"Red River Shore" and "Hanna Lee"

This is a half post, really. I'm working on something rather more involved for this week, but these two songs are ones I loved as a youth many a decade ago, and though there aren't many different takes on the tunes, I thought it might be fun to take a brief look at each.

The inception of this page was, as noted at left, in posts that I had made for the wonderful Kingston Crossroads message board, a great site for discussing all topics folk and roots related, though of course the prime focus is on the Kingston Trio, its 55 year history and recordings, and the doings of its current incarnation, which has just released the first CD in decades of all-new material by the group, Born At The Right Time - more on this to come. Most of the more than 140 songs discussed on this site have been recorded at one time or another by the KT, including many now very familiar tunes first waxed by the Trio years before the later hit versions.

A fair number of the more than 250 songs that the group has put on albums, though, are unique to them, as I had thought that both "Red River Shore" and "Hanna Lee" might have been. Not true, as it turns out - and both numbers have an excellent pedigree as folk-flavored pop tunes.

The copyright for "Red River Shore" is assigned as "Adapted by Jack Splittard and Randy Cierley." The former is the pseudonym that the KT adopted for copyrights that the three musicians wanted to claim jointly, much as "Paul Campbell" had been for The Weavers - albeit with the KT-ish humor of splitting the jack, a now nearly archaic term for money. Cierley, however, is a very real person who figured in the late stages of the Trio's first decade; he has had a fascinating and somewhat harrowing life and musical career that he chronicles in a great website HERE. It's certainly worth a look: Cierly has worked with some of the greats and has endured more than most of us ever will. In his youth, though, he worked as a musician and arranger on some of the cuts on the Kingstons' failed attempt at folk-rock, Something Else - though this arrangement of a traditional song works somehow mysteriously for me:



The organ and military-styled snare drum are rather less obtrusive than the rock instrumentation is on most of the album's other cuts. John Stewart has the lead spoken vocal, as he did on a number of other KT songs.

Cierley's and the Trio's changes to the original song are apparent when you listen to a version from five years prior by the Norman Luboff Choir, a wonderful chorale that I remember most for supporting Harry Belafonte on a number of his 1950s and 60s albums:



Aside from the alterations to the tune and some creative shifts in the chordal accompaniment, the biggest difference is clearly in which of the doomed couple dies, and why. It's an easy inference that Cierly and the Trio were adapting the song under the long shadows of Marty Robbins' "El Paso" (though Randy remarked recently that he was "pretty sure that 'El Paso' had nothing to do with it" directly) and the Trio's own last Top 10 singles hit, "The Rev. Mr. Black", a number also with verses spoken by Stewart. Thus, we get a shoot-out and some dying words instead of a suicide and accompanying note. Except for its clearly derivative nature (and its clear inferiority to Robbins' classic), I prefer the KT arrangement here.

"Hanna Lee" was co-written by Richard Mills, about whom I can't find anything, and the rather higher profile Stan Jones, who wrote "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and the theme song for the old Warner Brothers western Cheyenne, both of which are enough to endear Jones to any child of the 50s. In case you've forgotten -



Jones is a member of the Western Music Hall of Fame, and his page there is, like Cierly's, a fascinating look at the man's life in and out of music.

"Hanna Lee" is a bit of western fluff, reminiscent of the much superior Wilkins/Dill "Long Black Veil" though HL preceded LBV by several years. The Kingstons had had great success with earlier recordings of hanging-after-murder-for-love songs; though this is a decent cut, the band may have gone to the well once too often:



Other versions were recorded by major 50s pop star Guy Mitchell:



I like the "reckless lovers/pretty devil" line - and Johnny Western is also in the Western Music Hall of Fame as both a performer and as a radio personality:



Next up - something more traditional.

Tom Paxton's "Bottle Of Wine"

Back in January, I was delighted to be able to see Tom Paxton in concert at one of the great small venues on the West Coast, McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA. Paxton is a hale and energetic 75 years old, still writing great songs ("The Bravest" about the firefighters of 9/11 and the very recent "What If, No Matter" about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting), and still puts on about as good a folk show as you can see. I have profiled three of TP's best-known and most-often-covered songs here on CompVid101 - "The Last Thing On My Mind, "My Ramblin' Boy", and "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound", and I've outlined in those posts why I regard him as the best of the modern folk-type songwriters.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Milt Okun at a book singing, and Okun's Cherry Lane Music Co. has been Paxton's sole publisher for the more than five decades of his career. Reading Okun's book was illuminating about a wide variety of topics, most especially how an artist like Paxton, who has had steady but unspectacular album sales and virtually no singles sales, could have made a good living in music through all these years. Answer: the nine cents per unit sold that goes to the songwriter/copyright holder of the composition. Think about how many millions of albums have been sold with Paxton's songs on them - by the Chad Mitchell Trio (really the first high-profile group to do TP's songs), the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, and many more - and you begin to understand how even in lean performing times that a songwriter of Paxton's caliber can prosper. It also explains why publishing income frequently becomes a bone of contention within bands and why the issues of copyright with sharing sites such as Napster of ancient memory and YouTube today remain so controversial.

For all of Paxton's songwriting success, only one composition of his ever became a bona fide singles hit, and that was "Bottle of Wine," a celebration of the joys of a rootless life spent drinking cheap wine - clearly a younger man's composition. The Fireballs' version of Paxton's tune sold over a million copies, which in 1968 dollars would have given Tom enough coin to buy a really nice house and car - not to mention the ongoing income from royalties and licensing every time anyone wants to use the song and every time an oldies radio station wants to play it.

"Bottle of Wine" is an innocent bit of fluff - not a sermon against the very real evils of alcoholism against which the "preacher will preach and the teacher will teach." Paxton's own approach to the song has always been as lighthearted as his lyric - here is from last January in San Diego, the night after I saw him at McCabe's:



The Kingston Trio did a fine job with the tune in 1964 - John Stewart's banjo part lends exactly the right kind of rollicking touch, and the little key change at the end is nice:



Forty plus years after the '68 hit, here are Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs in 2009:



I think that the Harris Brothers here capture just about the right mellowed-out feeling with the song - where the Fireballs sing it as if they'd had a few bottles, the Harrises sound like most of us feel after a few glasses:



Finally - Madacoustic braved the family rec room and the drunken friends to deliver a fine amateur performance in just the right setting:



Not much more to be said after that. Hoping that everyone safely enjoys quite a few bottles of wine over the coming holiday weekend. I certainly intend to.

Tom Paxton's "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound"

When I was younger, there were certain poems and novels and songs and plays and films that I just knew I would love forever and would return to frequently. I've still never seen a better film than Lawrence of Arabia or found a poet more in tune with the subtle vibrations of experience than Robert Frost or W.H. Auden. Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls still affects me deeply, and I still think that O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night is the pre-eminent masterpiece of the American theater.

What I could not quite foresee, though, in my youth and callowness was that the ways these and countless other creative pieces would resonate for me through the decades would change, as change they have dramatically. To me as a sixty year old, David Lean's Lawrence is less heroic and more pitiable, and my sympathies in the O'Neill play now extend far beyond the helplessly drug-addicted Mary Tyrone to embrace as well her disillusioned, alcoholic husband and sons. Years and experience change us all and the ways in which we understand ourselves and our lives.

So has it been for me with this week's song, Tom Paxton's "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound" - and so as I think we'll see has it also been for many of the myriad of other artists who have covered the tune. I have written before about the sheer and absolute "folkiness" of Paxton's best work in articles about his "The Last Thing On My Mind" and "My Ramblin' Boy", and "Bound" is the equal of these as a song that will long outlive any of us. All three songs seem simple and direct in both music and lyrics - deceptively so, I would suggest. For though they mean what they say, each song has the same quality that an abstract expressionist painting or an imagist poem does - we bring ourselves and our own life experiences into understanding the work, and thus each means more than the simple literal reading of the lyric.

One of the first things that any lit student learns to appreciate is the power of metaphor, and at least since the time of Homer three thousand years ago just about everyone recognizes the symbolic value of the journey as a metaphor for life itself. Paxton's lyric in this song may have been intended only as a reflection of his sense of his own and his generation's rootlessness and yearning for meaning in life, but in the hands of the musical artists who have interpreted this song below, we'll see that each infuses the verses with his or her own personal sense of quest.

First, Paxton himself lays down the template for the song. When this performance was taped in Israel in 1994 (with Shay Tochner, one of that country's leading folk artists), "Where I'm Bound" was already thirty years old and Tom himself was well into his fifties:



I like the confidence that emanates from TP here - he knows that the audience knows his song, and it's clear that he knows he's written a damn fine one at that.

The first version that I actually heard was from the Chad Mitchell Trio (known when they recorded this as The Mitchell Trio) from their wonderful Reflecting album. The CMT was probably more responsible than any other single artist for taking Paxton's work and giving it a national audience, much as Peter, Paul and Mary did for Bob Dylan and the Kingston Trio did for Rod McKuen:



I always liked the two-guitar accompaniment of this (Paul Prestopino and Jacob Ander), and in the context of the CMT's often overtly political stance in many of their albums, I have always believed that this version was a 1964 query about the direction of the country as a whole. Vocal lead is by Joe Frazier, now an Episcopal priest in Big Bear, CA.

The Kingston Trio also did a fine job with Paxton's compositions, and their studio recording of "Bound" on their Stay Awhile album is one of the highlights of their years on Decca Records. I've chosen for this piece, though, their live performance from July of 1966 at Lake Tahoe as they kicked off their farewell tour before disbanding (temporarily, as it turned out) in June of the following year:



However much the upcoming dissolution of the group may have seemed the right thing to do at the time, there had to be an attendant uncertainty about the future that I think this rendition expresses. As a side note - this Trio changes the lyric in the third verse from "I hear he's out by 'Frisco Bay" to "Monterey" - because as a Bay Area group they knew what Paxton did not - that longtime residents up there despised the abbreviation and just never but never said "Frisco" for anything related to their beloved city.

Johnny Cash's American Recordings were spare, stripped down arrangements recorded in the last years of this great artist's life. "Bound" appeared on an album released earlier this year, American VI: Ain't No Grave:



I love the craginess of the voice and the tentativeness of a man who knew he was facing his last long and mysterious journey.

Nanci Griffith collected an all-star line-up of musicians and songwriters for her Other Voices, Other Rooms album in the early 90s - an entire recording of other people's songs, often as here with the composer performing with her:



The song clearly lends itself to Griffith's uptempo, good time country reading.

We forget, perhaps, that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel actually started out as a folk duo. Here is Simon in solo performance at Queen's College in 1964:



We conclude with two fairly recent, non-pro performances that I like. First, Riverbend - well, they're pros but have only recently come together as a group. Ron Wilburne, formerly of the New Christy Minstrels, is the lead in the center with David Meitz on mandolin and Art Morgan on guitar:


I haven't been able to find out much about Oliver Mulholland, who performs here. I believe he's up in the Puget Sound area: this video was originally posted by a high school classmate of his with whom I briefly corresponded, and I think this performance is from a reunion in the 90s: