"Seasons In The Sun"

This is a re-posting to rectify an error I made in May of 2009 when I conflated two very different posts into one - this look at Rod McKuen's "Seasons In The Sun" and a video presentation of all the songs from the 1962 album The Best of the Kingston Trio. I did so because first, until that time all of the posts here had been on individual songs, and second, because I was a bit embarrassed to be publishing posts of all Kingston Trio songs or even one McKuen creation - not because I don't like both of them to different degrees but rather because such posts seemed out of step with the whole approach of this blog. Since then, however, I've posted maybe 14 articles that were not about single songs, and ol' Rod has appeared in the song posts several times, especially this year. So it seemed natural to split the two posts as I should have done originally. The Best of the Kingston Trio post can still be found on May 9, 2009.

I have to say at the outset that it took me more years than I'd care to admit to appreciate the Kingston Trio's version of "Seasons In The Sun." I wasn't at first a huge fan of the Time To Think, the album on which it appeared, because I felt that the Kingston Trio for once was trying to catch somebody else's coattails - in this case, Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary - rather than be the step ahead of everyone else that they always had been. Additionally, if the Trio actually had a "dark" album, it was this one and not Make Way, especially when it is contrasted with the thematic and aural brightness of New Frontier (which remains probably my personal favorite album of the Shane-Reynolds-Stewart years of the KT from '61 to '67- it still just sounds so good).

Further, by the career point of Time To Think, the Trio was in full retreat from what folk music had been both traditionally and in terms of what they themselves had shaped it into. What TTT gives us is a mix of the trenchant ("If You Don't Look Around," "Coal Tattoo"), the wistful (Hobo's Lullaby," "No One To Talk My Troubles To"), and the sentimental ("Turn Around," "These Seven Men"). But nowhere on the album is a song that even remotely would have been termed "folk" a half dozen years earlier, and this is absolutely the first Trio album of which that was true.

What emerges from the record - and what "Seasons In The Sun" most effectively represents - is the group turning toward a broadening of its repertoire and an attempt not to be pigeonholed as a kind of feel-good, banjo-ringing frat party act that was fiddling while Rome burned. As an album whose entire playlist was original songs penned by professional singer-songwriters, it put an emphatic punctuation mark at the end of the group's continual rejection of the label "folksingers."

"Seasons In The Sun" is an Americanized attempt to tap into the rich vein of music that came out of French cabarets and [the real and original] Paris coffee houses of most of the last century and that gave rise to legendary singers like Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour (the French Sinatra and a tremendous vocalist) - and Jacques Brel himself.

Introduce into this milieu (and I feel a lot of French working its way into this post) San Francisco dilettante and Beat poet wannabe Rod McKuen, a hanger-on to the fringes of genuine iconoclasts (sorry - Greek)like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and more - who, like them or not, are the major American poetic voices of their era. McKuen didn't fit in with them - his verse was too light, too transparent, too simple in thought and composition, and he seemed to lack some of the Beats' self-destructiveness. So like any good lost artist, McKuen went to France around 1959 and ran into the cafe society, Brel's songs, and eventually Brel himself. The two became collaborators and fast friends; Brel seems to have approved even of McKuen's extremely free-hand and Americanized translations of Brel's very Gallic compositions, like "Seasons."

I believe it was the Kingstons' roots in San Francisco that acquainted them with McKuen, and the Trio's recording of "Seasons" is the first English language version of the song after McKuen's himself. The excellent production values of this cut are self-evident - the wonderful and subtle nylon guitar lead (John Steuber?), the likely John Stewart 12 string main accompaniment - and a superb lead vocal by Bob Shane, whose husky baritone is fully mature and in peak form:



The song is actually titled "Le Moribond" - "The Dying Man" - and though McKuen sticks to that general theme, Brel's actual sentiments are radically different. But whatever McKuen's shortcomings as a poet may be, he is an innovative and sensitive lyricist, and his live performance of this song is as close as you'll get in English to an authentic French cabaret effect:



This is real French cabaret stuff - the savoir faire, the je ne sais quoi, the inimitable French shrug of the shoulders in the face of catastrophe. I think McKuen's words capture some of that effectively, but - well, the French are the French.

I'm sure that we were all chagrined when an amiable musical lightweight named Terry Jacks took the Trio's recording in 1974 and turned it into a monster hit -



Overlooking for a moment the really thin and affect-less nature of the vocal - much of the musical accompaniment seems to be a riff off of the Steuber-Stewart-Shane-Reynolds work of the first recording.

After Jacks, a host of other artists tried their hand at imitating him instead of the Trio (as they should have):

The Beach Boys (Jacks should just have let them do it)



Nirvana (possibly a joke, and Cobain sounds stoned)



Westlife (really pleasant)



I like Westlife's version myself, the rest....

The studio recording by Brel gives us the song in its original production concept. In the best cafe tradition, Brel pulls a fast one here - the drumming background rhythm is similar to a bolero (think Ravel and Dudley Moore's movie 10), a truly erotic style used here to underscore a song about death. Sex and death - you don't get much more French than that:



We are at the very least a very long way from "Tom Dooley" here, on unfamiliar ground, breaking away from the roots that sustained the group's original and unprecedented popularity.

Appendix, 6/11

I just ran across a fine version of the song from Arizona's Joe Bethancourt, one of the leading performers and musicians in that folk-rich state (Dolan Ellis, Bill Zorn, the late Travis Edmonson at whose memorial this clip was recorded). Joe is both a traditionalist musician and a songwriter with an iconoclastic bent to his politics - and one of the most brilliant banjoists I've ever heard. I spent a pleasant hour with him and Greg Deering (of Deering Banjos) in August of 2010 in Scottsdale, AZ and had previously included his rendition of "South Coast" in my 2010 article on that song. Joe does a very authentic cabaret approach to the song here:

"The Tattooed Lady"

This odd little song is delightfully mysterious in its origin, at least as far as where it started its life. The when is easier to pin down, as we will see, because it is derived from a very familiar tune about which we know considerably more than we do about "The Tattooed Lady." I always thought that it was an English or French music hall tune, the former because the first version I heard was by the Kingston Trio in the late 1950s, and they sang it with the broadly satirical attempt at a British accent that they used on a number of their early recordings, and the latter because of the melody's affiliation with the most common musical setting for the can-can, that naughty Parisian theatrical dance with the lifted skirts and high kicks and all. And certainly there are variants of the tune throughout the English-speaking world, many of them positively obscene, ranging from Scotland to England to Australia and back. Complicating any search for information about the number is the fact that there are so many different songs with the same title, more or less, most especially "Lydia, The Tattoed Lady" by Yip Harburg ("Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow") popularized in a delightful performance by Groucho Marx in the 1930s.

But the likeliest point of origin for "The Tattooed Lady" may well be the Ozarks of Missouri - and that is strange because it doesn't sound much like a fiddle or banjo tune. Yet a multitude of different lyrics were collected in Arkansas and Mizzou in the 1940s, all using the basic frame of the verses but substituting local names and places for the more familiar ones we hear today. The tune also bears a strong resemblance to a very old country number called "My Home In Tennessee," the western portion of which state practically trips over the Ozark plateau.

And the root song is definitely of St. Louis origin. I'm pretty sure that I recognized right away that "The Tattooed Lady" uses a melody virtually identical to the chorus of "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay," but the connection didn't take hold in my mind because I usually heard the latter tune in brass band arrangements as a backing for circus acts or as a kind of ragtime piano number in B westerns that always seemed to feature a saloon scene with can-can dancers. But the origin of "Ta Ra Ra" is rather less savory and far more colorful than circuses or dance halls. The earliest copyright was filed by Henry Sayers in 1891, but Sayers was unusually frank in acknowledging that he had heard the ditty in all its suggestive glory in Babe Bonner's notorious St. Louis brothel, sung by local celebrity Mama Lou, a black songstress who did a slower, bluesier version than we hear today, which she punctuated with bumps, grinds, and pelvic thrusts (imagine "ta ra ra BOOM de ay" with a snare and bass drum accompaniment and the picture becomes clearer). Sayers cleaned up the lyrics and sped up the song, which didn't catch on in America until popular singer Lotte Collins took to England a further re-written version called "The Tuxedo Girl" that became a big hit and migrated to Paris, where the high-stepping young ladies of the musical revues adopted it for the can-can - and returned it to the U.S. complete with that scandalous dance, thank you.

Here is jazz age version of "The Tuxedo Girl" from 1943 by Mary Martin:



The lyrics about Dorsey and NBC are added of course, but the two principal verses about the naughty and nice girl are directly from Collins, and Martin is incorporating just a hint of Mama Lou's suggestiveness with a clear nod of the head (or shake of the butt, if you will) to the can-can girls of fifty years earlier. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to watch Martin's Peter Pan quite the same way ever again.

(Sadly and as you can see, Martin's performance has been yanked from YouTube, something that's becoming increasingly rare as I write this in September of 2015 as content creators have come to terms more and more frequently with video sites. I'm hoping for a return of Martin's "Tuxedo Girl" and will leave this section in for a while. Until then - we can enjoy a performance of "Ta Ra Ra" that closely mirrors the combination of innocence and suggestiveness of Martin's, this one from a couple of years ago by the marvelously stage-named Winnie-Woopsie Tapatit:



The raging notoriety of "Ta Ra Ra" throughout Europe, America, and Australia makes the transition of that song into "The Tattooed Lady" very murky indeed, with everyone from Australian rugby teams to Royal Navy sailors claiming credit for the standard lyrics we sing today. Even the academics are uncertain. I hooted with laughter when I saw, for example, that the Hill Collection at the University of Arizona listed the composer as "Jack Splittard," which was a pseudonym adopted by the members of the Kingston Trio when they wanted to copyright an arrangement of a public domain song and, well, split the jack. And though the song appears in Boy Scout hiking song collections from the '30s and in a 1943 B movie called (appropriately, perhaps) Hi Ya, Sailor! and elsewhere, it was the Trio's version from their 1960 Billboard #1 String Along album that restored the tune to national commercial prominence.



I'd bet on lead singer Nick Reynolds as the source for this as far as the KT was concerned. His father was a U.S. Navy captain who loved to play guitar, and sailors military and commercial from all points of the compass seem to have a very unsurprising affinity for the song.

The lone surviving member of the original Kingston Trio, Bob Shane, performs the number here in 2009 at the group's fantasy camp with the current group of (l-r) George Grove, Bill Zorn, and Rick Dougherty with Paul Gabrielson on bass:



The only other truly professional video of the tune that I could find comes from a somewhat unlikely source, at least in my opinion: angel-voiced Judith Durham of Australia's Seekers, here from a 1970 television show entitled Meet Judith Durham after she had left the group:



It's fun and fresh, but Durham looks just a little awkward and rushes the conclusion a bit, perhaps because of the "chest" reference that was at variance both with her wholesome Seekers persona and the primly pigtailed schoolgirl look that she is sporting. It is worth noting, though, that both before and after her tours with the Seekers, Durham was known as a powerful and sultry cabaret singer of jazz and blues.

From there it's on to the enthusiastic amateurs - first David Menefee, with broad and self-kidding humor:



David's sole video note reads "It is what it is" - I love that.

And for the truly strange, DJ Preo with a spoken version:



Well - it is what it is.

Of at least equal interest are some of the lyric variations that pop up here and there. Walt Robertson, a West Coast folkie from around Berkeley active in the 40s (and about whom I've read but have never heard) used as his opening verse

I paid a bob to see
A Scotch tattooed lad-ee
She was a sight to see
Tattooed from head to knee

and concludes with

But what I like best
Was right across her chest:
My home in Tennessee!

-one of many lyric versions that include a reference to Tennessee, including most of the aforementioned Ozark arrangements.

A Royal Navy version collected around 1960 is a bit more raw:

I went to gay par-ee'
And paid five francs to see
A bloody great French cherie
Tattooed from head to knee
And on her lower jaw
Was a British man-o-war
And across her back was a union jack
so I paid five francs more
to see her lilly white tits
And a map of the rising sun (up her bum)
And all along her spine
Were the andrew crew in line
And tattooed on her fanny
Was Al Jolson - singing mammy
But I love her
Yes I love her
That bloody great French cherie

There are dozens of other lyrical variations, including several which I won't post here. However, if you're not easily offended, you might glance at one of the British rugby team versions HERE - it's a .pdf, and the version is song 140 on p. 78. Along the way you'll find plenty of other bawdy numbers, often set to familiar tunes.

"The Tattooed Lady" as we know it is pleasant enough to be sung by scouts but suggestive enough, I would think, to raise a few eyebrows here and there even today. No matter. The era in which tattoos on ladies were scandalous seems almost as far in the past as the era in which the can-can was. I'm not sure whether that fact is a good or bad one, but - it is what it is.

Addendum

You didn't think I was going to post this without "The Howdy Doody Show Theme," did you?



Or Groucho's "Lydia, The Tattooed Lady" from At The Circus?

"We Are All Woody's Children" - Woody Guthrie At 100

"We are all Woody's children" Pete Seeger remarked famously several decades ago, and by "we" he clearly meant everyone who loves American folk and roots music every bit as much as he meant those who collect and perform it. The folk revival in this country, however you wish to define it and whatever parameters you put on its duration, has certainly had its oracles and prophets both before and after Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, from John A. Lomax and Cecil Sharp through Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan and beyond. But the central figure of the revival, the one whose cultural significance a century after his July 14, 1912 birth still stands above that of all the rest, is the skinny kid from Okemah, Oklahoma whose personal charisma, charm, and talent for writing songs that touched and moved ordinary people to both emotion and action make him the single indispensable figure in American folk music. That Guthrie was also a canny self-promoter who told a lot of tall tales about himself and was the primary painter of his own icon is also true as well. That he was a sometimes troubled soul with profound character flaws, a deep resentment of authority, and lifelong trouble maintaining stable relationships is equally true - and ultimately not especially relevant to his achievements except in one regard - and that is that his very iconization obscures, as it often does, the true nature of what he was able to accomplish in a musical life that was essentially over for him at the age of 40, fifteen years before what we would see today as his shockingly early death at 55. The nature of that achievement and its importance is currently being celebrated, debated, and discussed across the airwaves and print media and websites of the nation, and properly so. I'm sure that many of these discussions will point to the popularity of Guthrie's work as essential to the creation of a genuinely national folk music in the U.S. where a mere 80 or so years ago none had existed - it was all regional material, and before the near-simultaneous arrival of Guthrie, radio, and records, Americans seldom heard much music from outside of their own localities and cultural niches. Many others will discuss Guthrie's lifelong commitment to unions and other progressive and radical causes and his willingness to put his own welfare on the line for what he believed in. Still more will praise him for his influence on later and usually lesser lights of the folk world that he helped to create. All of this is true, all of this is real - and all of this misses the simple and essential point of why we should and do still care about Woody Guthrie. He wrote great songs. I mean, really really great songs - songs that decades after his death people still sing, people still march to, people still embrace, people still connect with, here and around the world. Guthrie's songwriter acolytes in later generations may have exceeded him in lyrical complexity and apocalyptic anger - but those are precisely the points at which they ceased to be folk musicians in any recognizable sense of the word and converted themselves into self-conscious artistes and percussionists for political movements. Folk music is in its very nature simple and repetitive - it is the music of The People, as poets Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg termed them, and that is the music that Woody Guthrie wrote. Many of his best songs sound familiar the first time you hear them, and you can usually sing them the second. Yet Guthrie is capable of lyrical brilliance unrivaled for its Whitman-esque beauty of simplicity - I roamed and rambled, and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts... As the sun was shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving, and the dust clouds rolling
As the fog was lifting, a Voice was calling -
"This land was made for you and me." No American lyricist has ever surpassed those lines for sheer American-ness - for an unselfconscious imagery derived from the real sight of his own two eyes and not from the pages of other people's poetry. You can remember those lines and hundreds more like them, and you can sing them again and again - and you want to. And Guthrie was able to do that in song after song, marrying his words to tunes sometimes traditional and sometimes of his own making but always ending up with compositions that were just, well, supremely singable. Guthrie's radical politics still give some people pause, perhaps more in these benighted and reactionary times rather more than in decades earlier - but even in this regard there are serious misunderstandings of what he actually created. Consider, for example, the lyrics of two of his most famous creations, the above-quoted "This Land Is Your Land" and "Plane Wreck At Los Gatos," better known as "Deportee." Singers today often jubilantly include the verses from "This Land" that didn't make it into the school songbooks or folk revival LPs - the one about the "No Trespassing" sign most famously. But take a look at the real penultimate verses: Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land still made for you and me? Not a lot there to argue with there, I would think - no party-line commie-loving armed-revolutionary sedition, just the powerfully evocative compassion of a poet who loves his country and his people and who wants to see justice done both for them and for himself. Or take the conclusion of "Deportee" about the crash that killed more than twenty itinerant farm workers - The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except "deportees"?

Again - could anyone seriously argue against such a sentiment or condemn it as radical? This is the real political Woody Guthrie, if not the sum total of his beliefs at least the very core and essence of them - compassion for people and passion for justice. In the four years of this blog, even focusing as it mostly does on pop-folk music, Guthrie's name has appeared in dozens of posts - as how would it not? - and six of his songs linked below have full articles on them, with a selection of different interpretations by various artists and more reflections on Guthrie and his legacy. For this post, I would like to conclude with three videos, one of Guthrie's first disciple and great friend Pete Seeger recalling WG, and two covers of the songs alluded to above that I find especially moving. It's the best way I can think of to remember the man who gave us so many other wonderful songs to sing. Pete Seeger On Woody Guthrie Seeger, Springsteen et al. 2009 Inaugural Concert Arlo Guthrie, Emmylou Harris et al, - "Deportee" _________________________________________ Comparative Video 101 Posts On Woody Guthrie Songs 1. "This Land Is Your Land" 2. "Deportee" 3. "Pastures Of Plenty" 4. "The Sinking Of The Reuben James" 5. "Hard Travelin'" 6. "Hard, Ain't It Hard"

"The Unfortunate Miss Bailey/Hunters Of Kentucky"

I am delighted to return after a brief hiatus (for radio show production and folk music performance in Big Bear, CA) with an absolutely genuine traditional folk tune, one that is complete with uncertain and disputed authorship, alternative sets of lyrics, cousins in several countries, and at least one significant derivative song. "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" is all of these and a delightful satire to boot, and like its music hall relatives "New York Girls" and "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm" manages to take an incident that in real life would would dismay us at the least and appall us at the most - and make it somehow amuse us in song. That may be because unlike the decapitated Queen Anne or the pants-less sailor of "NYG," our Miss Bailey manages to exact a measure of revenge on her heartless seducer, rather more completely as we shall see in the full lyric to the piece and in its sequel than in the standard versions that we will hear below.

The root song of "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" is alleged by most scholars to be an Irish number by piper Larry Grogan called "Alley Croaker," written and published around 1725. I have a bit of trouble with this, first because the lyrics don't fit metrically or thematically with the later tune, as they involve a young man whose drinking, gaming, and whoring destroy his chances of marriage to the prim Miss Alicia Croaker (or Crocker in some versions) - making the jilted narrator the inverse of love-'em-and-leave-'em rakehell playboy Captain Smith of "Miss Bailey." Alley's guy dies of a broken heart, or syphilis, or a combination of the two. Smith, on the other hand, seems at first to suffer no consequence for his betrayal of the maiden Bailey other than a very brief and easily exorcised haunting. Second, the melody of "Croaker" doesn't sound to me to be similar enough to consider it an ancestor (a MIDI version of "Croaker" can be heard HERE), not nearly so much as "Hunters of Kentucky" below borrows most of its tune from "Miss Bailey."

The same scholars believe that "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" was adapted from Grogan's work in about 1804 for a London play called Love Laughs At Locksmiths by George Colman the Younger (1762-1836) - but despite the superior academic credentials of those critics (vastly superior to mine, in any event), I doubt that Colman junior is responsible. First, the aforementioned "Hunters of Kentucky" was penned in the U.S. in 1821 about The Battle of New Orleans, and composer Samuel Woodworth remarked that though he had heard the melody in the Colman play, the song as "Miss Baily" had been well-known in America for years before the 1804 date. In addition, Edith Fowke and Richard Johnston note in their Folks Songs of Canada that

The words are credited to George Colman, an English dramatist (1732-1794), and were very popular in England for at least fifty years. By the early part of the nineteenth century the song had also spread throughout North America, for when Samuel Woodworth wrote his famous ballad of the War of 1812, 'The Hunters of Kentucky', the old broadsheets bore the inscription: 'To the air of Miss Baily'. The original setting for the story was, of course, in England, but when soldiers sang it on this side of the Atlantic [italics mine] they would naturally associate Captain Smith with Halifax, Nova Scotia.

My italics point out the problem: the only time that there was a significant British military presence in the U.S. was from Colonial times through the Revolutionary War - the only time that Americans might have heard redcoats singing a popular bawdy ballad and learned it themselves. The Brits weren't around much or for very long during the War of 1812, so I would go with Fowke and Johnston in supposing that it was Grogan's contemporary George Colman the Elder who adapted the tune and turned the Irish piper's tale on its head to give us "Miss Bailey," included without attribution by his son in the play. After all, daddy was dead by then.

Interestingly, there is a seldom-heard fifth verse in the original, one in which Miss Bailey completes her revenge in a rather "New York Girls"-ish manner:

Next morn' his man rapped on the door, his voice shook with emotion,
"Just how you're going to dress today I really have no notion.
Miss Bailey has your five pound note, the sum of all your riches,
And now she's vanished down the street inside your leather breeches!"

A sequel to the song apparently written by a certain Joseph Kertland about 1806 (lyrics below*) also references the stolen trousers.

"Miss Bailey" enters the era of recorded music courtesy of the now-forgotten 1930s and 40s duo of John and Lucy Allison, friends of Pete Seeger and with him involved in leftist labor rallies of the time. The Allisons often rewrote tunes and lyrics for folk songs (imagine that) and contributed a number of those to the Seeger/Weavers repertoire, notably the lovely "Wild Goose Grasses" (one of my personal Weavers favorites). But the Allisons also recorded a goodly number of traditional tunes straight up, as they did for both "Miss Bailey" and "Hunters of Kentucky." The Allisons inspired a delightfully off-beat version of our song by the delightfully off-beat Marais and Miranda in the 1950s, as well as versions by progressive singer/actor/activist Will Geer (Grandpa Walton and crazed mountain man Bear Claw Kris Lapp in Jeremiah Johnson, remember?) , Dean Gitter (also popularizer in the 50s of the Boleyn song), and Will Holt.

The Kingston Trio learned the song from their arranger and later Limeliter founder Lou Gottlieb and released what was probably the most widely-heard version of the song, appearing as it did on their 1959 album Here We Go Again that spent eight weeks as the #1 album in America and sold just under a million units:

(Reminder: when the video starts, toggle the little wheel in the lower right area of the frame to get a full 1080p hi-def view)


For my money, this track wears through the years better than nearly any of the Trio's other attempts at novelty and humor, likely because they (and Gottlieb) didn't mess much with the original lyrics. It is for me certainly the most successful of the songs in which they attempted a broadly self-mocking English accent.

Despite the tune's popularity on vinyl in the 50s and 60s, the only other musical version currently on YouTube is by Henry Martin:



Martin is a mainstay on the pirate/Renaissance fair circuit, a truly odd conflation when you consider that the actual 16th century Renaissance was pretty much a done deal by the great 17th century era of high seas piracy. Still - whatever works for you, and I think Martin does a fine and spirited job, and it's good to know that some strolling troubadours are out in the world keeping the music alive.

The stage-named Tom O'Bedlam has a YT channel dedicated to spoken verse, often of the off-beat and weird. Here is his take on "Miss Bailey," complete with two final stanzas from an alternate published text:



This may well be from the 1840 publication of the song (which some clearly inaccurately assert was the earliest appearance) because the final stanza's moralizing, however humorous, is much more characteristic of the Victorian period of that date than the Empire era 40 years prior when Colman's play was staged.

As noted above, Samuel Woodworth took the popular melody and turned it into a patriotic tune called "The Hunters of Kentucky" that Battle of New Orleans victorious commander Andrew Jackson used as his official campaign song in his successful presidential runs of 1828 and 1832. This version is anonymous, but internal evidence suggests it may be sung by a teacher named Fethermen.



While it's good of Mr. Fetherman to include the lyrics plainly and visibly, the error in the opening frame is a problem. "Hunters" composer Woodworth also wrote the popular classic "The Old Oaken Bucket" and was consequently fairly well-known in his day - but Fetherman is using the Lesley Nelson-Burns version and mistaking that estimable lady as the author. Nelson-Burns' site TheContemplator.com is one of the best on the web for traditional songs, with hundreds of lyrics and MIDIs for folk songs in English. Ms. Nelson-Burns makes it very clear that Woodworth wrote the lyrics and borrowed the "Bailey" tune.

The great Oscar Brand, with Pete Seeger the godfather of popular and mainstream performances of traditional American songs, gives "Hunters" his usual enthusiastic treatment:



Brand and everyone else who does the song knew that a quarter of Tennessean Jackson's troops at New Orleans were from Kentucky, whose woodsmen had been prized as soldiers for half a century even then because of the skill and marksmanship they demonstrated with the long-barrelled rifle that they invented and which is named after them.

The earliest versions of "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey" satirize rather than sermonize, and there is a hint that Miss B's revenge may well go beyond the one (or five) pound note and a pair of purloined pants. Some critics have suggested that Captain Smith's debilitating fever in the second verse may well be induced by the final stages of the syphilis he may have contracted from his nights of debauchery and dissolution - and that the hallucinations common to the tertiary phase of that terrible disease may render poor Miss Bailey nothing more than the dream of a fevered brain. Maybe so, but I think not. Miss Bailey does about as well as the ghost of a girl can do in getting even with her tormentor, and I refuse to believe that so fine a song as this is the result of a mere illusion. As far as I am concerned, Miss Bailey is as absolutely real as the Tower's headless Ann Boleyn.
________________________________________

*Kertland's Sequel, "Miss Bailey's Ghost"

The dog had ceas'd to bark,
The silver moon shone bright,
When, in the lone church-yard,
Stood poor Miss Bailey's ghost.
Oh! what will become of me?
Ah! why did I die!
Nobody coming to bury me!
Nobody coming to cry!

The first time I saw Captain Smith
I was fair, though he treated me foul,
So here tête à tête with the moon,
All night will I bellow and howl,
Oh! what can the matter be,
My own ghost in the cold must expire,
While wicked Smith, o'er his ratafie,
Is roasting his shins by the fire.

The last time I saw my deluder,
He gave me a shabby pound-note,
But I borrowed his best leather breeches,
To wear with my wooden surtout.
And its oh, to be covered in decency,
For a grave I the parson did pay,
But Captain Smith's note was a forgery,
And I was turned out of my clay.

And here I am singing my song
Till almost the dawning of day;
Come, sexton, come, spectre, come, Captain,
Will nobody take me away?
But hold, yet I've one comfort left,
Delightful to most married fair,
Though cold, and of all joy bereft,
Yet still I've the breeches to wear.
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And finally, an 1842 recipe for the "light, fruit-flavored liqueur" of the song, Ratafia:

Into one quart of brandy pour half a pint of cherry juice, as much currant juice, as much of raspberry juice, add a few cloves, and some white pepper in grains, two grains of green coriander, and a stick or two of cinnamon, then pound the stones of cherries, and put them in wood and all. Add about twenty five or thirty kernels of apricots. Stop your demijohn close and let it infuse for one month in the shade, shaking it five or six times in that time at the end of which strain it through a flannel bag, then through a filtering paper, and then bottle it and cork close for use; you can make any quantity you chose, only by adding or increasing more brandy or other ingredients.

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Addendum, May 2017

Thanks to JMarie's comment below, I searched YT again and found that the site has posted a copyright-permitted version of the delightful Marais and Miranda version of "Miss Bailey" alluded to in the article.

Sir Lancelot & "Shame And Scandal In The Family"

"You think you know a story," intones the voice of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII over the opening credits of Showtime's The Tudors television series, "but you only know how it ends. To get to the heart of the story, you have to go back to the beginning." As far as much of the mainstream pop audience in the U.S. (at least outside of New York City) was concerned in the 1950s, calypso music began with the landmark recordings of Harry Belafonte and pretty much ended there as well, with minor exceptions like Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders' "Marianne" and The Tarriers' "Everybody Loves Saturday Night." Of course, most all of the pop-folk groups of the 1950s and 60s - the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Brothers Four, The Limeliters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, the large ensembles like The New Christy Minstrels and The Serendipity Singers - also included calypso numbers in their repertoires in what was a kind of extended afterthought to the fad or craze centered around Belafonte. That they did so was an homage not only to Harry B but also to The Weavers of the late 1940s, who were at one and the same time the first commercial folk group and an extension of the leftist People's Songs outfit of earlier in the same decade.

The roots of calypso's popularity in the U.S. go back rather earlier than Belafonte and are entwined to a degree with the history of People's Songs. While Trinidad's Lionel Belasco was recording calypso numbers as early as 1914, much of the credit for bringing the music to the U.S.* has to go to Lancelot Victor Pinard (1903-2001), better known by his stage name of Sir Lancelot. Pinard was the well-educated son of a well-to-do Trinidadian family, the very opposite of the banana-slinging dockworker that became a kind of calypso cliché. After a private school education in the islands, Pinard went to New York in the early 1920s to study medicine but was drawn into music by seeing performances of African American singing stars Roland Hayes and later Paul Robeson. Pinard's early performances were of almost exclusively classical music, though gradually over the next decade he began to introduce the calypso songs of his homeland as novelty pieces in his repertoire. "This orchestra leader from Trinidad who had a nice band in New York heard one of my concerts and said, 'Would you condescend to record a couple of calypsos for me?' " Pinard remembered. "This is the music of my country," he replied. "I'd be proud to do it." Eventually the novelty songs became more popular with his audiences than the serious ones, and in 1940 Pinard adopted his stage name and did calypso full time - when he wasn't acting on Broadway and in films.

It was during this period and later in the postwar 1940s, when Pinard and other calypso singers were all the rage in NYC if largely unknown outside it, that Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax of People's Songs began to host a series of concerts in Carnegie Hall that they called "The Midnight Specials," including one called "Midnight Calypso." The political underpinning of the concerts was the same one that has illuminated most of Seeger's musical career - that folk music was the music of the common people, possessing a kind of virtue because of that fact, and that the reformation of the world was going to begin with people everywhere embracing the music of their own cultures and everyone else's as well. Pinard was drawn to this vision and participated in several Seeger-initiated concerts that had grown out of Midnight Calypso. These shows were hugely popular in New York and solidified Pinard's position as one of the leading nightclub acts of the city, right up to the time he was seen around 1949 by an ambitious young singer and actor named Harry Belafonte, whose repertoire and musical approach he has always acknowledged to have been strongly influenced by Pinard.

But Pinard's rather aristocratic family back in Trinidad had a position to maintain and were less than thrilled by his double career switch, first from medicine to music and then from serious music to vulgar. "They have a whole British style down there and figured this is the music of the lower classes," Pinard recalled. "Gentlemen didn't sing calypsos at that time. I was the first, and when I went back . . . my friends did not receive me." Nor did his family, which according to several sources all but disowned him, despite the tuxedoed dignity with which Pinard invariably performed in the posh music clubs of 40s New York. It was this rejection that gave Pinard the idea for the chorus of "Shame and Scandal," which made its first appearance with Pinard performing it as "Fort Holland Calypso Song" in the 1943 horror classic I Walked With A Zombie:



In the 50s, Pinard expanded his Zombie song into a full-blown calypso number with a plot more familiar to modern fans, including it on his Trinidad Is Changing album (along with soon-to-become-standards "Marianne," "Matilda," "Sweet Like A Honeybee," and "Oken Karenge"). Embedding is disabled for the video of that version, but it can be heard HERE.

Pinard's now-complete and humorous song was re-written slightly by "Lord Melody" (Fitzroy Alexander) around 1960 in what would become the template for the many version that followed:



Though Burl Ives had recorded a version in the late 1940s, it was Lord Melody's arrangement that inspired this 1964 take by the Kingston Trio, which of course had started its career seven years before as a calypso group:



Trini Lopez, whose proto-Latin-folk-rock impact is all but forgotten today, was the next to pick up Pinard's creation - about 1965:



Also in 1965, the recording in Portugese and in Brazilian jazz style by the Cords anticipates the crossover into ska and reggae about to come...



...which it does here, with this version by Shawn Elliott's band that features ska master Peter Tosh on lead vocals and reggae master Bob Marley singing backup:



The song has remained an international favorite. A kind of French reggae was waxed by Sascha Distel:



Harry und Ronny "Die Schande unserer Familie" - 1965 from Germany:



Britain's Tomcats singing in Spanish:



A French instrumental semi-ska arrangement - now there's a category for you - by Franck Pourcel:



There is a goodly number of interesting, scholarly, and entertaining sites across the web that deal with the calypso phenomenon, and it was fascinating to see how few of them mentioned Belafonte and how many wrote about '30s NYC stars like Roaring Lion, Attila the Hun, and Sir Lancelot. What was also moving was the number of warm personal recollections of Lancelot Pinard by fans who sought him out toward the end of his very long life. Even in his 90s, Pinard would receive uninvited guests in his Anaheim, California home, apologize for the fact that his recordings were long out of print (they did not come out on CD until after his 2001 death), and offer a personal photo to those good enough to remember him. The music world owes a good deal of remembrance to Lancelot Pinard, and when you think of the contributions through the decades of his acolytes direct and indirect like Belafonte, Irving Burgie, Bob Marley and more, it is hard not to think of his near-anonymity in death as just another garden variety injustice of memory perpetrated by an industry whose leading lights today know not where they came from and thus do not know who they are. Given the state of popular music in America today, this just cannot be a surprise.
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*The popularity of calypso and other Caribbean music in the UK is quite another story, with major figures like Edric Connor and Lord Kitchener.

"The Wild Mountain Thyme/Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?"

The summer time indeed is coming, and the trees in most of the U.S. have already bloomed sweetly, one major exception here in southern California being the jacarandas*, whose delicate and light violet blooms are only now making their appearance. The many and varied beauties of spring across our continent all possess their own special charms - the first pale green dusting of buds across the still-black branches of elms and hickorys and oaks in the Illinois of my boyhood; ice floes and break-ups in northern rivers and high mountain lakes; cherry, peach and pear blossoms swirling like snowflakes across lawns and fields.

It is, however, the evanescent nature of spring - the very transient time of its loveliness - which lends an edge and an urgency to its charm. "Death is the mother of beauty," wrote poet Wallace Stevens, and by that he intimates that it is impermanence that gifts all things with both beauty and worth. Without darkness, philosophers tell us, the word "light" would have no meaning. Without the burning inferno of summer to come, spring's brief and light-footed dance before our winter-weary eyes would pass us unnoticed and unvalued.

In poetry and art, spring is a worldwide and universal metaphor for youth, which is a time of both romance and hope. That accounts in large part for the number of love songs that are set in spring, from "Barbara Allen" ("It was in the merry month of May / When green buds they were swelling / Sweet William came from the west country / And he courted Barbara Allen") in the fourteenth century through "When The Swallows Come Back To Capistrano" (in March) in the twentieth. It is also the season of "The Wild Mountain Thyme," surely one of the loveliest of all Celtic tunes that celebrate youth and love.

The grandparent song for "Thyme" is naturally Scots, what with the "blooming heather" and all. The earliest published version is credited to Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), a contemporary and admirer of the rather more famous Robert Burns. Like Burns, Tannahill was an ardent Scots nationalist who believed that in the traditional tunes and tales of Caledonia there existed a treasure trove of artistic expression every bit the equal of the high literary culture of neighboring England. Also like Burns, Tannahill freely adapted traditional airs and lyrics to his own purposes, the greatest of which was to insure that British political dominance over his country never led to the amalgamation of the Scots identity into that of Giant Albion to the south.

Tannahill's proto-"Thyme" song is called "The Braes Of Balquhidder," or the hills around this small town:



If you already know "Wild Mountain Thyme," you can hear easily the number of similarities in the lyric and the rudiments of the more famous later tune. This version is from the Kells, which is an Argentinian group committed to performing Celtic music. Their command of both accent and feeling for this song is astounding.

The more modern song that we know as "The Wild Mountain Thyme" and "Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?" is attributable to a single source, Belfast folk performer and collector Francis McPeake. In about 1957, McPeake re-wrote Tannahill's lyric into contemporary English and altered the tune to suit his words. This relatively recent birth of the song (and McPeake's copyright) accounts for the similarity of the lyrics sung by the groups in the videos below.

You just have to give the Scots first crack at this gem, so we start with one of Scotland's greatest solo folk performers, Dick Gaughan:



And yes, that is Emmylou Harris in the backup vocal group and singing the second verse, along with the McGarrigles and Rufus Wainwright.

Next, Scotland's equivalent of Ireland's Clancys or America's Kingston Trio - The Corries:



The Corries were a national treasure in Scotland; their career stretched from the early 1960s to the early '90s. Note that they do not have to ask the audience to sing along.

I first heard the song around 1962 from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who included it on their wonderful The Boys Won't Leave The Girls Alone album:



This performance is from late 1984, when the quartet was on a reunion tour after a nearly 20 year split. The CB&TM are joined in the audience by John Sheahan (pennywhistle), Ronnie Drew, and the recently and lamentably departed Barney McKenna on tenor banjo - all from The Dubliners.

For something a tad different, The Byrds gave the tune their trademark folk-rock treatment in 1965:



Roger McGuinn is riding that jingle-jangle instrumental sound as usual, though I think the highlight of this cut is the harmony between McGuinn and David Crosby, whose voice you can clearly hear at the top of the mix.

One of the most popular recent versions is by Scotland's folk-rockers The Silencers:



Sounds to me a bit like the Corries meet the Byrds and produce some New Age offspring.

The New Christy Minstrels did a rather free adaptation of McPeake's version:



This is thus an adaptation of an adaptation. Lyrics were rewritten by NCM founder Randy Sparks; the musical arrangement is by my friend and radio co-host Art Podell - we used this one in our St. Patrick's Day show on KPFK.

Finally, an interesting combination that somehow works wonderfully - U.S. traditional country singer Don Williams backed by Ireland's greatest traditional music group, The Chieftains:



The Scots-Irish roots of much of the music of the southern Appalachians that gave birth to American country music is on display here, I think, in the natural and easy synergy between Williams and the Irish group.

There is, I think, a quiet urgency hiding behind the lyrics of "The Wild Mountain Thyme," one that is expressed whether consciously or not by most of the artists above. It is a kind of carpe diem or "seize the day" urgency - let us go now, my love, in the springtime of our lives and gather flowers, for summer follows hard upon, and after that.... We who are deep into autumn know well what comes after that.

*Jacarandas on a southern California street: