"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:

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

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":