The origin of my Comparative Video 101 blog and all that it has led to, including my co-host spot on KPFK radio's Roots Music And Beyond show, performances with the Chad Mitchell Trio's Joe Frazier, George Grove of the Kingston Trio and Art Podell of Art and Paul and the New Christy Minstrels, a "professorship" at the KT at Fantasy Camp, and much much more, was in a couple of innocent postings I made on the KT message board in May and June of 2008. I'd found in the still fairly early days of YouTube that there were several interesting and different versions of "Scotch and Soda" and "Tom Dooley" on the video site, so I embedded them in separate posts with a few comments. Well, a lot of readers seemed to enjoy the idea and the KT board didn't archive, so I saved them on this blog and began to do more and more of them, hitting a stretch of 28 consecutive weeks at one point in 2009 - no mean feat considering that I was working both daytime and evening teaching jobs and was usually writing the damn things after I got home at 10pm on Thursday nights.
Nearly 4 1/2 years later and with 173 articles/posts - after battling through copyright issues with Capitol and profiting from the exponential growth of YouTube with thousands of people uploading videos of songs and performances - I reached a milestone of sorts a couple of weeks back. With the publication of the September 15th piece on "Fast Freight," the CompVid101 blog now has a separate article on each of the 12 songs on the original Kingston Trio's self-titled first album, the legendary Capitol T996 - a record that reached #1 on Billboard's album charts in late 1958 and stayed in the Top 100 for 195 weeks, unheard of in those early days of LPs.
This wouldn't have been possible in 2008 when this blog began - given the approach I've taken of picking a KT song, writing about it, and then presenting a number of alternate versions. My recent "Banua" post wouldn't have been possible until about a month ago, when within five days two cover versions of the KT arrangement appeared, giving me the four alternates I've regarded as the minimum. And I doubt that it will be possible for any other single album by the group - there will always be a song or two on each of the rest that only the Trio ever recorded. I've had 10 song articles from the At Large album for over a year but despair of finding cover versions of two worthy songs, "The Seine" and the silly but fun "I Bawled."
Some of these posts are pretty pedestrian, and some of the songs on this, my favorite KT album 1A with Here We Go Again, deserve better treatment than I was able to give them in the early years (and I may get back to them and give them an upgrade). Some, on the other hand, I think are really good - I'd nominate "Bay of Mexico," "Saro Jane," and "Coplas" as the best of this lot.
It's been quite a bit of really enjoyable work, and I hope it's been an equally enjoyable ride for the few hundred people who click and read here on CompVid101 and on Kingston Crossroads. As always, I thank all for the attention and for sharing my enthusiasm for this great music.
The Kingston Trio Capitol T996 Recorded February 2-4, 1958 Released June 2, 1958
Timing is everything, they say, especially as it concerns success in any number of fields, music and the arts perhaps being chief among these. Vincent van Gogh sold only a handful of paintings in his short and unhappy lifetime; his style was just too radical, too assertive, too dramatic for the tastes of his contemporaries who, as Don MacLean told us in his song, "did not listen - they did not know how." They damn well might be listening now - to the tune of the $145 million paid a few years back for just one of his paintings, as VVG has become just about the personification of the suffering creative genius and one of the most beloved painters in the entire world. Had poet Emily Dickinson been born, say, a generation or so after her 1830 birth, she might well have enjoyed a career as a writer marked by financial success and the public adulation that came to her quietly sublime lyrics only in the 20th century, long, long after her death; she sold and published but seven poems in her 56 years.
The alternative to pining away as a misunderstood and under-appreciated artist, of course, is to take your talent or craft, work on it ceaselessly, be flexible about the uses to which you put it, and make the most of whatever opportunities come your way - to be Terry Gilkyson, in a word. Gilkyson (1916-1999) was a first-rate baritone in the pop vein and a more than competent songwriter of folk-styled music. But he wasn't a crooner like his contemporaries Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and the "style" of his folk was more pop than that of Pete Seeger, three years younger than Gilkyson - and the songs that he wrote in the folk vein that were covered by or became hits for the likes of Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, and the Brothers Four were performed largely by singers almost a generation younger than he was. Gilkyson was 42 when "Tom Dooley" became a hit and ushered in the commercial side of the folk revival - too old in most respects to become an idol to the college-age and teen crowds whose record-buying habits were fueling the popularity of the genre. He wrote a number of songs that became hits for various pop singers and released several respected if light-selling folk albums of his own.
TG was no stranger to pop success, though - he sang on a couple of million-selling records released by the Weavers, and his composition with fellow Easy Riders Richard Dehr and Frank Miller of "Memories Are Made Of This" became a hit for Martin in part because of the elegantly simple vocal and instrumental back-up provided by TG and the Riders. Gilkyson's folk-ish trio also scored one of the few acoustic hits prior to "Tom Dooley" with its delightful "Marianne."
After the Brothers Four had a major singles hit with his "Greenfields," though, Gilkyson could see the writing on the wall and realized that folk was as much of a pop fad as the calypso that had boosted "Marianne" proved to be. In his mid-40s Gilkyson became something of a contract in-house songwriter for the Disney studios, penning songs and incidental music for such ventures as The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (one of my favorites as a boy), The Swiss Family Robinson, The Jungle Book (for which TG received an Academy Award nomination), and Savage Sam. By refusing to sign a personal services contract with Uncle Walt and become a salaried employee of the studio, Gilkyson was able to retain the highly lucrative rights to those projects and his songs, and he enjoyed an early, comfortable, and very long retirement before his 1999 death. The music and fine arts history books may not have much to say about Terry Gilkyson, but he surely deserves to be remembered as an artist undaunted by shifts in time and tides and one who cheerfully made the most of the talents he had - and passed those talents on to his prominent musician children, roots singer Eliza and rock guitarist Tony.
Listen to Gilkyson take the lead on this recording of "Across The Wide Missouri" backed by The Weavers - this from the group's 1950 sessions for Decca supervised by Gordon Jenkins:
Clearly, TG was a talented vocalist - but as was said of Cisco Houston, with a voice rather too trained for folk but not quite bravura enough for full-on pop music.
One of Gilkyson's songs that has been covered by the likes of Tim Hardin, the Serendipity Singers, and the Kingston Trio - and more recently by James Lee Stanley, Ron Lloyd among many others - is the darkly atmospheric "Fast Freight." The song seems to have been the product of TG's imagination rather than from any real life experience, combining as it does the restless yearning to travel common across all forms of American folk music with the hobo motif thrown in for good measure. The Kingston Trio made probably the highest profile recording of the number - it was included in the group's debut album that sold more than half a million copies and charted for an at the time unprecedented 195 weeks:
The soloist on this rendition is cerebral Trio leading arranger Dave Guard. It speaks volumes, I think, that the most accomplished musician in the early years of the group chose this song as his solo on the band's first album. The hand-strummed guitars and pounding bass replicate musically the rhythm of a locomotive's drive wheels. A comment under the YouTube upload of the song says it all - "A wonderful blend, and what gorgeous dynamics!"
The influence of the early KT permeated much of the early pop-folk field, and that influence manifests itself clearly in this 1962 offering by a very young Gordon Lightfoot, with partner Terry Whelan as The Two Tones:
It's a fine performance, even if the arrangement is pretty much derived from the KT.
The Leesiders were a duo from the North of England in the early 60s who enjoyed a degree of local success and included "Fast Freight" both on an LP and in performance:
It's a different take on the song that works very well, I think.
For something a bit unusual - a 3D version by Fritz Capell. Or so I'm told - I don't have the glasses so I can't tell for sure:
It's a competent rendition, though I remain in the dark about the advantage of extra dimensions.
Finally and even more unusually, Spain's "John Paperback" turns the tune into an almost ethereal new-age blues-flavored meditation:
I'm not sure that this is completely successful, but Paperback gets an A for craft and originality in my book.
And Terry Gilkyson likewise gets high marks for doing the best he could, in his career and with "Fast Freight" - and in the words of a John Stewart song, doing it pretty up-and-walking good.
And here, far too tardily, is the recent version by Terry Gilkyson's famous daughter Eliza - as suggested below by her son and Terry's grandson Cisco Gilliland, who is also co-producer of the video. The performance is every bit as great as we fans knew it would be.
Before the passing of Neil Armstrong and my resulting article last week on the John Stewart song about him intervened, I had originally intended this week's piece as a direct follow-up to the article on "Canastas y mas canastas/Coplas" from two weeks ago because of several interesting parallels between that Mexican tune and our present selection from Africa, "Banuwa." Both songs appeared in U.S. folksingers' repertoires about the same time in the mid-1950s; both are in languages other than English; both were interpreted by a number of high-profile artists - and both may well have been contextually misunderstood by the American performers who sang them - or who still do.
In that last respect, "Banuwa" may share more in common than you might at first guess with two other traditional numbers that originated in Africa, "Mangwani Mpulele" and "Wimoweh." If you glance at the piece on "Wimoweh" and pay especial attention to the remarks by Joseph Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo - and listen to that group's sublime rendition - it becomes immediately apparent that the "hunting chant" approach to the song presented by The Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and The Tokens is far off base in terms of the song's actual meaning. Likewise, "Mangwani" may well be a wedding song as Theo Bikel and Laura Brannigan present it, but if so it is closer to the naughty "Canastas/Coplas" than it is to Noel Stookey's wonderfully religious and romantic composition also called "The Wedding Song."
American folksingers' occasional inability to appreciate cultural contexts is hardly surprising, especially if we remember that the songs cited above found their way into our pop/folk music song bag well before the era of broadened legal immigration policies of the 1970s and of the economic globalization that began to take serious shape in the 1990s, both of which have begun to chip away at the parochialism that has afflicted our country fully as much as it has most others. The usually stately grandeur of our wedding ceremonies, for example, makes it hard for us to understand places where that event is a raucous and highly eroticized celebration of fertility - where, for example, as in some Mediterranean nations, the sheets from a bridal bed would be paraded around town the morning after as "proof" of the bride's virginity, or as in a traditional wedding in India where at one point the bride performs an extremely suggestive dance while singing a song whose lyrics couldn't even make their way into a rap number in our country.
Though such cultural disconnects may sometimes result in unintentional offense (discussed in this blog, for example, in a song like the rewrite of "Si Me Quieres Escribir" into "Coast of California"), more often than not no harm is done by a folk process that converts one song into another, often very different in topic or intent from the original.
The Liberian song "Banuwa" exemplifies both a misunderstood original intent in some versions but a delightful transformation into a very different tune in others. The traditional number is tribal in origin and is said to be either a lullaby or a processional. Possibly so; take a look at the brief, simple lyric:
Banuwa, Banuwa, Banuwa yo A la no, nehnio la no Nehnia la no Banuwa, Banuwa, Banuwa yo
which is generally translated as something like
Don't cry, don't cry, pretty little girl don't cry. Don't cry, don't cry, pretty little girl don't cry. Your father off at the village Your mother's out for a while Your brother's down by the river. Don't cry little girl, don't cry.
This may be what it appears literally to be, a lullaby comforting a fussy and discontented little child. Compare it to, for example, "Rock-a-bye, Baby" - which, when you think about it, is really a pretty terrifying lyric, what with the breaking branch and falling baby. The soothing singing voice of the mother (traditionally) takes the terror out of it, we hope.
But consider the "Banuwa" lyric again - why would it comfort a child to know that father, mother, and brother are away from home? It sounds like cause for sadness or anxiety rather more than relief. That leaves open the possibility that the song functions on two levels, like most fairy tales and nursery rhymes do. There is an entire critical literature on that subject - on the dual meanings of, say, the many Red Riding Hood stories (in the original, she is killed and not rescued in what author Charles Perrault in 1698 strongly implies is a rape by a handsome young "wolf") or Mother Goose ditties like "Ring around the rosey" ("bring out your dead!" from the black plague and so on) or "Georgie Porgie pudding and pie/Kissed the girls and made them cry" because the George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham who is the proven model for the rhyme seduced and abandoned many a young lass (and a lad or two, if the stories are to believed). A five-year-old need not know these underlying themes (though Freud argued that children did get them at a subconscious level) to enjoy the parent's voice reciting or reading them, but the parent might well be aware of the second level of meaning - and in some cultures earthier than our own might well enjoy a small chuckle at the child's innocence. Considered in that light, the "Banuwa" lyric used to lull a child to sleep could well become the ever-so-slightly naughty suggestion of one adolescent to another - no reason to cry or fear 'cause no one's home, baby, but you and me.
Though there are one or two YouTube videos of African groups performing "Banuwa," they are church groups from central and east Africa, more than a thousand miles distant in geography, language, and culture from the west African coastal origin in Liberia of the song. This first version is by a German choral group called SingLust, and except for a slight mispronunciation, they are doing the lyrics as noted above:
SingLust (which would be accurately translated here as "LoveToSing") also preserves both the vocal round and gentle rhythm of the Liberian proto-song. Ditto this version by an unnamed Brazilian choral group:
And of course, Brazil traces much of its own musical culture to the west African slaves brought over by the Portuguese in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Next, a children's choir from the Philippines syncopates and accelerates the tune a bit, which will figure in another version below:
This is pretty far afield from anything remotely resembling a lullaby, and I strongly doubt that the children know what the words mean.
Similarly, the westerners who found the melody and harmony pleasing in the 1950s did not seem to know much about "Banuwa" except for its African pedigree. My friend Art Podell of the early New Christy Minstrels told me this morning that the song swept through Greenwich Village like wildfire mid-decade, and he had heard performers do it at college folk festivals as well. Pete Seeger seems not surprisingly to be the source of the tune in the U.S., as he was for dozens of songs from around the world. One of the first American recordings, if not the earliest, was by on a 1955 LP by a Village pick-up group directed by Seeger called The Song Swappers that included Erik Darling (soon to replace Seeger in the Weavers), Alan Arkin, and a chorus of teens from the Little Red Schoolhouse including a 17-year-old Mary Travers, later of Peter, Paul and Mary. This page from Smithsonian Folkways Records includes a sample of this version, and you can clearly hear Mary's not-yet-mature voice at the top of the vocal blend.
I would be willing to bet the farm that this record was in the possession of Kingston Trio founding member Dave Guard, who has the solo copyright for the next three versions and that he listed as "adapted by" for the KT's debut album. Most Trio fans will recognize from that Folkways page that the Song Swappers also include two more songs - "Bimini Gal" and "Oleanna" - that were later rewritten by other lyricists and that appeared on two other very early KT albums. Guard took his cue from the Swappers' more uptempo rendition of the African chant and turned it into a brief but entertaining calypso tune, reflecting his interest in that latter genre. No YouTube video exists of the KT version from their first LP, and I do not wish further to antagonize Capitol/EMI by posting yet another copyrighted song to the web. Not to fear, though - we have a near-perfect rendition of DG's arrangement as performed by Dave's son Tom and Tom's son Pascal McGilvray-Guard:
Tom is an accomplished musician and music teacher,* and this video was not intended for general release but rather as a gift to family and friends - so I am greatly in Tom's debt because he re-edited the piece and allowed me to use it here. In addition to having the same energy of the original Kingston Trio arrangement, Tom and Pascal are both using Martin 0021DG guitars, Martin's commemorative model in memory of Dave Guard.
Also employing Dave Guard's calypso arrangement is a delightful North Carolina roots group called Both:
The group's website is lots of fun and well worth a visit. Luckily for me and this article, Both posted this to YT just about 2 weeks ago...
...and exactly one week ago, this next rendition was posted by COD, which stands for "Cool Old Dudes":
The Dudes are Art Bivins on guitar, Eric Jones on bass, and Harvey E. Kaufman on banjo. They have several other equally entertaining videos as well.
"Banuwa" has "legs" as they used to say on Broadway in all of its many versions. It is widely performed by choral groups worldwide, especially in the arrangement by Mike Brewer, who included it in his Three African Songs collection. Lullaby or flirting song or calypso, its essential simplicity and tunefulness guarantee that it will be around a lot longer than any of us will. Addendum March 2013 -
For the moment at least, Capitol has not blocked a recent upload of the original Kingston Trio version -
For rather more than fifty years now, American folk fans have generally believed incorrectly that "Coplas" was the name of a song, recorded with the widest notoriety (and that is, as we shall see, the correct term) by first Cynthia Gooding in a duet with Theodore Bikel and a bit later in a still-controversial arrangement by the Kingston Trio. But coplas is a generic term in Spanish. Usually translated as "verses," it can in certain circumstances also mean "song" or refer to a cuplé, an often suggestive Spanish music hall number popular more than 80 years ago in Mexico and other parts of Latin America and Spain itself. All three definitions are necessary elements in understanding today's song, whose origin is in a Mexican tune called "Canastas y más canastas," or "Baskets And More Baskets." The literary Freudians among you may already have guessed from that title the direction in which this post is headed.
The word "coplas" itself in the first and most common definition above actually has an almost innocent charm to it. Romance-minded poets could write "Coplas de amor" or "Las coplas de la Luna" - verses of love or stanzas about the moon. The word is usually used in the plural, but it descends from the earlier singularterm copla, referring to a Spanish poem or folk song with four lines per verse - which also characterizes the always-naughty cuplé. Our "Canastas" song today could fairly be described by that last term since in every version still current there are a number of very suggestive double entendres, the most common one being the image of a cat in a sombrero and pantaloons interrupting the singer's wedding night. More on that below.
"Canastas y más canastas" is probably based on a traditional song, but the most commonly-sung version today was copyrighted by Humberto Betancourt Espinoza (1909-83), a popular singer, actor and songwriter originally from Veracruz. The tune was initially a hit for Irma Vila (1916-1993), often called the queen of falsetto, that high-pitched intoning of a melody through the nose and not the mouth, giving the singer greatly enhanced upper ranges. Think of most of what Frankie Valli did or the leads on most Bee Gees songs - that's falsetto. Vila was indeed very skillful with this, as she shows on her recording of "Canastas":
The lyrics are mostly double-entendres about flower baskets and roosters and an oddly dressed "cat" trying to enter a bridal chamber from a balcony. This track is from 1947, and if you know no Spanish but what you've heard in the Gooding/Bikel or KT versions of "Coplas," you can clearly hear Vila referencing the cat with a hat and long pants (un gato prieto con sombrero y pantalon) at the 1:10-1:13 mark in the song, followed by the male singers alluding to the interrupted wedding night. What puts this squarely in the cuplé tradition is that those improper tunes were originally sung on the stage by slinky Mae West-type chanteuses - or by men in drag. The last verse in this version sung by Vila means roughly "Fortune made me lucky/I'm poor but happy/I'm like a cactus spine/Bare but tasty" to which the male chorus replies "I would like to have the good fortune/the joy that the Rooster has/that has many hens...but I can no longer" - presumably because the male singer is trying to enjoy his first night of monogamous wedded bliss, only to be interrupted by one of his bride's former lovers trying to sneak in over the balcony.
The best-known latter day rendition of the song is probably by El Trío Los Panchos, a popular mariachi-oriented group that started in 1944, though this version is from 1962:
The first verses of "Canastas" are in colloquial or nearly slang Spanish and thus hard to translate correctly, but they go something like this:
Baskets and more baskets
María Andrea has a nice basket
It doesn't lump the bed
So nothing flowers María Antonia also has a good basket
It doesn't lump the bed
So no flowers sprout.
That's very rough, but you get the idea. If you happen to be a cat with a snazzy hat and some fine pants who likes to jump from basket to basket, you surely don't want any flowers to sprout as a result.
All of which makes Gooding's liner notes for the equally racy version of "Canastas" that she and Bikel named "Coplas" either disingenuously pretending to an innocence about the song's meaning or really just missing the point entirely. Gooding suggests that the tune is "a courting song from southern Mexico which.....has an almost blues form...." Not hardly, I would say, on both counts. First, a song this suggestive would not be appropriate for any kind of courting ritual, as anyone who has ever had a daughter would probably attest. You want that young man who comes calling to be un caballero, a gentleman, serenading your little girl with songs of love and the moon - not tunes about a randy cat. No, this is far more likely a wedding song, one used rather later in the reception when everyone has had plenty to drink and wants to dance and appreciates a bit of blue humor - or at least won't make a fuss about it when the men begin with it. Second, the chord structure of most of the verse and all of the chorus sounds nothing like blues at all - unless Gooding mistook that structure here (a very standard Em-D-C-B7 progression heard in hundreds if not thousands of Spanish language songs) for something like Mexican blues, which it is not - it is in flamenco style, and that is the musical language of erotic passion and seduction, of desire and fulfillment and loss and need. Fine for the wedding, friends, but not when you're trying to take my baby out for a ride in your carriage.
I tend to think that Gooding and Bikel knew exactly what the song meant, based on the verve with which they sang it, and a pity it is that we don't have a YouTube video of their version to demonstrate that fact.* There is little question, however, that the Kingston Trio lifted the Bikel/Gooding Spanish lyric completely, hammed up the presentation a bit, and provided the droll and usually fairly accurate translation into English that Cynthia and Theo avoided. This is the studio cut from the group's first album in 1958, in which the translation of the last verse - a cat wearing the familiar sombrero and long pants - was bowdlerized away from the Spanish original lyric, as discussed below:
This song by the original KT was always a popular concert number for them, and the group performed it in its 12 song set at the first Newport Folk Festival in July of 1959. Three and a half decades later, however, when Vanguard Records finally released a CD of that show, "Coplas" was missing from it despite the fact that there was a clean recording of it available (as attested to by its inclusion in the Bear Family's huge and comprehensive boxed set of Trio recordings). As far as I know, there was no public announcement of why it was omitted, but it's pretty clear that standards of humor had changed by the 1994 release date of the Newport recording. My friend Mary Katherine Aldin of radio and folk collection fame produced that album for Vanguard, and she fought tooth and nail to keep "Coplas" on the CD for purposes of historical accuracy. She even offered to write an explanatory note about the difference in eras and values and the evolution of our national culture - but the powers that be at Vanguard were either themselves too offended by the cut or too afraid of public outcry to permit it, so off it stayed.
I would guess that it was the mocking of Spanish and Japanese accents in English that disturbed them the most, but that in itself is a bit ironic. Dave Guard's "U C R A" quip during the second-to-last verse is actually covering up a lyric that is arguably rather more offensive. The Spanish for that verse is
La mula que yo mente la monto hoy mi compadre.
Eso a mi no me importa pues yo la mon te primero
which means
The mule that I used to ride
Is now ridden by my friend
Makes no matter to me
Because I mounted her first.
I'm not completely sure that they could get away with singing that today, much less in 1958. On second thought, though, network and air wave censors might well let that bit of humor onto a broadcast. The verse doesn't use any of George Carlin's famous forbidden words, and the only interest group being demeaned here is women - a long-standing tradition in world cultures anyway, and demonstrated one way or another on American television nightly. And lest one wishes to take me to task for saying that, I would simply ask if anyone would like his mother, wife, daughter, friend, girlfriend, or any other female significant to him referred to as a mule fit mainly for mounting.
And that really is the same problem with the Trio's overall rendition of the song. I may not have been offended at first decades ago by the mocking accents, but then I am neither Mexican nor Japanese. The Trio got in some fairly hot water less than a year after "Coplas" with the release of their second single, "The Tijuana Jail," which was banned from radio stations not only in TJ but throughout Mexico - again, for the satire of Mexican pronunciation of English and the consequent perceived disrespect for the country and its people. It's not as if that song and "Coplas" and Bill Dana as José Jiménez weren't offensive to a lot of people fifty plus years ago; we who aren't of Mexican heritage just didn't hear about it.
It's been said over the years by well-intentioned people that we should get over "political correctness" and all enjoy a good laugh over songs like this and have the KT reintroduce "Coplas" to its stage show. I'm all for the first part of that - p.c. run amok is a poison, an enemy to free speech and all things democratic. But insensitivity is equally pernicious. The measure of it all is in the Good Book and has been for rather more than two millenia - "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Take what is most precious to you - your religion, for example, or the flag of the country, or your children, anything with which your own identity is bound up - give it to some college smart alecks and have them mock the living daylights out of it with a meanness of spirit that comes from their failure to understand how and why that thing is so important to you - and walk away laughing with them. Some people can do that to a certain degree, but it's not common. Maybe if we had a Mexican theater troupe making fun of the American flag the point would be clearer. If we could all laugh at that, then perhaps it would be ok to rescue "Coplas" from the shelf of humor that has passed its expiration date where it now rests.
*Addendum, September 2015 A few months ago, YouTube itself posted a copyright-permitted video of the Bikel/Gooding rendition. I'm happy to be able to include it here in memory of the recently-departed Theodore Bikel, whose contributions to American folk music, film, and theater are unparalleled for their breadth and depth.
If there is a sort of folk Valhalla somewhere - a place where, say, Burl Ives is still taking the Rock Island Line to the Big Rock Candy Mountain and the Weavers are on top of Old Smokey wishing Irene yet another goodnight - then I'm sure that first cousins Darlin' Corey and Little Maggie are still up in some misty mountain hollows pursuing their conniving and very independent paths through (after)life. Thinking of the two as cousins is a neat little trope because a) their respective songs are certainly closely related mountain banjo classics, and b) both young ladies show quite a bit of the same kind of moxie that Ellen Smith et al. regrettably seemed to have lacked. Corey and Maggie dance only to their own tunes, and ain't no man gonna get the better of either of them.
The songs seem to be part of a family of "banjo blues" that are derived in part from genuine African-American blues in the wonderful melange of styles and sources that American folk music is. But the accompaniment structure - just two chords, typically a G to an F and then back again - is Euro all the way, closely resembling the rather mournful sounding mixolydian mode. That means essentially just that the songs use fewer notes than tunes written in our "normal" twelve note scale. And that's really easy to hear - both songs are even more repetitive than most other folk songs, eight bars repeated over and over, verse and chorus both.
Wherever it was that Corey and Maggie went their separate ways as songs, their recording histories continue to parallel each other. As noted in my "Corey" article linked above, that song was first waxed by Clarence Gill and later Buel Kazee in 1927 - the same year that Grayson and Whitter (of "Tom Dooley"fame) on October 1 laid down the initial "Little Maggie" recording, to be followed in 1937 by Wade Mainer, still with us at the age of 103. In the late 1940s, the Stanley Brothers covered the song, for the first time in the new bluegrass genre of which Ralph Stanley was one of the originators (more on this below).
Grayson and Whitter were a fiddle-guitar group, but "Maggie" has always been a favorite of banjo players because the very simplicity of its chord structure allows for a some genuine tour-de-force instrumental innovation. Classic Kentucky mountain banjoist Lee Sexton here plays the tune in a kind of pre-bluegrass picking mode:
Sexton seems to be playing here in some kind of modal tuning - again, a variation from what we normally hear. It's a kind of minor sound, and that changes the melody as well as the accompaniment.
Ralph Stanley plays the song in a straightforward bluegrass style - here he is interviewed by the late Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers:
Stanley's arrangement has become the template from which most subsequent recordings have been derived. I find it interesting in this video that Stanley is quietly trying to establish an independent origin for his banjo style, since by 1946 Earl Scruggs had established himself as the putative godfather of three-fingered banjo picking while he was a member of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. But the "forward roll" that Stanley demonstrates in the video is in fact markedly different from the standard Scruggs style of picking.
Now Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio was certainly no Stanley or Scruggs during the first week of February in 1958 when the KT recorded its first album and decided to close it with "Little Maggie" (last song on the B side for those who remember LPs) - and he knew it. Guard had been bitten by the banjo bug in 1956 while a graduate student at Stanford after he attended a concert by Pete Seeger (at which a fifteen-year-old Joan Baez was also in attendance). Prior to that, Guard was a guitarist all the way, quietly evolving his own style after having been taught the rudiments of the instrument by his high school pal and eventual KT partner Bob Shane. According to third Trio member Nick Reynolds, Shane and Guard searched the music stores of San Francisco in vain looking for a 5 string banjo - all they could find were 4 string tenor banjos used more commonly in Dixieland jazz and Big Bands rather than in folk-styled music. In stepped Reynolds' father, a captain in the U.S. Navy and a lover of all kinds of music, including old time mountain songs, and he gave Guard his own 1920s-era S.S. Stewart standard neck 5 string. Guard reportedly bought Seeger's How To Play The Five String Banjo and taught himself Seeger's primary style - the more traditional "frailing" or "clawhammer" approach to the instrument in which the strings are brushed in rhythmic combinations of different fingers rather than plucked as they are in bluegrass style. Here's what Davey came up with:
It's not a bad effort at all for a guy who's been playing the instrument for less than two years (if you can get past the gentle mockery of the "hilbilly" origins of the song that the group also employed that same year in their "Shady Grove" recording and blessedly omitted in subsequent arrangements of Appalachian tunes). The positively plunky sound of Guard's/Capt. Reynolds' banjo almost certainly comes from its having a calfskin head, a delightfully traditional sound when the air is dry but murder when it's humid, because the pressure from the strings forces the pliant calfskin to sink and consequently dulls the vibration and sound of the strings. I'm guessing there was rain in Los Angeles on that February day when the KT recorded this one at Capitol Records.
Ricky Skaggs has been outspoken in his dislike of the "commercial" turn that country music has taken, and he has built the second half of his career around both preservation and innovation of older mountain and country styles of music. Here he is performing "Maggie" in 1999 with Kentucky Thunder:
According to the album credits, the blazing banjo solo is by Marc Pruett - and the instrumentation overall is a good indication of why many country and bluegrass artists expressed such disdain for the (by comparison) primitive playing of most of the pop folk groups.
Contemporary bluegrass favorites The Grascals give us something in the same mode, though with a bit more emphasis on the instrumentals, if not at quite as breakneck a pace:
Maggie and Corey are clearly pursuing different paths. Corey is, after all, a moonshining entrepreneur, decidedly unromantic and apparently interested in men only for their money:
Don't care if you are living, don't care if you are dead If you want a taste of my product, then I'm gonna take your bread.
We can assume the product is moonshine only, though you never know. But Maggie is clearly a good time girl, fun to be around but deadly to lose your heart over. In this regard, she has a lot in common with Woody Guthrie's nameless beloved in "Hard, Ain't It Hard, who continually
...sits down upon another's knee, And tells him what she never will tell me.
Another cousin, perhaps? Little Maggie is, after all, continually "fooling another man" as well. In any event, all three ladies are clearly and in their separate ways thumbing their noses at convention and turning the tables on the menfolk. They all seem also to have a talent for self-preservation, and it's positively refreshing to have some folk songs where young ladies who refuse to conform to boys' rules don't end up shot through the heart lying dead on the ground. Maybe there is justice in the world after all.
Rivers seem to play a larger part in American folk music than they do in that of just about any other country. Sure, there are some Irish folk songs about the Shannon, and the Scots' "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton" is a standard; students of French probably remember singing "Sur le pont d'Avignon," and I have no doubt that the Rhine and the Volga and the Yang-tze and all the other big rivers have inspired some folkloric response.
But consider the rivers of America and the scores of songs they have inspired. The Hudson. The Chattahoochee. The Potomac. The Shenandoah. The Ohio. The Rio Grande. The Arkansas. The Red. The Wabash. And the Father of Waters himself, the Mississippi...and those are just the high profile waterways that have songs attached to them.
It is easy to understand why, since first, those rivers were the principal highways to and through the vast interior of North America in the days before railroads. But fully as important, I think, is that fact of the sheer majesty, power, and beauty of so many of them. If you'll forgive another short list - the Hudson at West Point. The Shenandoah at Harper's Ferry. The Ohio in southern Indiana. The Mississippi a mile wide near Cairo...so many more.
I have always loved the river and riverboat folk songs, perhaps second only to my love of a good sea chantey. Bob Gibson's first album in 1957 was called Folk Songs of the Ohio, and it was one of my favorites. The Weavers' "The E-Ri-E Was A Risin'" is a song that I still love to sing and play, as well as that great and stately cousin song, "The Erie Canal." You could do an entire book or a boxed album set on wonderful American river songs - and folkies have done so.
I suppose that reflecting on the very old "John Webb" song last week is part of what prompted me to pick "Rockabout My Saro Jane" for this week. I hadn't really thought much about the song for many years until recently. Last April when I was profiling Lou Gottlieb and his arrangement of "Good News", I remembered a passage from folk historian Ronald Cohen's Rainbow Quest that I used in the linked article and cite again here - Gottlieb told Cohen that
I had a wife and children and no money so I started working as a stand up comic and got a job at the Purple Onion. There were three guys there who used to hang around the Hungry i all the time. In fact, they'd be in the dressing room half the time. But they were cute....They were the opening act at the Purple Onion...Well, sir, these kids really had something different. There was a magic about that act that was hard to explain. When they made their first record...they needed a tune. I had a couple of old charts from the Gateway Singers that I quickly re-scored for three voices. They sang a song I stole from Uncle Dave Macon called "Rock About My Saro Jane" and put it on their first album. And they let me publish it. The royalties ultimately came out to thirty grand.
Here is Uncle Dave's recording from which Dr. Lou derived the arrangement to which he refers, courtesy of Chicago area roots expert Jeremy Raven:
Gottlieb was referring, of course, to the wet-behind-the-ears boys who were forming the Kingston Trio, and his arrangement of "Saro Jane" was a rousing opening number to the second side of that first album. I promptly forgot about the song (after remembering that I had indeed enjoyed it greatly) until late one night at the recent Trio Fantasy Camp in Arizona. A bunch of us were playing a few old KT songs in the Burns/Askins Hospitality Annex when Bob Shane and his wife Bobbie walked in and sat down to listen and sing along. Bobbie requested two songs that she said rightly that no one ever seemed to play at the camp, Stan Wilson's "I Bawled"...and "Saro Jane." Play them we did, and I was struck by what a fine arrangement Gottlieb had come up with and how much fun the song was.
As is obvious in the lyric, "Saro Jane" is a roustabout or stevedore's song from the Mississippi River. Alan Lomax also cites Uncle Dave Macon as the source, asserting that Macon learned the song in 1887 from black workers on the Cumberland River docks in Nashville but maintaining that the song was much older, probably of Civil War vintage. The late Rod Cook specialized in covering Macon's tunes and style - here he is with some absolutely first-class clawhammer on the song:
That is one fine sounding banjo, expertly played.
And here is what Lou Gottlieb came up with for the Trio - what they lack in finesse they make up for in energy:
Dr. Lou puts the verses completely in a minor mode and then creates a wonderful transition into the chorus by going to a major chord and then to a seventh leading into "Come on and rockabout..." - really nice.
Immortal Grass is a semi-pro assemblage from Haysi, Virginia whose rendition is a sort of bridge from Macon's old-timey mountain style to the more modern bluegrass interpretations upcoming next:
Something inside me says that folk music ought to be played this way - by a group of friends in a paneled parlor - with the lead singer in white socks. Perfect.
The Grascals are an up and coming "new grass" kind of act who put a good deal more professional polish on their rendition than the previous three videos demonstrate:
Finally, Wayne Shrubsall bills himself as "The Banjo Guy," and he delivers a different take on Dave Macon's arrangement than Rod Cook's. This video is well worth a listen for Shrubsall's introduction and his use of a century-old Vega/Fairbanks banjo:
In introducing "Saro Jane" in his Folksongs of North America, Lomax says that our country's interior rivers have been "pathways of folklore and song...made by men who shouted in triumph as the loads were hurled down, made by men who were driven by their own unbridled and beautiful strength to bring melody and rhythm...to the breast of the great rivers."
That's unusually poetic for Lomax - but it seems to me to fit perfectly for "Saro Jane" and a few dozen similar songs.
As I wend my way through the tedious taskk of changing the embed codes (the HTML that enables us to see these videos on this site) per the note on the left, I often run across an absolutely essential version of a song that was not available when I wrote the original essay. Just such a case is here. The New Lost City Ramblers - John Cohen, Tom Paley, and the late Mike Seeger - were the exact contemporaries of the Kingston Trio and other pop folkies, all of whom got started in 1958, but the Ramblers were as radically opposed to the popularizers as could be imagined. The NCLR wanted to demonstrate an absolute fidelity to the arrangements and identities of the tunes that the commercial groups were popularizing, and that is just what the Ramblers do here with this outstanding rendition of "Saro Jane:.
I can pinpoint the exact moment in my past when I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar. I was nine years old in the summer of 1959. I was going into fourth grade and had already been a classical piano student for two and a half years and was playing all those simplified Bach and Beethoven pieces that beginning students used to learn - and I really enjoyed making music. I'd had plenty of exposure to folk guitar (as I've detailed in earlier posts) because of records in the house by Burl Ives and because of the television shows of Chicago folksinger Win Stracke and of Mousketeer-in-chief Jimmie Dodd.
Many of our family's children's records included folk songs, and our dad had brought home The Kingston Trio At Large album because he was a commuter and loved "MTA." I thoroughly enjoyed that song, but I liked "Blow Ye Winds" and "Remember The Alamo" even more. None of these, however, inspired me to do anything more than spin the LPs on the old stereo.
Then, sometime that summer, my father came home with two more albums. Always a watchful and thoughtful parent, he paid great attention to what kinds of books and music his many children were drawn to - and he fed those interests with a steady stream of randomly purchased gifts. He had noticed my growing obsession with the Trio album and had purchased the first two LPs by that group, the red one and the white one. He put the red one - Capitol T996 - on the turntable first. I thought that "Three Jolly Coachmen" was amusing with the fake accents and all - but when the next cut on the album began, I sat absolutely transfixed by the sound coming out of the speakers, the syncopated strum of what I would later learn was an E chord played on a Martin D28. The cut only got better from there - but it was that opening four beat measure that transformed my life in an instant. I wanted to make that sound. I wanted to make music that sounded like that.
The song, of course, was "Bay of Mexico," and fifty plus years later, it remains one of my two favorite folk-type songs with "The Sinking of the Reuben James" and without a doubt the cut by the Kingston Trio that I admire most of the more than 300 that they put on albums. It's worth playing immediately to remember how effective a song it is:
There is just so much to like about this cut - the arrangement, the production, the recording, and the performance itself.
Most of the modern versions of "Bay of Mexico" are derived from an Alan Lomax field recording from 1935 of Bahamian singers singing the root song - which interestingly was a sea chantey as they sang it and not a calypso. Chantey expert and veteran sailor Roy Hugill (more on him in another chantey post) puts this song in a group that he identifies as "Santy Anno" chanteys, suggesting that the line "Way-o Susianna" is a substitute for "Heave Away, Santiano." The immediate antecedent of the KT recording is, once again, the Weavers from their Carnegie Hall concert from 1955 that had been released as an LP on Vanguard in early 1957. The origin of the song in the Bahamas apparently prompted the Weavers to interpret the song with an ever-so-slightly syncopated, quasi-calypso styled rendition, very different from the 4/4 chantey that the song had been:
Note the similarity in lyrics of the Weavers to the KT - but also note that the basic timing here is closer to the straight 4/4 of a regular chantey than it is to a calypso. The introduction, by the way, is by Fred Hellerman.
The Kingston arrangement may also be borrowing from Harry Belafonte, who waxed the song in 1959 but had been including it in concert for years, courtesy of his in-house songwriter, the great Irving Burgie. On his website HERE, Burgie claims credit for the KT "Bay of Mexico," though the Capitol album lists Dave Guard as arranger. Listen to what Burgie gave Belafonte to work with and I think the discrepancy becomes understandable:
Harry B is giving the song the full-on brass and steel drum calypso treatment, and I believe that Burgie is asserting a direct link between what he did - converting the song from chantey to calypso - and what Guard did. Note also that in what is a fairly standard maneuver, Burgie/Belafonte is/are taking the song up half a step toward the end. Guard's arrangement builds from there with the incredibly inventive half step up at each chorus - and the the final dramatic step down as a kind of coda to close the song as quietly as it began.
What producer Voyle Gilmore here did is also sheer genius. First, of course, Gilmore insisted on using Elmer "Buzz" Wheeler, house bass player at the Purple Onion where the Trio had had its first extended five month engagement, on all of the album's cuts. Now it's time to bring Wheeler out of the shadows and give him the credit he's long overdue. He is a tremendously important factor in making a folk music album a saleable commodity to a general audience in 1958. What he brings to "Tom Dooley" is beyond estimation - because with the wailing Nick Reynolds second chorus "Hang down your head and cry" line, it is what makes the recording unique. Wheeler was an accomplished enough musician to have been used on several recordings in the 40s by the great Charlie Mingus, and the jazz sensibility he brings to the group's repertoire literally makes these 4/4 folk cuts swing - an absolute requirement for 1958 pop songs and something no other folk group thought to do.
Wheeler's bass work on "Bay of Mexico" quickly becomes the real rhythm of the song, overshadowing the bongos in Gilmore's final mix. Listen to the increasing volume of the bass as the song approaches its crescendo on the third chorus and on Reynolds' verse - and listen to Gilmore fade it as the song winds down and Nick's bongos take over again. It's hard to find out much about Wheeler on the web - I'll bet that Dean Reilly knew him and someone should ask Dean. I did find a blog by Wheeler's niece HERE in which she adds a bit of color to what we already know of him. Bill Bush and others emphasize Wheeler's contribution as "bottom" and "professionalism" - but it's so much more than that. The commercial sound of the Kingston Trio is rooted as much in Wheeler's swing as it is in the harmonies and arrangements.
Gilmore is also furiously working those knobs - note how in addition to the Trio's own vocal modulations he brings up each voice for its solo and then quickly re-blends the voice into the harmony choruses. On stage with one mic, the singers did that. In Capitol Studio B with three mics - it's all Voyle. Gilmore also makes a virtue out of necessity. The monaural blend here, dictated by Capitol's refusal to spend stereo dollars on a fledgling group whose music no one really understood, is absolutely superb. The mono enables Gilmore to hit a perfect blend with the highly energetic, almost out of control vocal performance, emphasizing the group's trademark harmonies.
The outstanding three part harmony reaches a level of vocal perfection on the highest chorus, right before Reynolds' verse. The Trio creates what George Grove referred to in conversation last summer as a "phantom harmonic" - the aural illusion (a result of pitch and volume) of a fourth part that really isn't there, as on "Bimini" and "Wide Missouri."
To see just how far the KT took this arrangement and performance - listen to a rough version of the original, pre-calypso chantey by Hulton Clint:
And just to let us know the song is still alive and well - the group Banana Boat in Poland last year, a rousing go at the song with fine harmony:
I never, ever tire of listening to this song. My only regret about writing of it here is - it leaves me only one more chantey from the KT to write about...stay tuned.
Addendum - 8/27/11
Some recent recordings, posted today as Hurricane Irene bears down on the U.S. east coast - first, the Wilson Family in an excellent a capella version:
Next the Bootstrappers from a show in New Orleans in 2010 - the pirate costumes might not exactly fit with the tune, but they deliver a fine, high-energy performance:
Some really unfortunate things tend to happen when a real, three-dimensional person is transformed into an icon, the worst of which is that what makes that person unique and/or interesting and/or admirable (or despicable) is lost in a haze of sloppy, sentimental admiration. We Americans, long regarded as the wide-eyed innocents of the developed world, are especially guilty of transforming our very real heroes into very unreal semi-divinities. We can't tolerate the dark shades of gray that color the realities of every one of us. We implicitly insist that our heroes be flawless, and in so doing we lose sight of who they really were. Worse, if our plaster illusions are shattered, we often turn on those very heroes and demonize them, or at least reduce them in our esteem and tag them with a perpetual sense of our disappointment that they failed to be as perfect as we wanted them at be and as we ourselves are not.
Abraham Lincoln, for example, was by most measures the greatest of our presidents - but he was afflicted by the worst depressions of any of our leaders, and those depressions drove him at times to vindictive rage against those he thought let him down. He blundered at times both politically and militarily. He married for political clout and not love and suffered through a painfully stiff and unfulfilling marriage. But no one wants to hear about those things. We want Lincoln the Icon - wise, gentle, homey, humorous, and strong. He was all of these, truly - but what is impressive about him is that was able to demonstrate those iconic qualities in the face of massive personal failings that conspired to prevent him from doing so. Lincoln is a hero in spite of who he was, not because of it, and that is what makes him admirable. One of Ernest Hemingway's many definitions of courage (not as lyrical as "Grace under pressure") was that it was the quality not of the man who felt no fear but rather of the man who was terrified but overcame the terror to do what was good and right.
In our world of folk music, Woody Guthrie is rightly the ultimate iconic figure. He probably did more to popularize regional folk music and embed it it our developing national popular culture than any other single individual. The Lomaxes and others found the songs, but Guthrie sang them - and then wrote his own. He was a radio star at times and in certain regions and a solidly selling recording artist just as much as he was a political figure. Guthrie had an eye to the commercial possibilities of the music he performed, and if he never allowed financial concerns to dictate what he sang and where he sang it, he never ignored them either. His influence on those who made folk music a truly successful part of the American music industry - especially Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, and Bob Dylan - is nearly immeasurable.
Guthrie's charismatic personality overshadowed his darker side, the side we don't want to remember: unfaithful husband, neglectful father, erratic and undependable friend, anti-authority rebel, radical fellow-traveller (as they used to say). I recall a remark made about actor Errol Flynn - that he could charm the socks off of anyone but inflicted devastating injury on anyone foolish enough to love him, and that seems to have been at least partially true of Guthrie as well. We want him to have been the Man of the People, the unsullied hero with a guitar on which was inscribed "This Machine Kills Fascists," the simple, the country-bred prophet of a new age of justice and equality. We don't want the sly, canny self-promoter and personal legend-builder that he also was.
I've profiled five of Guthrie's songs on this site: "This Land Is Your Land", "The Sinking Of The Reuben James", "Pastures Of Plenty", "Deportee", and "Hard Travelin'." The first four of these have clear political overtones, and the fifth implicitly so in its celebration of the Working Man and its illustration of Guthrie's credo that "I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."
But Guthrie could also be whimsical and funny and pointed and just plain fun, and no song illustrates that better than "Hard, Ain't It Hard." No politics here, no noble working man, no progressive causes. This song has more in common with a fundamentalist revival camp meeting than it does with socialism - being as it is about the evils of hard drink and misdirected desire and all. But it ain't no camp meeting song, because Woody has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek and is singing it just for the fun of it:
Say what you will about the Kingston Trio - but they knew a good song when they heard one, as the really impressive number of songs that they recorded first or gave first national exposure to later found their way into other folk artists' (or pop artists') repertoires. Here they deliver Guthrie's composition with their trademark uptempo energy and high spirits:
For hardcore Trio fans - this is almost certainly the first KT song on which Bob Shane is using a pick to play the guitar. Virtually every other song on the first album, Capitol T996 The Kingston Trio has Shane strumming those steel strings bare-handed.
Oddly, just as I had been surprised that "Darlin" Corey" had over 120 different versions on YouTube, the two videos above are the only professionally recorded and performed versions of the song on the site. But there are some fun amateur and semi-pro recordings - first, bluegrass style from The Custom Grass Revue:
Next, the Cast Iron Maidens from Seattle in May of 2010. This is an interesting version, beyond the use of a musical saw and an aluminum upright bass - because Annie and Katie "re-gender" the lyric to relate Guthrie's lyric about a ne'er-do-well from a woman's point of view:
Every Kingston Trio album was structured like one of their concert sets - a strong opener followed by a change-of-pace, heading toward a high-profile big number (not necessarily uptempo - maybe a single or familiar hit or promoted song from a new album), and then repeating that pattern leading to the high-energy finale.
The Kingstons to this day proclaim with pride on their press releases that they "emerged from the clubs of San Francisco's North Beach," and it is as a nightclub act for which their early sets were designed. As great as they proved to be in concert halls, the intimacy of the upscale clubs always seemed to me to be the natural habitat for the group and their music, and "...from the Hungry i" gives plenty of evidence for that thought. When they played for, say, five thousand people, a barn-burner opener like "Hard Travelin" or "Hard Ain't It Hard" was almost compulsory - but in the smaller and quieter clubs, they could and did open with songs like "Three Jolly Coachmen."
And a fine opening for Capitol T996 it was, being a re-arranged (and, ahem, cleaned up) version of a traditional song, with all the hallmarks of the Kingston Trio style - great energy, strong interpretive dynamics, some humor, and solid if not spectacular musicianship.The root song was known as "Landlord, Fill The Flowing Bowl" and appears in a play by Shakespeare collaborator John Fletcher about 1630; it's said to be either Scots or English in its origin. The unexpurgated (and very funny) lyrics are here:
So return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, June 1st, 1958 (my eighth birthday, in fact) for the very first cut on that legendary first record album:
And courtesy of our Mallorcan Swedish friend Bo Wennstam - fly with us back to last August in Scottsdale to see the combination of fidelity to the original and musical innovation with which today's Trio performs the number:
The most interesting other version that I found on YouTube is from the Husky Singers from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, a fine choral adaptation that includes both some of the more risque lyrics and an excellent satiric last verse:
Adding a delightful feminine touch to the song are Molly and Sonny Boy from Minnesota - this is a traditional version I've seen in songbooks that truncates the verses somewhat:
For a talented amateur group - a garage Trio of Chilly Winds/County Line Trio vintage - the Tungsten Trio from Pennsylvania:
I have a feeling that renditions of the song from, say, two hundred years ago may have looked something like this tavern version from what appears to be a Renaissance fair group of enthusiasts:
Finally, and continuing the costume/re-enactor theme - a Madrigals group from Hiram College in Ohio:
Next week - a special Christmas song from one of the great holiday albums of all time...
When I began to think of these Weekend Videos as a kind of series that I'd do regularly, I resolved that I likely wouldn't be writing up any really commonly-known KT songs, or at least not some of the highest profile ones that exist in different versions. The problem was, I thought, that we'd have the KT rendition and then a host of other pale imitations of it (as with "A Worried Man," which as I noted in my article on that generally has everyone from Pete Seeger to Johnny Cash doing different words to the KT's distinctive arrangement of the melody) or an absolutely unique Trio version with everyone else doing imitations of an alternative take (as with last week's "Someday Soon," in which all non-Kingston versions are variations on Tyson's original and Judy Collins' wonderful performance). Consider, for example, what would happen with "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face": the New Frontier arrangement is singular, and everyone else is doing a less-successful Roberta Flack.
Of course, I've also proven myself wrong again and again, what with some really interesting versions out there of well-worn tunes like "Tom Dooley," "Greenback Dollar," and "Long Black Veil."
Few other "hits for other artists" have as direct a bloodline from the Kingston Trio to massive popularity as does "Sloop John B." As most Trio fans know, Al Jardine of The Beach Boys was and is a huge KT fan (note his comments on the Wherever We May Go video) and brought the song with the striped shirt look to Brian Wilson, who despite an initial lack of enthusiasm eventually came up with the classic rock arrangement that is the most widely-known version of the song today.
The John B apparently was a "sponger" in the Caribbean that went down to the bottom of Governor's Harbor in Eleuthra in the Bahamas around 1900 after a fire of uncertain origin, possibly insurance-induced arson but just as possibly the result of some careless partying by the crew (which of course would be more in keeping with the song). Classic American poet Carl Sandburg included a version of the song in a 1927 collection of folk numbers that he edited, and Alan Lomax had it in his seminal 1947 Folk Songs Of North America.*(For corrections to this and several other errors in this post, please see expert Peter Curry's comments below.) Lomax acknowledges Sandburg as the "collector," and Sandburg insisted on sharing the copyright with Weaver Lee Hays, who seems to have given the song its current structure.
The Weavers recorded it in their Decca sessions supervised and orchestrated by Gordon Jenkins around 1950 (and as with the other Jenkins' collaborations with the group, it was a case of two brilliant styles just not meshing), but it was likely the 1956 recording of the group's Carnegie Hall concert that was the immediate predecessor of the KT's version, though as we will see, the Lyn Murray Singers may have been an influence as well.
So here is the very original Kingston Trio - fifty years ago - from Capitol T996 in all its glorious monophonic mix. Bob Shane is doing a great understated rhythm strum (with Travis Edmondson, Theo Bikel, and Alex Hassilev, Shane is one of the all-time great bare-handed strummers - but unlike the others, on a steel string guitar[!]). Nick Reynolds is doing some great understated bongo work; Dave Guard is like Shane using bare fingers to pluck what sounds like a calfskin-headed S.S. Stewart banjo:
I have always believed that this number is actually the signature song of the Trio's first album and the key to its genius. The arrangement is so well-thought-out and so different from what came before - and so in keeping with the desperate, hung-over nature of the lyric - that the singular and unique touch that the Kingstons brought to so many later numbers first displays itself here (and on several other songs from the first album, including "Tom Dooley").
Fifty years later, our current Trio has updated their performance and given it a kind of "Blow The Man Down" swagger that even the Beach Boys can't match. Courtesy of Debobwan himself - thanks Mr. Shane! - George, Bill and Rick rock it out:
Of course, you can't go very far into a discussion of the song without reference to The Beach Boys. Their version is so widely known that posting it here would be redundant - except that the structuring of an intricate harmony is really on display here in this remastered rendition:
Here are the aforementioned Lyn Murray Singers from 1952 - sounds like a Gordon Jenkins arrangement with a touch of pop-calypso and a wrinkle or two that just might have been included by the KT.
Well, CopyVio got this one - too bad, because it is more of a direct antecedent of the KT and the BB than this interesting early 1950's recording by Blind Blake Higgs - thanks to PC Fields for this one:
And what happens when rockabilly meets calypso? Shall we ask Johnny Cash?
I've recently discovered this outstanding guitar duet by two of pop/country/rockabilly's best, the legendary Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed:
And Waylon Jennings has a sensitive treatment of the song, apparently with some influence from the quieter way in which the KT sang it:
I have always loved this song and been fascinated by it, most especially the original Nick,Bob, and Dave Kingston Trio cut with its subdued desperation. That's probably why I want to close with this, my favorite all-time performance of the song, posted for nearly a year now my channel and embedded here to Xroads by me before - our two friends departed from us this year having fun with the song at Fantasy Camp4 in 2003. It's classic Kingston - Nick and John are joshing each other, they want everyone to sing along, Travis Edmondson takes the second verse - and on the last chorus, John's high harmony is full of the plaintive longing of the original album cut, and Nick is glowing and confident and happy as he leads the audience in this wonderfully quiet and nostalgic moment:
A great song to sing indeed - and with three distinctly different Trio versions.
Later Additions - 9/1/11
A few more versions uploaded to YouTube since this article was published:
Surf guitar legend Dick Dale from the late 1950s:
RelientK covering the Beach Boys version from the early 2000s:
February, 2012
From 2000, the legendary Van Morrison of Ireland and Lonnie Donegan, the great UK skiffle star of the 1950s - more reminiscent of the early Kingston Trio than the Beach Boys:
Comparative Video 101 is a resource for performance videos of some of the classic popular folk songs of the last several decades with personal commentary on them by Jim Moran, a teacher of literature for nearly forty years and a folk musician and writer for a decade longer. He was also co-host of the "Roots Music And Beyond" radio program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles. Some of these posts appeared originally on the Kingston Crossroads message board, and many of the profiled songs were performed by the classic pop folk group the Kingston Trio. The page will be updated once or more per month. Your comments are welcome.
Use the Google Search Bar above as you would use the Google web search. Enter the name of a song or artist, press "search," and the results will appear showing every mention of your search term in the 150+ articles on this blog. An alphabetical index of song titles is coming soon; until then, the Google Search This Blog will substitute for it.
Since Blogspot/Google has recently begun including readership statistics as part of its service to bloggers like me, I have become aware that the readership for these pages is far more extensive and international than I had ever dreamed, usually approaching 1,000 visitors per week from literally all around the world. I am profoundly appreciative of the interest in these posts and glad that folk music fans find enjoyment and value in them.
There are currently more than two hundred articles here, and nearly all of the twelve hundred posted videos in those articles are from YouTube. Most readers will already know that because YouTube is another subsidiary of Google, the latter company is being sued for copyright infringement by a significant number of content providers like Sony-BMG and Warner's Music Group. YouTube/Google's normal response to infringement claims is to remove the disputed videos or ban them from certain countries in which the claims have been filed.
This, of course, has a profound effect on the content of posts like the ones in this blog. Videos that I have selected for any given article can be and often have been removed at any time without warning. I try where possible to replace deleted videos with other versions of the same performance or with similar renditions of the songs, though this is not always possible.
Policing the hundred plus posts to be sure that there are interesting and representative video performances is itself a major undertaking, one that involves a significant commitment of time. I hope that those of you good enough to stop by this blog will have a bit of patience. I review as many of the older articles as I can every week with the goal of maintaining the integrity of each, and sometimes this enables me to find newer, better, and more exciting performances of the songs profiled here.
The origin of my Comparative Video 101 blog and all that it has led to, including my co-host spot on KPFK radio's Roots Music And Beyond show, performances with the Chad Mitchell Trio's Joe Frazier, George Grove of the Kingston Trio and Art Podell of Art and Paul and the New Christy Minstrels, a "professorship" at the KT at Fantasy Camp, and much much more, was in a couple of innocent postings I made on the KT message board in May and June of 2008. I'd found in the still fairly early days of YouTube that there were several interesting and different versions of "Scotch and Soda" and "Tom Dooley" on the video site, so I embedded them in separate posts with a few comments. Well, a lot of readers seemed to enjoy the idea and the KT board didn't archive, so I saved them on this blog and began to do more and more of them, hitting a stretch of 28 consecutive weeks at one point in 2009 - no mean feat considering that I was working both daytime and evening teaching jobs and was usually writing the damn things after I got home at 10pm on Thursday nights.
