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

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 our 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

"South Coast"

One of the more interesting developments of the folk revival - in its broadest sense, encompassing the early days of recording and the union/political songs of the 1940s and the Library of Congress collectors and more, all pre-dating the 1958 beginning of the commercial folk boom - was the rise of what Time critic Richard Corliss called "the faux folk song" and what less kindly translators referred to as "fake folk." The terms referred to songs that were not traditional or that didn't have the fine folk pedigree of a composed song that had weathered a few generations, like the Civil War songs of George F. Root or nearly anything by Stephen Foster (it would take a hard heart indeed to suggest that "Oh Susanna!" was anything other than a folk song).

Some of those "faux folk" numbers pretended to be nothing more than they were - modern songs composed in a "folk style," with a simple chord accompaniment, usually with an acoustic guitar, basic and repetitive lyrics and chorus, and a ballad-like story. I always thought that Tom Paxton was the master of these - songs like "Dubarry Done Gone Again" and "Willie Seton" (both Chad Mitchell Trio numbers) or "Come Along Home Now" or many more. Paxton's compositions just sounded authentic, though he never tried to pass them off as such. At other times, the writers or performers tried to create a folk pedigree for these modern numbers where none existed, usually by implying that they were really old when they were really not (the New Christy Minstrels occasionally did this in concert - I recall them trying to pass off some riverboat song or other as 19th century when the only 19 in its history was 1960).

None of this matters at all today, of course, since nothing called "folk" by the record companies makes any pretense to being anything like "traditional" or any similar description that the Library of Congress used to use. Even the nominees in this year's Grammies for "Best Traditional Folk Album" feature recordings that include by my count less than 20% of material that would have been called "folk" fifty years ago.

Which brings us to this week's selection, "South Coast," a poem written by Lilian Bos Ross with music by Sam Eskin (1898-1974). Bos Ross wrote the poem while on a camping trip to Big Sur in 1926, but the original melody was derived from "Irene, Goodnight" until Eskin (with Richard Dehr of Terry Gilkyson and The Easy Riders, who recorded the song first) dusted off his friend's composition and gave it its current dramatic minor key melody. Eskin seems to have been a great unsung collector of folk songs, a modest man who spent much of his life around Woodstock, New York, and who at his death was praised fulsomely by the luminaries of the folk world, many of whom were named Seeger and Lomax. Katie Lee, folksinger, rabble rouser, boon companion of Cisco Houston and collaborator with Travis Edmundson (and someone with whom I had some delightful conversations at Trio Fantasy Camp 4 in 2003), had high praise for Eskin, and especially for his melody for "South Coast":

It is far and away one of the greatest 'folk' melodies ever to come along. If Sam never did another thing in his life (which he did, and plenty!) he gave us a true marriage of lyric and melody in that poem. He should have had much more reward for it than I'm sure he got, except the satisfaction of knowing. He truly felt the essence of Big Sur.

The longer version of the composition of the song appears in Jerry Kergan's Kingston Trio Liner Notes - the archives are still up here:

Jerry Kergan's Liner Notes

Go to "Songs," click on S, and click on "South Coast" for a more detailed discussion and for great links to Eskin.

"South Coast" never claimed to be, as Bob Shane asserts on the Hungry i recording below, a 200 year old song. But Bob isn't exactly trying to pass a counterfeit bill here - because even a casual fan of Spanish gypsy music, the flamenco that so influenced the folk music of Mexico, will recognize immediately the familiar chord structures, key changes, and syncopated rhythms of real Spanish music. The melody does indeed sound very much like a number of 17th century Spanish folk songs, so Shane was exaggerating only slightly in his intro. The vocal lead here is by Trio tenor guitarist/percussionist Nick Reynolds, and it is one of his absolute best performances with the group:



Good recovery here from an ill-timed drunk's laugh. The complete poem, which I'll post in a follow up, fills in parts of the story elided by the Trio's edited version.

Nancy Ames had a dramatically different take on the song in 1963



A fragment of Doc Watson doing the song here:

Doc Watson

Jeremy Raven posted a few weeks back a fine version of Ramblin' Jack Elliott singing the song - a few days after I thought I'd discovered a hidden gem. Not hardly. It was Ramblin' Jack's first studio album in 20 years and won the Grammy for best Traditional Recording in 1996 - and actually does come closer to the older meaning of traditional. Here is Elliott a couple of years ago -



Sadly, there is no video of Travis Edmundson singing the number, because by all reports he did a bang-up job. But Joe Bethancourt chose the song to honor Travis in a memorial concert last May, and does the song in Travis' style:



Finally - Horse Sense, which was Justin Bishop singing and John Nielson on fiddle and harmony, from 1983. This is the complete lyric:



I have to agree with Katie Lee here - the song surely sounds authentic, however recent it in fact is.
_________________________________________

The complete original poem by Lillian Bos Ross:

Ballad of the South Coast

My name is Lonjano de Castro
My father was a Spanish grandee;
But I won my wife in a card game
To hell with the lords o'er the sea.

In my youth I had a Monterey homestead,
Creeks, valley, and mountains all mine;
I built me a snug little shanty
And roofed it and floored it with pine.

I had a bronco, a buckskin­
Like a bird he flew over the trail,
When I rode him out forty miles every Friday
To get me some grub and the mail. 

Chorus:
But the south Coast is a wild coast and lonely­
You might win in a game at Jolon,
But the lion still rules the barranca
And a man there is always alone. 

I sat in a card game at Jolon;
I played with a man there named Juan.
And after I'd won all his money
He said, "Your homestead 'gainst my daughter, Dawn." 

I turned up the ace, I had won her!
My heart which was down at my feet
Jumped up to my throat in a hurry;
Like a young summer field she was sweet.

He opened the door to the kitchen;
He called the girl with a curse;
"Take her, God damn her, you won her!
She's yours now for better or worse." 

Her arms had to tighten around me
As we rode up the hills from the south.
But no word did I get from her that day
Nor a kiss from her pretty red mouth. 

We got to my cabin at twilight
The stars twinkled over the coast.
She soon loved the orchard, the valley
But I knew she loved me the most. 

That was a glad happy winter;
I carved on a cradle of pine.
By a fire in that snug little shanty
I sang with that gay wife of mine.

But then I got hurt in a landslide
Crushed hip and twice-broken bone;
She saddled up Buck just like lightning
And rode out through the night to Jolon. 

A lion screamed in the barranca;
Buck bolted and fell on a slide.
My young wife lay dead in the moonlight;
My heart died that night with my bride. 

They buried her out in the orchard.
They carried me out to Jolon.
I lost my Chiquita, my nino;
I'm an old broken man, all alone. 

The cabin still stands on the hillside,
Its doors open wide to the rain;
But the cradle and my heart are empty,
And I never can go there again. 

Oh, the south Coast is a wild coast and lonely.
You might win in a game at Jolon.
But the lion still rules the barranca
And a man there is always alone.

Lee Hays' "Lonesome Traveler"

I mentioned a few weeks back in a post about "Shady Grove" that the other half of the Kingston Trio's medley - "Lonesome Traveler" - involved a somewhat darker and sadder story than did the traditional "Grove" song. That was because LT came from the pen and imagination of Lee Hays, a founding member of the first two real popular folk groups, the Almanac Singers and The Weavers, and his story is surprisingly sad, bordering even on the tragic.

With his friend/opponent/collaborator/nemesis Seeger, Hays was easily the most prominent of the four Weavers because of his voice, his size, and the force of his personal presence. The son of a strict Methodist preacher from Arkansas, Hays spent most of his life in rebellion against any element of power that he felt stultified, cramped, or confined the hopes and aspirations of individuals as he felt his father had done to him. The deep and conservative religiosity of the father spurred Hays into the embrace of leftist agnosticism, though as even a casual acquaintance with his music indicates, he continued to frame his angry radicalizing in terms rooted in religious expression - he remained a great singer of spirituals and spiritual-based music, though like Woody Guthrie, who was Hays' friend and collaborator before Seeger met either of them, he often replaced "Jesus" in camp meeting songs with "union" and made similar transformations in other lyrics.

Hays and Seeger were in the Almanac Singers together, and though their avowed purpose was to sing at union organizing meetings and other political rallies, what Seeger and Hays found that they had in common was a belief that the music that rural child Hays had grown up with and the urban and educated Seeger had adopted as his own had the potential to unite common people into a united front against what they perceived as the tyranny of capitalism. It was a Utopian ideal that the two held to so strongly that it drove them into affiliation with the Communist Party - oddly for Hays, since few other organizations have ever been as top-down authoritarian as the Stalin-era CP was. But as I noted a few years back in a piece on Seeger - the Utopia envisioned by Hays and Seeger wasn't the brutal collectivism of Stalin's USSR but more an almost Jeffersonian Arcadia of The People as imagined by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and practiced by communal religious groups like the Amish.

Hays and Seeger turned out some of the great songs of the era - "If I Had A Hammer," the arrangements we know today of "We Shall Overcome" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", and the Weavers' signature protest against McCarthyism, "Wasn't That A Time" (a rousing piece that NBD or NBJ would have rocked on). But there had always been a strain in their relationship - Seeger was far the more talented of the two, more articulate, and to Hays' chagrin, more knowledgeable about American folk music. In fact, when Seeger decided to leave the post-blacklist re-formed Weavers in 1957 - ostensibly over the group's 3-1 vote to sing on a radio commercial for a cigarette company (wouldn't I love to find that recording!) but actually to free himself from the commercial restraints of a pop-folk group - Hays complained that he took with him knowledge of over 300 songs that he, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert just didn't know and would find it nearly impossible to locate and arrange.

Though Hays stayed with the Weavers through their post-Seeger reunion tours, he sank further into the related pits of depression and alcoholism that he had struggled in for his whole adult life. The diabetes brought on by the latter condition and his weight problem led to Hays' loss of both of his legs and eventually his life at the age of 67 in 1981.

I'd bet that prior to Peter, Paul and Mary's stirring re-write of the Hammer song (and both Seeger and Hays acknowledged that the pop-folk trio had vastly improved their composition), "Lonesome Traveler" was probably Hays' best-known original composition and certainly the most widely covered. Everybody doing folk music took a swing at it - it just sounded so authentic, and it had that signature Hays combination of a cry for secular/political reform couched in camp--meeting religious terms.

The Weavers naturally recorded it first, in 1950 on Decca, under the direction of producer/arranger Gordon Jenkins. As I've noted here before in other posts - it's downright strange to hear what the gifted Jenkins thought folk music should sound like, a mere eight years before the KT's Voyle Gilmore created a pop-folk genre that sounded so much more "authentic":



Now listen to those crass commercializers, the Kingston Trio, offer their rendering as the second half of this medley. Which group fifty years later is considered the parent of modern roots/Americana/authentic folk music and recently won a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement? Hint: It's not the guys singing here:*



To be fair, even the urban traditionalist Greenwhich Village folkies had problems with the commercialism of the Weavers, especially after Seeger left. Sing Out! founder Irwin Silber lumped the Weavers in with the KT in decrying the "sallow slickness" of all pop folk music.

The pop folkies just continued to pop on, though, and few with more wit and verve than the Limeliters, making their first appearance on my blog here after 61 posts - a shame because they were a great group, and one that probably got the most attention for singing LT - here as a reunion in 1988 at the Chabad Telethon:



The second generation Limes do the song justice as well:



Skiffle legend and Beatle-influencer Lonnie Donegan released his version a year or two after the Kingstons:



Finally, a folk-rock version from the mid-Sixties by Esther and Abi Ofarim, an Israeli married couple who had their greatest success in that decade in Germany - there's a story there that needs to be told:



Makes you want to dig out those Carnaby Street fashions that have been lying in the attic for a few decades.

Back a long time ago in a less benighted time, art was considered separable from artist. Van Gogh could send his ear to the lady who spurned him, Gaugin could abuse friend, foe, ladies, and alcohol with a savage disregard, Beethoven could roll in garrets and die in the gutter - but the sublimity of their creations suffered no taint as a consequence. Lee Hays was more tragic and less objectionable as a person; at nearly 30 years after his death, perhaps we can remember Hays' friend and biographer Don McClean's observation that "weathered faces lined with care/Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand" - perhaps even the artist's own.

______________________________________________________________

*Addendum: December 20, 2014
Thanks to the comment below from JC, I stopped by this article and was able to replace two videos that had been removed from YouTube, the KT and Lonnie Donegan versions. The Weavers had been awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006; when I wrote this in 2009, the Kingston Trio had not been so recognized, and that was the source of my ironic comment. However, just over four years ago, in December of 2010, the Trio was also voted the award, which sole surviving founding member Bob Shane accepted (with the widows of bandmates Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Guard replacement John Stewart) in February, 2011.

Another Appalachian Classic: "Shady Grove"

Today's intended weekend video was a bit of a downer of a song ( or rather the story behind it), so I decided spontaneously to go two for the price of one - the first and cheerier half of this Kingston Trio medley tonight and the sadder, darker half for a later date.

One of the things that traditional folk aficionados hated about the early Kingston Trio was the KT's refusal to treat folk songs as sacrosanct. The Trio joked and quipped and entertained - often before doing a bang-up job on a traditional number. If some of the humor today seems sophomoric - well, as the videos show, we are talking here about three very young men, barely out of college themselves, the oldest (Nick Reynolds) not yet twenty-five as of this recording whose origin was in the pre-"Tom Dooley" Hungry i engagement era and album and the youngest (Dave Guard) astoundingly not yet 24 (DG turned 24 in October of 1958 when TD was climbing up the charts). A little sophomorism is forgivable, I think - and here I'm referring to Bob Shane's cornpone accent and jokes on the album rather than Dave's intro on the video below.

If you saw the KT Wiki, though, you must have seen Frank Proffitt's remark that watching the Trio doing their take on his own prized arrangement of "Tom Dooley" on TV made him "sorty sick." That was an honest remark, at least, and one Proffitt had a right to. He was the genuine article, a real back woods guy who knew the songs only as the music he grew up on and who couldn't understand what the three guys in the striped shirts were doing to his song. The excoriating reaction to the KT by urban folkies like John Cohen, however, is harder to stomach - city born and bred guys like Cohen (and the late great Mike Seeger) putting on string ties and imitating the nasally intonations of mountain singers in an effort to sound like - Frank Proffitt. That's just fakery with hypocrisy thrown in to boot.

"Shady Grove" is likely an old Irish tune, and the fact that Guard is absolutely correct in his attribution of the song to the Appalachians (North Carolina, to be specific) simply illustrates the intimate connection between the Celtic tunes of Ireland and Scotland and the real traditional folk tunes of the Eastern U.S., settled largely by the Scots-Irish. A number of folklorists I've read, in fact, explain how the African bania (banjo in English) of four strings as played by black musicians sprouted a fifth string halfway up the neck when played by those Scots-Irish Appalachian whites - it was, they suggest, an attempt to imitate the drone pipes of the Celtic bagpipe common to both Ireland and Scotland. The same explanation has been put forth for the drone strings on the mountain dulcimer you'll see Jean Ritchie playing below.

Some accounts suggest that there are fifty different versions of "Shady Grove," some with more than two hundred verses (shades of John Stewart/John Phillips' "Chilly Winds"). It also seems to be related to the Scots-Irish-Appalachian murder ballad "Matty Groves," though clearly Lady Shady is the much happier of the two, worshiped and desired as she is by the singer of the song.

So - if we can get past a bit of the stagey silly humor, we can enjoy first a fine version (that you'll see isn't far off the traditional) featuring developing master banjoist Dave Guard:



I still can't believe that DG at this point was still playing (effectively) with one finger and his thumb.

For comparison's sake, look at what Doc Watson does with the song. Doc is a North Carolinian, born in 1923, and as real a deal as Frank Proffitt - except that Doc may be the greatest musician that the Appalachians have ever produced. Fine singer that he is, it is his guitar work that amazes:



David Holt on banjo here is doing the real old time frail or clawhammer style.

For another fabulous performance focusing on guitar - here's Tony Rice and band after he lost his singing voice - Rice speaks through his guitar now:



Now for the roots from which the branches grew - Jean Ritchie, with John Jacob Niles, the greatest of traditional American mountain dulcimerists. Ritchie, still performing at age 86 is like Watson the real article, born and raised in the Kentucky mountains:



And two fun versions - a more recent (2002) Doc Watson version played with the outstanding Kruger Brothers from Sweden



And a delightful if camped up version by the Dillards from the Andy Griffith Show that makes the KT's version sound absolutely authentic:



There. I feel better already. Nothing like a good old folk song really well-played by five or six artists to lift one's sorry spirits.

"They Call The Wind Maria"

Every time I think I'm coming to the end of this series and can envision only four or five more songs to profile, something comes up and I find myself seeing ten or fifteen beyond that number - and delaying one week's selection for something more immediate.

When I did the KT Wikipedia a month ago, I came upon and used a quotation from Bob Shane from the 1997 book Martin Guitars in which Bob descried the folksinger label attached to the group, saying that they did "folk-oriented material amid all kinds of other stuff." The first song that popped into my head for "other stuff" was "They Call The Wind Maria," a Broadway Lerner&Loewe chestnut that stood out from the folkier selections on the ...from the Hungry i album but remained a highlight of that record because of the sheer power and excellence of the performance. And as with songs previously profiled here like "Scarlet Ribbons" and "Try To Remember", it has been folkies and country singers who have contributed at least as much to the song's popularity as the musical comedy community.

The Trio has long introduced the song as one swiped from a failed Broadway musical, but that's not quite so, unless you prefer to think relatively. Paint Your Wagon played on Broadway for 289 performances between late 1951 and mid 1952 - at seven shows a week, that's about 40 weeks - not enough to retire on but what should have been well past the break-even point for shows of that era. Production problems created cost overruns that ate up the modest profits. Now that's not a flop - unless of course you remember that Lerner and Loewe were almost co-equal with Rodgers and Hammerstein as the dominant composers on postwar Broadway and unless you compare Wagon with genuine L&L hits that ran for years like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

Still, Wagon would likely be dismissed to the dustbin of history were it not for this song and another great tune, "I Was Born Under A Wanderin' Star." "Maria" was sung in the original cast by Rufus Smith, the least-known but fully equal member of that group of stunningly talented Broadway baritones of the era that included Gordon MacRae, John Raitt, Richard Kiley, Robert Goulet and more - and the recently-deceased Harve Presnell (d. 6/30/09), whose version here is from the 1969 movie and is as Lerner and Loewe conceived it:



The Kingston Trio gives us the next three versions - first, the one that many of us fell in love with from Hungry i, a fabulous version in a nightclub without orchestra or chorus (forgive the fanzine images of Mariah Carey, whose parents did in fact name her after this version of the song but got the spelling wrong):



Now, I never fully embraced John Stewart doing Dave Guard-era Trio songs - until the Flashback album. That version here is a superior performance - five years down the line Shane is in even better voice, Stewart's lead guitar and background vocals are haunting, and Stewart and then Shane just blow away the rhythm guitar part at the end - and John Triofan Lee's mastering brings Nick Reynolds' bongos up to a proper level - just magnificent:



And an excellent piece of evidence showing why Bill Zorn is the only singer in folkdom with the vocal power to take Shane's place in the group - here's the current KT in an equally wonderful rendition:



And another Big Voice from the days of yore - I hope some here remember Vaughn Monroe:



Frankie Laine, from 1998, late in his career:



It would have been a treat to hear Laine do this in his prime.

Carlie Slaven presents a delightfully unique and original bluegrass version:



Finally, our surprise selection of the week - actor Pernell Roberts of Bonanza and Trapper John MD set against videos of the former show in its glory days:





Contrary to some people's suppositions, I do not actually live at the computer, and next week's Weekend Videos may well go the way of last week's - into the dark cavern of lost good intentions. I'll be in Manitou Springs CO rehearsing like crazy for our show there - hope to have a WV anyway but no promises. Then again - no one seemed to miss one last week....:)

From The American Music Hall: "New York Girls"

Daniel Day-Lewis & Finbar Furey in
Gangs of New York
A few months ago I posted a piece on the English music hall as a source for many familiar American folk recordings like "Three Jolly Coachmen" and "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" and "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm". It wouldn't be right to ignore the very real contributions to folk music of the American music hall, precursor of Broadway musical theater and the regional theater and musical companies that have supported amateur performing arts in our country like they exist in no other.

People today find it hard sometimes to imagine our nineteenth century American world, which had star actors, fan magazines, millionaire musical performers - and even successful folk musicians. How was this accomplished without benefit of electronic media? The answer is the same one that John Stewart gave me at the FC Q&A in 2003 when I asked him how the Kingston Trio managed to create and maintain such impeccable timing in their recordings and performances - "We played 200 dates some years - we worked and worked on it."

It was not uncommon for the big stars of that century to play two hundred dates per year - stars like actors Edwin Booth (a far better actor than brother John Wilkes) and James O'Neill (father of playwright Eugene and the most popular star of the era with his adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo) and Sarah Bernhardt from France (who played Hamlet at the age of 70 and was said to be the best in that role of her era) and singers like Lily Langtry and Jennie Lind ("The Swedish Nightingale") and folk groups like The Christy Minstrels, who sang the songs of legendary Songwriters Hall of Fame Members like Stephen Foster, George F. Root, and Henry C. Work.

And they played those 200 dates in every village and town that had an opera house, usually the third building to go up in many a community after the jail and the first church. The town opera house (sometimes just a simple auditorium but frequently an opulent and expensive structure, some of which became the great movie houses of the 19 teens and 20s) could present serious productions, revival meetings, political debates, traveling Chautauqua-type shows when they weren't under tents - and music hall entertainment.

Though Broadway had actual music halls, the term actually refers to a style of theater copied from the English and which featured humorists (like Mark Twain and the forerunners of comedians), pop songs, dancers (later evolving into burlesque), and sometimes scripted shows or sections of shows (George M. Cohan's family were among the biggest stars in this genre).

Out of this milieu came a large number of popular American songs, Foster's first and Cohan's later probably being the best known. But the rough-and-tumble world of the immigrant Irish lent the American songbook a share as well, from sentimental ballads like "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" to raunchy rip-roarers like "New York Girls." The latter (as accurately reflected in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York) had a shadowy birth sometime before the Civil War. It exists in a really impressive number of variants, though the hapless sailor taken in by a lady of the night is the common element. The tune seems to have been based on an earlier Irish reel that is now often performed as a polka (an Easter European dance form not known in Ireland at the time)called "Britches Full Of Stitches" (see Appendix).

Burl Ives sanitized the words a bit, and though he did the more traditional tune (which you can hear in subsequent versions below), it is his lyric that the Kingston Trio credits in their version:



The chorus the boys are singing is of the mysterious "Wayess Annie," meaning of the first word unknown. Most of the other versions hear use the equally obscure "Away, you Santee" - I'm guessing that first is more accurate and that we'll never learn what "wayess" meant.

Much of younger America first heard the song as background in a scene in the Scorsese film, sung by Finbar Furey of the really fine Irish group The Fureys. Here is the full version in all of its glorious naughtiness - note that the Ives version leaves to the imagination what the Fureys' version makes explicit:



The opening fiddle riff is "Britches Full of Stitches" - you can hear how the verse derives from it. (For the song in context of the film, see the appendix.)

Gen Xers may know the tune from the popular neo-Celtic group from the 80s and 90s, Oysterband, here in a rockish version:



I usually have reservations about Springsteen-ized "Seeger Sessions"-type updates for traditional folk songs, but for some reason I like this version by Bellowhead, probably because even with the multiple instruments and drums and all, they preserve the original feeling of the song:



From Later With Jools Holland.

The Dusty Buskers hit YouTube a few years ago. They're based out of Tucson and since their early busking days have become extremely successful on the web, with downloads, and in live performances throughout the Southwest. Here they are busking with the traditional version in Silver City, NM a couple of years ago:



"New York Girls" is also a staple at Trio fantasy camps, delightfully easy to sing and play and just a ton of fun to do with a group.

Appendix:

Irish musicians Jackie Daly and Seamus Creagh Sullivan caught in their native habitat - a pub - doing the root song "Britches Full of Stitches":



The scene from Gangs Of New York:



And a fine, more recent version from Bill Dempsey at the 2009 Adams Avenue Roots Festival in San Diego:




And An Addition 12/8/12

An amusing and somewhat bittersweet updating of the song to the Vietnam War era Saigon called "Chu Yen," the Saigon girl, by vets Saul Brody and Robin Thomas from their album Folk Songs of the Vietnam War:


 

And Yet Another Update, January 23, 2016

....courtesy of Eric Zorn, whose comment appears below. This is a really great version by a really great group, the U.K.'s Steeleye Span, who with Fairport Convention was quite possibly the best progressive folk band of the era on either side of The Pond.

"The Song As We Found It Down There Was...Naughty" - "Zombie Jamboree"

I was struck by a phrase in a Jeopardy! clue the other night about the KT - the Kingston Trio was described as "clean-cut," which we all know was exactly the image that Frank Werber and the guys wanted to cultivate, at the very least to distinguish themselves from the vaguely shadowy politics of The Weavers and probably more especially from the parent-infuriating gyrations and pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley.

But the Trio started its life as a nightclub act, and that suggested some - suggestiveness, I guess you'd say. Your average 1950s club was a place neither for the wholesome nor the easily-offended. If the comedians' humor had not yet descended to the scatological and obscene level that it routinely has today, it was nonetheless implicitly edgy - Tom Lehrer and the Smothers Brothers and Lou Gottlieb and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce all started out around the same time as the Trio did. Except for Bruce, who was up and in your face, the comics played for "naughty" - and the Trio fit right in, not least because their initial genre was calypso music.

Calypso music proper originated in Trinidad and Tobago, and some purists maintain that Caribbean music from other places like Jamaica and the Bahamas should not be termed calypso. But thanks mainly to New York City's Harry Belafonte, born there of Jamaican parents, the term came to be an all-encompassing word to mean most Afro-Caribbean music.

It's a bit of a wonder that calypso music took off in the relatively uptight world of 1950s America because virtually all of it includes sly double-entendres, political commentary, and really off-color humor. I've always guessed that those Puritan-bent Anglophone ears that we grew up with just didn't pick up on the meanings very well any more than our parents' Big Band generation quite got what those "great balls of fire" were or where Johnny B. Good was go go going. But go back to those three great Belafonte albums from the mid-50s - "Calypso," "Belafonte," and "Belafonte Sings Of The Caribbean" - and listen to the songs with adult ears. You might be surprised. "Judy no drownded Judy lie in bed" indeed, and "Matilda run Venezuela" with more than the guy's money; "Angelique-O's" mama got to take her back to teach her all the things she lack - and so on.

While Kingston Trio fans recognized the sly, eyebrow-raised humor of "Ah Woe, Ah Me" from Back In Town - I wonder how many picked up on Lord Intruder's little quips in "Zombie Jamboree." Intruder was the stage name of Winston O'Connor, born in Tobago into the original calypso tradition. (There really was a Lord Invader, but he didn't write "Jamboree" - and the 12 Penetrators never existed except in Dave Guard's scripted and slightly bawdy song intro. The "Conrad Eugene Mauge, Jr." of the copyright is just another of O'Connor's stage names.) Lord Intruder is poking fun at expatriate Caribbeans (like Belafonte's parents) who lived in New York - hence the Long Island locale of the song and other pretenders to his throne ("some of them great Calypsonians"). But Intruder's reference to the "season was Carnival/They got together in Bacchanal" leaves no doubt about the song's intent.

Carnival, of course, is the Latin name for Mardi Gras, a slightly naughty event in New Orleans that in its roots and in its most famous manifestation in Rio De Janeiro reaches heights (or depths) of debauchery that conservative Louisianans could scarcely imagine. Just take a look at the costumes that the dancers wear in Rio and you'll see what I mean. And for a little refresher vocabulary - Bacchanal means an alcohol-drenched orgy.

Take the lyric from there. The female zombie of the song is clearly bent on seduction with her quart of wine - and Intruder's humor becomes clearer when you consider the rather literal implication of "an old bag of bones I cannot love" when being "belly to belly." The unexpurgated lyric also apparent had a different one syllable word than "after you kiss this dead zombie."

But our "clean cut" Trio weren't going to belabor those points. They sang the song for fun and money and let the audience make of it what they wanted:



This has always been one of my all-time favorite trio performances.

The current Kingstons also do a delightful job, showing respect to their predecessors' arrangement while leaving their own distinctive stamp on it:



Many Gen Xers are unaware of the KT's connection to the song and know it primarily from the 1990's vocal group Rockapella, who has perhaps fifteen different recorded versions on YouTube. They keep the song fun but take it further from its roots:



Brazilian vocalists Jack Jeans use Rockapella's words but give us a video a bit more in keeping with Intruder's off-color humor and the inescapably erotic rhythms of calypso:



Last December I included Alvin and the Chipmunks' version of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" as an antidote to the Everly Brother's turgid rendition of the same. We close today with that legendary trio's version of this classic:



I saw Dave Guard live with the Modern Folk Quartet at the Ice House in Pasadena CA in 1976, and the group's closing number was "Zombie Jamboree." It was also, as noted in KTOR and on the Capitol twofer of the KT's first two albums, a song that Dave specifically requested be played at his funeral - the KT Hungry i version. I was delighted to read that the late great Dave Guard thought as highly of that cut as I and countless other fans did.

Appendix - 6/20/09

This humorous video on YouTube uses as its musical background the version by Lord Jellicoe & His Calypso Monarchs:



Appendix 2 - 6/16/10

And a rare video of a live performance of the song from the greatest popularizer of calypso music, Harry Belafonte:

For Solomon Linda And A New Era: "Wimoweh/Mbube"

 

I thought that I might post something about the coming inauguration...whose meaning and import transcends politics of party, as no one less than George W. Bush acknowledged both the morning after the election and in his farewell address this evening...change is in the wind...

This is my 25th Weekend Videos - as I'm a little short on time, being finals week and all at my school, I'm cribbing part of this from a post from my other blog, The Vivid Air, about Solomon Nisitele "Linda" that I called "The Sad Case of Wimoweh." Here's part of what I wrote back then.

The song was indeed a traditional Zulu chant, though according to Joseph Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo (of Paul Simon's Graceland recording, if anyone's forgotten), not a hunting chant, as is often alleged. Shabalala believes it was a "tribute" song to someone's majesty, and I have read elsewhere that the song arose in the mid nineteenth century as a tribute to Shaka, the Zulu king who devised their system of warfare, established an empire, and handed the British one of the worst military disasters that their colonial armies ever suffered - a kind of a Custer's Last Stand multiplied by about fifteen times. Shaka was known, not surprisingly, as "The Lion."

The version we hear was codified by Solomon Nisitele, also known as Solomon Linda. Shabalala has pointed out that Linda made a daring, even shocking, change to the performance of the song. The falsetto "verse" was originally a "ululation" - the curdling cry most often heard in the West as intoned by Arab women in celebration or encouragement but apparently common throughout Africa. This "verse" was done in a singing style that before Linda's version was done only by women. For a man to sing the part was revolutionary - part of what Shabalala guesses was the "tribute" factor - to the audience, or the Zulu king, or God.

The song came to America from Linda's record company, Gallo of South Africa, a subsidiary of Decca - which was recording The Weavers. It was Seeger who picked out the song out of a couple dozen on records given him by legendary folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax, and Seeger who pronounced "mbube" (very soft first "b") as "uwimoweh." The Weavers recorded it and included it on "The Weavers At Carneige Hall," and it became a moderately successful single, reaching the Hit Parade Top Forty.

The source for most of the remaining American pop iterations of the song was the first "live" album in 1958 of the t Kingston Trio, recorded at San Francisco's legendary showcase nightclub, "The Hungry i." Except for a slightly sophomoric and lightly amusing introduction, the Trio's reading of the song is pretty straightforward and respectful of the original, delivered with their trademark verve and energy

On "At The Hungry i" the Trio attributes the song to both The Weavers and Linda, and the song was covered a really surprising number of times by other performers.

The problem that arose then and persists to this day is one as contemporary as tomorrow's newspaper - the use and ownership of intellectual property, a bone of sharp contention between especially the US and China, where literally millions of counterfeited CDs and DVDs of mostly American songs and films find their way into international markets from pirate copiers in China, not to mention the recording industry's near-hysterical attack on Napster and Viacom's recent suit against YouTube.

Black musicians were not at the time (Linda wrote the song in 1939) permitted to receive royalties, all of which went to the record company initially (Gallo). Linda received a few dollars for a song that has sold millions of copies in different versions world wide. According to Seeger on the show (a sheepish Seeger who did not remember whether or not The Weavers ever sent Linda any money when their version became successful), George David Weiss , who wrote the "lyric" "In the jungle, the quiet (or mighty) jungle, the lion sleeps tonight," owns the copyright and has claimed to have "written" the song. Seeger related that a US copyright court case determined that if those words were sung, Weiss gets the royalties; if only the melody is heard, the Weavers do. Solomon Linda and heirs - zilch.

The poignant aspect of it was that The Tokens' familiar million seller peaked in 1961; Linda, an accomplished career musician, died in utter poverty in Soweto in 1962. His three surviving daughters live in Soweto; they have recently won international copyright approval for the song, though both George Weiss and Disney are fighting it.

By contrast, the Kingston Trio's attribution of the song in part to Linda (and the fact that "At The Hungry i" achieved platinum status, selling more than half a million copies - an incredible number for an LP in those days) apparently secured at least a small amount of money for the composer through the auspices of his record company, to whom the money apparently was paid. So it's all the more distressing that their "do right" attribution to Linda never made him any significant amount of money - money that might have extended his and his sick daughter's lives.

Here's Linda and the first recording from 1939:



Ladysmith Black Mazambo has a wonderful traditional African rendition, which I'm posting first to demonstrate just how "respectful" the KT version was, especially compared to the Tokens:



And here's the Kingston Trio - good montage-type video:



And where did the Trio get the song? The Weavers of course - here from Carnegie Hall:



The Tarriers from a few years later -



A thrilling version from the recently departed Miriam Makeba, one of the great cultural ambassadors of our time:



A reggae-flavored version from the Mahotella Queens:



I was going to embed the Tokens here - but why? IMHO - they're crass, and each of these versions is sublime.

The PBS show that I saw about Solomon Linda that inspired the post above led me to a whole lot of articles on the web about the copyright issues, which seem to be heading toward a resolution in favor of Linda's estate.

Nothing can undo the multitude of injustices done in the past - not to Linda, nor to Africa, not to any of the poor and oppressed corners of the world, as George W. mentioned tonight. Certainly an inauguration won't make right all the wrongs, maybe not any of them. But as Winston Churchill once said, "This is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."