Print The Legend: "Remember The Alamo"

For fans of classic western movies, it just doesn't get better than John Ford's wonderful The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The film's components are hard to beat - what's not to love about John Wayne (in one of his absolutely best performances) playing Tom Doniphon, an upright tough guy who is reduced to alcoholism and failure by an act of self-sacrifice for the woman he loves, or James Stewart as Rance Stoddard, a good man corrupted into a false success by that selfsame act, or Lee Marvin as a villainous Valance who would be a comedic stereotype were he not so casually, psychotically, and believably evil?

The film seems somehow perpetually relevant as well in its implied commentary on the nature of fame, especially in politics. Stoddard is retiring from a brilliantly successful political career as the movie ends - but a career based on a fundamental falsehood, one that contributes to the destruction of a better man than Stoddard will ever be.

Liberty Valance is also notable for one of the great tag lines of any western of that or any era - the newspaper editor's comment that "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I'm always reminded of that line when I listen to what for many years was my second-favorite Kingston Trio song (after "Bay of Mexico"), the group's stirring performance of Jane Bowers' "Remember The Alamo," the last cut on the B side of At Large.

The album's liner notes, as I recall, identified Bowers as a "proud Texan who knows much of Texas lore" - and it is the lore of the Battle of the Alamo that we get in this excellent song.

Much, perhaps most, of what actually happened in San Antonio in February and early March of 1836 has been lost to history by neglect, personal and political agendas, and the simple passage of time. The motives of the defenders of the mission were not wholly pure (commander William B. Travis and perhaps a quarter of the Texians or Texicans were intent on creating Texas as a slave state in the Union, viewing an independent republic as only a temporary step), as many as a third of the garrison were Tejanos of Mexican descent, the garrison attempted to negotiate a surrender at least twice, and many of the casualties among the Mexican soldiers resulted from friendly fire because of the incredibly doltish plan of attack by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, which called for simultaneous assaults from three sides causing his troops to fire into each other in volleys.

Other cherished myths about the battle reflected in the Bowers' song also do not stand up to historical scrutiny - to wit: serious historians question whether or not Travis ever drew a line in the dirt with his sword (likely not), Bowie was probably unconscious and near death when bayoneted in his pallet (ouch) by Mexican soldiers who took him for a coward hiding from them, and Davy Crockett was 50 years old, alas! young neither then nor now.

I'm not sure how much of this Bowers knew, and in light of the intent of the song, I don't think it matters much. Here's the KT's version (parenthetically, my first attempt at making a Windows Movie - pardon its crudeness, but it's still better than a stationery image!):



The highlights of this outstanding recording are IMHO first the arrangement (more on that below) and second Bob Shane's incredible rhythm guitar strumming, unmatched in any other version.

I had always thought that Bowers had written this either for the KT with them in mind - but not so, as this version from 1956 by country legend Tex Ritter demonstrates:



Ritter's version, perhaps the first recorded, differs significantly in the chord structure of the accompaniment from the KT's. NBD replace the major chords that Ritter uses with some unexpected sharps and minors that create that flamenco-based sound in their version - very unusual for a banjo, BTW, and I think hugely more effective.

I always try to find an unusual version for these weekend video posts - and here's one from an Irish group called Gaelic Mist:

The Mountains Of Mourne

I was always a bit puzzled by Dave Guard's comment in the Elizabeth Wilson interview (most of which is available at Dave Guard Interview under "Read, Look, and Listen" starting on p.22 of the Popular Folk Music Today DG Memorial Issue and appears in full in Allan, Ben, and Jack's Kingston Trio On Record) that the original Trio began to "run out of ideas" "halfway through Here We Go Again." I say puzzled because in addition to my personal preference for that record, I regard it as critically the best of all Trio albums in design, pacing, song selection, harmony, solos, cover,the kitchen sink, and everything else.

But I am more puzzled because the next two albums, String Along and Sold Out, which Dave apparently regarded with some disdain and which Bob has indicated he disliked several songs included therein ["Don't Cry Katie" comes to mind], include some fabulous songs, one of the most memorable of which is on the short list of the best songs Nick Reynolds ever sang and possibly his finest solo, "The Mountains of Mourne."

Not quite a real folk song, "The Mountains of Mourne" was penned in England in the late 1800s by Percy French (with collaboration from H. Collisson), a music hall composer who realized that he would never make a good living in impoverished Ireland and hence moved to London, where his often comedic songs and stage routines earned him great success for more than 20 years and led to tours of Canada and the U.S.

What might not be immediately apparent to American listeners is the source of the clear satire of the early part of the song. The ethnic jokes that in the U.S. are "Polish" or "dumb blonde" or take-your-pick-of-the-group-you-wish-to-mock have for more than a century been "dumb mic" or "dumb Irish" jokes in England. So in "Mourne" we have a poor, rural, rube of an Irish boy gullible enough to take literally the sardonic comment of sewer workers that they are "digging for gold in the streets" - and who is appalled by the high fashion, high society décolletage of Victorian ladies, a style that violates his Irish Jansenist and puritanical sense of propriety. In one of the verses that the Trio omits but that Don McClean (below) includes beautifully, our lonely young man sees a hometown friend who is a London traffic cop and ascribes to him "great powers" because the traffic stops "at a wave of his hand."

But unlike several of his expatriate peers (see the "Finnegan's Wake" song for a wickedly funny stereotype of Irish drunkenness), French redeems the humorous portrait with the poignant devotion of the singer to his "wild rose that's waiting for me." Unlike many an Irish song popular in America that tend toward sometimes over-wrought feeling ("Danny Boy," "Galway Bay," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and the like), French manages to present the emotional framework of the song in such a way that it skirts the edge but never falls over the cliff of pure sentimentality.

We start, of course, with the audio of the best version of the song on record, Nick Reynolds singing the solo but with Bob and Dave both playing and "ooohing" in the background.




A close second to this, IMHO, is Don McClean's version, which adds the verse about the policeman (but not the three others about French's hope that Ireland and England could be friends - some chance of that). Piano adds a nice touch.



Even a good song can be overdone, and Irish singers do have a tendency to drift into overly-florid singing. I thought I'd upload a Frank Patterson version, or Daniel O'Donnell, or some other less-than-reserved Irish tenor - but since Celtic Thunder is the flavor du jour in over-wrought imitation Celtic music, here's how the song would sound if sung on American Idol.

(2/3/11 - CopyVio got Celtic Thunder - so until they return to YT, here's a fine folk version from Irish Mist:)



Despite the satire, the song is beloved in Eire, as well as in much of the rest of the Celtic world - or perhaps because of it. The Irish do have a sense of humor, and the song is just too lovely and too authentic-sounding to ignore. Here's Scots-Canadian tenor Johnny McDermott:



From England, famed British tenor (from the D'Oyle Carte operatta company and a long career in light opera) Webster Booth, around 1940:



And finally, a nice a capella choral version from 1982 by a group called Wall Street Crash (how timely!) that includes the verse about being friends with England.



I always wished that Liam Clancy would sing this - I believe it would have been comparable in excellence to Nick Reynolds' superb version.

Another Classic Sea Chantey: "Santy Anno"

Capitol T996 "The Kingston Trio" was reputed to be producer Voyle Gilmore's favorite effort of the 21 or so KT albums that he oversaw, and in all its monaural glory still ranks as among the Trio's best efforts. The eclectic mix of the contemporary ("Fast Freight" and "Scotch and Soda"), the novelty ("Three Jolly Coachmen," at least in its droll presentation), the foreign language ("Coplas"), the calypso ("Banua," "Bay of Mexico," and "Sloop John B") and the dramatically re-imagined traditional ("Tom Dooley," "Saro Jane," and "John B") is a great collection in and of itself, and in addition sets the general pattern for most all of the albums released by the original group of Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard.

The old Gold Rush era sea chantey "Santy Anno" is an excellent example of the the way that the musical imaginations of three very young men [with a great add-on by Gilmore] transcended the simplicity of the original source material to produce something new and exciting. [Gold Rush era San Francisco Bay, above]

The origins of "Santy Anno" are obscure - English certainly, but possibly Irish before that - and clearly adopted by American round-the-Horn sailors - the Weavers' version (immediate antecedent of the KT begins "From Boston town we're bound away..." following the text of one of the published Lomax versions). Further, though the English might well have cause to celebrate an enemy of their former colonies, why Americans would take to their hearts a song whose chorus refers to a widely-hated figure (even in his own country) is equally mysterious.

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, general and several times president and dictator of Mexico, was an arrogant, self-important figure. An officer of limited skills (his victories over the Spanish, the French, and rebels within his own country seem frequently to have been products of good luck rather that tactical skill), his subversion of the Republic of Mexico's 1824 constitution (the flag over the Alamo was the Mexican tricolor with the usual eagle/serpent design replaced simply by the date 1824) undermined the brief, flickering possibility for land reform in that country and is the grandparent of the unending widespread economic problems in Mexico to this day.

The Kingston Trio's version is a gem. Gilmore's abovementioned contribution is Buzz Wheeler's wonderful bass run as an intro that presages the dark shadings of the minor key of the song; Gilmore insisted that the album should include Wheeler, whom Gilmore had heard accompanying the group in its first serious professional engagement at San Francisco's Purple Onion nightclub, where Wheeler was the house bassist. The Trio's vocals have the almost hushed urgency that I  love about so many songs on that first album - "John B,""Fast Freight," and "Tom Dooley" especially. No banjo here - but a ton of energy:



Perhaps the best-known classic folk performance is by Odetta, who combines basic instrumentation with a thrilling vocal:



For another take on the song (and please overlook the weird and incongruous anime/manga images), here is a marvelous Seattle-based group called Northwestern Musicians on the album Victory Sings At Sea.* This sounds like the British version of the song - and note how many verses here appear in another KT song from Capitol 996 - GREAT vocals here:



I'd thought this was a completely original arrangement - and then I heard Liam Clancy with cousin Robbie O'Connell and son Donal. And typical Clancys it is - less polished, more direct, and undeniably energetic:



I was delighted to see in the late 90s that former Trio member John Stewart returned to his folk roots with a group called Darwin's Army, which  included Stewart stalwarts John Hoke, Dennis Kenmore, and Dave Batti (all currently touring as part of the John Stewart Band) and John's wife Buffy. They have a classic version of the song, contributed by Kingston Crossroads message board regular Mr. Banjo:



For the more contemporary minded - Nebraska folk-punk (that's what they call themselves) group The Killigans, who put this on a CD. Note their incorporation of the KT/Buzz Wheeler closing riff here:



Finally - a really interesting variation - Spanish-French singer Hugues Aufray, who actually had a hit with this, singing it at his farewell concert in 2001 - in French:



Stan Hugill, himself a former sailor in the last days of the age of sail and who referred to himself as "The Last of the Shanteymen," named an entire category of sea songs the "Santy Anno group," which included "Lowlands" and "Bay of Mexico" and "Away, Rio" - all of which have a punctuating refrain like "Way up, Susianna!" and "Heave away, Santy Anno" and "Away, Rio!" The darkly mysterious power of this old song, performed with gusto and drama as we can hear in the renditions above, assures that we will be hearing it for a long time to come.

Addendum, 5 Years Later - August, 2013

I just found that a few months ago, some kindly soul had uploaded The Weavers' version of this marvelous song - and it was that version that is clearly the direct inspiration for The Kingston Trio. The Weavers at their best:





*And Further....6/1/2014

I have since found out that the commanding lead vocal in this version is by the redoubtable Hank Cramer, one of the Pacific Northwest's finest folk performers (and busiest, looking at his performing calendar). I think this arrangement and Hank's singing make this the best rendition of the song currently available.

The Water Is Wide

In The Kingston Trio On Record, Ben Blake and Jack Rubeck's comment on the original Kingston Trio's ninth album Make Way was that it lacked "the spark of vibrant enthusiasm" of earlier LPs, that its jacket suggested a "brooding aura" of "dark tones" - and their estimate that many fans regarded it as the "least effective" of the NBD efforts. While the album lacks the all-out banjo blaster that became the Trio's hallmark, it does in fact have some outstanding cuts: the song that in a faster version became the show opener for the NBJ trio's last two years (Guthrie's "Hard Travelin"), one of Bob Shane's best solos - one that really showcases the range and color of his voice ("Blow The Candle Out"), two fine and original versions of English folk songs ("Hangman" and "Fair And Tender Ladies"), and three nicely-turned Celtic songs in "Bonnie Heilan' Laddie," "The Jug of Punch," - and "The River Is Wide."

"River" is copyrighted by the Trio as a Nick Reynolds arrangement, and in the best KT tradition, Nick simply changed the rhythm and a few words of a very old Irish (or Scots - no one is sure) song entitled "The Water Is Wide," also known as "O Waly Waly." Authoritative websites like The Contemplator [a treasure chest for traditional music lovers - here's his "Waly" page: The Contemplator] suggest the song dates to 1734 - but they're not entirely correct - I found a version of it in the crumbling leaves of a Renaissance song book from about 1590 in the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois many years ago.

The song has a multitude of variants - the Irish "Carrickfergus," which to me sounds little enough like the original until the very end, and with distant echoes in Ray Hannisian's choral number "I'm Moving On" and even Rod McKuen's "Isle In The Water" (this last not surprising since most of McKuen's lyrics are derived directly from a poem by William Butler Yeats, who was steeped in his own Irish folk traditions).

The sheer plaintive beauty of the song, with its older-but-wiser and lost love themes, is given a simple, direct, and effective reading by the Trio in their album cut - which is here from Make Way:



The song has been re-interpreted scores of times in scores of ways by a plethora of really famous and talented musicians.

Speaking of whom - I believe my earlier posting of golden-voiced New Zealand soprano Hayley Westenra's "Shenandoah" scored some points with a few Xroaders who hadn't heard her before, and she has several performance videos of her interpretation:



The most traditional-sounding version I could find - and interestingly, the one closest in some ways to the KT's - is not surprisingly Liam Clancy's solo effort:



Back to the ladies - I alluded above to an Irish song called "Carrickfergus" - which I knew as a child through the rough voice of Tommy Clancy. Well, before Hayley W. there was Charlotte Church, to whom Hayley is often compared. Here Church sings "Carrickfergus," and you can hear the extent to which it echoes "The River is Wide":



A search on YouTube will yield many more female singers giving it a go, from the sublime version of the late Eva Cassady to the disappointingly awful bluesed-up version attempted by Sheryl Crow. Bob Dylan gives it a shot - a rather poor one, I think, even with Joan Baez trying to help. But Joan B's solo rendition is, as you would expect, sublime:




Of the many instrumental versions out there (often over-done - something about the simplicity of the melody seems to encourage guitarists and pianists to start riffing all over the place), the most unique I found was this slightly syncopated yet still traditional sounding one - by a chorus of harp-guitars:



The last word for this post will be a blast from the past, black and white, sung in mid-Sixties syncopated pop fashion by a great pop singer of the era, gone now for nearly a decade from cancer - Dusty Springfield:



It's a great song that keeps getting reinvented - many more versions out there on YT.

Addendum 6/11/10

The late actor Pernell Roberts (1928 - 2010), most famous for TV roles on Bonanza in the '60s and Trapper John, M.D. in the 80s, was also a trained and professional singer whose ten years on the boards in NYC included a number of musical comedy roles. He released one album of folk songs, and his rich baritone on "Water" is a revelation to those who knew him only as an actor:


Addendum II - July 2012

The explosion of popularity of YouTube over the last four years has led to the posting of dozens of more quality versions of this and most any other good song. Here are a few of the ones that I regard as the best.

2009 - Emmylou Harris & Ensemble At Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday Celebration



Australia's Seekers, About 1966



Judy Collins, 2005



Fred Neil From His 1965 Debut Album - The Only Song On The Record That He Did Not Compose

"A Lovely Shade Of Red, But A Naughty Boy": Hoyt Axton And "Greenback Dollar"

Hoyt made a mere $800.00 from the song. "After I got ripped off as a writer on 'Greenback Dollar', I didn't go into a blue funk and walk around crying that everyone's crooked," Hoyt says of the experience. "I've always been an optimist, and I'm going to stay that way until I die. I think I get that from my mother, who could go up to the devil himself, and she'd say 'Hello, young man, you're a lovely shade of red, but you're a naughty boy'. With 'Greenback Dollar', I had a crooked publisher, and that was when I'd only been in the business a year, so I didn't know anything - I was just a kid with a guitar living in a car... How could I sue when the whole point of the song was how I didn't give a damn about a greenback dollar?"
- Mark Weierman

Hoyt Axton was a character and a half. Voice, personality, physique, creative success - he was a sort of a larger than life latter-day Burl Ives on drugs. If Axton was never either quite the singer or actor that Ives was - and he wasn't, as Ives could range from "The Blue Tail Fly" to "Long Black Veil" as a singer and from melodrama to Faulkner and Miller as an actor -
Burl never wrote a succession of iconic songs as Hoyt did - "Joy To The World" (Three Dog Night), "Sweet Misery" (John Denver), "The Pusher" (Steppenwolf and the opening song in Easy Rider ), "Never Been To Spain" (Waylon Jennings and Three Dog Night) - and of course, "Greenback Dollar."

As most fans probably know, Axton was the son of "Heartbreak Hotel" co-writer Mae Boren Axton and came to the LA/San Francisco folk scene somewhat late in the game - around 1962, making GD a relatively quick if not quite golden financial success for a 24 year old singer/writer who was just about a year older than John Stewart.

Axton, however, was seduced by the music business drug culture that took off roughly simultaneously with Axton's career, and Hoyt's ongoing battles with addiction to alcohol and cocaine likely contributed to his premature death in 1999 at 61.

I saw him solo several times at the Troubadour and the Roxy in LA, and he gave no outward evidence of those problems. He was a large bear of a man with an engaging personality, ready wit, and utterly no pretension about him. He just didn't fit comfortably into any niche - too throaty and rough edged for the smoother 70s singer/songwriters like Simon, Taylor, Denver, and so on - but neither rocked out enough to appeal to the metalheads nor pseudo-country enough to appeal to the Flying Burrito-Poco-Eagles crowd. But he kept plugging away, a workman-like actor, performer, and songwriter who stayed on the job til the end.

Axton related somewhere I can't find that he met cowriter of GD Ken Ramsey in a laudromat, and that Ramsey had some of the words and part of a chorus for the song that became his first writing hit. Ramsey and Axton finished the song in an afternoon, did a demo, and sent it to the abovementioned publisher, who promptly bought their rights to the song for $800 each.

I'll bet it looked like a lot of money at the time........

You might think that the Kingston's version was all that there was to the song.............but not at all so. The enduring appeal of the KT version, though, is reflected on its continually self-renewing popularity, most recently as we know at the end of the film Thank You For Smoking - and in the fact that a weak video montage of the Trio that includes photos of many KT troupes (but not the one that sang the song!) would garner more than 370,000 views:



A YT video of Hoyt doing his own song was yanked for CopyVio - but another YouTube phenom - Fretkiller performs a version close to Axton's own. He did not permit his videos to be embedded - a stricture I evaded for nearly two years by using an international site that permitted embedding. The web cops caught up with that site though...and with Fretkillr, whom they banned for unspecified reasons (probably copyvio complaints from rights holders of some of the songs he covered). Some intrepdid YouTubers, however, managed to rescue some of FK's work from the dump - here is his excellent "Greenback Dollar":



Speaking of Mama Mia - here are Sweden's famous Hootenanny Singers with future ABBA star Bernie Ulvaeus - a real KT tribute:



For the just plain strange, how about surf guitar/singer/legend Dick Dale giving it a try - with the DelTones, sax, drums - but no Dick on guitar:



Finally - of all the straight-on rock versions on YouTube, the benchmark performance is probably 80s neo-folk group the Washington Squares:



Nostalgia moment: I still have stored somewhere a beautiful vinyl album with my favorite KT album cover - New Frontier. A red sticker is affixed to the upper right of the record - an ink drawing of a genie with a crystal ball and the legend "Preview Album! Hear 1963's Music Today!"

Of time and the river.............

2011 Addition

Johnny Rivers, who never gets enough credit for his pop-rock-folk-blues contributions, - live from 1965:




...and Barry McGuire of "Eve Of Destruction" fame - a good friend of both Axton and Ramsey and an uncredited co-writer of this song,

Generic Uptempo Folk Song: "This Little Light Of Mine"

One of the delights of the Hassilev-Daugherty-Zorn incarnation of the Limeliters (as on 2002's This Land Is Your Land PBS special) is their "Generic Uptempo Folksong," which manages simultaneously to satirize the genre, deliver an excellent example of it, and credit its most successful exponents ("the one we stole from the Kingston Trio"). [In the unlikely event that someone hasn't seen/heard this, I'm including it in an appendix below.]

As effectively as the Trio could deliver a ballad or quieter number (see the "Shenandoah/Across The Wide Missouri" discussion below - and "Flowers" of course, and many more), they set themselves apart from their host of imitators with their nearly inimitable delivery of strong, usually banjo-based fast songs with an energy approached IMHO only by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (in their distinctive style) and maybe CMT and PP&M on some numbers. But the Kingston's 50,000 watt performances just embodied the old saw of "often imitated, never duplicated."

Oddly, that golden Capitol T-996 that Bert mentions below does not open with one of these - "Three Jolly Coachmen" isn't "Hard Ain't It Hard" (which we know became their concert-opening staple) or "Little Maggie" on that same album. Most - but not all - of their subsequent albums, however, do open with a toe-tapper, if not always with a banjo number.

Now while At The Hungry i is often listed as the Trio's top-selling album (with no hit single but opening with generic UTFS "Tic Tic Tic") [KTOR lists [The Best of the Kingston Trio, there is no doubt that for many fans, College Concert is at or near the top of the list for either favorite album or favorite live performance album. And it, of course, opens with the Trio's stirring rendition of "This Little Light Of Mine," presented here as our benchmark for comparison:



The Trio always seemed both comfortable with spirituals, and after "When The Saint Go Marching In " (whose arrangement down to lyrics, pauses, and inflections is borrowed directly from The Weavers) had an interesting and original way with them - think about the key shifts in "Good News," or the modulations of volume in "Round About The Mountain" or the antiphony in "To Be Redeemed." They also stayed within themselves, to use the sports phrase, and didn't try to be something they weren't - like a gospel choir. For that - the roots version, I guess you could say, sounding probably a little bit closer to the way that the song actually was sung in the 19th century - here is the Sydney Ellis Gospel Quartet:



It's hard to say at this distance in time where the Trio got the idea for doing "Little Light," but certainly one of the highlight performances of the number pre-CC was by Bob Gibson as the Bob Gibson Trio (with master guitarist Dick Rosmini, whom our own Mr. Roadie knew, and legendary jazz bassist Herb Brown) at the Newport Folk Festival of 1960, the two Vanguard albums of which are personal treasures of mine. Gibson was the best damned folksinger that you may have never heard and had three albums of popped-up folk songs including a Carnegie Hall concert before the Trio hit Capitol Studio B.

No video of Bob is currently available - but Australia's Seekers are definitely doing Bob's arrangement in both lyrics and chord structure here:



For an interesting alternative take, here is Leontyne Price, one of the great American operatic sopranos of the last century:



I suppose I have to acknowledge that Bruce Springsteen did a creditable job with the song during the 2006 Seeger Sessions recording and tour - here he is in Italy closing his show with the Trio's opener:



If you do a YouTube search for the song, you will find literally scores, including many from European gospel choirs, clearly singing in a language and idiom not familiar to them in some cases.

As the Trio's version of this classic shows - they created their own idiom and performed brilliantly with in it.

Appendix

The Limeliters "Generic Uptempo Folk Song":

(Yanked for CopyVio - so here are The Limeliters Who Never Were - current Lime Gaylan Taylor in the center flanked by former Limes Bill Zorn (L) and Rick Daugherty (R), currently in the Kingston Trio. Though all three had been Limeliters, they never played together until 8/10 at the KT Fantasy Camp. This one is not copyvio - this is just three guys playing a song):



And finally - I used to say that YouTube was over-populated by teenage girls lip-syncing and undulating in their rooms to various pop songs (leaving one to wonder about parental monitoring of online activity....another question).

I'm not a fan of that so this last may seem odd - but a) the girls aren't teens, b) they're in the driveway, c) the sound is surprisingly good, and d) they do a bang-up job. Here are Jenny and Kathy: