all Christmas songs are in one way or another folk songs - they are all meant to be sung and remembered and sung again, year in and year out, even those most recently composed as well as centuries-old carols. "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" (which I included on our radio playlist), for example, were popularized by Gene Autry only in the 1940s, but it is hard to find anyone in the U.S. who has not at least heard those songs, and most of us under 80 probably sang them as well. Art was spot-on correct: if that doesn't make a tune a folk song, I am not sure the term has any meaning worth paying attention to.

The primary means of oral transmission of folk music through the most of the last century was through group singing, especially in primary schools. It was a poor school indeed that did not make at least some provision for children, especially younger ones, to sing together on a weekly basis. That's how most of us learned "Skip To My Lou" or "Camptown Races" or "Oh, Susanna!" and many more - and as I noted last summer in my post about "The Hunter", those music programs have been chopped dramatically through the last several decades, leaving an ever-growing number of children to develop emotional bonds with the music of the Disney animations that they see that rather than with the meat-and-potatoes folk-ish songs of our own childhoods.

That's a pity, because those children may well be missing the delights of songs just such as "The Fox Went Out On A Chilly Night," a bit of nonsense that posits a very homey-looking family of anthropomorphic foxes, with a daddy fox going to town to provide for his ten little fox kits. It is a very old song, even by English folk song standards, with versions in print as long ago as 1500, a mere fifteen or twenty years after printing came to England. The Oxford Book Of Nursery Rhymes lists the first verse as

It fell ageyns the next nyght
the fox yede to with all his myghte,
with-outen cole or candlelight,
whan that he cam vnto the toowne.

That's pre-Shakespeare Middle English, though only "yede" (meaning "go") is completely archaic, and you can see that the opening is very close to the version sung most widely today. The near-uniformity of the lyric that we hear in this week's versions results in all likelihood from the 1810 miscellany of fairy tales and songs printed in the UK called Gammer Gurton's Garland - a book used routinely by schoolmarms on both sides of the pond throughout the 19th century for the edification of the minds of the young.

The song came across the Atlantic with the English colonists and embedded itself firmly in America's folkways, and it is no surprise that one of the most popular versions of the era of recorded music was done by Burl Ives, who actually had a number of folk hits in the 1930s:

Ives' version contrasts interestingly with that of his one-time friend Pete Seeger:

Seeger and Ives were both fine singers, but the instrumental laurels here clearly go to Pete, who could really make that banjo blaze.

Odetta brings a greater dramatic flair to her interpretation, and you can practically see her entrancing a room full of children with this:

Such a fine voice, and so sad that she is gone.

But Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio is still very much with us, and in 2008 after fifty years of recording with groups finally released a solo album. Shane thought enough of "The Fox" to include it with a number of other gems on that recording, and in the liner notes he writes that he used to sing it in the early 50s with fellow KT founder Dave Guard when both were school kids - "We felt it was a cute song and fun to sing. I still think it's cute song and fun to sing.":

Shane's recollection of this goes back 60 years, and I'd wager a modest sum that singing it brings back more than a few memories for him.

Harry Belafonte is a contemporary of Odetta and Shane and was in fact something of an inspiration to them both. But there's no mistaking Harry B's inimitable calypso-flavored take on the number:

Like nearly everything else Belafonte did, this works wonderfully in his own idiom.

Finally, the pride of San Diego's roots music scene, Nickel Creek with a more modern inflection, in a very early performance of theirs from the 90s on Austin City Limits:

There you have a half dozen of the major folk artists of the last half century or more bringing their talents to bear on a centuries-old ditty designed to delight children. The why of that may be quite simple. There is also a video on YouTube of actor Jake Gyllenhaal singing a fragment of it, saying that his father used to sing it to his siblings and him - and there are at least half a dozen comments on the video versions out there which identify dad or mom as singing the song better than the pros themselves. I'd guess that sentiment would sit just fine with our artists, because that's what folk music is supposed to be about.

Late Addition, 1/12/12

Just found this version by pop/rockabilly star Jimmy Rodgers, of 1950s vintage. It was hiding under the title of "The Fox and the Goose":

The Best Of Comparative Video 101 - 2011

2011-12-29T08:27:00.000-08:00

Comparative Video 101 appeared 30 times during 2011, significantly less frequently than the 46 and 47 times of the two previous years. Still, those thirty posts included some stellar performances of the songs profiled in the articles, and once again, we end the year with a completely subjective selection of the videos and arrangements that I found most compelling from the last calendar year. Some of these are wonderfully original takes of songs that I have long known and loved; others are just very fine videos or live performances.

As in my earlier "Best Of" posts, the song titles are hyperlinks back to the articles in which the arrangements appeared. We will, God willing, return to weekly posts in 2012 - and my heartfelt best wishes for a wonderful year to all who do me the great favor of stopping by this site to share my enthusiasm for this wonderful music.

1. Steve Goodman, "The Dutchman" - 2/3/11

2. Chet Atkins, "Old Joe Clark" - 2/18/11

3. Johnny Cash, "The City Of New Orleans" - 2/24/11

4. Tom Roush, "Tenting Tonight On The Old Campground" - 5/29/11

5. The Weavers, "The Battle Cry Of Freedom" - 5/29/11

6. Gordon Hudson, "The Keeper/The Hunter" - 6/17/11

7. Van Dyke Parks, "Greenland Whale Fisheries" - 7/17/11

8. The Short Mountain String Band, "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" - 8/5/11

9. James Taylor, "Go, Tell It On The Mountain" - 9/8/11

10. Audra McDonald, "Children, Go Where I Send Thee" - 12/16/11

For The Season #4*: "The Gloucestershire Wassail Song"

2011-12-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

Among the most delightful of Christmas customs for centuries have been caroling and taking a nip of good cheer of one sort or another, and in recent times - oh, the last two hundred years or so - the two have been conflated into our modern definition of "wassail." No matter that the origins of both the carol and the drink predate Christianity and that both were trotted out at different times of the year by northern European ancients. Thanks to the powerful impressions of the winter holidays created by the 19th century stories of Washington Irving in America and Charles Dickens in England, wassailing has come to mean pretty much an exclusively December tradition of door-to-door carol singing, the reward for which would be a cup from a Christmas bowl of mulled wine or cider or ale.

Carols, in fact, started as seasonal dances; the word "carol" itself probably comes from the Celtic "coroli," meaning a kind of circular reel, and there were spring and summer carols as well as winter ones. And "wassail" clearly derives from an Anglo-Saxon or Old English phrase "Waes hael," meaning "good health" - the "hael" being the root of both our words "health" and "hale" as in "hale and hearty." One use of the word - "waes hael drinc" - explains why Googling "wassail" will take you to several hundred recipes for an alcoholic concoction.

The medieval English, appreciating as they did the fine qualities of strong drink, "wassailed" their crops and orchards in the spring by pouring some liquor on to the ground and wishing good health to the spirits that even in the Christian era they believed animated their trees and other growing things. In Wessex, the old kingdom of the West Saxons and the place of origin of many of Britain's most famous Christmas songs (including "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"), the custom was to sprinkle apple trees with hard cider from the previous year's distillation, hoping to insure a bountiful crop of still-ready fruit. It was probably the church that redirected this pagan custom into a single Christmas-themed practice, as also happened with holly and ivy and candlelit evergreens (similar to the transformation of Samhain into All Hallows Eve).

The Gloucestershire wassail song may have its roots in pre-Christian times, which would make it very old indeed, but the oldest published version goes back to the 17th century - which is plenty old enough. There appear to have been two complementary customs as part of the Gloucestershire wassail. The wandering group of celebrants would visit homes bearing food and drink, which they would offer to share with the residents - hence the part of the lyric that goes:

Wassail, Wassail, all over the town
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree
With the wassailing bowl we'll drink to thee

In turn, the hosts would re-fill the bowl with their own mulled drink -

Come Butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all

All in all, it looks like quite a good way to celebrate Christmas. When I was a child, a handful of my neighbors used to get themselves a bit mulled, to use an old Sinatra phrase, and wander around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and singing carols, including this one. My parents generally offered them only coffee, but that didn't seem to dampen their spirits in the least.

The song lends itself to enthusiastic singing, so we start this week's selections with a "hael" version by the Kingston Trio:

The opening instrumental here is played on a bouzouki by Trio member Dave Guard, who liked the sound of the instrument so much that he learned to play it for this recording.

Modern choral groups tend to show a bit more restraint with the lyric, as here by the "early music" consort Chanticleer (not to be confused with the excellent gay men's choir of the same name):

Really pleasant if a bit stiff, which often happens when folk songs are tackled by artists whose training is elsewhere.

Traveler's Dream is a contemporary Indiana folk group with Denise Wilson and Michael Lewis taking the lead on this rendition:

The rhythm and instrumentation are rather more contemporary Celtic-sounding than Anglo-Saxon (and Celts and Saxons do not, let's say, get along - even at Christmas), but in the amalgam of styles that characterizes the modern American folk scene, this works wonderfully. Folk process, you know.

Canada's Loreena McKennet taps into both traditions effectively. Her a capella version here goes straight back to Gloucestershire:

Another contemporary style is "electric folk," one of whose pioneering members is Ashley Hutchings, also a force in Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. Here Hutchings leads his Albion Band:

American instrumental group Mannheim Steamroller, founded by producer Chip Davis, has utilized all kinds of modern synthesized and electrified instruments in their many Christmas albums, which they use to great effect here:

Finally - I seldom slip into overt sentiment in these articles, and though at first glance it may seem as if I am doing so here - I'm not. Listen to this outstanding performance from a middle school production of A Christmas Carol from Edmonton, Alberta:

That's 11-year-old Anni Yu making those very grown-up sounds on the violin - she has performed with the Edmonton Symphony and elsewhere in Canada. These children perform the song with just the right amount of gusto, and it delights me that they demonstrate such feeling for so old and traditional a number. Maybe there is hope for folk music yet. Christmas is, after all, a season of hope.

And writing this lengthy post has given me a prodigious thirst for some form of wassail or other - so I hope to close with a drink, a health, and best wishes to all for the merriest of Christmases.

__________________________
*The first three songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes included #1 - "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"; #2 - "All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"; and #3 - When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year. Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include "Children, Go Where I Send Thee", "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy" , "Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo", and "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"

2011-12-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

Comparative Video 101 returns this week after a long and unplanned hiatus with the first of two holiday-themed articles. The blog will resume on a weekly basis in 2012.

The holidays are upon us again, bringing with them their usual odd mixture of inclement weather, celebratory joy, retrospective melancholy, happy reunions with those whom we love, and pangs of sorrow for those whom we have lost. The winter solstice is days away; the early darkness in the northern hemisphere amazes us with the rapidity with which it falls and the utter blackness of December nights - no matter for how many decades we have known them prior. It would seem to be a strange time for festivities did we not, like our ancient forbears, recognize that the days will soon begin to lengthen into warmth and spring. That, in fact, is the real "reason for the season," as any student of anthropology and church history can tell you. Solstice celebrations are nearly universal across human culture, a fact recognized and utilized by second century Christian churchmen, some of whom also had the wit to graft Teutonic observances like decorated conifers, holly and ivy, and gift-giving into their version of the mid-winter festival. The symbolism was a perfect fit - firs and holly flourishing in the blank landscape of leafless trees, steel-gray skies, and limitless and seemingly eternal snow and ice, those evergreens appropriated by the church as the symbols of all the hope personified by the "little bitty baby who was born in Bethlehem," as the chorus of today's song goes.

Somehow the spirit thus expressed has survived and manages still to survive the onslaught of the ever-earlier commercial, tawdry, and vulgar manifestations of what we call Christmas today in these United States. What was once a largely religious observance of a single day in late December preceded by perhaps a week or ten days of preparation has been expropriated by the Scrooge-like moneychangers in the temple and perverted into a two-month orgy of frenetic buying and selling. Red and green and holiday music on the radio begin appearing now in early November, blithely ignoring the fact that the religious season is that of Advent, a time of quiet reflection, of anticipation of the joyful celebration that is yet to come, of sober purple vestments in church and purple candles on the Advent wreath.

It is in the music of the season that the spiritual essence of it all remains most deeply embedded and alive - and I mean spiritual in its broadest sense, rooted in Christian faith but extending far beyond it. God knows that we are all in need of both hope and redemption, regardless of what we do or do not believe in. The best music of the season captures and expresses that.

And "Children, Go Where I Send Thee" exemplifies that hope beautifully because it was originally an African-American slave song - and no group in U.S. history has ever had less to celebrate than pre-emancipation slaves. Many of their spirituals express the suffering and pain of that hopeless existence, yet many more are anticipatory of a better day and a glorious future, in the next world if not in this one. The source of that hope was the Christian faith initially forced upon the kidnapped Africans but in a generation or two embraced as their own with a fervor scarcely matched by their masters and captors. In those spirituals, often an amalgam of African rhythms matched with European tonalities, we have the roots of much of later American music - ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock.

The origins of "Go Where I Send Thee" are lost somewhere in the 19th century, and unlike many of the spirituals popular today whose resurrections are associated with particular artists (Mahalia Jackson with "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands," for example, or Louis Armstrong with "When The Saints Go Marching In"), this song has just always been around. While some scholars attribute the popularity of the song to Kentucky's great folk singer, dulcimer player, and song collector Jean Ritchie (who is said to have heard a group of school children singing it), recordings of the song in the U.S go back to 1936 when Dennis Crampton and Robert Summers waxed it as "Go I'll Send Thee," followed in 1940 by the Alphabetical Four and in 1947 by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet as "Go Where I Send Thee" (the latter on the legendary Bluebird label).

Not quite completely a Christmas song, "Go Where I Send Thee" bears a clear similarity that everyone notes to Britain's "The Twelve Days Of Christmas." Other scholars believe the song may have been influenced by "Green Grow The Rushes-O," a song that many of us of a certain age learned in grade school as "I'll sing you one-o/Every day we grow hi-ho." Maybe yes, maybe no in both cases. What is clear is that the lyric of "Go Where I Send Thee" is instructional, a kind of walk through biblical stories for the pre-literate slaves. Each number has a mystical significance beyond itself, much as the gifts do in "Twelve Days" - though in both cases, no one is completely sure about what the original significance of each number and each gift was.

We begin our musical selections with the sadly nearly forgotten folk duo of Joe and Eddie, here from the Danny Kaye show in the early '60s.

Joe Gilbert (left in the video) and Eddie Brown enjoyed several years of recording and television success until Gilbert was killed in a car accident in 1966. His early death may well be why generally only the hardest core of folk aficionados remembers this great due today.

Contrast that with the spare a capella version of legendary bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley:

Stanley's haunting vocal reminds us of the cross-pollination that existed between the music of the slaves and the music of the masters in antebellum America. "Go Where I Send Thee" is like countless other religious songs that had versions in both camps.

The Kingston Trio included the tune on their landmark 1960 album titled The Last Month Of The Year, which eschewed the usual Christmas standards in favor of an arrestingly original collection of folk and folk-flavored Christmas tunes from the U.S. and Europe.

As with many of the group's early recordings, the driving and jazz-tinted bass accompaniment here by David "Buck" Wheat provides all of the syncopation and much of the drive in this version.

One great folk trio deserves another - so here is Peter, Paul and Mary, who created a medley of several spirituals with "Go Where I Send Thee" as the root song:

Yet another outstanding vocal group from the pop-folk explosion of the '60s, Australia's Seekers featuring the sublime Judith Durham - this recording is from a reunion tour about ten years ago:

Johnny and June Carter Cash closed their Christmas Show in 1977 with this version, backed by an all-star chorus including The Statler Brothers, Roy Orbison, Helen & Anita Carter, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and others:

Tennessee Ernie Ford from the late '50s:

Gordon Lightfoot recorded "Go Where I Send Thee" at the very beginning of his career, when he was still a member of the Two Tones with Terry Whelan:

And finally - a full-on production version featuring Audra McDonald, multiple Tony Award winner and Julliard-trained classical vocalist, backed by the gigantic Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

The Choir has produced some of the best choral Christmas recordings out there, and they show a bit more restraint here than is usual for them.

The Weavers, Cliff Richard, Hall and Oates, Natalie Merchant - a whole passel of other artists have worthy renditions of the song as well.

Next week - our fourth edition of "For The Season" with a bona fide folk Christmas classic, and links back to the first three of the series.

"Go Tell It On The Mountain"

2011-09-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

I was watching a screening of Murray Lerner's 1967 film Festival this morning, that widely-praised documentary of some of the performances at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1967. I have always been lukewarm toward the film; it presents some outstanding artists and renditions, but it slants away from festival founder George Wein's "big tent" approach to folk music and toward the political and the electric, as if Lerner's only understanding of the term "folk" had been derived from some smokey basement clubs in Greenwich Village and not out in the real world where dulcimer and banjo players from the Appalachians, cowboys from the Rocky Mountain and southern plains regions, whalers and sailors, and clean collegiate professionals were making very different brands of folk music than those represented in the movie.

The film still had its moments, of course. Though I have seen it many times, I had never really noticed until this morning that on the 1963 festival-closing number in which many of the performers had linked arms while singing "We Shall Overcome" that Liam and Paddy Clancy of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were among the singers. And I had likewise forgotten what a stirring snippet was included of the Staples Singers, led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples himself, doing "Go Tell It On The Mountain."

Though now performed most often by gospel groups, "Go Tell It On The Mountain" is actually a spiritual that dates from the days of slavery, and there is a difference. "Mountain" first appears in print and performance in the hands of the legendary John Wesley Work, Jr. (1871-1925 - pictured above), an African-American teacher and scholar who wanted to preserve the oral culture of his parents (who had born in slavery) and consequently started the Fisk Jubilee Singers (named after Work's alma mater, Fisk University), arguably America's first great professional "folk" group and a healthy antidote to the demeaning and racist black-face minstrel shows that were also popular in the late 19th century. "Go Tell It On The Mountain" appeared in print in a 1907 Jubliee Singers songbook, though the group had been performing it for decades before. Work had the copyright but freely acknowledged that he had arranged and re-imagined a traditional slave song.

The "Jesus Christ is born" part of the traditional refrain seems to mark this song as a Christmas composition - but it ain't necessarily so. Despite the still-raging controversy over "coded messages" that some scholars believe are embedded in the lyrics of spirituals, it is most certainly a cornerstone of Christian theology across the entire range and breadth of orthodoxies within the religion that the birth, life, and death of Jesus leads to a profound spiritual liberation from sin and damnation. Hence - "Go Tell It On The Mountain" is a song for all seasons in its optimistic celebration of the coming salvation from sin - and it has been performed and recorded in all seasons of the year.

The Golden Gospel Pearls perform the song in a version that seems closest to what Work published in 1907:

This is likely my favorite of the versions presented here in its clean, unadorned, and deeply-felt performance.

Most white Americans born after 1930 or so owe a good deal of their knowledge of this music to the popular crossover appeal of Mahalia Jackson, arguably the greatest singer of spirituals that this country has yet produced:

Though there is currently no recording on YouTube of the Staples Singers' performance*(but there is now, courtesy of Eva - look below), the Blind Boys of Alabama are doing something very close to Roebuck Staples' arrangement:

.

The Boys here use the Staples' mainly minor chord accompaniment that lends the song an almost grim seriousness, very different from Work's original.

Our next versions likewise demonstrate a transliteration of the song away from its roots and into the peculiar artistic visions of the singers. First - that unique combination of jazz, blues, and funk that Al Jarreau has been delivering for several decades:

Inimitable.

It could be argued that the large numbers of white singers and groups who have done "Go Tell It On The Mountain" are an indication of the universality of its message of celebration and hope. Yet each version creates a different spin. Peter, Paul and Mary are likely best remembered for their political songs, and at the suggestion of and with the help of their musical director Milt Okun they re-wrote the lyric with different biblical references to turn the spiritual into a civil rights anthem:

James Taylor works an alternative lyric as well into a satisfyingly JT-esque performance, as thoroughly stamped with his own brand as Jarreau's version is with his.

Likewise - three bars into the vocal here, you cannot mistake the distinctively mellow sound of the Brothers Four:

And as much as the B4 were known for their relaxed-sounding vocals, the Kingston Trio built a reputation for super high-energy, almost out of control vocals, as they do here in this version for their orchestrated Something Special album:

There are also many other wonderful versions on YouTube: country-inflected by Dolly Parton, reggae by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, blue-eyed soul by Michael McDonald, many more - truly a song for all seasons.

*Appendix, 12/23/11

Courtesy of Eva (below), YouTube now is graced with a 1962 performance by The Staple Singers - maybe the definitive version:

.

"Parchman Farm," Mose Allison, And The Real Blues

2011-08-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

It seems a bit odd (to me at least) that I am nearly three and a half years into this blog and haven't yet even begun to plumb the depths of the great American catalogue of blues songs. That isn't because I don't have an appreciation for that tradition; it is rather more that I have very particular tastes in it, and those tastes seldom find much play in the recording industry, having been washed away by the red tide of electrified pseudo-blues purveyed by everyone from British Invasion rockers to contemporary "roots" groups.

Are my prejudices showing a bit here? Allow me to explain. My first childhood exposure to anything like the blues came from my parents' love of blues-infused jazz, especially Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. While both are always more particularly and properly identified as jazz artists, you're going to hear a lot more of the roots of real Delta blues in their work than you will in much of what is marketed as blues today. Armstrong especially seems to capture the essence of it all and often slyly underpins his jazz riffs with some trumpet lines that Robert Johnson would have appreciated.

My young adult interest in folk music led me (through my oft-cited in this blog love of Vanguard's Newport Folk Festival, 1960 records) to the great John Lee Hooker - who with Robert Johnson epitomizes for me the real sound of American blues. One of the songs that Hooker performed at Newport was his classic "Tupelo," presented here in a TV performance from roughly the same era. Watch his left hand:

Segovia or Carlos Montoya could appreciate that left hand work.

One good Hooker cut deserves another - "Serves Me Right To Suffer":

The harder edge of the Delta blues is personified in the great Robert Johnson, dead at 27, largely unknown in his lifetime, and resurrected with a series of 1961 reissues of the few recordings he made in 1936-37. As a point of comparison - the original blues as opposed to the popped-up, modified contemporary version, here is Johnson's often-adapted "Crossroad":

Now, modern audiences tend to think of blues as sounding something rather more like this - Eric Clapton and Cream's 1960s rockification of Johnson's classic:

That is a great, great cut - worth another listen just to hear what Clapton is doing on guitar and Jack Bruce's amazing bass line.

But it's not what I'd call blues. It's white-guy blues as imagined by British Invasion musicians - meaning, finally, that it's rock. Nothing at all wrong with that - my own propensity to like commercial folk groups suggests that I have a high degree of tolerance for adaptation - but it has morphed far afield from what it originally was.

There has been a kind of intermediate group of musicians whose adaptations have been perhaps truer to the music's roots, white musicians like Elvis Presley and today's composer Mose Allison, who grew up with the music, imbibed it with their mothers' milk, and learned to play it naturally and not as a respectful study of someone else's music. Presley grew up in Hooker's Tupelo and Allison in Tippo, Mississippi where both heard black musicians everywhere except perhaps in church. Their free-hand adaptations of the music originated because they were trying to sound like the singers whom they had actually heard growing up - singers virtually unknown to the larger mass white audience because of the segregation that existed in radio station programming and in the records carried in music stores. The earliest Presley recordings show perhaps the greatest influence - for Allison, the blues burst out of him after he had made a name for himself as a jazz musician, playing with greats like Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. When Allison began recording with his own trio in 1957, he began to write in blues style and sing what he had written. Here is his '57 original recording of his "Parchman Farm":

Don't know about you, but I hear a lot of Hooker's vocal style in what Allison is doing here, and a lot of Hooker's uptempo guitar work in the piano accompaniment to the verses (but with a full-on jazz instrumental break).

Parchman Farm was the correctional facility that evolved into the Mississippi State Penitentiary - and temporary home to great bluesmen-to-be Bukka White (who wrote the original but different song "Parchman Farm Blues") and Son House. There is a bit more on prison farms and the music that came out of them in my article on "Ain't No More Cane On This Brazos".

Probably the best-known version of Allison's tune was waxed by British Invasion blues legend John Mayall in 1966 - Mayall here in 2010 reprising his version:

Mayall may not be imitating Allison here, but he isn't going all Clapton on us either. I hate to sound like a broken record (ask your parents if you don't know what that means) - but this has strong elements of Hooker's style in it too.

Popped-up blues were the specialty of Baton Rouge's Johnny Rivers, who presents the song with that distinctive cool Whisky-A-Go-Go Sunset Strip mid-60s sound:

Rivers does an entirely creditable job here, keeping the vocals well within the range of his own style - which brings us to our final and most curious cut, that of the Kingston Trio. By 1965 the KT, which had for a time in the late 50s and early 60s been the top record sellers and most popular act in U.S. music, had been pushed aside in sales and popularity by the British Invasion, folk-rock, and more politically-oriented folk performers. In an unsuccessful attempt to stay relevant, the group recorded a folk-rock styled album called "Somethin' Else" for Decca Records, the group's third on that label and 24th original LP overall. The record was a dismal failure commercially, becoming the first KT album not to hit the "Billboard Magazine" charts, and a serious misstep according to critics as well - the group's upbeat, clean-cut image and sound just did not morph easily into the newer styles. Judge for yourself:

Taken by itself, it's not a bad cut at all, and as a single it reached #30 on Billboard's easy listening charts. The Trio's Nick Reynolds often observed that the group had made the conscious decision, like Rivers maybe, to sound like who they were - suburban white college guys, not sharecroppers or sailors or convicts. So far, so good - the Trio isn't trying to be John Lee Hooker here. What they sound as if they are trying to be, though, is Bob Dylan - and they ain't he, babe.

I have always absolutely loved Clapton and Rivers and the KT, which may seem contradictory to the thesis of this article presented at the outset. Not so. I love them - but I wouldn't call what any of them are doing the blues. Maybe because of politics and mass media and a hundred other factors we have failed to realize just how debased our use of language has become, where things are what we say they are because we say them (a form of solipsism for you philosophy majors). But again - not so. Words have meanings - meanings that always morph and change but that also have an original and primal integrity. Or as Hooker was once quoted as saying - "The blues is just the blues. Ain't nothing else."

"Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?"

2011-08-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

"The fastest train I ever did ride,
Was a hundred coaches long,
And the only woman I ever did love,
Was on that train and gone."

"Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?" is a typical American lost love folk ballad, generally similar to and possibly derived from its sister songs, the rather older "I Never Will Marry" and "The Butcher Boy/In Tarrytown I Did Dwell," both of which boast pedigrees that go back to the British Isles. "Pretty Little Foot," though, is in its present form attributed to and copyrighted by Woody Guthrie, who typically and honestly notes in the copyright "Words and Music Adaptation by Woody Guthrie."

Both lyrics and melody indicate why Guthrie did so. The "who's gonna shoe your foot/hold your hand/be your man" sequence appears in several Appalachian ballads and reels; "the only girl/boy I ever loved is gone" on some train or other likewise keeps popping up, most prominently in the first verse of the closely-related "I Never Will Marry," whose melody has the same structure as Guthrie's. No one better to present that one than a very young Joan Baez, from early in her career when her repertoire consisted primarily of traditional songs:

Baez is still learning to play guitar at this stage, and she is having some difficulty making her modified Travis-style picking fit with the 3/4 time that "Marry" and "Shoe Your Foot" share. That's a "waltz" tempo, a 1-2-3 1-2-3 rhythm that is clearer and audible in Guthrie's own recording of "Shoe Your Foot":

Guthrie is likely drawing on the older "There's More Pretty Girls Than One," a 19th century song recorded early in the 20th by both the duos Alton Delmore and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith and Rutherford & Foster, whose version is here:

A more contemporary take on "Pretty Girls" by Lyle Lovett with Alison Krause:

Both "Marry" and "Shoe Your Foot" have evolved into gender-neutral songs, performed with slight lyric alterations by performers of both sexes - though if I were a betting man, I'd wager that the root song of "Foot" was from a masculine perspective and feminine for "Marry" even though early published versions of both were male-oriented. Put the two together and you have the New Lost City Ramblers' Tom Paley with Pete Seeger's half sister Peggy combining the two:

Largely Guthrie's arrangement, with that clear 3/4 time on both Paley's and Seeger's guitars.

The Weavers also combine the male/female voices to good effect, and the instrumental skills of Pete Seeger and Fred Hellerman are on display as well:

Great harmonies here, and note that the Weavers are combining "Pretty Girls" with Guthrie's "Shoe Your Foot" to come up with a new song - and a new copyright.

One good theft deserves another, which is pretty much what the Kingston Trio's Bob Shane and his friend and songwriting partner Tom Drake did to create "Who's Gonna Hold Her Hand?". The Kingstons always acknowledged the primary influence of the Weavers, and note that this KT number follows the Weavers tune almost exactly, significant because the latter group clearly made minor changes in the line length from the older songs:

Musically interesting for the seventh chord that the group adds to the end of the fourth line of each verse and chorus, the cut also represents what enraged traditionalists about KT adaptations. The new lyric explores pretty much the same emotional geography of the original songs, but the "oooh" background vocals violate traditional standards and identify this effort as the 1950s pop ballad that it really is.

Interestingly, pop vocal harmonizers extraordinaire Phil and Don Everly present a version much closer to the traditional. accompanied by a single guitar:

Of course, the Everly's alteration of the last line to "I'm gonna kiss your ruby red lips" takes the melancholy out of the song and stands it next to the KT in the 1950s ballad folder of the American musical archives.

One more pop version to close with - Guthrie's fellow Oklahoman and 50s superstar singer Patti Page:

This would seem to be the inspiration for the Everlys. The arrangement Page is using here combines a touch of the old-timey with the harmonica but otherwise goes for the full-on 50s pop orchestra and chorus - nice version nonetheless.

"Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?" and its associated songs represent much of what I like about folk music and explains why this blog just keeps going and going. The variations are all interesting musically entertaining, even the 50s pop versions. I could wish that more of today's acoustic songwriters would more frequently mine the rich and largely untouched veins of American folk gold for some of their melodies and themes.

"Blue-Eyed Gal/Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss"

2011-08-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

The ascendancy of the now-ubiquitous guitar in its many incarnations as the primary instrument of American folk music is actually a rather recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1960 (likely thanks to the combined popularity of Elvis Presley and the Kingston Trio) that guitars actually outsold pianos in the U.S. Think about that one - relative cost, size, and difficulty to master. The mass media of recordings and radio pushed the guitar past the piano, and it has never looked back, the former now outselling the latter by factors of ten.

So what did our eighteenth and nineteenth century forbears use to make music while the guitar was still in the childhood of its development and played largely by refined urban young ladies in parlors? Harmonicas, of course, and the ever-present concertina - even the banjo was beginning to break out of its segregation as a slave instrument by the 1830s. But the granddaddy of all American folk instruments is the humble fiddle, simply a slightly smaller and cruder version of its more august sibling, the violin. Compact, light, and portable - but capable of producing a great volume of sweet sound when played well - the fiddle was perfect for accompanying either voice or dance, as a solo instrument or in tandem with just about anything else that could make music. "Turkey In The Straw," "Flop-Eared Mule," "Old Dan Tucker," "Devil's Dream" - there is an entire repertoire of American folk songs, many that we now think of as banjo tunes, that first saw the light of day two centuries ago in rural American hoedowns and square dances and camp meetings, played on the fiddle.

This week's song, which has dozens of names and variants, generally starts with a short fiddle riff, with a clawhammered banjo coming in at the second bar. It is a very old song, learned by legendary country-folk performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford from one Fletch Rymer in 1898 - and Rymer was a really old man at the time. Lunsford was one of the first to record it, along with Sarah Bumgarner as "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" in 1924, the same title used in the same year by Frank Blevins and his group. In this remarkably well-remastered 1931 recording with yet again the same name, The Skillet Lickers gave the tune genuine national exposure on radio:

I am not sure of the personnel of the group here - Britain's folk site Mudcat.org identifies the lead singer as Riley Puckett - but I'm going to hope that Chicago musician and old-time music devotee Jeremy Raven will fill us in a bit on this. It is to Jeremy that many of us owe any knowledge of this group at all, whose bang-up version here certainly sounds like a 1930 edition of the Kingston Trio in their energy and the fun they are clearly having with the tune. I am also reminded here of Lindsay Buckingham's remark to John Stewart that a good recording should be "simple, repetitive, and hypnotic." I think Buckingham may have meant "simple-sounding," because the sophistication of the instrumentation on this recording is amazing.

The Kingston Trio in 1960 didn't have a fiddle player handy - but their version of the song as "Blue-Eyed Gal" gave them an opportunity to showcase the impressive development of Dave Guard as a banjoist and vocal arranger of the lyrics adapted by KT's Bob Shane with Tom Drake and Miriam Stafford:

Guard is blending different banjo styles here, much as he would do a year later in his tour-de-force "Coast of California." It is not exactly a traditional rendering of the song - but definitely one that respects the origins and roots of the piece.

Hickory Wind released an album in 1978 that they described as "in the style of the New Lost City Ramblers" - and that is really clear here:

I always get a kick out of talented non-professionals, especially when they are young. Here is the Short Mountain String Band in Frostburg MD two years ago - a fine toe-tapping instrumental once they get going:

Another great instrumental, this one by Julie Duggan on clawhammer banjo:

Duggan's right hand work here is mind-blowing.

For a more contemporary reading - indie rock group Built to Spill (now almost 20 years old) updated the lyric and electrified the accompaniment on an album appropriately named Ancient Melodies of the Future:

I actually rather like this, though it clearly uses the root song as a starting point only, as for instance the Kingston Trio did with "A Worried Man." But for sheer repetitive and hypnotic exuberance, I'll take the Skillet Lickers any day - or the Kingston Trio.

Stand And Deliver! - "Brennan On The Moor"

2011-07-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

The album pictured here is one of the treasures of my youth and to this day one of my favorite of all collections of traditional songs, the first recording to be released under the group name of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem . Recorded largely on a reel-to-reel recorder in the kitchen of eldest brother Paddy Clancy's Greenwich Village apartment (good acoustics, but not great), the recording possesses the raw energy and arrestingly different sound that many other groups' first albums also demonstrate. Hard as it may be to imagine today as the airwaves and music vendors are awash in Celtic-flavored groups and soloists - this 1959 release on the Clancy-owned Tradition Records was the first that many Americans had ever heard of something akin to real Irish folk music. And the song that they chose to lead off this landmark recording - the song that subsequently and consequently became their opening number in concerts for decades to come - was "Brennan on the Moor."

Like many another highwayman and robber who came to be immortalized in a folk song, Willie Brennan was a very real person who was hanged for his crimes in 1804 in Clonmel, County Tipperary. In those days, following close upon the heels of the Great Rising of 1798, many extra-legal activities were punishable by death, worth mentioning perhaps because young Willie apparently never "sullied himself with blood," according to some of his contemporary admirers - however bold Brennan may be in the song, he is not a sociopathic and murderous thief of the stripe of Jesse James and other American bad guy killers. The mere act of theft, however, was itself a capital crime until well into the 19th century in Europe in general an England in particular. There are indications that there were hangings of children as young as eight for stealing loaves of bread in the 1730s, and the dark underpinning of the narrative of Dickens' Oliver Twist (and hence the musical Oliver!) is that a noose awaits those delightful pickpocketing boys should they be caught - the fate that finally befalls their handler Fagin. So Willie Brennan's apparently non-violent career of Robin-Hood-like plundering of the wealthy for the support of his dear old ma and her friends was destined to end in a painful strangulation in any event, murderer or not and rebel or not.

The song was likely penned as a broadside ballad very soon after Willie's gallows dance. But broadsides were printed on cheap newsprint and sold for a penny; few originals survive. The first printed versions of Willie Brennan's tune that we have today appeared in both Ireland and England in 1859 - long after the song had entered the folk tradition because, as we shall see, it was popular with immigrant Irish soldiers in the American Civil War. In Ireland, there are a couple of major variants and all of the versions feature eight or nine verses (with a subplot encounter with a peddler) as opposed to the five or six verse version we usually hear in the U.S.

The Clancy version has become the template for nearly every other group's adaptations and performances of the song. There is a bit of irony there because, as Liam Clancy noted in his memoir The Mountain of the Women and elsewhere, the "Brennan" song that they had first heard as youngsters was a moderately slow, mournful fiddle tune. The brothers and Makem felt that the lyric demanded more energy, and that is what they gave it. The beauty of that very first recording, however (unavailable as yet on YouTube) is that they started the song very quietly and built to a rousing climax; most live performances were largely climax with little build-up (and you may blame the banjo for that, which was not part of the original instrumentation that consisted only of Liam whacking away on a 00028 Martin guitar with nylon strings).

Our first version here is almost as close in time as we can get to that 1959 recording, a live performance of the CB&TM from Australia in 1963. There is a 1962 Chicago PBS video of lesser quality - this one is a better watch:

The fully-realized performance by the group, complete with a last verse from one of the variant versions, is here from the group's 1984 reunion concert from Belfast:

Now for something a little different. I have learned of and come to admire the work of the 97th Regimental String Band while doing these articles - it's a group that specializes in authentic replications of Civil War-era tunes (I have included their version of "Goober Peas" in my piece on the song). Here is how "Brennan" might have sounded in a camp somewhere in Virginia in 1862:

Quite a resemblance here in the modified tune to a number of other Civil War melodies, notably "The Bonnie Blue Flag."

Most of the contemporary award-wining Celtic bands sound little like the Clancys, moving the acoustic folk sound more toward what we called folk-rock in the 60s. The Killigans, for example, identify themselves as "folk-punk," and the Dropkick Murphys and Pogues also go generally for the loud and electric. The band of the moment in this field is the Sligo Rags, a southern California group that has been making waves nationally. This is definitely a fresh interpretation of "Brennan":

Sort of a blues/reggae take on it - not sure exactly what I think of this. Interesting at the very least.

Declan Nerney is a contemporary Irish folk/country performer who dramatizes the Clancy version with humor and a very Hibernian squeezebox in the accompaniment:

Lastly - Bob Dylan has been open about his admiration for the Clancys (Liam especially) since he first arrived in New York in 1961. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, of course, young Mr. Zimmerman appropriated perhaps half a dozen of the Clancys tunes for his own songs, including this "Brennan" rewrite that he titled "Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie" and that the Clancys called "Ride Willie Ride" - the circle completes itself as the inspirers sing the composition of the inspiree:

This is the farewell tour of the group in the early 90s. Tom Clancy has died, replaced by Bobbie Clancy on banjo; Tommy Makem has gone solo to be replaced by cousin Robbie O'Connell.

For a final thought, I turn to my brother Rick, whose Rightwing Nuthouse blog is a delightfully literate and provocative site whose politics rile me even as I'm smiling. No disagreement between us four years ago, though, when Rick published a marvelous essay called "Death, Be Not Proud" following the passing of Tommy Makem. He wrote in part:

For me, their music inspired a far more personal journey than the great issues being illuminated by the Pete Seegers or Peter, Paul, and Mary’s of the folk music scene. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s music opened the door to discovering my family’s Irish heritage and helped us all take enormous pride in who we were and where we came from....For the Moran family, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem opened up an entirely new world, a means of discovering our past. Their music was not at all like the melodramatic “American” Irish music we were all familiar with. Their songs were of the real Ireland – a place of pain and suffering, of oppression, and a kind of fatalism that seems to me unique to the Irish people.

...and of "Brennan on the Moor," the song that started that journey for all of us.

When The Whale Gets Strike: "Greenland Whale Fisheries"

2011-07-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe that it has taken me more than three years to get around to discussing "Greenland Whale Fisheries," since for more than fifty years it has been likely my favorite of all folk songs, in large part because of the memories that hearing it stirs - more on that at the end. But it's just a damned fine song any way you look at it, and a very old one at that - which of course means, as we'll see shortly, that it has lent itself to a greater-than-usual variety of interpretations.

Almost two years ago, I did a piece here on "Blow Ye Winds In The Morning" - another fine 19th century whaling song, but one that differs fundamentally in its intent and affect from "Greenland." "Blow ye Winds" is a commercial, a recruiting poster - "they say you'll take five hundred whales/Before you're six months out..." and hence make quite a bit of money from the shares of the profit (while having a very good time, if you look at the rest of the lyric). But "Greenland" is a song that is much older, harder, and tougher - more of a commentary on what kind of adventures actually faced the whalemen out there (and there is more about that in the "Blow Ye Winds" article linked above). The portrait of the whaling life in this song is grim at best, and the minor chords in the accompaniment serve to underscore the melancholy tale being told.

"Greenland Whale Fisheries" has, as noted, many variant versions, but there are several common motifs that go back to the very earliest published arrangement of the song from about 1725 (Oxford's Bodelian Library copy here - scroll to the right): a month, day and year specified early in the song, a whaling ship bound for the "Greenland ground," a brave captain and an eagle-eyed lookout, a chase, the whale's "flunder" capsizing a boat and killing several men, the captain's regret (though over what varies interestingly), the seamen's bitter desire to leave the "dreadful place" forever. It is a compelling narrative, one derived from the terrible conditions and dangerous circumstances in which the men lived and worked.

As usual, The Weavers and Burl Ives are most responsible for giving this song a second life in the mid-20th century, and The Weavers arrangement is the first one that I heard, around 1961. I'd love to present it here, but YouTube has been getting a bit hinky with me over all of my uploads for this series - so with a great deal of temerity, a bit of hesitation, and a gulp, I will present my own version first. It is almost word-for-word and chord-for-chord replication of what The Weavers did with the song, though needless to say without the superb professionalism that characterized their work. What I have especially emphasized is a) the moderate pace of the Weavers version, and b) the Seeger/Hellerman idea of framing the basic song with a part of a slower lament that they learned from collector Alan Lomax, who found it in Barbados (not a great whaling area, oddly). This is an analog recording done on a Korg 4 track tape machine, recorded in one take per track with no digital ability to fix the mistakes - it's not The Weavers, but who is?

Now, The Weavers had the captain mourning the loss of the men more than the whale - I changed it because I liked the way that Theo Bikel did the song, with the heartless captain grieving over his lost profits. Heartless captains are rather more the rule than the exception in sea folk songs anyway. Here is Bikel with Judy Collins at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival:

Note that Collins and Bikel are following the Seeger/Hellerman arrangement but presenting the first go around of the Barbadian fragment as an instrumental.

Paul Clayton , profiled here a couple of weeks ago, also maintains a fairly moderate pace in his simple but effective treatment of the tune:

But "Greenland Whale Fisheries" has also been performed over the years as a very quick, high-energy, rollicking chantey, and for me the prototype of that version is this recording from the Chad Mitchell Trio:

Canadian-Irish Ryan's Fancy tried something similar but with two distinct disadvantages - they didn't have the trained vocalists Mitchell, Kobluk, and Frazier of the CMT, and they didn't have the Mitchell group's Paul Prestopino on banjo. They gave it a good go, though:

"Greenland" is still covered widely today, though unfortunately IMHO in the ragged and rocking version popularized by the Pogues, here from 1984:

There is an absolute tribe of other so-called Celtic groups who riff off of this arrangement for reasons beyond me. The raggedness doesn't make it more authentic; traditional English ballads like this were nearly always performed at a very moderate pace.

For me, other artists have far more interesting approaches - like eclectic genius Van Dyke Parks, who did an album of sea chanteys in 2006 and provides instruction in how you can update and rockify a trad folk song with sensitivity and skill:

Or AnnaLee Rockinsquirrel on harp:

Or Scotland's legendary Corries, who sound like three Tommy Clancys with a burr instead of a brogue:

"Greenland Whale Fisheries" was one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar - I could add that it was one of the songs that influenced me to want to play guitar. It became a standard part of spontaneous family singalongs going back to the early '60s - singalongs that originated out of necessity. My family rented a place in a remote area of northern Michigan for a few weeks each summer. We were beyond the reach there of anything that had to be transmitted over radio and microwaves, and in that pre-digital epoch before cable and satellite we had to create whatever entertainment we wanted to enjoy. All ten of the Moran children were musical to some degree or other - but it was in the heart of the folk boom, and even in my early adolescent desire To Be Alone, I could not start playing songs for myself anywhere inside or outside without attracting a sibling or two - and eventually the whole passel of them with the parents to boot. We always seemed to close those sessions with the melancholy version of "Greenland" at the head of this essay - very Irish of us, I suppose. Fast forward to 2001, forty years down the road. Our mother has died, leaving us finally in middle age, orphans. The ten of us are assembled in the library of the house most of us had grown up in, a house to be put on the market the next day. We spend a long evening of drinks and laughs and songs and reflection - and as two o'clock hour approaches, with most of the "younger" ones ready to go to bed, the four or five oldest of us spontaneously begin to sing "Greenland Whale Fisheries." It is our last act as a family in the family home. That, after all, is the kind of thing folk songs are all about - and "Greenland Whale Fisheries" served the purpose handsomely.

Tom Paxton's "Bottle Of Wine"

2011-07-01T10:16:00.001-07:00

Back in January, I was delighted to be able to see Tom Paxton in concert at one of the great small venues on the West Coast, McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA. Paxton is a hale and energetic 75 years old, still writing great songs ("The Bravest" about the firefighters of 9/11 and the very recent "What If, No Matter" about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting), and still puts on about as good a folk show as you can see. I have profiled three of TP's best-known and most-often-covered songs here on CompVid101 - "The Last Thing On My Mind, "My Ramblin' Boy", and "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound", and I've outlined in those posts why I regard him as the best of the modern folk-type songwriters.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Milt Okun at a book singing, and Okun's Cherry Lane Music Co. has been Paxton's sole publisher for the more than five decades of his career. Reading Okun's book was illuminating about a wide variety of topics, most especially how an artist like Paxton, who has had steady but unspectacular album sales and virtually no singles sales, could have made a good living in music through all these years. Answer: the nine cents per unit sold that goes to the songwriter/copyright holder of the composition. Think about how many millions of albums have been sold with Paxton's songs on them - by the Chad Mitchell Trio (really the first high-profile group to do TP's songs), the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, and many more - and you begin to understand how even in lean performing times that a songwriter of Paxton's caliber can prosper. It also explains why publishing income frequently becomes a bone of contention within bands and why the issues of copyright with sharing sites such as Napster of ancient memory and YouTube today remain so controversial.

For all of Paxton's songwriting success, only one composition of his ever became a bona fide singles hit, and that was "Bottle of Wine," a celebration of the joys of a rootless life spent drinking cheap wine - clearly a younger man's composition. The Fireballs' version of Paxton's tune sold over a million copies, which in 1968 dollars would have given Tom enough coin to buy a really nice house and car - not to mention the ongoing income from royalties and licensing every time anyone wants to use the song and every time an oldies radio station wants to play it.

"Bottle of Wine" is an innocent bit of fluff - not a sermon against the very real evils of alcoholism against which the "preacher will preach and the teacher will teach." Paxton's own approach to the song has always been as lighthearted as his lyric - here is from last January in San Diego, the night after I saw him at McCabe's:

The Kingston Trio did a fine job with the tune in 1964 - John Stewart's banjo part lends exactly the right kind of rollicking touch, and the little key change at the end is nice:

Forty plus years after the '68 hit, here are Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs in 2009:

I think that the Harris Brothers here capture just about the right mellowed-out feeling with the song - where the Fireballs sing it as if they'd had a few bottles, the Harrises sound like most of us feel after a few glasses:

Finally - Madacoustic braved the family rec room and the drunken friends to deliver a fine amateur performance in just the right setting:

Not much more to be said after that. Hoping that everyone safely enjoys quite a few bottles of wine over the coming holiday weekend. I certainly intend to.

Paul Clayton, John Steinbeck, The Open Road, And "Gotta Travel On"

2011-06-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a minor American classic - brief, poignant, and deceptive in its apparent simplicity. After all, what's so tough about it? One hundred pages of big print, two guys, a dog or two, a really bad villain, and a tragically inevitable conclusion.* Just right for the seventh through ninth graders who are usually required to read it, no?

Well, no. Like most of Steinbeck's novels, Of Mice and Men expresses the writer's deeply progressive and socialist political beliefs, his anger toward rapacious capitalism (always personified in his books by an authority figure like a bank or [as here] a Boss), and his fundamental faith in the redemptive power of loyalty and love. In stark contrast to the novel's other characters, George and Lenny have hope through much of the book because they have each other; their interdependent friendship is profoundly affecting, even though the bad guys seem finally to win. George is as isolated at the end of the novel as any of the other hopeless souls on the ranch, a point visualized in two of the three film versions (1981 with Robert Blake and Randy Quaid and 1992 with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich) by a brief scene (not in Steinbeck's book but certainly implied by it) depicting George on the road again, this time alone.

And it is that lonely road that is the subject of this week's song, "I Feel Like I Gotta Travel On," attributed to Paul Clayton, a seminal but today largely-forgotten figure of the folk revival years. Like Lou Gottlieb, Clayton (1931-1967) came to professional folk music with some pretty hefty academic credentials - a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia and a masters from the same university in folklore studies. He had taught himself guitar, banjo, and dulcimer while in high school, and had even had his own folk radio show during those same years. At Virginia, prominent folklorist Arthur Kyle Davis was so impressed by Clayton's knowledge of traditional songs that he made the young scholar his research assistant (along with another undergrad named Matthew J. Bruccoli, who would become one of the nation's leading professor/scholars on F. Scott Fitzgerald) and took him on folksong collecting expeditions throughout the Appalachian mountains. Clayton had recorded professionally as part of a group for the Stinson label as early as 1952; he eventually abandoned academic life in favor of collecting, performing, and writing about folk music. Naturally, he moved to Greenwich Village around 1954 and recorded dozens of albums for Tradition (where he met and worked with Liam Clancy), Elektra, Folkways, and more. Clayton was about as successful as any traditionalist singer expected to be in the pre-folk boom days; he had a lovely, mellow voice reminiscent of Pete Seeger or Bob Gibson and a simple but effective guitar accompaniment style.** Clayton's career nosedived with the whole folk movement, and feeling abandoned by performers whom he had mentored (including Bob Dylan, who has always acknowledged Clayton's influence) and depressed by drug use, legal troubles, and his closeted homosexuality, he took his own life in 1967.

Clayton left behind a truly remarkable discography and his copyrights for his widely-covered arrangements of some traditional songs. Chief among these is his "I Feel Like I Gotta Travel On," about the origins of which Clayton was always mysterious. The likeliest reason is that he had heard the basic words of the chorus in a traditional song and had incorporated them into an old W.C. Handy melody, probably "Harlem Blues." The other verses were likewise adopted from other earlier songs, making Clayton's piece one that was rather more assembled from earlier sources than actually composed.

The original copyrighted lyrics that Clayton himself recorded reflect that Steinbeckian ambivalence toward the road, which in American folklore can be the portal to a new life or the desperate means of escape from an old one. Clayton's lyric quite clearly expresses the latter, as reflected in our first rendition by the Kingston Trio from 1964:

The KT was the only major group to catch some of the melancholy that Clayton had invested in the song. The Weavers' version that predates the Kingstons by about five years catches the wistfulness but at the expense of substantially re-writing (and re-copyrighting) the lyrics as Clayton wrote them:

The extent to which the KT was indebted to the Weavers is clear here, at least as far as musical stylings went. The Weavers' lyric re-write, possible because of Clayton's use of a public domain tune, enabled the group to retain all publishing royalties for themselves, and the BMI website lists Weavers Seeger, Hays, and Gilbert as copyright holders as well as Clayton. That was something that the Kingstons also learned from the Weavers, though while there are people who still deride the former group for pulling that little trick, very few people today recall how thoroughly the Weavers protected and profited from their own repertoire in exactly the same manner.

I wonder if any of Clayton's depression emanated from what happened next when country singers got wind of Clayton's work. The prototype for that was the country hit by Billy Grammer in 1959:

Grammer is using Clayton's words but charges through them as if blissfully unaware of what he is singing about. In his hands and those of some of the other country performers below, all the affect and sadness disappear from the song and it becomes a kind of "Happy Wanderer"(you know, "Val-der-ee, val-der-ah") with slide guitar and requisite twang added. Consider Jerry Reed, Tammy Wynette et al. from 1975:

Ditto Boxcar Willie, who sound positively cheerful:

The always-cheerful Seekers:

I have to confess to a great deal of disappointment here - the Seekers are doing the Weavers lyric, not Clayton's - and they could have done so much better.

Chet Atkins provides momentary relief - slower, if not exactly reflective:

The nadir may well be here - archetypal kitsch from The Lawrence Welk Show from 1972:

Looking at the different versions of this song reminded me sharply of my article on Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans", where similarly most of the artists ignore the implications of the lyric and just charge full speed ahead - you know, a train song, riding the rails, the Song of the Open Road and all. Clayton was trying to reflect on something very different - on the feelings of sadness and abandonment of the rootless and disaffected. As Clayton conceived it, this is the song that George Milton might well have been singing to himself as he had to hit that never-ending road solo right after the end of Of Mice and Men.

Appendix

*If you have forgotten the plot, Wikipedia has a decent short summary HERE .

**Here is Clayton from an album of sea chanties singing "Spanish Ladies," which film buffs will recognize as the fragment sung repeatedly by deranged shark hunter Quint (played by Robert Shaw) in 1975's Jaws:

Among The Leaves So Green-O: "The Keeper" / "The Hunter"

2011-06-17T13:45:00.001-07:00

This week's song has been one of my favorite traditional tunes since I first heard Burl Ives' version of it rather more than fifty years ago. The most common name for it is "The Keeper Did A-Hunting Go," but it has also appeared in publications as "The Hunter," "Among The Leaves So Green-O," and "Derry Derry Down." It is clearly and unmistakably English in origin, and from what I can gather occupies the same place in U.K. music education that perhaps "Oh! Susanna!" does in the U.S., meaning that for a very long time just about everyone learned to sing it in primary school. Most versions sport an antiphonal chorus - one in which one singer or group alternates responses with another, like "Jackie Boy - Master" here - and is consequently a delight for little children to learn. Or it was, at least when most of us were children. I'm not sure how much basic education in the joys of singing is left in schools today in either Britain or here - and I am even more uncertain that Stephen Foster or "The Hunter" would be included today in any event.

Too bad, because the song is a delight on several levels. Most versions sung today are derived from the rather sanitized version published in 1909 by legendary British folk song collector Cecil Sharp in School Songs. Sharp's rendering makes the song a literal deer hunt, and the tune works just fine on that level:

The keeper did a-hunting go
And under his cloak he carried a bow
All for to shoot a merry little doe
Amongst the leaves so green-O.

The first doe that he shot at he missed,
And the second doe he trimmed he kissed,
And the third ran away in a young man's breast,
She's amongst the leaves of the green O.

The fourth doe then she crossed the plain,
The keeper fetched her back again.
O and he tickled her in a merry vein,
She's amongst the leaves of the green O.

Now, unless you're ten years old, you might well look at that lyric and suspect that something else is afoot here, since most hunters as far as I know neither kiss nor tickle their prey. If you further consider the soft and supple coat of a doe, its fetchingly luminescent brown eyes, its skittish temperament, its elusiveness - well, you don't have to be Freud to figure that the deer might well be a kind of folk code for a supple, luminescent, and elusive female of our own species. (One of my all-time favorite poems is from about 1530, "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind" by Sir Thomas Wyatt where the connection is clear and intentional, a hind being a female red deer.)

In fact, Sharp was presenting a 19th century cleaned-up lyric of a much older song, one that was first printed in the 1500s and has long been thought to date back to the 13th century, the time of Robin Hood. The 1600s version was called "The Huntsman's Delight; or the Forester's Pleasure" and included stanzas like:

The third Doe she made great moan,
Because that she was big with Fawn,
Which made her to go weeping home,
From 'mongst the leaves so green a:
Hey down, &c.

The fourth Doe could no longer stay,
But she must be gone her way,
For fear that the Keepers should her lay
Amongst the leaves so green a:
Hey down, &c.

The fifth Doe leapt over the stile,
But the Keeper he got her by the heel,
And there he did both kiss and feel,
Amongst the leaves so green a.
Hey down, &c.

That's pretty clear, I'd say. Whatever the quarry is, however, the song is just plain tuneful fun, as our videos will show. First, an instrumental version done with overdubbed pennywhistles by Edinburgh's Gordon Hudson. Lest that sound too weird, give it a listen - it's a delight:

Warms the cockles of my Irish heart, it does.

Now you would think that the Weavers would deliver a creative but straight-up traditional version of the song, as I did when I got the Travelling On album in about 1960. You would be wrong:

The group ultimately cannot blame this travesty on their Decca Records producer Gordon Jenkins and his insistence on orchestrations for folk numbers in the quartet's 1950 recordings; this dates to 1959, though since Seeger had left the group by then over disagreements about the commercialization of material (you think?) and the fact that the other three compelled him to sing on a cigarette commercial that he really objected to, the recording cannot be later than April of 1958. Even if the cut is a refugee from the Decca vaults that somehow found its way onto this otherwise excellent Vanguard album, the group still had to sign off on its inclusion. Big mistake.

That version simply enables me to attempt to drive yet another stake through the heart of the casual misperception of pop folk groups, because the Kingston Trio does exactly what the Weavers should have done - which was to deliver a sophisticated arrangement that respects the song's musical roots:

A truly marvelous arrangement indeed, as Jeremy Raven notes below in my post about Nick Reynolds: " 'The Hunter' is one the Kingston Trio didn't write or significantly rewrite...But probably the harmonic spin was their own. Listen to the quiet verse and chorus, starting with "'Tis merry we are"...The modality of the harmony evokes madrigal-singing or even Gregorian chants , even more so than 'Riu Riu Chiu /Guardo El Lobo'. It's a perfect example of the kind of thing Dave Guard wanted them to start being able to accomplish by learning to read music!" It also exemplifies what I think was the genius of the original group - the ability to present legitimate folk material in a modern setting that does not ultimately distort the integrity of the number. My thanks to Jeremy R. for the comment (part of what made me want to do the song this week) and to Dave Long's marvelous upload. (Dave is saving me a lot of work these days!)

For more creative interpretations - first, a fine ukulele version from "Eugene Ukulele":

From the UK again, Chris with a kind of new-age arrangement done on a 12 string guitar in what sounds like an open tuning (but actually is not, since Chris forms a perfectly normal-looking B minor chord at the end of each verse), slightly reminiscent of John Denver's take on "The Bells of Rhymney":

Youngsters Colin on lead with Mary and Dickon in an adaptation as part of a dramatic version of The Secret Garden:

And finally - because the fantasy camp is coming up soon, because I have been thinking a lot recently about our late friend Bo Wennstam, whose video this is, and because I always like to include in these articles amateurs having fun with folk songs in informal settings, here are Triofan John Lee, Zurich's Tom O'Donnell, and I making up in volume and enthusiasm for what we lack in rehearsal time. It's a jam, after all:

And that is an example of what goes on at the KT Fantasy Camp, pretty much 24 hours a day somewhere or other. The late John Stewart used to remark at the camp that the only way that songs like this and folk music in general would ever survive the onslaught of music biz-American Idol pop culture would be if people just got together and sang their lungs out on these tunes. This last one's for you, John.

On The Shoulders Of A Giant: Milt Okun's New Memoir "Along The Cherry Lane"

2011-06-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Every mature fan of popular folk music and in fact popular music in general probably already knows who Milt Okun is - one of the most influential figures in American pop music history, of the same weight and significance as the likes of Gordon Jenkins and John Hammond and Voyle Gilmore and Quincy Jones. A classical musician by training and a music teacher early in life, Okun spent decades shaping and influencing the careers of artists like Harry Belafonte , Peter, Paul and Mary , the Chad Mitchell Trio, an alum of that group named John Denver, Tom Paxton , Laura Nyro, The Brothers Four, opera superstar Placido Domingo, and many, many more. Okun was a literal jack-of-all-trades for these artists, by turns producing their recordings, arranging their music, influencing their artistic choices and musical directions, and providing them with rehearsal space and a place to lay their weary burdens down in the home he shared with Rosemary, his wife of now more than fifty years.

Okun has had a long and colorful career (he is today a hale and active eighty-seven years old) but one that clearly defies easy categorization. Like Hammond and Gilmore, he is a producer par excellence with an innate sense of how to get a recording to sound right for each artist he has worked with; like Jones and Jenkins, he has created complex and beautiful arrangements across a number of musical genres. Okun has also conducted orchestras, recorded his own folk albums, provided creative criticism, suggested material, discovered artists and songs, and shepherded temperamental musicians through some rough spots in their careers. There is not a single term that can encapsulate such a richly complex professional life.

It is a testament to the quality of what Okun (R. below) and co-author (and son-in-law) Richard Sparks (L. - at a book signing in Santa Monica, CA) have accomplished in Along The Cherry Lane, Okun's memoir published this week by Classical Music Today, LLC, that that career emerges in all its aforementioned complexity as the expression of a single, clear passion - Okun's love for music in nearly all of its forms, which in turn has driven him to

work unflaggingly to help other musicians, from children in New York City's public schools to major international stars, to realize most completely their own potential as musicians. It is equally to the credit of Okun and Sparks that the liveliness and color of that career do not expire when they reach the pages of a book that cannot present the music itself of which it speaks so clearly and warmly.

Much of the credit for that latter point must go to Sparks, who is himself a record producer, lyricist and playwright of note and the author of a number of other books on everything from music to poker. Sparks has chosen to eschew a simple chronological narrative in favor of letting Okun tell his own story in his own way, and most of the book is the record of conversations between Sparks and Okun, with the former pitching questions to the latter. Interpolated at key points are comments from many of the musicians who benefited from Okun's work, and Along The Cherry Lane derives its structure rather more from the creations of the musicians themselves than from a simple autobiography of the subject. It works nicely, not least because Okun's involvement in the careers of the artists usually occurred at a point when they were most in need of musical direction - Peter, Paul and Mary's learning to sing harmonies, for example, or Placido Domingo's decision to attempt a crossover into popular music by recording an album of non-classical songs, most notably his duet with Okun client John Denver on the latter's composition "Perhaps Love."

Okun and Sparks also reward the reader with significant insights into the often Byzantine workings of the "music publishing" industry, and nowhere else will you find a more succinct description of what that term means than in this book. Just as Okun speaks most glowingly in Along The Cherry Lane about musicians (Denver and Domingo especially), the con artists of the business side of music who attempt to chisel away at the money earned by the songwriters and performers (or just flat out steal it) come in for his sharpest barbs. Okun is especially critical of the way royalties and licensing of songs have been handled by the major recording companies, which often deprive the artists of significant income due to incompetence, dishonesty, or neglect. Okun speaks most proudly of the way that his own publishing company, Cherry Lane Music (named for an off-Broadway theater near his original office, and quite coincidentally a line from the "Puff, The Magic Dragon" song that Okun helped to arrange) managed to rectify some of those errors, and the consequent loyalty of songwriters like Denver and Paxton to the company as a result.

Thanks to current technology, we can get a glimpse into some of Okun's genius today by looking at and listening to some of what he wrought. Two examples here should serve nicely. First, though impresario, club owner, and antic character Albert Grossman is listed as the producer on Peter, Paul and Mary's albums, the actual musical force behind them was Okun. Grossman was a businessman who fancied he understood "the biz," but he knew little about music and had assembled the three Greenwich Village soloists Peter Yarrow, Noel Stookey, and Mary Travers into a vocal group to create what he called "a hipper version of the Kingston Trio" and thus tap into the rivers of cash flowing into record company coffers from the early '60s version of folk music. But the three singers had had little experience singing in harmony and almost no idea of how to create and blend three vocal parts - so in stepped Okun, who rehearsed the trio for nine months at his home before getting them into a studio. It paid off, literally and handsomely. The group's eponymous first album hit the number one spot on the Billboard Magazine charts and stayed there for a month - but more impressively remained in the top ten for an unbelievable eighty-four weeks, ultimately selling almost two million units. The group's next half dozen albums enjoyed comparable success, and all the months of drilling the vocalists in harmony singing and working out arrangements that their voices and instrumental skills could handle are on display in the quality and professionalism of those records, still among the best of the entire decade in any genre of music. Take, for example, what Peter, Paul and Mary did with the then-unknown Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind" from their third album:

The arrangement is perfect for the skills of the musicians, with voices brought into the mix simply, as on the second verse where a solo vocal blends into duo unison and then flowers into three perfectly integrated parts. It is complex enough to be interesting but simple enough to execute for the self-taught musicians that all three group members were.

Another example, and one in which Okun expresses great pride in Along The Cherry Lane, is the duet by John Denver and Placido Domingo on Denver's "Perhaps Love." Except for the songwriting itself and the actual vocals, this is an Okun production all the way, and one that he could midwife into existence because of the much greater musical sophistication of both the operatic tenor and the country boy singer-songwriter. Grainy video notwithstanding, this is an inspired arrangement:

The mix here is nearly perfect. As fine a singer as Denver was, he could not match Domingo's volume, so Okun chose to have the singers alternate lines for the most part, keeping moments of actual harmony to a minimum and influencing Domingo to moderate his vocals so as not to overwhelm Denver. Once again - it worked, and Okun and Sparks relate the story of how it came to be thoroughly and engagingly.

Along The Cherry Lane is a significant and welcome addition to the growing number of books that have tried to deal with the popular folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of those books are pedantic and unfocused; some are scurrilous and gossipy; a few are inspired and highly readable. Okun's and Sparks' effort belongs in that last category, and it is in every way worthy of the career that inspired it.

Along The Cherry Lane By Milton Okun as told to Richard Sparks. Classical Music Today, LLC. $24.99 at Amazon.com

Remembering Nick Reynolds - "Everybody Sings!"

2011-06-10T11:11:00.001-07:00

I hope soon to be back to posting regularly and about individual songs - I actually thought to do "Greenland Whale Fisheries" this week because it's maybe my all-time favorite folk song.

But first - a circle needed to be closed here. On the last two anniversaries of John Stewart's death, I've posted memorial articles about him and "July, You're A Woman" and "Chilly Winds", in addition to having created a page in honor of his memory . Last June, I profiled Bob Shane's solo performances, and six months later in December tried to express some of the essence of the genius of Dave Guard.

It only remained to say something about Nick Reynolds, the third member of the original group.

And there is quite a bit to be said, because Nick Reynolds was the heart and soul of the seminal pop folk group The Kingston Trio.

With his college buddies Dave Guard (1934-1991) and Bob Shane (b. 1934), Reynolds and the Trio transformed American popular music, bringing traditional folk songs, sea chanteys, calypsos, world music, and more to an unprecedented level of popularity and visibility, selling more records between 1958 and 1961 than any other American musical act except Elvis Presley and outselling their (today) more respected predecessors, The Weavers, by a factor of five. The group's commercial success, widely belittled by folk purists at the time, paved the way for recording companies to sign and promote traditional musicians, singer-songwriters, topical/political musicians, and international performers - all because of the astounding album sales of the Kingston Trio between 1958 and 1961, more than $175 million in today's dollars.

The core of the Trio's sound was the soaring tenor harmony of Reynolds, and the breakneck energy of many of the group's signature numbers was derived from Nick's supersonic tenor guitar strumming and his masterful percussion accompaniment on bongos, conga, and boom-bams. The late singer/songwriter John Stewart, himself a Trio member for six years following Guard's departure, said that "Nick Reynolds was the real rhythm of the Kingston Trio." And Trio-mate and best friend Bob Shane wrote after Nick's passing, "Nobody could nail a harmony part like Nick. He could hit it immediately, exactly where it needed to be, absolutely note perfect, all on the natch. Pure genius."

Nick was easily the most accessible of the original group members - this despite the fact that for the predictably short period of his international celebrity he was probably the most easily identifiable of the KT, standing as he did nearly seven inches shorter than Guard and six than Shane. There is a section of the video below of "A Worried Man" where you can see Reynolds swarmed for an autograph and jostled by a group of Japanese school girls - he takes the buffeting with a wry smile and just keeps on signing. When I was a teenager in the group's heyday in the '60s, I was granted a short post-concert interview with the Trio for my local newspaper. Shane and Stewart were friendly and cooperative, but it was Reynolds who gave me a story to write, staying with me a quarter of an hour longer than the others and making sure that I had the kind of exclusive tidbits that every reporter of any age prizes. I met him again in 2003 at the Trio's fantasy camp in Arizona - and in each of the four subsequent camps he'd greet me with a "Hiya Jim! How've you been?" with no need for me to remind him of my name - and he did so with literally everyone of the several hundred people who came annually to the event.

Reynolds was nearly always self-deprecating about himself (he was a genuinely outstanding athlete, lithe and muscular til his death at 75 in 2008) and his career, referring to the historic success of the group as "just something we did when we were kids" or "we started doing it for the beer and the chicks and it got all out of hand for a while." On two occasions, however, he let slip comments that might have been nearer to his reaction in the '50s to the excoriating criticism that the group's free-handed but very lucrative adaptations of folk songs excited. In 2004, Nick was talking about his friendship with the late Irish folk star Paddy Clancy and his widow Mary when he interpolated, “People criticized us for not doing enough protest songs. What the heck did they know? You want to hear a protest song? Listen to the Clancy Brothers sing ‘Roddy McCorley!’" Even more so - in 2003, John Stewart and Reynolds duetted on "Sloop John B" in a rough, unrehearsed version . Even before the thunderous applause had subsided, Nick had grabbed the vocal mic and with an asperity in his voice that I found arresting said, "When we were first starting out, there were a lot of people calling us 'phony folksingers' and such. One man who stood up for us - one of the really righteous men - was the poet Carl Sandburg, who collected that song. He sent us all a really nice letter with autographed copies of his works The Lincoln Years. We never forgot that." There was a passion of wronged and wounded pride there, forty years after the event. It seemed like it was rather more than just beer and chicks for Reynolds - it was a good part of his life's work, something of which he was justifiably proud. A word more on that at the end of this article.

It was Reynolds' innate gregariousness and good humor that acted as the balancing point between the combustible temperaments of Guard and Shane, and when the former left the group, it was Reynolds who mentored the somewhat reticent and awkward 21-year-old John Stewart to the point that Stewart eventually became the primary arranger and onstage personality for the act - something that Stewart never forgot and never forgot to acknowledge until the day of his own death a few months before Reynolds. (In fact, San Francisco Bay-area resident Stewart was in San Diego visiting Reynolds at the latter's home when he collapsed from the stroke that took his life - after listening to several hours of KT recordings and reminiscing with Reynolds.)

What is often lost in remembering Reynolds as a person, however, is an appreciation of just how fine a performer he was, and the videos below give some indication of this. He had the most flexible voice in the group, having been a medium baritone with enough clarity and range to be able to sing most of the group's tenor harmonies. Reynolds was also a singularly expressive vocalist, as the first four of today's videos attest:

Hobo's Lullaby

The Mountains of Mourne

One More Town

The Wanderer

The perhaps more familiar high-energy Reynolds performances are typified in the next four clips:

MTA

A Worried Man

"Badman's Blunder"

"New York Girls"

And yet - there were plenty of fine vocalists in the pop folk era, as good as or better than Reynolds - the trained voices of the Chad Mitchell Trio members or Glenn Yarbrough's crystalline and honey-sweet tenor come to mind - and other groups that could play at least in the same ballpark as the Kingstons' high-energy performances. No, there was something more to the group and to Reynolds' contribution to it than syncopation and energy and good singing. What that was has been expressed perhaps most eloquently by Nick's son Josh, in the liner notes for the remarkable 2009 CD of a 1963 KT show called Flashback. Josh wrote:

"You hear the guitars and banjo kick in on 'Little Light,' that first upbeat sing-along song that gets everyone going. Rousing openers like that were a signature template to the Trio's live performances.

Then you hear Dad shout out 'All right!,' which is his signal to 'the boys' that things are moving, and then he brings the audience into it by yelling, 'Everybody sings!'

It hit me. That's it. 'Everybody sings!'

If there was one thing he cherished most about what he accomplished with the Trio, it's that he got everyone up and singing."

And in so doing, Reynolds and the Trio helped to complete what Pete Seeger and The Weavers had started but what their politics had prevented them from completing - the gifting back to the American public of its own folk heritage, a heritage that even back then show business had obscured with its often glitzy but shallow celebrity culture. And that was a priceless and ultimately enduring gift indeed.

Folk Songs For Memorial Day

2011-05-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

The sesquicentennial remembrances of the Civil War have stirred something that runs very deep in me, in part because I have been a CW buff my entire life - and because I remember so vividly that as a boy 50 years ago I watched the calendar daily and reflected on the battles and events of that tragic cataclysm during the centennial observations. It was, of course, that war with its more than 600,000 dead that gave rise to observations of Memorial Day, officially beginning three years after Appomattox in 1868, though in both North and South communities had already begun to honor the war dead before then.

The songs of the Civil War from both the Union and the Confederacy were among the first folk-type songs that I ever learned. I was a piano student at the time of the centennial, and my parents got me a book of piano arrangements for the songs of the era, as well as an LP called Billy Yank and Johnny Reb by the wonderful Chicago folk performer Win Stracke. Most of the songs had a single and known author, but the best of them became so universally known and sung (as had "Yankee Doodle"a century earlier) that they became for all practical purposes traditional - sung by the millions of soldiers on both sides who seldom had any idea who wrote them. The writers themselves - including giants like George F. Root and Henry Work - seemed to have been flattered rather than chagrined at the widespread but often uncompensated use of their songs.

What struck me about many of these songs, even as a boy, was their reflective and mournful quality - and not surprisingly, the almost universal "wishing for the war to cease." "It is well that war is so terrible," said Robert E. Lee after a total and heinously bloody victory at Fredericksburg, Virginia, "otherwise we would grow too fond of it." Lee caught perfectly there the paradox of Memorial Day. We wish to honor those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" without losing sight of the fact that the military and war are sad and grim necessities in a brutal and dangerous world. In what is a massive and ironic conundrum, we commemorate the dead most completely when we strive most mightily to try to insure that such sacrifice is never repeated. That may well be a Utopian "strangest dream," but then, so once was the thought that a nation could be governed as a democratic republic. It is only such a dream that can beget such a reality.

Our first selection today is a song that has haunted me for all these decades, Walter Kittredge's "Tenting Tonight On The Old Campground," performed here by Tom Roush:

What a wonderful and poetic lyric - "many are the hearts that are weary tonight/Wishing for the war to cease..."

The Confederate equivalent of "Tenting Tonight" was actually written before the war by HD Webster. But "Lorena" was quickly adopted by soldiers throughout the South, especially as the war dragged on. Tom Roush here again:

Only one problem for me with this arrangement - virtually everyone who sings it today (including greats like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings and John Hartford) affect a contemporary country swing and syncopation. I could not find a single recorded version that presents the song as written - as a slow-tempoed 4/4 time ballad.

George F. Root was probably the greatest of the Civil War songwriters, and the two selections from him presented here show why. First, the haunting "Just Before The Battle, Mother" sung by one of the great talents of the last half century, Marty Robbins:

Root's best-known and most enduring number is certainly "The Battle Cry of Freedom." The backbone of this arrangement from The Weavers is the duet on the verses between Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert, both blessedly still with us:

Rousing, yes and most certainly - but the cost of "no man shall be a slave" is clearly referenced by "the vacant ranks." A captured Confederate officer is reported to have said of Root's masterpiece, "If we'd a-had your songs, we'd a-whipped you, hands down."

Scholars have never ascertained the exact origin of the two "Johnny" songs. It was long believed that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" of Civil War vintage was derived from the earlier Irish "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" - but there is a distinct possibility that it was the other way around. The latter song has always been a favorite of mine, here from the first Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem album, supposedly recorded in 1958 in Paddy Clancy's kitchen:

I always preferred Makem's solo performance supported only by Bruce Langhorne on guitar at the 1961 Newport Folk festival. It's quieter, more reflective, and consequently both more touching and more bitter.

The more contemporary songwriters have also catalogued some of the other costs of war. Tom Waits wrote the surprisingly sentimental (for him) "The Day After Tomorrow" in 2004. I like Joan Baez's unvarnished rendition of this:

Rod McKuen wrote "Doesn't Anybody Know My Name?" (aka "Two-Ten, Six-Eighteen") in 1962, likely thinking of the forgotten veterans of the Korean War, though eerily pre-figuring the emotional casualties to come from Vietnam:

This rendition is from the wonderful and recently-released Flashback CD of a 1963 concert by the Kingston Trio. The inimitable Bob Shane sings lead, and you can hear why many believe him to have had the best voice of the pop-folk era.

But the aforementioned Utopian dream of a world without "guns and swords and uniforms" persists, and it finds perhaps its greatest expression in Ed McCurdy's classic "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream." I always thought the best version of this song was by the Chad Mitchell Trio, here from their 1986 reunion show, joined by Mitchell's replacement in the group, John Denver:

The group still closes its shows with "Dream."

To close, we come full circle - the first episode from the Civil War series by Ken Burns, in my opinion the high-water mark of television in U.S. history, closed with the reading of the remarkable letter of Sullivan Ballou, written to his wife shortly before the Battle of Bull Run, spoken over Jay Ungar's modern yet classic-sounding "Ashokan Farewell":

A blessed and thoughtful Memorial Day to all.

Comparative Video 101 Third Anniversary Special: The Best of CompVid101

2011-05-07T16:34:00.001-07:00

The second week of May marks the third anniversary of my first modest post on "Tom Dooley," published on Kingston Crossroads in May but uploaded to the web in general in July when at the suggestion of folks here I began saving the posts into a blog.

Since that week in May, 2008 there have been 132 editions of Weekend Videos/Comparative Video 101 (both silly names but all I could come up with at the time - now I'm stuck with them). 12 of the articles have been special subjects, like the retrospectives The Best of Comparative Video 101 - 2009 and 2010 , retrospectives on the careers of Dave Guard , Bob Gibson , Bob Shane (linked below), two on John Stewart (Nick Reynolds upcoming), fantasy camp, and other topics.

That leaves 120 separate posts on individual songs. The mathematically inclined among us will note that that means these articles have covered the equivalent of ten complete, 12-song LPs. Most of the posts include versions of the songs as performed by the Kingston Trio, and I believe that no comparable archive exists for any other artist anywhere else on the web. CompVid101 is not a comprehensive page and pales in comparison of scope to genuinely landmark sites like Jerry Kergan's Kingston Trio Liner Notes , Rick Daly's Folk USA , Ake Holm's wonderful Harry Belafonte website , or the lamentably retired John Stewart page by Ron Beffa called Clack's Cellar - and of course the full site of Ken Laing's The Kingston Trio Place where these articles first appear.

But this series is, as they say, what it is. I'm sure most of you have noted that the posts really aren't research articles, exactly, though I am proud of the bits of background I've been able to provide about the songs. Each article is actually an essay, one that presents my personal experience with and memories of each individual tune and my opinions on the performances I've been able to find. That anyone at all would care to read my ramblings on often long-forgotten folk songs is something I find immensely pleasing.

Which brings us to this anniversary edition. I really love doing these posts, and I have to review them with some frequency to be sure that the videos I have included in each article are still there - and if YouTube has yanked some of them for copyvio, I try to find replacements. (And one of my big projects for the summer will be to create a usable index-by-song-title page.) Of the 132 posts, nine stand out for me as the best overall of the whole group - best writing, best information, and best range of musical/video performances.

So this shamelessly self-congratulatory post simply re-presents for your consideration my own favorite articles of the last three years. Here they are in order of publication - and thanks to all for doing me the great compliment at looking at my work over the years.

1. "The Sinking of the Reuben James" - 1/1/09

2. "The Patriot Game" - 4/4/09

3. "The Colorado Trail" - 5/15/09

4. "Bay of Mexico" - 3/12/10

5. Bob Shane, Soloist - 6/18/10

6. "The Escape of Old John Webb" - 9/2/10

7. "The Dutchman" - 2/3/11

8. The First Grammy For Folk - And Why It Matters - 2/10/11

9. "The City of New Orleans" - 2/24/11

"You Don't Knock"

2011-04-27T23:57:00.001-07:00

Personally, I prefer spirituals over gospel music for roughly the same reasons that I like traditional music over most singer-songwriter numbers. There is a kind of almost democratic populism in real old time folk songs - the best tend to survive and come down to us, and that "best" is determined largely by a kind of collective popular will, expressed over generations of time by the simple fact that people have sung and keep singing them, at least until the advent and then domination of electronic media converted music from something that people made - that virtually everybody made - to something that people consumed, like any other commodity hawked by marketing hucksters.

You could draw a parallel to the spiritual/gospel relationship. Real spirituals, several of which like "Good News" (profiled a year ago this week) and "My Lord, What A Mornin'" (with a longer discussion of spirituals in general) have appeared in these posts, arose from the suffering and longing engendered by slavery and express a collective dream of a brighter day, in this world or the next. Gospel music, which sometimes grew out of spirituals and is the proper category in which to place this week's song selection, "You Don't Knock," has a definitely commercial aspect to it. That of course in no way denigrates it - Bach to Bernstein and everyone in between also created sacred classical music for pay, too.

But I think that "Shenandoah", for example, is unsurpassable for its sheer, flat-out beauty, a beauty that has embedded within it a kind of truth that very, very few individual songwriter efforts have ever matched, a beauty refined and enhanced by the generations of ordinary folk who have sung it. Good spirituals share in the same nature, I think.

Gospel music, on the other hand, is largely performance music. It may invite participation from a congregation, but its power is derived from fine and professional performances of it. Gospel songs are the visions of individual writers; spirituals are the collective voice of the people.

All of this makes "You Don't Knock" an ideal song to consider, because evidence points to a derivation from a lost spiritual while its current form comes from the legendary Roebuck "Pops" Staples, the patriarch of the family singing group that he founded in 1948 with his children. The earliest copyright anyone seems to be able to find for "You Don't Knock" is 1949, assigned to Cedar Walton and Wesley Westbrooks, though the name R. Staples was added to it later in the '50s. Certainly one of the earliest recorded versions of the song belongs to Roebuck S. and his children - the Staples Singers:

Most subsequent recorded version seem to riff off of this one, and the near-identicality of lyrics in other artists' version certainly points to a single origin for the song.

The New Grass Revival (here from Austin City Limits) is certainly one of the highest-calibered assemblages of country/bluegrass musicians put together in recent decades , with Sam Bush, John Cowan, Pat Flynn, & Bela Fleck:

I love the fact that they have converted the basic African-American sound and rhythm of the number into their own idiom, a kind of old-timey mountain music sound that skirts the edges of rockabilly.

The Kingston Trio translates the song into another idiom entirely - just a whisker on the folk side of rock:

It's hard to believe that this is from Dave Guard's last album with the group. He sounds like he is having a heck of a good time, whaling away as he is on his still-new jumbo Gibson 12 string guitar and vocally going Elvis-on-steroids in his treatment.

One of the better and more interesting pop collaborations in recent years has been Led Zeppelin rocker Robert Plant with roots music superstar Allison Krause:

Who would ever have thought that Dave Guard would out-rock Robert Plant? Clearly, though, Plant and Krause are going back to rock's deep roots in blues - interesting to compare this to the Staples.

The Detroit Cobras are a covers band that nonetheless brings an original approach to the song - almost country-rock, I'd say, sort of the Staples Singers as imagined by the Joe Walsh-era Eagles:

And two final versions for fun. First, home videos from a group only known as Anthony, Isaiah, and Dallas:

Regular readers of this blog know how much I love videos of folk music well-performed at home by amateurs who love what they are doing - as with these young guys.

Finally, what may be the weirdest version of a song I have ever posted in 132 articles - the young ladies of Alpha Xi Delta at the University of North Carolina Wilmington:

Here's what they are chanting:

Dont knock dont knock
just walk right in
the door the door
to the alpha xi den
there's love theres love
theres joy for you
to share to share
your whole life through
i know i know
my friends are there
the golden quill we'll always wear
the gold the quill
the double blue
the doors wide open just waitin for you
dont knock
just walk right in
dont knock
just walk right in

I'd say that that removes all the spiritual/gospel elements from the song most effectively. Guess that's just part of the folk process.

Paradise Lost: Ole Bull And "Oleanna"

2011-04-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

Sometimes as I consider the economic and political life of our country in 2011, I can't help but feel that we are in some ways being dragged headlong back into the 19th century, and the worst elements of it at that. Public life in the latter third of that century featured economic bubbles of speculation and subsequent crashes, concentrations of massive amounts of wealth in the hands of a tiny coterie of Wall Street bankers and their associates (industrial capitalists at the time), demagogic hysterics on both the right and left railing at abuses perceived and actual, and a government that seemed to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of moneyed interests.

What we sadly have not imported from that period are its best elements - like selfless dedication to causes that transcended personal interest or greed, causes like women's suffrage and abolition and temperance and trade unionism. The practical patriotism of the day may have been tinged by jingoism in foreign affairs, but our tough-minded forbears did not propound the illusion that their beloved Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean was a perfect place that was, like the Blues Brothers, on a mission from God. Rather, with the profound doubts about human institutions and perfectibility inherited intellectually from the Puritans, they believed that America was a work in progress whose perfectibility rested in their own hands and efforts.

Nowhere was that more in evidence than in what today appear to be the charmingly idealistic and quaint efforts to create Utopian communities, like the Transcendentalists' Brook Farm in Massachusetts, or New Harmony in Indiana - or Corning, Iowa, or the scores of Amish and Mennonite and Shaker communities stretching from the mid-Atlantic to the prairie states - or to the Great Basin Kingdom itself, Mormon Utah. Despite ethnic and religious differences, all of these shared in common the desire to become the New Jerusalem, the city on the hill that would become a model for national and eventual world-wide reform.

One of the lesser-known of these visionaries - or rather, a man known less as a visionary than as a musician - was the Norwegian violin virtuoso Ole Bornemann Bull (1810-1880). Bull was reputed to be second only to the legendary Paganini as the greatest instrumental soloist of the century, a reputation cemented by more than 40 years of extensive touring (he performed an authenticated 237 concerts in the U.K. alone in the year of 1838 - and then went off to tour Germany) and collaboration with the great composers and orchestras of his day. Bull was a veritable rock star, wildly applauded and mobbed by fans wherever he went. He was also a first-class luthier and made a fortune which today would be in the millions of dollars.

But Bull was also an idealist and a patriot, one who believed that his native Norway should be independent of Sweden (which it was not until 1905). He toured the U.S. several times and was so taken with the country and its ideals that in 1852 he decided to create what he called a New Norway colony in northeastern Pennsylvania. Bull used what today would be about half a million dollars of his own money to buy land (much of which today is Ole Bull State Park), and in September of 1852 started the colony in the rugged mountains of virgin forest with a few dozen countrymen, proclaiming, "We are founding a New Norway consecrated to liberty, baptized with independence and protected by the Union's mighty flag." Eventually more than two thousand people joined Bull in four sub-colonies, the last of which he named for himself and his mother - "Oleanna."

Like most of the other American Utopias, New Norway failed in a few short years, largely because Bull had been tricked into buying tracts that we virtually un-farmable due to steep slopes and rocks. Most of his Norwegian colonists ended up leaving for (you guessed it) Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas to become later beneficiaries of the Homestead Act, where good land was free to those who would work it. Bull continued his splendid career in Europe, though returning frequently to America and in fact marrying a Wisconsin woman in his declining years. His whole story is well told HERE .

So how did a Norwegian classical musician and communal idealist become the subject of an American folk song?

Though Bull's dream community had died, the power of his vision and his total dedication to it had not. In 1853, Norwegian editor Ditmar Meidell wrote a poem in praise of Bull's ideals and set it to a popular tune named (of all things) "Rio de Janiero." The song has been popular in Norway ever since but was not translated into English until the 1930s, with 22 verses. Working off of that translation, in the mid-1950s Pete Seeger edited it down to six verses, preserving the flavor of the original, as in the first verse -

Oh, to be in Oleanna!
That is where I'd like to be,
Than be bound in Norway,
And drag the chains of slavery.

Vintage Seeger - and here he is singing it, alternating English with the Lillebjorn Nilsen's Norwegian at the legendary Tonder Festival in 1991:

A bit more restrained and with a slightly different translation, here are Jim Nelson and Lori Ann Reinhall, collectively known as Duo Scandinavica:

International folk songs have been the special province for 60-plus years of another of our national treasures, 86-year-old Theodore Bikel - who happens still to be touring in the demanding role of Teyve in Fiddler On The Roof. He recorded Seeger's "Oleanna" shortly after Pete himself, here with Geula Gill:

No credits available, but that sure sounds like Pete on the banjo.

The song has gone full-on international. Here is a snippet of a group of students giving it a go in Soncillo, Spain:

and the Yellow Devil Blues Band from Lucca, Italy three years ago:

IMHO, that's another in the endless line of unfortunate attempts to "update" an acoustic folk song into an electrified, rocked-out and ultimately bastardized non-entity, neither folk fish nor rock fowl. Yes, Pogues and Avetts and Killigans, I'm talkin' to YOU.

I suppose I'm thankful for that - stuff - for one reason here: it makes the Kingston Trio's somewhat lame attempt to turn Meidell's idealism into 1950s semi-topicality sound downright authentic:

The guys cannot be faulted here for quality of arrangement or enthusiastic vocals. It's just that the chorus has nothing to do at all with the verses, which I always found odd. I'd guess that the group didn't really know the original - this adaptation is by Tin Pan Alley songwriters Mark Seligson and Harvey Geller, who also penned "Mark Twain." As a matter of interest to me only - I always figured this song had Dave Guard playing banjo on it - but now that I listen more closely - I don't think so.

The latest incarnation of the term "Oleanna" was a 1992 drama and 1994 film by leading American playwright David Mamet, whose piece portrays the conflict between a smug, superior college professor and a disturbed female grad student who accuses him of sexual harassment. The idealized community of Oleanna in the song implicitly represents the "ivory tower" of the university, both being ultimately unreal and unrealizable illusions. And what a commentary that is - that Ole Bull's pure 19th century vision becomes a sardonic byword for the failures of our own times. Sad it is indeed.

Will Holt, Part I - "Lemon Tree"

2011-04-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have to say at the outset that the charms of this particular song have eluded me for half a century, though I am certainly an admirer of its composer Will Holt and of the artists whose renditions are presented below. But "Lemon Tree" is one of those songs that falls into the odd cracks and fissures that characterized the folk revival, not unlike some of the early songs of Rod McKuen or possibly even Irving Burgie - not quite really full-blown pop music but hard to categorize as folk, though tunes like it were popularized by guitar-strumming acts that were identified in the popular imagination of the time as "folksingers."

Holt (who will turn 82 on April 30th) is a man of considerable talents, though it might be said of him that no single one of them was so dominant that it became an immediately identifiable signature, like Sinatra's phrasing or Bob Dylan's songwriting. But an outstanding singer Holt has been (as we will see below), and though his early 1960s albums on Elektra might be loosely termed folk, his likely most enduring performances on vinyl were his duet efforts with Martha Schlamme interpreting the dark musical theater vision of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He wrote a few dozen songs, several of which like LT were widely covered; he acted on Broadway and on television - and following the stuttering end of the pop folk fad in the late '60s turned with great success (and a few flops) to writing book and lyrics for Broadway shows such as The Me Nobody Knows (1970), Me and Bessie (about blues legend Bessie Smith) in 1976, and A Walk On The Wild Side (1988), for which he also wrote the music. Holt is still performing, and as recently as 2005 recorded yet another album of Brecht/Weill numbers with Gisela May, overdubbing some original Weill-supervised tracks by the legendary Lotte Lenya.

Like McKuen, Holt seems to have been less interested in actual folk songs than he was in the worldly cabaret style of music (French for McKuen, German for Holt) that fascinated post-war Americans rather more in the '40s and '50s than it seems to today. European music appeared more urbane and knowing than either American pop or folk, and even when Holt ventured into pure folk, he did so with a polish and sophistication generally not seen in the genre before him - as here with his rendition of "Shenandoah":

"Lemon Tree" is probably the best-known of the compositions that carry Holt's name on the copyright, but he has always been open about the fact that he was creating a free-hand translation of the melody and lyrics of a 1937 Brazilian composition called "Meu limão, meu limoeiro," based on a traditional song in Portuguese. The original has the lost love theme and the mention of the lemon tree, but the father's advice and the son's bitter lesson are pure Holt. The first version of it that I (and about 3 million other Americans) heard of it was on the 1962 first album by superstars-to-be Peter, Paul and Mary - whose version here is so well-crafted that it remains after 50 years probably the definitive rendition of the song:

Intentionally or not, PP&M are preserving just a hint in their syncopation of the Brazilian origins of the tune. But their version, with the pause before the change of key that leads to the chorus, also emphasizes just how far the number is from traditional Euro-American folk, where such shifts are fairly rare.

A number this mellow eventually just had to be covered by the masters of mellow folk-type music, the Brothers Four:

This version is from the group's 1997 Greenfields And Other Gold album; Bob Flick is the sole remaining original member of the group on the recording, though Mark Pearson and Bob Haworth each had spent more than 20 years with the group by the time this was waxed.

It probably should not be surprising that the Kingston Trio also recorded "Lemon Tree," actually some months before PP&M or nearly anyone else. It appeared on Goin' Places, their ninth and final album with original member Dave Guard, released almost exactly 50 years ago in April of 1961:

The superior recording techniques of producer Voyle Gilmore and engineer Pete Abbott just aren't sufficient to cover the essential weaknesses of this perfunctory performance, which takes most of the affect out of the lyric. Perhaps the Trio went to the well once too often: they had previously successfully recorded Holt's "Raspberries, Strawberries" and the "MTA" song that they had first heard from him, and those two both became top 40 singles for the group. But the gleeful, uptempo arrangement presented here suffers in comparison to what PP&M did with the tune.

Britain's semi-folky Chad and Jeremy seemed to split the difference between the versions of the two giant American folk groups: they take the essential PP&M arrangement with its gentle verses but blast the chorus up to KT speed:

Trini Lopez, who IMHO never gets sufficient credit for introducing rock elements into folk-styled songs years before McGuinn or Dylan, puts his distinctively Latin syncopation into his rendition:

No article of this nature would be complete without presenting the version of Australia's Seekers for just about any tune that they recorded:

This is one of the few Seekers' songs I can think of where the distinctive vocals of Judith Durham are mixed down into the blend rather than featured prominently.

Will Holt is a protean artist, changing genres and styles with an easy virtuosity. It seems as if today few people remember his contributions to pop folk music, which may not be such a bad thing. He is a wonderful and engaging vocalist, and I still listen to his Brecht/Weill albums from time to time. But the fact that rockers Fools Garden have recorded a completely different song with the same name (often covered around the world) has served to bury this number even deeper into 1960s obscurity. Holt deserves a better fate than to be remembered mainly as the composer of this slight and pleasant bit of fluff.

Scotty Wiseman's "Brown Mountain Light"

2011-04-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

North Carolina is yet again the setting for this week's song, and for once (as contrasted with "Tom Dooley" and "Poor Ellen Smith" and possibly "You're Gonna Miss Me") the topic is not a murder but rather an interesting paranormal phenomenon, one that has inspired a series of local legends and one often-covered country song, if you can excuse the Gone With The Wind-type attempt to romanticize slavery (a very big if, obviously).

Sightings of the mysterious "Brown Mountain Light" have been verified back to 1922, though stories surrounding them apparently go back at least sixty years earlier to the Civil War era and maybe before. Brown Mountain is near Linville, NC, and that estimable town provides a fine and comprehensive brief history here:

Perhaps a little background information is in order here for readers who have never heard of the lights. Brown Mountain is a long sloping ridge on the edge of the Blue Ridge lying within U.S.Forest Service land at an elevation of some 2,600 feet.... One of the three main viewing points of the lights is at a roadside pull-off on highway 181. The other two look outs are at Wiseman’s View...and the Lost Cove Cliffs overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway (milepost 310).
Since their first recorded sighting by the German engineer Gerard de Brahm in 1771 the
lights have attracted scientific scrutiny. Explanations for these mobile spheres of glowing light have ranged from nitrous vapor to ball lightning, from foxfire to a fourth form of energy known as plasma. The U.S. Geological Survey conducted an investigation of the lights in the 1920s, publishing findings that dismissed the lights as man-made...
About the only thing that most experts can agree on, however, is that the lights tend to
appear in late summer and autumn on cool evenings following some rainfall. Those fortunate ones who have seen them speak of the experience as wondrous and unforgettable. Mention the topic ofthe lights in just about any gathering in the Blue Ridge and cries of “Have you seen them?” and vivid anecdotes will swiftly follow.

Without further ado, the star of the show - from a few years back, one of several good videos of the lights on YouTube:

The song was one of the last that was penned by Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame member Scotty Wiseman (1908-1981), who partnered for most of his career from the mid-1930s til 1958 with his wife Myrtle Eleanor Cooper under the name "Lulu Belle and Scotty." (pictured above) They were regulars on The WLS Barn Dance broadcast from Chicago in the 30s and 40s - I've mentioned the program before as the main competition in the vast mid-section of the country for Nashville's Grand Ol' Opry. Wiseman wrote a string of hits that included "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?" (the country number recorded by Jim Reeves, Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley and many more - not the Rod Stewart/Van Morrison song), and Cooper contributed the classic "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight?" to the American song bag. The duo retired in '58 when Wiseman completed an M.A. from Northwestern University and went on to a teaching career; Cooper ended up as member of the NC House of Representatives.

"The Brown Mountain Light" song apparently dates to the early 50s. According to the Linville village web page cited above, Wiseman heard the legend of the slave and the lantern from his great uncle Lafayette "Fate" Wiseman, a drover born well before the Civil War and the man for whom Wiseman's View above is named. Great nephew Scotty always liked the story and came up with this:

I'm a bit more inclined to cut Wiseman some slack about the "faithful old slave" bit than I am for Hollywood depictions, both because of his own pre-modern 1908 birth date and because he was re-telling the story as he and other had heard it from Uncle Fate. But I still get more than a little uncomfortable with any attempt to romanticize slavery in the U.S., especially in the century after it was abolished. GWTW is in most respects a great movie, though unfortunately the somewhat dignified and Academy Award-winning portrayal of the house slave Mamie by Hattie McDaniel is counterbalanced by a truly vicious stereotype in the younger girl played by Butterfly McQueen ("I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies"). I treated the subject at greater length when I wrote about the spiritual "My Lord, What A Morning" last October.

Sonny James' #1 country hit version has been removed from YouTube, but shortly after James's rendition Tommy Faile had a rockabilly-tinged hit with the song:

The 1962 date of James' hit suggests that it is the immediate antecedent of the 1962 version by the Kingston Trio:

The KT also seems to have borrowed James' idea for the narrative opening and that guitar lead in. John Stewart is doing a really creditable banjo arrangement here, and I think most KT fans will agree that this acoustic rendering is a light year better than the awful horns- and percussion-littered cut on the '62 Something Special release.

The Country Gentlemen also did "Brown Mountain," though I cannot find a date in their discography. It seems not to predate the KT's version, though the latter group freely borrowed material from the Gentlemen's first few albums, including "Jesse James", "Long Black Veil", and "Poor Ellen Smith". They do a classic bluegrass arrangement here:

Finally, two non-professional but really good folkish versions, first by Ronda Foust of Tennessee doing a clawhammer banjo accompaniment:

That's a fine banjo performance by Ms. Foust, and it shades the country composition toward folk wonderfully. She mentions that she first heard the song from the Kingstons.

And a bluegrass jam session, from Townsend,TN in 2008:

That's Bruce Fox on mandolin and lead vocal. I love to hear folk-styled music this way - being able to join in sessions like this is one of the chief attractions of going to the Trio Fantasy Camp in August each year. We'll have to see how many folkies remember and like this one when we assemble again in Scottsdale this year.

La Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Chose - Sheldon Harnick's "The Merry Minuet"

2011-03-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, that ["The Merry Minuet"] was written in the 50s I think, maybe late 40s. Not much has changed!
- Bob Shane, FaceBook, 3/28/11

It is both amusing and disconcerting to find that a song like Sheldon Harnick's "Merry Little Minuet" that was written in 1948 or '49 as a topical comment on those times retains both its humor and its relevance more than six decades later. The vast majority of such songs amuse or rankle (or both) for a few years and then get dumped into the folk "remainder" bin when they lose their relevance as the events and conditions that inspire them fade into newer sorrows, outrages, and idiocies. But the best topical songs seem to acquire lives of their own, or "legs" as they used to say on Broadway. "Blowin' In The Wind" is surely an offspring of the Civil Rights era, and it was the Dust Bowl and Great Depression that engendered "This Land Is Your Land" - but does anyone doubt that those tunes will be loved and sung a century from now? What was originally created to be timely can occasionally become timeless, as with those two classics.

But I doubt that Harnick could have foreseen that his composition would remain as apropos as it has. "This Land" and "Blowin' In The Wind" have a distinct advantage in that regard over "Minuet" because their themes are universal and even more because they are not humorous. Usually nothing has so short a shelf life as topical humor. Vaughn Meader's The First Family was a brilliant and affectionate send-up in 1962 that wouldn't even get a smile (much less a laugh) out of anyone under the age of 60 today. Few comic impressionists were as gifted as was David Frye, and if you look today at videos of his Nixon, LBJ, RFK, William Buckley and more, you'll still probably laugh at how apt his barbs were - but your children will wonder what's so amusing about the guy. So why has "The Merry Minuet" beaten the odds and remained funny through all these years?

Well, for one, it's a well-crafted composition by an expert crafter of lyrics. Harnick would be enshrined in the pantheon of great American lyricists had he never written anything other than his best-known work, Fiddler on The Roof (with music by Harnick's long-time collaborator, Jerry Bock), which is surely one of the best and most enduring classics of Broadway musical theater. But he also wrote the words for the songs in Fiorello! and She Loves Me and the musical play version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - and maybe fifteen other profitable shows on The Great White Way. Harnick is a pro's pro, and if his lyrics never quite attain the poetic flavor of Oscar Hammerstein or Alan Jay Lerner, they possess truer emotional depths and a much more wicked and satiric trenchancy - think "Do You Love Me?" for the former and "If I Were A Rich Man" for the latter.

Harnick's "Merry Minuet" was composed for an off-Broadway review, one that also included songs by Michael Brown, whose "Lizzie Borden" and "The John Birch Society" later got the Chad Mitchell Trio off and running in terms of radio airplay. At some point in the mid-1950s, MIT mathematician and general satirical gadabout Tom Lehrer heard the song and began including it in his shows, always careful to credit Harnick from the stage - to little avail because to this day many people assume it to be a Lehrer composition. Lehrer was a regular act at San Francisco's Purple Onion and Hungry i in the mid 50s, along with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce and Phyllis Diller and more. The SanFran nightclub audience considered itself more hip and with-it than their counterparts in New York - which is probably part of what motivated the otherwise determinedly apolitical Kingston Trio to add Harnick's topical comment (undoubtedly learned by them from Lehrer) to their shows, which after all began in those same Bay Area night clubs.

But the Kingstons left out two verses* (for time purposes, really - there's nothing especially controversial about them) and made one critical change to the song. Harnick's original lyric calls for "la la la's" between the satiric lines; the KT, however, had an expert whistler in Bob Shane, who with Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters was one of the best of the era. The drollery of punctuating the black-comic awfulness of riots and nuclear explosions with a mindless, light-hearted whistle just took the song to another level of humor - and has helped to keep it there. Nearly everyone who does the song today retains the whistle - so for for first version, we turn to Raymond Crooke for the song as Harnick wrote it:

Crooke is an Aussie who lived in Hong Kong from 2004-09; he was a teacher there and a moving force in the resuscitation of the Hong Kong Folk Society. His YouTube channel of his performances of more than 500 traditional folk songs has earned an impressive viewership of over 6 million hits.

The version most people in the world heard first was this next one, by the Kingston Trio in live performance at the Hungry i in the summer of 1958, some months before "Tom Dooley" became a hit single and ushered in the popular folk revival, not to mention fame and fortune for Trio members:

When "Tom Dooley" took off as a single and pulled the group's debut album with it to the top spot on the charts, it also ignited a chart rise for the From The Hungry i album from which this cut is taken. The latter was released in January of 1959, the same week that both the TD single and album were awarded gold records. Unlike the first five studio albums by the group, Hungry i did not hit the #1 position on the charts, mostly because Capitol decided to try to rectify its initial error of not recording the now-cash-cow KT in stereo, and a mere two months later rushed out the (IMHO) fairly useless Stereo Concert album, basically a retread of the first two LPs. Three albums by the same group vying for chart positions, all released within nine months - that insured that Hungry i with "Merry Minuet" would only make it to #2. Even at that, it sold several hundred thousand copies, and for my money only this song and "Zombie Jamboree" from the same record are enduring and not dated comedic classics of all the attempts the group made at humor.

Travis Edmonson was a mentor to the KT and a regular in the SF folk scene, both as a solo act and as a member of the Gateway Singers, and later with partner Bud Dashiell in the Bud and Travis duo:

Travis adroitly avoids uttering the KT's name while indicating that B&T heard and learned it from Lehrer at about the same time. The two part harmony on the whistling adds a nice touch, though it sounds less like the product of an unbalanced mind than Shane's is supposed to and does.

Like Raymond Crooke, Alonsogarbanzo is a non-professional YouTube phenom whose work I usually enjoy:

I like Alonso's idea of ending the song with the nuclear blast (even if it wasn't completely intentional to do so). Heckuva nice looking Martin he's playing, too.

Finally, the U.K.'s G.D. Clarke has an amusing YT channel called The Poetry Fireside Hour - and he delivers this week's selection as a poem:

I'm guessing that Clarke reconstructed the lyric from memory and updated it a bit - and he has the properly dry and droll tone of voice that we associate with British humor. Though I like what he does here, I believe it also underscores a point I have made in many other posts, especially about Bob Dylan - poetry and lyric writing are two entirely different things. Lyrics get a boost from the music and vice versa, whether humorous or impassioned. Real poetry and real music are distinctly different crafts or arts, complete within themselves.

Harnick was writing in the shadow of World War II, and we may today be more in a bit more danger from nuclear power (sushi, anyone?) than nuclear war. Too, the ethnic hatreds and geographic flash points that the original lyric highlights may have drifted a bit - but just a bit: the strife in Iran is more threatening than it was in 1950, and Rwanda and New York and London and Madrid and elsewhere worldwide are sober indications of the changing but ever-present danger of what may be "done by our fellow man." We may yet find ourselves whistling that chorus inanely as we dig ourselves out of the ashes of whatever self-inflicted horrors we perpetrate that insure the continued relevance of Sheldon Harnick's little ditty.

*Appendix: The Full Original Lyric

There are days in my life when everything is dreary
I grow pessimistic, sad and world weary
But when I am fearful and tearfully upset
I always sing this MERRY LITTLE MINUET

They're rioting in Africa
La,la la, la la, la la
They're starving in Spain
La,la la, la la, la la
There's hurricanes in Florida
La,la la, la la, la la
And Texas needs rain
La,la la, la la, la la

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don't like anybody very much

In faraway Siberia
La,la la, la la, la la
They freeze by the score
La,la la, la la, la la
An avalanche in Switzerland
La,la la, la la, la la
Just got fifteen more
La,la la, la la, la la

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man's been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away

They're rioting in Africa
La,la la, la la, la la
There's strife in Iran
La,la la, la la, la la
What nature doesn't do to us
La,la la, la la, la la
Will be done by our fellow man
La,la la, la la, la la

For St. Patrick's Day: The Incomparable Clancy Brothers And Tommy Makem

2011-03-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

"And since it falls/Unto my lot..." - that this year, St. Patrick's Day coincides with my normal Weekend Videos post, it seems only right that I devote this week's offering to the greatest and most influential Irish folk vocal group ever. What this group brought to the world will last as long as Irish music does, long after U2 and the Pogues and the Young Dubliners and the rest are simply footnotes in the story of 20th century pop music. Additionally and regarding Xroads and the KT - this is perhaps the only folk group that both was influenced by and in turn influenced the Kingston Trio.*

A word on that, and an interesting one, I think. About 10 years ago, Liam Clancy (the last of the group to pass away, in December of 2009) published a memoir called The Mountain of the Women. In it, he related how the group's first gig outside of Greenwich Village was at Bob Gibson's (and Albert Grossman's) Gate of Horn club in Chicago in 1959 or early 1960, Gibson having met Pat Clancy and Tommy Makem at the first Newport Folk Festival in '59 where both appeared as soloists before the formal start of the group. At the Gate, the boys dressed in their Irish best - meaning tweed jackets, dress shirts, and ties. They were mortified by the ridicule from some parts of the audience at their appearance and resolved that it should never happened again. Inspired by the Kingston Trio, who was at that point riding an unprecedented wave of popularity and whom Liam described as "our heroes," the group decided to wear a stage costume of the nearly-matching Aran Island-style sweaters that Mother Clancy had sent for her sons, fearing the harsh New York winters' effects on their health. ("Nearly" because, as the true Irishman knows, those cream-colored sweaters with the cable and popcorn knit are native only to the three lonely Aran isles to the west of the country, populated by fishermen who wore them to sea - in part because when and if they drowned, as they frequently did, their decomposed bodies could be identified if they washed ashore by the family pattern and individual stitching of the knit of each sweater.) The Kingstons returned the favor by recording and popularizing a number of songs that they themselves first heard from the Clancys, including "The Gypsy Rover", "Roddy McCorley", and "The Patriot Game".

The CB&TM had developed a strong local following in NYC and Boston both as soloists and as a kind of informal group, and the success of their early home-made recordings on their own Tradition Records (truly home-made: many of the tracks were recorded in oldest brother Pat's kitchen) led Columbia Records to sign them at the precise point that Ed Sullivan featured them for what was supposed to be two songs on his show in 1961. Someone in the act that was to follow them on Sullivan became ill back stage (it was live, you remember) - and the producers asked the Clancys to fill in - so they ended up on national TV for an astounding 16 minutes when they had been scheduled for five. Both the in-studio and national broadcast audiences loved them, and they were propelled into a decade of recording and concert success, not only in the U.S. but throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. And just as the Kingston's enormous record sales paved the way for record companies to sign and promote other American folk groups, the Clancys opened up an international market for many of the great '60s Irish groups that followed them, notably the Dubliners and the Wolfe Tones.

In the '70s and following, the group broke up and re-assembled in various configurations, including the much-beloved Liam Clancy-Tommy Makem duo and the reunion tours of the original four in the 1980s. But for me, it was that original group in its first few years that created the template for the way that Irish music should sound - this despite the fact that the Clancys were almost fully as much popularizers as the U.S. pop-folk groups were - and were equally derided by purists who recognized a truer Celtic art in the Chieftains and similar groups. I would guess, however, that even purists might find the 1960 Clancy sound preferable to much of what emanates from Ireland today attempting to pass as folk, be it the smarmy "Celtic"-type groups or the rockers like the Pogues and their ilk who think that folk music should be electric and shouted.

So let us recall with fondness some of the great songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. This handful of tunes, culled from a YouTube library of several hundred uploads and from a personal memory of many more, is simply a collection of some of my own and my family's favorites, songs we have known and sung together for fifty years and more. There are ballads here, and rebel songs, and love songs - they truly need no introduction beyond saying that this is some of the best folk music Ireland ever produced.

The significance of the group both in the U.S. and internationally far transcends their fairly brief moment in the pop music sun. When Tommy Makem died in the summer of 2007, my prominent conservative blogger brother Rick published a remarkable essay titled "Death Be Not Proud" - and since he reflected at length on that and did so eloquently, I'm going to let him speak for me here:

For the Moran family, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem opened up an entirely new world, a means of discovering our past. Their music was not at all like the melodramatic “American” Irish music we were all familiar with. Their songs were of the real Ireland – a place of pain and suffering, of oppression, and a kind of fatalism that seems to me unique to the Irish people. In fact, the group’s first album – Irish Songs of the Rebellion – released in 1956, celebrated that fatalism in songs that told the story of several futile Irish uprisings against British rule. One of those songs, Roddy McCorely, is a staple of family reunions and is guaranteed to bring emotions about our heritage close to the surface:

"O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn,
From farmstead and from fishers’ cot, along the banks of Ban;
They come with vengeance in their eyes. Too late! Too late are they,
For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

Up the narrow street he stepped, so smiling, proud and young.
About the hemp-rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung;
There’s ne’er a tear in his blue eyes, fearless and brave are they,
As young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today."

...The image of the young McCorely going to his death so stoically is one of the most powerful of my childhood. It’s an example of a song with a mournful subject that has the effect of uplifting the listener emotionally.

Beyond the impact the group had on the world at large, their affect on my family cannot be measured. We glory in singing many of the group’s songs (accompanied by my brother Jim and his trusty Martin guitar). The drinking songs, the Irish patriot songs, and the songs of protest...There is something so defiant in those lyrics that brings out the pride I feel in being of Irish heritage.

Tommy Makem is gone. I wonder if they’ll put the lyrics to this last verse of “Jug of Punch” on his gravestone?

"And when I’m dead and in my grave
No costly tombstone will I have,
Just lay me down in my native peat
With a jug of punch at my head and feet."

No, Rick, they didn't. But no matter. You recall that on the original recording, Tom Clancy barks "The best one!" after the word "tombstone." He meant a jug, of course - but we know that the real marker is the wonderful body of music that they left behind, and the reawakened sense of identity and heritage that many of us have come to feel because of their music, especially on this day of all days. Erin go Bragh!

*One little fun indication of that - Bob Shane himself asked me to do a presentation at next August's Fantasy Camp on the influence of the Clancys and Irish music on the history of the KT. Of course I will...

¡Víva Las Mujeres Mexicanas! - "La Adelita"

2011-03-09T22:38:00.001-08:00

Director Fred Zinneman's 1954 film High Noon is on the short list of the best westerns ever made, and in fact of the best American movies of all time. Beyond the taut drama of a decent man facing almost certain death as the clock ticks relentlessly toward noon, the film was decades ahead of its time in its depiction of good and evil, of racial prejudice, and of thoughtful and mature women. The latter aspect of the film featured the classic cinematic dichotomy between the fair-haired heroine, in this case actress Grace Kelly portraying Amy Fowler Kane, the prim Quaker bride of Gary Cooper's Marshal Will Kane, and the dark and passionate lady Helen Ramírez, played by the superb Mexican actress Katy Jurado. Ramírez owns the local saloon (purchased with money earned in a bordello) and was Kane's lover prior to his marriage.

Both women in the film are frightened by the prospect of Kane's imminent gunfight with three convicts whom he had sent to prison, and wife Amy vows to leave town rather than see her Will shot down. In a last desperate attempt to forestall the duel, Amy visits Helen an hour before the fight to enlist her aid in dissuading Kane from facing his enemies. Jurado's Helen listens in disbelief as Kelly's Amy announces her intention to depart, and then scorches the Quaker woman with her contempt by saying, "What kind of woman are you? How can you leave him like this?...If Kane was my man, I'd never leave him like this. I'd get a gun. I'd fight."

When I first saw the movie on television some years later, that scene burned itself into my memory. I knew that in the Hollywood scheme of things (though clearly not in the subversive Zinneman's view), I was supposed to respond to the delicate, virginal, and ultimately sexless morality and beauty of the Kelly character. But it was Jurado's Helen and her fierce and undying love for the man who had been faithless to her that seized my imagination. "I'd get a gun. I'd fight" - now THAT was a woman.

And it is just such a woman who has been immortalized in the ever-popular Mexican corrído "La Adelita," a song as widely-known and as frequently sung in México as perhaps "This Land Is Your Land" is in the U.S. The song in its present form dates from the period of the 1910 Mexican Revolution in which Francisco Madero led a democratic rebellion against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (though it may be based on an older tune). The lyrics exist in several significantly differing variants. Some portray Adelita as the beloved of an officer in the revolutionary forces whom he must leave to fight for freedom; in many others, however, she is the very personification of the soldadera, the strong and independent woman who goes to battle herself, both for liberty and for the man she loves. In other words - "I'd get a gun. I'd fight."

Both the authorship of the song and the woman depicted in it are of uncertain origin. Some research seems to suggest that there was a woman from Durango, possibly named Velarde, whose battlefield exploits provided the raw material for the song, but this is speculative and no hard evidence exists. Nonetheless, "Adelita" came to be a term used to describe any of the women who joined the military. One soldadera recalled in a 1979 interview:

The most popular lyric sung today makes only passing reference to Adelita's courage:

En lo alto de la abrupta serranía
acampado se encontraba un regimiento
y una joven que valiente los seguía
locamente enamorada del sargento.

(In the heights of a steep mountainous range
a regiment was encamped
and a young woman bravely follows them
madly in love with the sergeant.)

Popular entre la tropa era Adelita
la mujer que el sargento idolatraba
y además de ser valiente era bonita
que hasta el mismo Coronel la respetaba.

(Popular among the troop was Adelita
the woman that the sergeant idolized
and besides being brave she was pretty
that even the Colonel respected her.)

Y se oía, que decía, aquel que tanto la quería:

Y si Adelita se fuera con otro
la seguiría por tierra y por mar
si por mar en un buque de guerra
si por tierra en un tren militar.

(And it was heard, that he, who loved her so much, said:

If Adelita would leave with another man
I'd follow her by land and sea
if by sea in a war ship
if by land in a military train.)

Y si Adelita quisiera ser mi novia
y si Adelita fuera mi mujer
le compraría un vestido de seda
para llevarla a bailar al cuartel.

(If Adelita would like to be my girlfriend
If Adelita would be my wife
I'd buy her a silk dress
to take her to the barrack's dance.)

One of the earliest recordings of the song is from Trio González, waxed in 1917:

This rendition is in the original, simple, pure mariachi style - accompaniment by strings only, with a simple harmony in thirds around the melody.

A more contemporary mariachi sound, one in a style that you'd be more likely to hear in México today, is by Pepe Aguilar, a great singer in his own right but also son of the legendary Antonio Aguilar:

The trumpet flourish that opens the song is now an almost required element in modern arrangements of corridos, and the lushness of the instrumental accompaniment indicates how sophisticated (or you could say "commercial) traditional music in México has become, as is the case here.

A fine instrumental version here from Stephane Kubiak and orchestra:

Once again, the trumpets open the number, but note both the primacy of the strings (both violins and guitars) and the polka-like tempo throughout.

"Adelita" is one of a handful of genuine Mexican folk songs that has become popular in the U.S., especially in the southwest. Though English-language versions are rare, no less of a major pop vocalist than Nat "King" Cole gave the song a try in Spanish in the late 1950s:

Though Cole is singing only the chorus, he is showing a remarkable respect for and fidelity to the source song, very unusual for a norteamericano at the time.

Cole's version almost undoubtedly inspired the Kingston Trio's loose translation of one version of the lyric where Adelita is the passive lover and not the brave fighter:

This is clearly an anglicized version of the song, but while not copying the Spanish source, it too respects the song's origin in its own way - and it is no further afield from that than many of the KT's and other pop folk groups' renditions of English language traditional songs were.

And Mexican folk has also gone country and electric, as the next two versions demonstrate. First, the Country Roland Band combines "Adelita" with a familiar country tune:

And if you're ready for it - a Mexican punk version:

To such an end folk music seems to be coming worldwide. If you know Oysterband or the Dropkick Murphys or the Pogues or the Killigans, you'll recognize the trend of electrifying and rock-ifying songs that originally were neither.

Yet even in these last versions - which are not to my taste - something of the original spirit of La Adelita survives. I think that my personal favorite of these is the very first one in this collection, for its purity and its proximity in time to the actual inspiration for the song - who in my mind will always look like Katy Jurado: "I'd never leave him like this. I'd get a gun. I'd fight."

Derroll Adams, John Stewart, And "Portland Town"

2011-03-02T23:39:00.000-08:00

It has been just over 35 years since former Beatle George Harrison was forced into court in late February of 1976 to defend himself against charges of copyright infringement and plagiarism by Ronald Mack and Bright Tunes Music in the case of Harrison's hit single "My Sweet Lord," which Mack and Bright Tunes contended was stolen from the song "He's So Fine" that Mack had composed for The Chiffons in 1963. Harrison acknowledged that he had heard the song but contended that the guitar setting and overall meaning of the piece were different enough to warrant consideration as an original composition. The trial lasted three days, and the judge's decision was swift: Harrison was indeed liable and ordered to pay $1.6 million (rather more valuable dollars then than now). Thus the term "unconscious plagiarism" became a part of the world's vocabulary when discussing intellectual property. There is a good and relatively brief discussion of the case HERE.

The case involving this week's song "Portland Town" was a bit simpler and more straightforward, but some of the same issues of ownership of an idea or a musical phrase did crop up. "Portland Town" was written in about 1957 by Derroll Adams, an American who never achieved much success in the U.S. but was and remains highly regarded as a kind of godfather figure in the European folk revival, especially in the U.K. Adams was a colorful character, an Oregonian (from Portland, of course) who joined the Navy at the under-age of 16 in 1941 to fight in the war - until the military found out about his age and a debilitating medical condition and discharged him. Adams went to Portland's prestigious Reed College and its art school - where he saw Josh White and became enthused about folk music. He taught himself the rudiments of the five-string banjo while working at several different jobs but only became serious about it after he met Pete Seeger around 1952 - and learned how to tune it properly. Adams drifted to southern California, living first in San Diego and eventually on Will Geer's Topanga Canyon ranch, which was a sort of art colony for radicals. It was there that Adams met the newly re-named Ramblin' Jack Elliott (born as Elliott Adnopoz), and the two became fast friends and performing partners, eventually moving as all early 50s folkies did to New York City.

Elliott sought greener and less McCarthyistic pastures in Europe and urged Adams to join him. Adams did so and spent the rest of his life there, mainly in the U.K., Belgium, and Italy, with sojourns in Denmark several times as well. His now fully-developed banjo and guitar skills won him an impressive following of soon-to-be influential musicians, most notably Davy Graham, Donovan Leitch (who idolized Adams), Paul Simon, Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell, and dozens more. Despite a troubled personal life that included extended bouts of alcoholism and extended hiatuses from performing, Adams remained a seminal figure in the Old World, appearing at and being honored by folk festivals across the continent until his death in 2000.

Adams wrote "Portland Town," he said, as a response to a couple he knew who lost their only son in the Korean War. Here is the song as he wrote it:

It's easy to discern the mid-50s folk/radical/Seeger/Geer nature of the song - and to understand why an America in the shadow of the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings was none-too-friendly an environment for Adams. But it is equally easy, given the simple, traditional-sounding and compelling nature of the song, to understand how a 22-year-old John Stewart of the Kingston Trio could have mistaken it for a traditional number. Where Stewart heard it first is unclear; it may well have been in one of the Greenwich Village folk clubs that Stewart frequented as a member both of the Cumberland Three and the KT. In any event, Stewart re-wrote both melody and lyric in his first year with the Trio and chose the song as his solo for the second KT album on which he appeared, the orchestra-supported Something Special. Stewart took the basic structure and some of the lyrics of the piece but turned them from an anti-war statement [which interestingly prefigured Stewart's own "Oldest Living Son" from his early solo album Willard (1970)] to a plaintive love song. Here is his acoustic track for the album:

The dressed-up album cut sounded like this:

This is instructive, I think. There is a charm, innocence, and longing in Stewart's acoustic version, which retains the simplicity if not the meaning of Adams' original. The Jimmie Haskell orchestrations, however, distort those charms here as they did on most of the cuts on the album and turned Stewart and the KT into a kind of poor man's Brothers Four, a pop vocal group before the folk boom whose Four-Preps-type roots showed in most of their recordings, many of which were unabashedly similarly orchestrated.

Stewart was not the only artist to mistake Adams composition as a traditional song. British pop superstar Marianne Faithfull (who had folk roots as well) recorded the song for a 1965 album and cited it on the record as "Traditional." She performs the song as Adams wrote it:

At a distance of 50 years and with Adams now departed, it is hard to ascertain what exactly his response to these versions was. One music website claims that he "never even attempted to reclaim his lawfull [sic] rights on this song," citing Stewart's adaptation as an example. But Adams' good friend Frank Hamilton - co-founder of Chicago's influential Old Town School of Folk Music and one of Pete Seeger's banjo-playing replacements in the Weavers - wrote just three years ago that "Derroll didn't get anything for Portland Town 'cause John Stewart of the Kingston Trio stole it from him and used up the royalties supposedly to go to Derroll in court costs. Welcome to the music business." Hamilton clearly implies that Adams either sued or threatened to sue Stewart. I can find no hard evidence of this on the web, and it would take more time and better legal research skills than I have to determine exactly what the interchange between the two was. I suspect that legalities were involved if not an actual suit, and with songwriter's royalties for a tune on a #7 charting album with sales approaching 300,000 copies, there would have been quite a lot of money at stake, if not at the gargantuan proportions of George Harrison's liability. Two things seem to me to be uncontestable: first, Stewart was not cynically and deliberately plagiarizing, as Hamilton implies (which BTW would not have mattered in an actual lawsuit), and second, that Adams never made any money off of Stewart's efforts. History has had its revenge, however: Stewart's version today is largely forgotten while Adams' original is still performed. Here is an unnamed Korean trio from two years ago:

An equally eerie-sounding take on the song from A Hawk and a Hacksaw from 2006:

Dick Weissman had genuine credentials as a traditionalist singer both before and after his three year stint with the pop-folk group The Journeyman:

A more straight-on interpretation of the number from the now ragingly popular roots/rock band, the Avett Brothers from last August:

There is no great lesson here, no grandiose conclusion to be drawn. Adams' original marches on, like "Blowin' In The Wind," because there are always cannonballs flying somewhere that still need to be forever banned. Stewart's nearly forgotten rewrite remains only as a minor memory to those who loved the popularized folk music of an era that in public perception is practically invisible. That fact is more melancholy than the song itself.

Appendix

For comparison's sake -

Goodbye, America - How Were You? Steve Goodman's "City Of New Orleans"

2011-02-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

It is "the best damn train song ever written," according to (depending on your source) Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson (who discovered it and composer Steve Goodman), or John Prine - or all three, though my money is on Goodman's close friend and collaborator Prine. Whoever originated it, he was making a sweepingly significant statement, given the centrality of the train to the history of the U.S. and the plethora of great songs engendered by it, songs like "The Wreck of Old 97" and its nephew "Charlie on the MTA," and like "The Ballad of Casey Jones," and "Pat Works on the Railway" and "Drill Ye Tarriers" and "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" and "Freight Train" and scores, even hundreds more. It may have been the automobile industry that turned America from a middling power to the industrial giant of the world through most of the 20th century - but that would never have happened had there not first been what we today call an infrastructure of steel rails that made large scale - gigantic scale, really, - manufacturing in this country possible, even inevitable.

It was the train that superseded the barge and the paddle-wheel steamer as the primary vehicle of American commerce because the former were limited to where there were navigable waterways but the latter could and did go anywhere and everywhere. The railroads did not simply connect places where people were; they led the way to places for people to go. And go they did, by the millions, especially at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. That's why every one of us learned about the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 completing the transcontinental railroad, an epic achievement that marked the first time in human history that a fast, reliable, and safe means of transport breached a continental expanse and linked the two largest oceans in the world.

Freight was always at the core of the railroad business, but the great rail companies of the day took such pride in the quality of their passenger service that they dared to name their trains in much the same way as ocean liners were named - and those names conjured up the romance of far places in the minds of American children for more than a century. The Empire Builder. The Super Chief. The Sunset Limited. The Zephyr. The Silver Meteor. The Twentieth Century Limited. Who of us did not have a model train set, likely with an engine that recreated one of those fabled trains?

And for nearly a hundred years, the very center of rail service in the U.S. was my home town of Chicago. It was also Steve Goodman's birthplace in 1948 (2 years before me), and you just couldn't live in the Second City in the '50s without your life defined by trains of all sorts, from freight and long-haul passenger trains to the electric inter-urbans to the subways to the commuter trains to the legendary El (for those non-Chicagoans, the elevated electric commuter trains whose track configuration created the Loop, which is downtown Chicago.) Trains were in our DNA as surely as autos were for '50s and '60s teens in LA.

So it is no surprise to me at all that the best damn train song ever written was brought into being by a Chicagoan, and that is what Steve Goodman was, dyed in the wool and to the marrow of his bones. Who else but an unreconstructed Chicagoan could have written such wonderful songs as "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" or "Lincoln Park Pirates' or "Daley's Gone, One More Round" - or "The City of New Orleans"?

Goodman penned CONY likely in early 1970, when plans were announced to end independent passenger rail service in the U.S. and amalgamate the most profitable routes into AMTRAK - which at first de-commissioned many of the named trains in an effort to establish its own "brand." The success of Arlo Guthrie's version of Goodman's song, however, changed some corporate minds, and AMTRAK in 1974 resurrected the name a mere three years after it had dropped it. The names were good for business, and a number of the other classic monnikers were resurrected as well.

Goodman's song is a poetic eulogy to the passing of an era, and bringing back the name did not bring back that era. My guess is that Goodman knew that more than a name was evanescing into the mists of history; it was a way of life, or perhaps more properly stated, an attitude toward life. Travel by train seemed lightning-quick in 1910, but air travel supplanted it over the next fifty years for speed and initially for convenience. Rail travel became leisurely, relaxed, and at times elegant in a country and era that had little use for any of those. And as passenger patronage dropped, the old grand dames of the named trains fell into deep disrepair. I took the CONY any number of times in the mid- and late 60's to visit friends at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, a stop on the route, and the cars had gone to seed: torn upholstery, dirty decks, stinking restrooms, third-rate and over-priced food.

But Goodman's artistic eye saw past all that and into the heart of the romance that the train and its name engendered: his City of New Orleans is still the proud queen of the heartland, at least in his imagination. While I know that most people respond most enthusiastically to Arlo Guthrie's hit version, for my money no one else ever did the song as well as Goodman himself - here from England in 1972:

I wish every cover artist had heeded Goodman's original concept. Listen. It's Kank -akee, folks, not Kan - kakee. The rhythm of the song is that of drive wheels pounding at full speed through the open countryside. In his original lyric (and clearly he is amending it as he goes along here) it was "passing trains that have no names" - those less regal and distinguished than CONY.

But what is, is - and Arlo Guthrie's arrangement is the one that most people know. And a fine arrangement it is - but it's not the way Goodman imagined it. Arlo in 1978:

Guthrie gives the tune a bit of country swing, and he sings it movingly - but it doesn't sound or feel much like a train at all.

John Denver stayed closer to the song's roots and Goodman's musical concept, though like much of JD's early stuff, this is maybe a bit over-produced:

You undoubtedly noticed that Denver substantially rewrote the melody and lyric in verses two and three - one of the more disreputable things he ever did musically, partly because he claimed partial copyright for a song not of his own making, which was also the case with "Country Roads, West Virginia." I wonder why Goodman let him get away with this. I'd guess that it was because Goodman was struggling still and Denver had already had a Top 10 hit and was beginning his stratospheric ascent into superstardom. But I also wonder if Denver ever realized how badly he messed up the arrangement and how completely he missed the inherent melancholy of the song.

Willie Nelson won a country Grammy for his 1984 recording (at which ceremony a Grammy was also awarded posthumously to Goodman, who had died earlier that year at age 36 from leukemia):

Nelson is a great singer and interpreter, but this quasi-country blues approach leaves me unmoved, at least to the extent that I can ever listen to this song and not be moved.

I think that New Orleans R&B legend Alan Toussaint is more successful at translating Guthrie's musical setting into his own idiom:

There's a catch in Toussaint's voice on the chorus that gives his rendition just enough of an edge of sadness to keep it in Goodman's conceptual ballpark.

Country legend Hank Snow goes full-on cheery here:

I like the way Snow preserves the speed and something of the rhythm of a passenger train rumbling through the night that Goodman invested into the song. He still sounds too happy for my taste.

The song was tailor-made for a pop-folk group like the Kingston Trio, who gave us a tightly-harmonized and thoroughly professional take on the song in their 1976 Live In Reno album:

Lead vocal here is by the late Roger Gambill, and the banjo is by Bill Zorn, who rejoined the group in 2004 after a 28-year hiatus. This version has the right rhythm, even if the gusto of the vocal overwhelms the lyric a bit at points. It's still a fine performance.

I might be less inclined to find fault with the versions above did I not have a superior interpretation to close with...but I do. Johnny Cash, solo acoustic, the only accompaniment being Cash on rhythm guitar, from 1984:

That would be my favorite version after Goodman's himself. Cash knows what to do with the lyric, and if he is simplifying the chords somewhat, he is simultaneously making the song his own while recognizing what the composer's intent was.

Steve Goodman wrote a song that lamented, as noted, the passing of an era. But the era of the song's composition has also passed, a distant memory like the America that you could greet in the morning that now is no more. I am reminded by this song of the opening scenes of the movie Rudy, which I love not simply because I went to Notre Dame but even more because it evokes the gritty, snowy, industrial Midwest of my boyhood - the same industrial Midwest that nurtured Steve Goodman and the great trains that rolled out of the great stations, many of which are today abandoned and silent. All is changed, changed utterly, as Yeats wrote. While I have little doubt that something golden and wonderful will ultimately arise from the ashes of the fires we lit that destroyed our industries and our cities of what is now most accurately termed the Rust Belt, it is too much to expect that some of us will not mourn what has been lost. Steve Goodman did, though he didn't live to see how the disappearance of this train simply presaged the disappearance of so much more. He has, however, left us with a great and evocative song that reminds us of that loss.

"Old Joe Clark": Then And Now

2011-02-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice
To change true rules for odd inventions. - Shakespeare

Ah, the Bard! As almost always, the perfect phrase for every mood and thought. I was reminded of this line (culled from a funny scene about a music lesson, of all things, in The Taming of the Shrew) as I watched parts of last Sunday's Grammy ceremonies - and subsequently after an exchange of posts on the John Stewart message board regarding whether or not popular music has descended to a lower level today even than heretofore. For me, the main show was secondary to the internet-broadcast Special Awards ceremony at which the Kingston Trio, Julie Andrews, drummer Roy Haynes and several others were honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards. The Sunday broadcast of the 53rd awards left me with the impression that there is still a tremendous amount of genuine talent in American popular music, but that much of it is wasted in over-glitzed, over-produced, pyrotechnics-riddled refuse, vulgar at best and ridiculous at worst - or roughly the same as it has always been. Take the opening - Lady Gaga has written a genuinely fine pop-rock number in "I Was Born This Way," and she has the genuine vocal chops of a real singer. But the egg thing from which she emerged (intended to be symbolism of the kind that would be thought cool and deep by a 12-year-old) and the hyper-sexual costumes, dance, and overall visuals actually worked to obscure the quality of the number rather than clarify or enhance it.

Which is not to say that old things are always better than new, but rather as Shakespeare's Bianca notes above, the "true rules" of the better parts of the traditional are always under assault from those "odd inventions" of pop culture, which has an insatiable appetite not for the truly innovative as much as it does for the short-term novelty. Were this not so, we would have seen long before now some genuine innovation in rock music away from a pattern like the four or five instrument-based band that has been the ironclad rule since the Stones and the Who nearly fifty years ago. Instead - just more of the same, never done as well now as when it was new. Punk, hip-hop, glam - all the same - a burst of innovation followed by endless, unimaginative replication. Most years the Grammys simply add an exclamation point to that, as they did this year.

At its best, American folk music has been able to find a kind of middle ground between a slavish imitation of the old and a careless disregard for it. I fear that in last week's post I didn't clarify how much I appreciate what the so-called traditionalists of folk have done. What they have tried to preserve is worth preserving, and its near-invisibility now simply underscores the validity of their efforts. But it's too bad that the "big tent" idea of George Wein at the original Newport Folk Festival never actually took hold (even at that festival, which today tends to include nearly no traditional music at all). About all that you find on the American music scene today that resembles what used to be called folk are bluegrass bands (and that is a genre which can hardly be called traditional, dating as it does and as we've discussed here really only to the 1940s) and a large number of "Celtic" bands, many of which from Celtic Woman to Celtic Thunder to Celtic-What-Have-You are simply pop groups that affect an Irish accent and go in for the heavily-orchestrated and visually over-produced settings of their rock and "country" cousins. But folk in its original sense? It's AWOL.

Or almost. Here and there, scattered around the English-speaking world, there are bands and soloists who owe their musical aesthetic rather more to the New Lost City Ramblers than they do to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. And this week's song, "Old Joe Clark," gives us ample evidence of where folk music has been and the crossroads at which it finds itself. Again.

"Old Joe Clark" has been a popular number for more than 90 years, and there seems to have been a real character by that name who inspired the song. Most folklorists believe that the real Clark was born in 1839 in either eastern Kentucky (probably) or western Virginia (maybe) and was eventually murdered, date and circumstances subject to dispute. The real Clark (and the picture above is allegedly a statue of him) made moonshine, possibly under a government license. He may have been married twice, or three times. He may have been murdered by his first wife's second lover - or by his own son. What is certain is that a lot of mountaineer doughboys in WWI sang the song quite a bit, and a lot of Yankee doughboys and Rocky Mountain doughboys and Midwest farmer doughboys took a liking to it and brought it home with them after the war, which accounts for the explosion of published and later recorded versions following the initial printed versions from 1918. You can find several versions of the song's history on the excellent website of our first artists for this week, the UK's Rosinators:

Lisa Clark On Ancestor Joe

The Rosinators On Song History

The Rosinators deliver a fairly straightforward fiddle- and banjo-inflected interpretation, though I personally could do without the Seeger-Sessions-Springsteen-infected-not-inflected drums. A kindly word here - in traditional music, both the banjo and guitar ARE the rhythm setting for the song. Oh well.

Many of our contemporary recordings are derived from the one of the first waxed versions, the 1927 recording of Fiddlin' John Carson:

Carson sets as a pattern one of the more interesting aspects of the song - he opens with an instrumental, which you'll see is common to all all the versions below. An acknowledgment is due here from me to Chicago-area musician and folklorist Jeremy Raven, who knows more than I ever will about folk roots and whose writings introduced me first to Carson several years ago on the KT message board.

There were plenty of other old-timey recordings of the song, but Ol' Joe takes a major step into Big Time Show Biz when Pete Seeger in 1946 not only records a version of the song but films it as well. "OJC" is the third tune:

That opening banjo riff is amazing - and it sounds to me like Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good And Greasy". Seeger and the Almanac Singers re-wrote the lyrics for "Round and Round Hitler's Grave":

The videographer made one clear mistake - Burl Ives was never in the Almanacs and was not on this recording - which should have been more controversial than it was, taking a traditional tune and appending topical lyrics to it. Tsk, tsk, Peter.

The Callahan Brothers in 1945 also played a bit fast and loose with instrumentation to create this sort of proto-country take on the tune:

And on to the crass popularizers of the 1960s - first the Kingston Trio from their 1962 album Something Special:

Traditional? Not quite, though you can hear the roots in it. Fun? I'd say so.

And speaking of fun - the great Chet Atkins:

Atkins had bona fide country/folk roots, but he is really breaking the versatility bank here - you can hear classic pop, a touch of blues, genuine rockabilly, and a bit of rock all in this one cut.

Finally to the contemporary. The Avett Brothers of North Carolina are an up-and-coming band who were featured last Sunday on the Grammy broadcast. They have been including their unique arrangement of "OJC" in their concerts for several years:

Folk-rock, I'd call this, and more legitimately so than bands like the Byrds or Mamas and Papas, who were singer/songwriter rock rather more than folk.

Yet in hidden and distant corners of our benighted land (smiley), the traditional continues, here by mountain autoharpist Kenneth Bennefield on Folkways Records in 2006:

The production and recording here were done by the late Mike Seeger of the NLCR, one of the last of his decades of contributions to American folk music.

Finally - maybe my favorite of all of these recordings, two guys at home making some good old time music and recording themselves. That's Casey Abair on fiddle and Hunter Robinson on clawhammer banjo:

George Wein had it right, I think - American folk music is a big tent, probably with room enough for all of these markedly different styles.

The First Grammy For Folk - And Why It Matters Today

2011-02-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Bob Dylan will be bringing his acoustic guitar to perform this weekend [at the 53rd Grammy Awards] on the same stage as Justin Bieber, Drake and Katy Perry.
- Geoff Boucher, The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2011

What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen [The Kingston Trio] have with a folk festival eludes me...except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize.
- Mark Morris, Sing Out Magazine, 1959

To call the Kingston Trio folksingers was kind of stupid in the first place. We never called ourselves folksingers... We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff. But they didn't know what to call us with our instruments, so Capitol Records called us folksingers and gave us credit for starting this whole boom.
- Bob Shane, in Washburn and Johnson's Martin Guitars, 1997

A bit more than 50 years ago, a (metaphorically) bloody civil war was raging in the outer provinces of American popular music, and the passages above represent both the flashpoint of the conflict and the residual effects of it. And in an odd harmonic convergence, this year's Grammy Awards will bring the strife to a definitive close, and a winner will emerge from the smoke and blood. Here's a hint: he'll be wearing a striped shirt.

But let us return first to those dark times half a century ago. Popular music's center homeland was safe and stable, ruled by Sinatra and Cole and Garland and company and administered by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Tin Pan Alley. Order was insured by the cabal of the six or seven largest recording companies in a dark and sometimes payola-ridden relationship with the radio stations and programmers. All seemed well.

The outlanders were restless, however. Unruly musicians around the country were creating a subterranean and subversive counterculture, and a truck driver from Mississippi and his friends were daring to infect the mainstream of the country with their take on the wilder, syncopated, and sensuous music of Black America. But after an initial burst of lawless creative energy, the rebellion against conformity had been sidetracked by a series of disasters that had robbed the incipient movement of its leaders - draft (Elvis Presley), death (Buddy Holly), and disgrace (Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry). In their place appeared a bland and homogenized version of their music, purveyed by the likes of Fabian and Dion and Pat Boone. A yawning void had appeared.

It was this void that allowed to come to prominence an element from even further out on the fringe, performers of a music so obscure that it didn't even have a proper record company/radio format name. In Cambridge, Mass. and Greenwich Village and Chicago's Old Town, rural singers with acoustic instruments and their urban peers who sought to emulate them began to record and release music on tiny labels like Vanguard and Folkways and Elektra. They were serious musicians, committed to the preservation of the great cultural inheritance of folk music, of traditions that they thought were threatened by the modern world. They were often political as well, tending as their musical antecedents had been to the progressivist/socialist end of the spectrum. They were also not very popular, a mere step or two away from complete invisibility, inhabiting their open-air squares and underground coffee houses without much regard for popular attention or acclaim.

This all changed in a heartbeat in 1958 when a well-scrubbed, fresh-faced trio of West Coast nightclub performers sold several million records of an old Appalachian folk ballad called "Tom Dooley." A series of monster hit albums followed over the next two and a half years, generating record sales of what would be $180 million in today's dollars for that group, the Kingston Trio, and its label, Capitol Records. Suddenly, "folk music" was a hot commodity, and all the other major labels went scurrying about to college campuses and upscale nightclubs looking for acts to help them mine their share of the new-found folk gold.

What the record companies were initially looking for, however, was not the earnest and old-timey sound of the genuine traditional folks or the politically-hued repertoires of the urban traditionalists. They wanted the polished, accessible, commercial sound of the corporate groups, who were making millions selling music that the older-line folkies felt that they neither respected nor understood. A combination of genuine distress at the bowdlerization of their music and a resentment at the amount of money being made by the commercial groups led to a vitriolic campaign in print against the popularizers by the traditionalists, the comment above by Mark Morris being one of the milder critiques published at the time.

The fissure between the adherents of something like traditionalism on the one hand and the commercial popularizers on the other became painfully and visibly public in a series of events from mid-1959 through 1960. The first of these (in addition to the articles in Sing Out and other folk publications) was the controversy at the first Newport Folk Festival in July of 1959. Jazz promoter George Wein, who owned the Storyville clubs around Boston and who had in 1954 started the Newport Jazz Festival, had experimented in the late summer and fall of 1958 with featuring the "folk" acts Odetta and the Kingston Trio in his clubs, and their amazing popularity had prompted him to include a "folk afternoon" at his jazz festival in April of 1959 including the same two performers and a handful of others. When that proved to be a runaway success as well, Wein decided to act immediately on a proposal being kicked around by folk icons Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, and Theodore Bikel (all including Wein remarkably still alive and active) to sponsor a full-fledged folk gathering in Newport that summer. Wein's idea was to have a "big tent" festival, one in which all shades of folk-styled music would be showcased in joyful harmony.

Wein also realized that he needed the Kingstons to make the festival a commercial if not artistic success - because the Trio was riding a wave of popularity that year unprecedented in American music history up til that time. They had in May been awarded a Grammy at the NARAS first presentation ceremony for "Tom Dooley" for "Best Performance - Country and Western, 1958" (there was no folk category that first year) much to the chagrin of many long-laboring real C&W performers. Their first three albums to that time - all released between June of 1958 and late May of 1959 - had gone gold and were charting, and a fourth was in the works for release later that year (and all four would crack Billboard's top ten selling albums chart for five consecutive weeks in November and December that year, a feat unmatched before or since).

But the Trio's appearance at Newport, intended to be the festival finale on Sunday night, created both near-riot conditions from an unruly and largely young (and alcohol-fueled) crowd estimated at between 13,000 and 18,000 (especially when Wein tried to bring banjo legend Earl Scruggs on after the Trio - that is a separate story) and a tidal wave of ill feeling from some of the trad performers who had not enjoyed the same adulation lavished on the KT and other pop-folkies like Bob Gibson. The presence at Newport of legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstadt to do a photo shoot of the Trio for the cover of Life Magazine didn't soothe any bruised egos either. Wein's festival made some money but left in its wake a good deal of ill will as well between the now openly warring camps.

The number one album in the country during that first Newport show was the trio's second studio album and third real record overall, At Large. (A concert from a Texas show that had been recorded by locals and not Capitol's people had been bought and rushed out by the label because it was in stereo, and the group's first two albums were not - but the album did not sell especially well and was barely noticed by the public.) At Large was deemed by founding member Dave Guard to be the best of the nine albums that he was part of, the point at which the group's original musical vision was most fully realized. The record held the number one spot on the charts for an astounding fifteen weeks, still among the top 20 albums of all time for longevity at #1. In May of 1960 at the second Grammy awards ceremony, At Large won the first folk statuette for "Best Recording - Ethnic or Traditional" - neither of which, of course, the album was.

What At Large was, in fact, was the harbinger of a new era and the precursor of all that came to be called folk in later decades to the present day. It was a superbly-crafted collage of re-imagined traditional songs, a pop ballad or two, a dash of calypso, and some modern songwriter art-folk that in a later epoch would be called roots or Americana. It even had just the slightest whiff of a political protest song, the opening cut on the album, the now much-beloved "MTA":

The song had begun its life as a humorous protest/campaign song for Progressive Party candidate for mayor of Boston Walter F. O'Brien. Seeking to avoid political controversy and blacklisting, the KT had tried to de-fang the song's politics by altering the candidate's name. The whole story is HERE . Doing so, of course, drove and even deeper wedge between the Trio and the traditionalists.

The inclusion on the record of several pop ballads didn't help, either. One of these, "Scarlet Ribbons," had been written by Tin Pan Alley composers Jack Segal and Evelyn Danzig and had already been a pop hit for both Jo Stafford and Harry Belafonte:

The tight harmonies and incidental use of a celeste sounded to many nothing like folk was supposed to sound. And though "All My Sorrows" was derived from an actual folk song, the re-write by pop folkie Glenn Yarbrough had turned a plaintive slave song into a 50's love ballad:

But as with Wein's Newport big tent, At Large was part of the process of redefining what the term "folk" meant, at least in the music business - and it was that re-definition that in large part opened the door for artists like Bob Dylan, whose tenuous connection to folk music was made possible only be the expanded definition of what the term meant. That as above Dylan could ever have been called "folk" simply because he wielded an acoustic guitar (and will do so again this Sunday) comes from all that At Large represents - and part of that is the way that the Kingstons handled genuine traditional music, with more fidelity and respect for it than Bobby D and the first group of protest singer-songwriters ever managed to show. Consider "Darlin' Corey":

This is a pretty straightforward homage to the Weavers, with fledgling banjoist Guard doing his best to replicate Pete Seeger's thrilling banjo part. On another trad number though, the group transcends Burl Ives' signature arrangement of "Blow Ye Winds"with a respectful but original take on the chantey:

The harmonies and energy became the group's trademark, and they manage here to present them with sophistication while maintaining respect for the song's origins.

The album's final cut, Jane Bowers' "Remember the Alamo" that had originally been recorded by Tex Ritter in 1955 and that would be covered numerous times later by artists of the stature of Donovan and Johnny Cash, anticipates the folk songwriter and Americana music that has today replaced any earlier definition of the word "folk" in the music biz. Again, the signature energy and harmonies -

- with the patriotic pride and theme that would color much of the country and Americana compositions of the Sixties, Seventies, and later.

The Kingston Trio's Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented this Saturday afternoon by the NARAS at a special ceremony, and some mention of it is likely on the actual Grammy broadcast on Sunday. It will be the first Grammy for the KT since the one for At Large fifty-one years ago, and since the whole Grammy thing is, like the Oscars, fundamentally a promotion vehicle for the industry overall as much as it is an attempt at genuine recognition of artists, I suspect that the half of the nation and a larger proportion of the music business that is under 40 years of age is probably looking at the income that the KT generated in its heyday more than they are at its singular musical accomplishments. I will be very interested to see what emerges from the ceremony. But I know already that you need a magnifying glass to find anything genuinely traditional in today's Grammy nominees for folk, and I know that even staunch traditionalists like Doc Watson and the Chieftans and others have recorded Trio-discovered art-folk and pop-folk songs like "Long Black Veil," "South Coast," and dozens more. The outlanders have moved into the capital, and whatever else folk is, it is now mainstream. And it looks a lot more like what Dave Guard, Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds and their Kingston associates imagined it to be than their dyspeptic traditionalist critics did. Frenetic tinselly showmen indeed.

Michael Peter Smith, Steve Goodman And More - "The Dutchman"

2011-02-03T00:36:00.000-08:00

As last week's article on "My Johnny Lad" indicates once again, my personal taste in folk music tends much more strongly to traditional tunes, often polished and re-imagined, than it does to the singer-songwriter material that overwhelmingly constitutes what people today seem to think of as folk. One reason for this is reflected in the nature of probably 85% of the 120 posts archived on this blog. Traditional songs usually exist in a wide range of variants, lending themselves to often radically different interpretations that make (for me at least) interesting listening and I hope interesting reading. Singer-songwriter compositions, on the other hand, are usually copyrighted, words and music both, and consequently tend to have less diversity in presentation.

There are, of course, many exceptions to that rule of mine. I've always thought that the all-time champ for singer-songwriter numbers that have spawned some truly original arrangements is Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Mornin' Rain", but of course there are many more. And it isn't as if I'm not a wild aficionado of singer-songwriters like GL and Tom Paxton and Paul Simon and Ian Tyson and John Denver and dozens more. It's just that something in the traditional speaks to me at a deeper and more lasting place in my being than do most contemporary numbers, regardless of how well they are written or how artistically performed.

Of the several exceptions to that point for me - at the head of the list is Michael Peter Smith's "The Dutchman." The song is a veritable miracle - because out of the awfulness of senility and dementia Smith is able astoundingly to create one of the most beautiful testaments ever set down to the enduring power of love. And he does so in the deceptively simple framework of a song that includes many of the qualities that I have frequently cited in these posts as the hallmarks of a legitimately folk-type modern composition - simplicity of melody and lyric, an easily-mastered and remembered chorus, and an instantly identifiable trope or lyric passage - here, perhaps, "And dear Margaret remembers that for me."

Smith wrote the song at the very beginning of his long and honored (if under-appreciated) career in 1968. After his own recording of it, Smith's classic-to-be was first covered about a year later by Steve Goodman and added to "Chicago Shorty's" concert repertoire immediately - which I know because in my senior year at Notre Dame in 1970, the student union invited Goodman to perform a solo concert, one at which he performed "The Dutchman" and "The City of New Orleans," though he didn't record the former until his second album on Buddha Records (Somebody Else's Troubles) in 1972.

Goodman's version of "The Dutchman" became an instant FM radio hit back when that meant something - when FM with its shorter broadcast range and outstanding sound quality was a hotbed of originality and innovation - when you could hear extended music sets without interruption of commercials and jabbering DJs. How well I remember and miss those days...listening late into the night with a very special young lady to LA's KNX-FM and hearing early cuts from many of the great acoustic artists of the day, Goodman foremost among them. When I heard his recorded version, I was immediately reminded of his live performance, and for me and I suspect a whole lot of other people, "The Dutchman" will always be a Steve Goodman song:

One of the highlights of this version for me is the fact that it is entirely acoustic - Goodman demonstrates how resoundingly beautiful two expertly-played and impeccably arranged complementary guitar parts can sound, in addition to his great vocal. I would add parenthetically that I think that videographer "paganmaestro" has done a superlative job with the visuals.

Smith has often been questioned about what basis in actual life experience his song had, if any...did he know someone with Alzheimer's disease? was there a Dutch uncle in his background? is he close to someone named Margaret? (For the record: answers are no-no-yes.) In April 2010, Smith provided a well-considered answer to the question of his composition in response to questions from a Dutch music writer HERE. Click and you'll see how fine a writer of prose Smith is (and you'll find links to lots of his other songs as well). For those who want a precis - Smith's sister is named Margaret; she had a Dutch boyfriend decades ago; he has never been to the Netherlands; he tried to jam every cliche about Holland (canals, windmills, wooden shoes, tulips, Hans Brinker's grandpa) that Americans cherish into the song's lyric...and emerged with a masterpiece despite it all. And while the artist is never the last or best word on the meaning of his/her work, and while composers may not always be the best interpreters of their own music - there is still something magical about hearing a song the way the composer imagined it - Smith, here from 1997:

There is a quiet, reflective gentleness to Smith's rendering of his song that I find profoundly moving.

Smith has credited Goodman's performance of "The Dutchman" with propelling his songs to a higher degree of visibility than prior, emboldening Michael to ask Liam Clancy ("the greatest ballad singer of all time" according to Bob Dylan) to record it, which Liam did, here with Tommy Makem in 1983:

As you can tell from contrasting Liam's intro with Smith's comments - Clancy is imagining his own story for the song, as all great interpretive artists do.

Some Clancy fanatics attribute a kind of "ownership" of the tune to LC, and I recall comments on the Clancy message board disparaging the fact that Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio was including a version of "The Dutchman" on his first solo album. Too bad - because as Smith makes clear in this post from his blog from 2008, his first musical dream as a boy was to write a Kingston Trio song - Smith on the KT - scroll down to May 2008. Smith comments -

Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio has recorded "The Dutchman" on his very first ever solo CD and it's coming out momentarily and I've heard it and he does it so good, it makes me cry. It is the definitive recording of "The Dutchman" as far as I'm concerned, and "The Dutchman" is a Kingston Trio song at last, fifty years after I first heard the Trio... :

The banjo here is played by current Kingston Trio member Bill Zorn, who was also a member of Shane's New Kingston Trio from 1973-76 with the late Roger Gambill, whose voice I believe I hear at the top of the blend. If so, then this is a NKT number from the mid-70s unreleased until Shane's solo effort.

Jerry Jeff Walker gave "The Dutchman" just a touch of country in this excellent 1992 performance:

Finally - I wonder how many remember that original Starsky and Hutch actor David Soul had a sweet tenor voice and a monster hit in 1977 with "Don't Give Up On Us Baby." He does justice to Smith's song here from the mid-80s:

Part of the magic of "The Dutchman," I believe, lies in the fact that it marries a chilling fear to a profound and beautiful hope - that if, God forbid, we should lose our selves in the mists and then darkness of old age, there might be someone there whose love is so complete that he or she can see past the wreckage of what we have become to the beauty of what we once were. Smith's song makes us believe that it is possible that the dark realities of aging can be held at bay to a degree at least by the miraculous reality of a transcendent love.

Late Additions

This post has elicited some wonderful suggestions from friends of mine in the John Stewart/Kingston Trio internet world. Tim Riley, proprietor of Bloodlines (the very long-running John Stewart message board) related his admiration for the version by the protean pop-rock-folk rock group Cashman and West, and my fellow subscriber to Tim's board and Trio fantasy camp buddy and fine performer in her own right Kate Snow did the same for Steve Cottrell's take on the song, Steve being a mutual friend. I'm delighted to present those two versions here as well:

Cashman and West

Steve Cottrell

And courtesy of my NorCal friend and general folk expert PC Fields, here is the We Five (of "You Were On My Mind" fame) from 2009:

A fine version from the Shaw Brothers of New Hampshire, formerly of the Brandywine Singers:

And from 2010, Tony Poole:

"With You My Johnny Lad"

2011-01-27T22:01:00.000-08:00

I can well remember fifty years ago being intrigued by an anomaly that I noted in many of the folk records that I was listening to regarding a Scots song (one that was often covered by Irish groups) called "My Johnny Lad." It's a fun little song about dancing and courtship and a whole bunch of other things. What was odd, though, was that there were two rather radically different versions of the song that I was hearing. By itself, perhaps, that was not such a big thing - after all, it's hard to imagine how a song like "The Raggle Taggle Gypsies/Black Jack Davy" morphed into a variant like "The Gypsy Rover" - but the different and associated "Johnny Lad" songs were at the same time very different in tone and pace while sharing many of the same words.

The first version that I heard was from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's first album on Columbia Records in 1961 (they had three full albums on their own Tradition Records prior to this release). Here is a live performance virtually identical to the album cut from a 1962 Chicago PBS broadcast:

This is one of the all-too-few CB&TM numbers that features eldest brother Paddy on lead vocal. I remember a comment made on this site when I wrote about "The Jug of Punch" two years ago that Paddy had a distinctly aggressive way of presenting a lyric, one that was refreshingly manly. The same could also be said for the Clancys' general approach to Celtic songs, one that generated for them the same kind of criticism in Ireland that the pop folk groups here in the U.S. were getting at the same time. This is not surprising, because as Liam Clancy related in his autobiographical The Mountain of the Women a few years back, the group patterned themselves after the Kingston Trio, even including the decision to wear nearly matching versions of those impossibly warm, cable-knit Aran Island sweaters (or "jumpers" as they called them). Many of the Clancys songs - their trademark opener "Brennan on the Moor," for example - were originally medium to slow reflective tunes that the group powered into high energy numbers, replete with shouts and barks and whistles. And that approach to the music, as we'll see below, became standard for Scots and Irish folk groups that followed them.

A couple of years before the Clancy release, the Kingston Trio had recorded a song called "With You My Johnny" on Sold Out, one of their musically most satisfying albums. This version has distinct lyrical similarities to the Clancy version but with a radically different melody:

This is vintage popularized folk music. The Guard-Reynolds-Shane lyric is simply an anglicized rendering of the traditional Scots dialect version done a couple of years before by the great Ewan MacColl and his lady Peggy Seeger, which you can see on Mudcat.org HERE . The group's musical setting - somewhat slower and in a minor key compared to the Clancy rendition - is a clear attempt rhythmically to catch the feeling of the drone of bagpipes, with its heavy, punctuated emphasis on every fourth beat - listen to Bob Shane's guitar intro to hear it.

To muddy the waters further, the Kingstons two years later recorded a number with a Clancy-type melody and chorus and verses that evoke the same feeling as the traditional number - but that they called "Genny Glenn":

(Note - 8/24/11: Well, Capitol/ EMI has blocked the Trio's version of the song - so here is their arrangement as performed a couple of years ago by some enthusiastic amateurs at the KT Fantasy Camp in Arizona)

The reconciliation between the two versions, it turns out, was not at all that complex. Ewan MacColl, a folklorist as well as performer (and radical and actor and 20 other things as well) wrote that the "Johnny Lad" song was "originally a very beautiful pastoral song in the tempo of a slow (minor) strathspey. Johnny Lad moved to Glasgow during the late 19th century and was transformed into a children's street song. The lyrics became urbanized and the original air was abandoned in favor of a catchy but much plainer tune." A strathspey is a Scots dance named after a region that featured a moderate tempo - as can be heard in the Kingstons' "Johnny" above. That's the original rural version, with its slyly naughty lyric. The Clancys are doing the second, later, urbanized version with the slightly more sophisticated and satiric lyrics. Note that the "with you my Johnny chorus" of the KT version fits with the lyric sung by a girl - but that the "urban" Clancy version is a man's song except for the chorus. As for "Genny Glenn" - a Kingston re-write, probably by John Stewart, to reap the copyright rewards, just as the group had done with other traditional songs like "A Worried Man."

Now for some other versions. First, the rural girl's number sung by a lady, from a house concert by the charming Sarah McQuaid, whom I previously featured as a lady doing a lady's song in my post about "The Wagoner's Lad":

McQuaid, who has an Irish mother and spent her formative years in Eire, is doing the KT modern English rendering of MacColl's Scots lyric. The jazz-based chords of the guitar setting make an interestingly original if not wholly successful presentation.

One of the great Folk Revival Scots groups was The Corries, here from 1976:

You can hear traces of the old strathspey here, I think.

Finally, from the Canadian-Irish trio Ryan's Fancy:

This was a great group, performing here on Tommy Makem's TV show and with, I think, a clear bow of the head to the pioneering musical style of the Clancys with Tommy.

I have to say that this has been one of the most enjoyable of these posts for me to write, not only because I've always loved both versions of the song but also because of the number of actual live performance videos here. I'd also add that however "popularized" these may be, they sound a hell of a lot more authentic that the punked out stuff of the Killigans or the Pogues on one extreme and the sugary and sentimental Celtic Thunder-type groups on the other end of the contemporary "Celtic" spectrum.