"Pay Me My Money Down"

I saw on FaceBook that today is the 31st anniversary of the death of the legendary Bob Marley, the musical genius who was probably more responsible than any other individual for the popularization worldwide of reggae music. I've often thought of reggae as an acquired taste for many of us who were already grown up when the genre took shape in the late 1960s and 1970s. The musical emphasis on the counter-beat moves syncopation to a new and initially unfamiliar level to those of us who grew up on 4/4 time and 3/4 time standard rhythms, not unlike the effect of the really far-out jazz of a decade or so earlier of Charlie Parker and Theolonious Monk and Dave Brubeck.

And that reggae revolution all but erased the older and more familiar calypso genre from the mainstream of popular music, a really significant erasure if you recall that for a few years in the mid-50s calypso was the most prominent form of pop in a craze that was spearheaded by the phenomenon of Harry Belafonte, one of the first black American musical artists whose crossover appeal far past the restricted areas of blues and jazz presaged in many ways the social upheavals that were to come in the Civil Rights era. Belafonte was a singer's singer, an artist who never limited the material he performed to a single genre and who started his professional career as a Greenwich Village folksinger. His Calypso album of 1956 on RCA Records is a landmark in American musical history as the first recording certified to have sold more than a million copies, and nearly every song on the record has become a pop standard - "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)," "Jamaica Farewell," and "Will His Love Be Like His Rum?" to cite three. The album gave a boost to the careers of both the Caribbean originals from whom Belafonte learned the songs and to American folk groups like The Tarriers and The Weavers who had already included Jamaican and Bahamian songs in their repertoires.

Belafonte was born in New York City of Jamaican parents, and it was from them and from his trips to the island to visit relatives that Harry B first heard the music. The irony is, though, that to scholars what Harry was hearing and singing was not actually calypso music at all, which in its narrowest academic definition can only be from Trinidad and Tobago, whereas similar music from Jamaica must be called mento. So fine a distinction never reached the consciousness of the executives at Victor or the American population at large, and "calypso" came to be the preferred term for all Afro-Caribbean music before reggae.

What we call calypso today was markedly different from reggae in more than rhythm. Calypso music was derived largely from the work songs of black sailors and stevedores and not from the political sensibilities of individual writers as much of reggae is. Even the great calypso composers like Lords Kitchener, Invader, and Intruder were generally basing their compositions on older songs from the docks and fields. And the overwhelming popularity of the genre was such that songs that had originally been 4/4 folk songs were re-cast in the 6/8 calypso rhythm, songs like "Bay of Mexico" for example - or "Pay Me My Money Down."

However old "Pay Me My Money Down" may be, it was first "collected" for publication from dock workers in the Georgia Sea Islands in 1942 by Lydia Parrish, but it must have emigrated to the Caribbean well before that because it was being performed on radio by Lord Kitchener by 1946. Kitchener's lyrics differ somewhat from those published by Parrish, but the basic storyline of a somewhat comical and ill-fated adventure at sea of a roguish working stiff is common to both.

My favorite version of "Pay Me" currently available is the solo effort from 2008 by Bob Shane, the last man standing of the original Kingston Trio, a group whose repertoire in its earliest days and its very name evolved from the '50s calypso craze:



This is classic calypso rhythm and instrumentation, at least as those came into mainstream American pop. Belafonte's recordings often also included steel drums and brass instruments, but the "folk" nature of the genre is on display here more effectively.

Fifty years before that recording, Shane's Kingston Trio was rehearsing the number and testing it out on audiences at San Francisco's Purple Onion nightclub:



A more refined version of the song by the Trio appeared on the CD release of the group's Stereo Concert album, but I prefer the wild energy of this early cut.

The song resurfaced in pop music with Bruce Springsteen's 2006 album and tour that the Boss called "The Seeger Sessions" because the repertoire consisted of largely re-imagined American folk tunes that had been recorded fifty years early by Seeger, or rather in most cases by Seeger's Weavers. While YouTube includes a number of uploads of Springsteen's live version from the tour, I prefer this folkier promo video from 2005:



Springsteen's comments after the song are worth a listen as well - I find his extolling of acoustic instruments somehow amusing. But this cut, which the Boss used to open many of the shows, demonstrates I think Springsteen at his best with this folk material. I thought that the Seeger experiment was a mixed bag: Bruce's attempts at Anglo-American songs fell flat for me, but the spirituals and other African-American songs like this succeeded. Love that touch of zydeco as well.

More recently - a couple of weeks ago, in fact - an Irish folk supergroup consisting of contemporary singers Paul Kelly, Mick Hanly, Eleanor Shanley, Séamus Begley and Frankie Lane and calling themselves "Folk The Recession" posted this Springsteen-influenced version on YouTube:



And continuing with the European flavor - Sweden's young soloist Alexandra Jardvall gets her audience singing along in 2010:



I wish that folks would leave Bruce's off-tempo syncopation to Bruce alone - but I can't complain too much because I have a weakness for throaty alto voices like Jardvall's.

You can trundle around YouTube and find fifty more people channeling Springsteen, and that's fine. As a closer here, though, I thought it would be interesting and fun to include the pop-song hit "Cindy, Oh Cindy" by Vince Martin - the melody will be instantly recognizable as a rewritten version of "Pay Me":



The group backing Martin is none other than The Tarriers, one of the few pre-KT groups to have an actual acoustic folk hit, the calypso "Marianne."

"Pay Me My Money Down" is a two-chord song and consequently is one of the first songs that a number of my guitar playing friends ever learned (mine was "Good News). In folk music, such simplicity is a virtue, and I think that may be what Bruce Springsteen is trying to get at in his comments after his performance of the song in the video above. Elaborate arrangements are what people quite rightly pay to see and hear - but what keeps a song alive is its sing-ability, and "Pay Me My Money Down" certainly has that.

Addendum - May 12, 2012

I'm delighted to have the comment below from "Ranzo" (fine sea chantey name that is), who is Hulton Clint. Hulton has created a YouTube channel dedicated to his renditions of and comments on "chanteys of the seven seas," and his total video view are just under 2 million. Hulton has himself an extended discussion of the nature and history of "Pay Me" on his YouTube upload of the original version of the song HERE, and I'm delighted to present his video below. Thanks, Hulton!



And Further - May 22, 2012

I had intended to include this version of "Hey Li Lee Li Lee" in the article above because it is essentially the same song as "Pay Me." This is a trademark Limeliters number from 1961, featuring a their typically slightly naughty lyric and excellent audience participation:

Remembering Dave Guard

For the last two and a half years as I've been writing these posts, I've noted that there has been a ghost hovering in my office over my right shoulder, gazing at me intently as I write, with an ironic half-smile on his face. I've done my best to ignore him, even when I've mentioned him in these 100+ articles, because he has been haunting me in one incarnation or another for more than fifty years now, just as his long but nearly invisible shadow colors nearly all of the extant threads of American popular music. He is not a threatening spirit at all, though I often think I can hear him insisting in that inimitable voice - "Get it right!" It is the ghost of Donald David Guard, who left this earth 20 years ago next March, a few weeks short of 30 years after he left the group that had started its existence as "Dave Guard and the Calypsonians" and had evolved into the Kingston Trio.

In the small and obscure corners of the internet where you find Guard mentioned at all, it is almost invariably as the founder of the KT, and this is a kind of minor injustice on several counts - to Guard because he quit the group with three decades left in a life that was one of productive if lower profile (and less remunerative) achievements, and to his bandmates Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds because it was a three part synergy that made the group work and not the contributions, however significant, of any single one of them.

I would guess that the Kingston connection is the cornerstone of discussions about Guard not only because of its self-evident historical importance, but also because of the elusive, even ephemeral, nature of what Guard did with his life post-Trio. There was the Australian adventure with the Dave's Place TV show; the Color Guitar music instructional method that he invented; involvement with The Whole Earth Catalog; solo musical performances and shows in combinations with his KT replacement John Stewart and at times with original Trio member Reynolds; several books that he wrote and published and an album that he produced of the music of Hawai'ian slack key guitar legend Gabby Pahinui; an arrestingly original CD/album of his own in 1988 decades after he left the Kingstons and just three years before he died; and a lifelong spiritual odyssey that took him as far away as India and as close to home as San Francisco and New Hampshire. You just can't fit a life like that into a 30 second soundbite or the two sentence lead for a wire service obituary. It has always been easier just to say "founder of the Kingston Trio."

I often wonder how Guard would have felt about that. I met him but once, for about five minutes in 1976 after he had shared the bill with the Modern Folk Quartet at the Ice House in Pasadena, California, and it was just a brief "hello" at a fan meet-and-greet following the performance. I know only the Dave Guard that he intended me and all the other fans to know - the musician, the writer, the ironic onstage intellectual, the iconoclastic restless spirit - the public person whose work is all that he really wanted to share or needed to share in an era before the public's interest in its heroes turned voyeuristic and tawdry.

So it is the public work of Dave Guard with the KT that I want to talk about here, but how to do so is a bit of a challenge. Six months ago when I did a retrospective on Bob Shane, the post was easy to write because Shane's whole professional life has been the Kingston Trio, and his chiefest contributions to it as both a singer and guitarist have been to act as the bedrock voice and rhythm of the group. But Guard's roles were more diverse and harder to express - so it takes more than my share of moxie to divide what Guard did into three aspects - arranger, banjoist, and singer.

Arranger

Though the Trio's repertoire evolved from songs brought to the group by each of the three original members (a process described by Bob Shane in the liner notes for the recently-released Above The Purple Onion CD that chronicles the band's earliest rehearsals and performances), the task of arranging singable (and not incidentally copyrightable) versions of those songs fell to Guard. When he was asked in an interview from the mid-1980s that appeared in The Kingston Trio On Record (much of which is published HERE on Kingston Crossroads courtesy of sitemaster Ken Laing) why this was so, Guard quipped, "Let's see -- the original set-up was that Nick handled transportation, Bobby handled costumes and laundry, and I handled the music." I don't believe that Guard meant that literally, not least because I cannot for the life of me imagine Bob Shane hiking the hills of San Francisco with a pocketful of change and a laundry bag full of soiled striped shirts. It may be accurate in some symbolic way, like the myth about the group signing a contract with manager Frank Werber on a paper napkin at the Cracked Pot beer garden, a tale debunked by Werber as "nonsense" except as a metaphor. I think that this was a bit of Guard's dry humor, mostly because he says more earnestly in the same interview that "I was the guy who was willing to sit down and write the music down and talk to people who did know music about doing it the right way." That sounds right to me.

Of all of the group's early arrangements, there are two that I find especially revealing of Guard's talents as an arranger. First, take a listen again to "Bay of Mexico":



I wrote extensively about this arrangement in my article about the song, last March; suffice it to say here that this version, copyrighted by Dave and Gretchen Guard, combines elements of what the Weavers had done with the song and what Irving Burgie was doing with it for Harry Belafonte with a Guard-esque syncopation, three-part harmony, trademark energy, and key changes. It is simply brilliant.

Bob Shane's Purple Onion CD also gives us the chance to take an even closer look at what Guard was doing with "Across The Wide Missouri/Shenandoah". Trio members always acknowledged the influence of the Weavers on their repertoire, and this heavily orchestrated Gordon Jenkins arrangement from the Weavers' Decca sessions in 1950 (lead sung by non-Weaver Terry Gilkyson) seems to have have been the one that sixteen year old Guard and Shane heard first while they were high school students at Punahou in Hawai'i.:



Guard turned that into this far more respectful and traditional-sounding rendition in the group's earliest days before fame and fortune:



Nice, and better than what the Weavers did, but ultimately fairly pedestrian. However, a mere two years later and with then about twenty five recorded arrangements to his credit, Dave Guard came up with this stunner:



As it seems was the case with everything Guard put his hand to, the quality of what he did grew exponentially as he learned as he went along. The KT "Across The Wide Missouri" is not merely one of the best of the more than 250 songs that the KT waxed - it is one of the absolute best recordings of the entire pop folk boom. And note one detail critical to the success of this version - where Dave took the vocal lead on the Purple Onion recording, this arrangement puts Bob Shane front and center, with the best voice in the group on lead in one of its best songs. Wherever else Guard's ego may have intruded into the group's history, it surely does not do so here.

Banjoist

A generation of banjo players have acknowledged that their romance with the instrument began when they first heard Dave Guard playing it on Kingston Trio recordings (especially Guard's banjo break on "MTA"), among them Tony Trischka, Steve Martin, and Bela Fleck. Given the fact that Guard never even tried the instrument until mid-1956, his progress on it transcends the remarkable and makes a close brush with the miraculous. Here he is in 1959 doing an inspired adaptation of Pete Seeger's banjo arrangement for "Darlin' Corey":



As fine as that is, nearly everyone familiar with KT music acknowledges that Guard's masterpiece of both skill and innovation appears on Goin' Places, the last album he made with the group, on a cut called "Coast of California":



Guard is again clearly influenced by Seeger's banjo work on the root song "Si Mi Quieres Escribir" (you can hear Seeger HERE) - but self-taught banjoist Guard is combining three distinctively different styles of playing folk banjo in a way that literally no one ever thought to do before and that to my knowledge no one has attempted since.

Singer

Guard's voice was a kind of utility infielder in the Kingston Trio - he would go high, middle, or low range depending on what the song called for. That and the fact that Bob Shane had one of the best voices in pop music at the time has often obscured just what a fine singer Dave Guard was, if not necessarily in timbre or tone. Guard's gift was interpretive, especially (though as below not exclusively) on quieter numbers, like the "San Miguel" song he is credited with co-composing with Jane Bowers:



It's hard to describe that voice and why it is so affecting. Time Magazine's Richard Corliss called it "careful"; I prefer "tentative," not because I believe that Guard was especially reticent but because he walked the walk - he always said that it was the music that mattered, and in light of that I think he considered his voice to be one of the instruments in the ensemble rather than necessarily the main focus. You can hear that as well in this cut from Guard's 1988 solo album Up And In, 29 years after "San Miguel":



I don't need to point out that this is also an outstanding arrangement of Stan Rogers' powerful modern folk classic. It has all the elements of what Guard had been doing for thirty years by then - gradual build, the sequential introduction of instruments into the mix, a good sense of syncopation, and the unmatchable energy of the early KT recordings. No matter that Guard's voice gets rough at points: the passion of the lyric emerges from the vocal, you believe the singer means what he is singing - and all the elements serve the composition and allows its essential nature to shine forth. It demonstrates what Pete Curry implied in the inspired title for his book on Guard's banjo style, derived from Guard's own book on guitarist Pahinui - it's "Pure Dave."

There is so much more to be said about Dave Guard. His departure from the group deserves deeper exploration (especially in light of some things I've run across in primary source documents over the last year), his innovations in music post-KT, his relationship with Bob Shane, more.... For now, though, I like to believe that this last song somehow characterizes a good portion of Dave Guard's public legacy. I find Guard's interpretation most convincing at the end of the lyric:

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow.
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go.
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!

Rise again, rise again!
Though your heart it be broken and life about to end
No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!

I will hazard the guess that this lyric had some personal meaning for Guard as the end of his life loomed. No matter, though, if it did not - you can't tell because as always Dave Guard is putting all of himself in service to the song, as he always did.