"The Erie Canal/Low Bridge"

"The Erie Canal" song represents a confluence of many of the deepest, longest-term, most cherished and most abiding interests of my entire life. It is one of the very first songs that I ever remember hearing and singing along with, back in the very early 1950s to a children's record that featured what was probably Burl Ives' version. It reflects on what was one of the most moving chapters in early American history, which with literature has been the greatest intellectual joy of all my years. It is, as we shall see, a nostalgic reflection on a time that had already past when the song was published - and we Hibernian Americans are nothing if not nostalgic. Finally, it reflects in its lyric the best of what America used to be and can be again - a land where government in partnership with energetic individuals works best to serve the interests of the common people who work for a living, and not the interests of those already-fabulously wealthy folks who plead, then as now, for just one more break that will somehow mystically redound to the Greater Good while it further enriches them.

The Erie Canal project was the Mission to the Moon of its day - widely considered an impossible folly, it was completed on-time and at budget and began immediately to pay for itself, not only in dollars but in the improvement of the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the Upper Midwest in general. Just as the voyage to the moon engendered directly or indirectly a plethora of useful technologies (including most of the advances that led to the computer I'm typing on and the internet to which this will be published), the Erie Canal provided an economic lifeline for all of the Americans who had moved into the old Northwest Territory that we now call the Midwest (my birthplace, not coincidentally). The Canal created a cheap and dependable transportation link that enabled farmers and miners and settlers and lumbermen to put cold, hard cash in their pockets and improve their lot and that of their families.

While canals linking Lake Erie at Buffalo, NY with the Hudson River (and consequently the Atlantic Ocean) at Albany had been proposed as early as the 1760s, it took the vision of career politician (an honorable term, once upon a time) DeWitt Clinton to realize the dream. Clinton had held virtually every important office in the short history of the state of New York - state legislator, mayor of NYC, U.S. representative and senator (and nearly successful presidential candidate), lieutenant governor, and finally governor. In the latter two capacities, Clinton cajoled, bullied, and persuaded the NY legislature to budget $7 million to build the canal - an unthinkable, TARP-like sum at the time, when the federal budget in DC was a mere $19 million per year. Clinton understood that no amount of privatization or outsourcing could make this project happen. It was a government enterprise all the way, and it was government that succeeded in accomplishing a task that most rational people thought impossible.

It took a mere seven years to complete the 363 mile "ditch," including 83 locks that enabled the flat-bottomed barges to rise the 600 foot differential between Albany and Buffalo. It was the most stupendous and amazing feat of civil engineering of its era - and this despite the fact that none of the men who planned the route and the locks were professional engineers or government employees. It was truly a marriage of the vision and energy of private citizens with the sponsorship that only a government acting as its incorporated citizenry could provide.

The Erie Canal also gave rise to a subculture of teamsters and boatmen and merchants who quite naturally gloried in their roles in this wondrous achievement and consequently and of course sang about it. There were some great songs - "The E-Ri-E Was A-Rising," "Oh! Dat Low Bridge!," "Raging Canal," and of course, this week's selection, likely the most famous of all, published in 1905 as "Low Bridge, Everybody Down" by Thomas Allen. Allen maintained that he composed the song as a nostalgic tribute to the then-vanished mule teams and drivers who had originally pulled the barges through the canal at fifteen miles a day, replaced eventually by steam cars that could do the job cheaper and faster. But Allen was likely drawing to a degree at least from songs that had actually been sung by the workers themselves - in the best folk tradition, he borrowed and stole and invented and re-arranged until he had a song that was simultaneously all his but with a musical DNA stretching back decades before.

I found it just a tad discouraging that I couldn't find on YouTube or elsewhere a Burl Ives recording or one that sounded really like the version I learned as a child - but this amusing video from theBigFish [sic] comes fairly close:



You can hear Allen's musical sophistication here - the key and tempo shifts, with the melancholy minor-keyed verses resolving gently into the positive, upbeat major chord chorus. This version is a bit too Springsteen-ish for my tastes, but it is the basic song with minimal embellishment.

[Interpolated Edit - May 2012: Eureka! A video of Pete Seeger doing part of the song has been uploaded to YouTube. I wish Seeger had done the whole thing - but at least we can get the idea of how the song should sound:



Now this really amateur home recording from RoseMarama of New Zealand at least has the virtue of solo guitar accompaniment:



I think Rose does a commendable job - at least she performs it like a folk song and really seems to enjoy doing so.

This version from 1958 features Mitch Miller's group on background and the Sandpipers:



The Corndoggers start out promisingly and carry a good boat-man-sounding vocal throughout - but then instrumentally they go all Springsteen on us. Too bad:



I can do without the drums, guys. It's a FOLK song.

Sony-BMG has blocked virtually every video of Bruce Springsteen performing his 2006 Seeger Sessions version of the song, except for an occasional bootleg that manages to pass under the radar, as in this crude cellphone video from a Dublin performance:



I had a mixed reaction to the Boss's Seeger project (much as Pete himself did). Springsteen is a rocker, one of the best that this country has produced. But as we all know, rock is derived primarily from black blues and rhythm and blues traditions. I thought that Springsteen's best efforts on that album were those that tapped into black traditions, spirituals like "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." I didn't feel that Euro-Anglo-Irish derived tunes like "Jesse James" or this one worked particularly well at all.

And now for some genuinely different versions - first, the Kingston Trio:



This is one of the last Public Domain numbers attempted by the group. It's a serviceable arrangement - kind of a "generic uptempo folksong" reading that sacrifices the emotional nuances of the original for a kind of good-timey feeling that is more anticipatory of what in 1962 the New Christy Minstrels were about to do with pop folk music than reflective of the more sensitive and often introspective folk arrangements of the original Trio.

Speaking of different - here is a soul arrangement by The Juke Box Band:



The rhythm here is a fascinating melding of reggae with straight-up R&B. Maybe not folk, but a "noble experiment."

Frank Macchia's All Star Jazz Band likewise combines a bit of Dixieland with a more contemporary ex-temp jazz style - a really interesting crossover:



This CD of Machia's is called Folk Songs For Jazzers, and that about says it all. It is a great effort, and if the song is propelled far beyond its folk roots, it's still nice to see kissing cousins jazz and folk getting along so well.

When I was a boy, I loved "The Erie Canal" song's shift into the major key on the chorus, and I sang along lustily. I suppose that now I am a lot older, it is Allen's nostalgia that touches me most deeply. Our boatman's affection for ol' Sal - an anachronism whose time has passed - connects somehow with my wistful memories of a time when folk was folk and an acoustic guitar and/or banjo and a good song like this one was all that you needed to make compelling music that people would connect with and listen to.

Blind Willie McTell To Johnny Cash: "Delia's Gone"

On Christmas Eve of the year 1900, according to several shadowy but semi-authenticated sources, a fourteen-year-old African-American girl named Delia Green was murdered by her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Mose Houston (or Huston), in Savannah, GA for reasons that time has obscured. According to the same fragmentary records, young Houston was convicted of the murder but in an act of clemency unusual for the South at the time and likely due to his age was sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled some decades later and vanished into obscurity.

This incident may have - or may not have - been the inspiration of a song (or songs) that come down to us as "Delia's Gone" and that provide a fine example of what we call the folk process.

With some songs, ethnologists and musicologists have a fairly easy time tracing roots and branches. There is, for example, a direct and easily hearable connection between the 17th century Irish lament "The Bard of Armagh" and the grandaddy of all American cowboy songs, "The Streets of Laredo," because the melodies are virtually identical; it's more of a challenge to hear the connection between "Bard" and the old Basin Street blues number "St. James Infirmary," though nearly every discussion of the latter song says it's so. And thus it is with hundreds of the folk songs collected and categorized by giants of the field like Francis James Child and the redoubtable Lomax family.

Like many genuine songs that we now identify as traditional, no one knows exactly where or when people began to sing mournfully about the recently departed Delia. Not surprisingly, one version seems to have been in circulation in Atlanta and Charleston, SC (and please, in honor of Mike Askins, do not pronounce the "r" - it's "Chall-ston") around 1910, and a decade later a substantially different and more ambiguous arrangement pops up in New Orleans. The older one features lyrics similar to Johnny Cash's below - a "Tony shot his Delia/ On a Saturday night" - Cash changes it to first person "I"); the Louisiana number identifies Delia as either a gambler or trusted friend whose death is a cause for sorrow, rather more like Dylan's, and which Waylon Jennings shows cross-pollinates with another New Orleans number. Some experts believe that it was just the natural diversification of song variants that we can see in, say, "The Gypsy Laddie" becoming "Black Jack Davey" and finally morphing into the very different "Gyspy Rover" while others maintain that there were two different root songs - and maybe two different but equally unfortunate Delias.

Whatever the case, one of the really early recordings is from the Library of Congress recording of Blind Willie McTell (who inspired Britain's Ralph may to change his name to Ralph McTell, composer of "The Streets of London") from around 1933:



Now the Kingston Trio didn't venture too frequently into blues-flavored numbers, though when they did (think "Leave My Woman Alone" or "This Mornin', This Evenin' So Soon" or "The Wanderer") they could be very effective. The Trio's version separates the singer from responsibility for the girl's death, leaving him in a pain that can only be alleviated by drinking - "one more round." The instrumental accompaniment here features one of the stronger and more emphatic contributions of KT bassist Dean Reilly - there was an odd comfort and symmetry in knowing now that the last time that Nick, Bob, and John ever played together in August 2007 in Scottsdale that they were joined by a vigorous and beaming 80-year-old Dean:



The highest profile modern rendition of "Delia" belongs to Johnny Cash. There is a fine performance video of JC singing it in 1969 on his TV show, but I found this MTV-era video from the Americanh Recordings sessions of 1994 to be more satisfying - Just Johnny in fine voice accompanied only by his own guitar work, reminding us of what a fine rhythm player he was. JC's lyrics are bloodier than the Trio's and give another possible meaning to "one more round." This is Cash at his folkiest:



The above-mentioned Mike Askins mentioned how much he loved "Hee Haw" (me too, Mike), and Waylon Jennings' rendition of "Delia" is a reminder of how much good music the show featured. Jennings is clearly doing the New Orleans version, which is conflated with another very familiar N.O. classic:



Reggae/blues/rap/all-purpose superstar Wyclef Jean gives an island flavor to Cash's arrangement:



For a completely different take, our late friend Travis Edmondson and Bud Dashiell do that inimitable up-tempo Spanish-flavored guitar accompaniment that only they could pull off - Travis especially here with his rhythmic tapping of the sound board leaves you astonished - from one of Hefner's shows in the 60s:



Now I happen to be in the minority around here, I think, in that I really like Bob Dylan's singing when, as they say in sports, he stays within himself, which he does very effectively in folk blues numbers like this - rather closer to Willie McTell's:



This is one of those weeks when I really, really enjoy this Comparative Videos project - every version is a gem.

Addendum - 6/13/10

Here are some other interesting amateur versions - first, Bill Kostelec doing a fine rendition of the most traditional St. Louis bluesy version:



Warren H. Mayo presents NYC folk legend Happy Traum's arrangement - excellent guitar work here:



If videos of the deleted ones above become available again, I'll re-post them.

"Lonesome Valley/The Reverend Mr. Black"

Most Kingston Trio fans know the story of how "The Reverend Mr. Black" became a hit single because it was related expertly in the Blake, Rubeck and Shaw The Kingston Trio On Record. The short version is that a high school English teacher in Chicago was trying to instruct a class in the ways in which small groups could manipulate mass media, so he had his 95 students pick what they deemed as the worst and most obscure cut from a record album that they could find and try to promote it into an attention-getting hit. The students chose this song from the respectably-selling 1963 album #16 and immediately began flooding Chicago station WLS with calls requesting that the station play the number.

Now WLS was much more than the Windy City's most prominent Top 40 station. Along with Pittsburgh's KDKA and a handful of other mega-powerful 50,000 watt stations, its signal blanketed the central third of the country and had already contributed enormously to popularizing country music in the 30s and 40s with its "Barn Dance" show (among others). Owned initially as it was by mid-America's champion of retailing, Sears Roebuck, whose logo "World's Largest Store" gave the station its call letters, it possessed a huge influence in the music industry. If WLS said a song was a hit - it was a hit.

Capitol Records recognized that power, and largely at the insistence of WLS released "The Reverend Mr. Black" as a single. It reached #8 on the national Billboard singles Top 40 chart, the only KT single record after "Tom Dooley" to reach the Top 10.

But the fact that a few score phone calls from teenagers had a part in creating a hit record does not, in fact, tell the whole story at all. They may have tricked WLS and Capitol into thinking that there was hit potential in the song - but over 400,000 units of the recording were sold, and that didn't happen because of a high school English teacher. It happened because of the pedigree of the song itself and because of a rockin' good performance of it by the Kingston Trio.

We know that the song was penned by the great Billy Edd Wheeler (above) and Jed Peters, but as Wheeler explains, he had some pretty heavyweight help. The "Jerry and Mike" he alludes to here are none other than Lieber and Stoller, one of the greatest pop music writing duos of all time ("Hound Dawg," "Stand By Me," "Kansas City," "Jailhouse Rock," and dozens of others).

Billy Edd Wheeler on "Reverend Mr. Black" and "Coal Tattoo"



The other part of the pedigree and possibly the more significant one is that the root song is "Lonesome Valley," one of the best-known of the gospel hymns copyrighted by A.P Carter in the 30s and sung by the original Carter Family (though it's one that AP credited as "traditional"). By the time that Wheeler's song was muscled into public attention more by the KT's star power than by a few students, millions of Americans had already heard the chorus on the radio and from gospel choirs in their local churches. I'd bet that the Trio's decision to include a back-up group of gospel-ish female singers on the record stemmed in part from that and in part from the fact that Bob Gibson's wonderful 1961 album Yes I See (a real stunner if you've never heard it) had sold very well and included the Gospel Pearls quartet as back-up singers on about half of the songs to great and original effect.

So here's the Trio with as we-all-know-now-but-didn't-then Glen Campbell on banjo:



It was this song as much as any other that saddled John Stewart with the "Johnny Cash sound-alike" tag, which wasn't really fair because Stewart had a more mellifluous and on-pitch baritone than Cash did. Given the obvious similarities, though, I always thought that Cash was tipping his hat to Stewart when he recorded it years later:



And a non-embeddable link to a church web page featuring Cash's version : Johnny Cash: The Reverend Mr. Black

For an interestingly different version, here is actor and singer Tim Grimm from Indiana. Grimm has a great resume as an actor and records for Allan Shaw's Wind River records - this is a slower, softer, more reflective take:



"Lonesome Valley" itself has been covered repeatedly and beautifully by some of the greatest folk artists of the century. First up, a later incarnation of the Carter Family, Mother Maybelle with sisters June, Helen, and Rosey with Johnny Cash on harmony, from the 1980s:



Next, as far as I'm concerned, my "find" of the week - Joan Baez with the recently departed Mary Travers at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, a real gem:



Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with Pete leading the audience, from about 1990 I'd say. 'Nuff said:



Speaking of classic - the first folk blues artist I ever heard (in the Newport recordings from 1960-61), Mississippi John Hurt:



Closing here with the most soulful version I've heard from the gospel Fairfield Four, as heard in O Brother Where Art Thou?



I'm out of space - so in the words of a comment on Tim Grimm's video - "nice job guys! make this kind of music live on!" Amen.

Addendum - 12/21/09

The current Kingston Trio recently uploaded a video of their performance of the classic - a nice update to the original KT recording. George Grove is doing a remarkable re-imagining of the banjo part from the original - remarkable because on the '62 disc, Glen Campbell was playing a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar. George gives it better tonality and a more authentic banjo sound on his Vega longneck:



And Further Yet - August 12, 2013

Unbeknownst to me until today, a year and a half ago some blessed soul uploaded Billy Edd Wheeler's original recording of the song to YouTube. And a fine version it is, demonstrating not only Wheeler's performing chops but also the fidelity that the Kingston Trio's arrangement maintained to the original:

The Mystic Chords Of Memory: "Try To Remember"

Here in Southern California, we baked like hell (nearly literally) in the second hottest October since record-keeping was initiated in 1885, thus obliterating for me even the most fleeting memories of the multi-hued autumns of what was my favorite of all months of the year growing up in the Middle West five decades ago. The fading late afternoon light, softened by the sun's declension into a lower arc in the evening, the chill of the early evening air, the pungent scent of burning leaves - all encouraged the wonderfully strange and almost mystical feelings of melancholy and passing time and yearning for I knew not what that sought out the deepest reaches of my adolescent and Irish soul and embedded themselves there, familiar and comfortable annual visitors that gave even my youngest self opportunities for reminiscence and a gentle, not-unpleasant sense of regret.

And into this emotional landscape dropped the song that expresses those feelings as effectively as any song I know, Harvey Schmidt's and Tom Jones' "Try To Remember" from the longest-running show in theatrical history (42 years, 1960-2002, over 17,000 performances), off-Broadway's The Fantasticks. [The original cast from 1960 (including Jerry Orbach,  center) is pictured at left.]

The show itself is a bit of slightly cornball fluff, a romantic semi-comedy that taps into audiences' most accessible emotions about love and youth and age and experience. There is a narrator named El Gallo who sings this number (repeatedly, like "Old Man River" in Showboat), an ingenue couple, wise old parents, and a Romeo/Juliet kind of story though with an almost happy ending.

But the song burst out of the show that resided all those years at the Sullivan Street Theater, a non-Equity playhouse, meaning 99 seats or fewer, and almost immediately became a standard of the American songbook. Like the signature song in many an American musical - you could walk out of the theater, never having heard it before, humming it and wanting to hear it again.

"Try To Remember" isn't a folk song - but then, in the purest sense, neither is "The Mountains of Mourne" - or "Oh, Susanna!" for that matter. Yet all three and many more like them have been beloved of and sung by generations of people, reminding one of Big Bill Broonzy's quip that all songs are folk songs because he never heard a horse sing (or Bob Shane's corollary - "I'm not a folksinger - I'm a folks' singer.")

The song, though, has many of the elements of a folk song - repetition, lyrical simplicity, a fairly easy tune, and an accompaniment structure that can be done with four easy chords (you can throw in a kind of rogue 7th if you feel you have to). It's so widely known now that it might as well be a folk song - and interestingly, after the play itself, it was largely folk type singers who popularized it.

And now to the music. We start with the original El Gallo himself, the late, great Jerry Orbach. Now Law and Order is one of my all time favorite TV shows, and Orbach was its centerpiece as Det. Lennie Briscoe. But I had known of him 25 years before the TV show because of his Broadway career including Tony Awards and nominations - and Jerry gets our first video today - the original cast recording here:




Now Bob Shane of course always had a way with show tunes, from the very beginning of the group with "Maria" from Paint Your Wagon. What I like so much about this great solo from the KT album #16 in addition to the wonderful guitar arrangement (by John Stauber) is that the raw talent that Bob demonstrates on the several live recordings of "Maria" has grown through years and performance into the superb craft of a vocal artist on his take on the song:



Here is Bob again, eight years later in 1970 from a Japanese recording of the New Kingston Trio - interesting to compare it to his first recording:



A year or so before Bob, though, The Brothers Four had one of their patented mellow top ten hits with the number. This video from the 2002 This Land Is Your Land PBS special has only bassist Bob Flick from the original group, though lead singer Mark Pearson is kind of the George Grove of the BF, having joined the band in 1969 and remained with them through the years. I prefer baritones on this number, but Mark's voice is so clear and melodic that he has almost changed my mind:



To some degree in the popular mind of the time, the song "belonged" as well to Harry Belafonte - and with good reason. This video, from 1976, shows the interpretive and vocal power of one of the greatest popular singers of the last century, 39 at the time and at the height of his power. HB is using his own distinctive vocally counter-pointed arrangement and accompanied by all-star guitarists, Brazilian Sivuca on the left and long-time Belafonte collaborator Millard Thomas on the right. That smoky, mellow baritone of Belafonte's still moves me beyond words:



Critics have branded the song as a kind of sentimental nonsense. Sentimental, yes - but like the best songs of that stripe ("Danny Boy," anyone?), an honest and unabashed sentimentality is an art form of its own, one of enduring validity. "Try To Remember" pretends to be nothing more than it is - a simple song whose evocative power resides precisely within its simple emotionality.

Appendix - 6/7/10

Within the last few weeks, a performance video of the great Jerry Orbach doing the number in 1982 surfaced. Given the fact that videos from TV shows tend to disappear rather quickly from YT, I'll post it here for as long as it's viewable:



9/2/11

For the full on pop vocal, the great Ed Ames: