Composed by Clarence Williams and Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller
Recorded: July 30, 1923
Performers: Clarence Williams’ Blue Five
Sidney Bechet, soprano sax
Clarence Williams, piano
Thomas Morrison, cornet
John Mayfield, trombonist (possible)
Buddy Christian, banjo (possible)
2:58
This recording contains a few firsts — it’s Thomas 'Fats' Waller’s
first recorded composition, and it marks the initial appearance on record of
the masterful soprano saxophonist, Sidney Bechet.
The absolute best source of information on the recording is
found here, in the essay Thomas L. Morgan wrote on the piece for the National Recording Registry. In it, he makes a firm case for the importance of pianist, composer,
music publisher, and talent manager Clarence Williams in the history of jazz.
Williams did it all, and he understood how to make and market great music. (His
grandson, the prominent actor, is his namesake, Clarence Williams III.)
The tune is credited to both Waller and Williams; however,
it was standard industry practice for the music publisher to get a co-credit,
for the sake of revenue distribution. Williams is also credited with writing or
co-writing other classics such as “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Royal Garden
Blues,” and “Shout, Sister, Shout.” He understood and knew how to work the
connections between live performance, recordings, and sheet music to maximize
profits.
Waller had just made his first recordings the year before. A
preacher’s son, he was a wunderkind on the organ, quitting school at 15 to play
accompaniment in movie houses. Soon he would be one of the most popular and
prolific performers and songwriters in 20th century music.
At the time of the recording, all the principals involved
were young — Williams was 25, Waller was only 19. Soloist Sidney Bechet was a
relatively old 26. Like Williams, Bechet had migrated north from New Orleans to
where the work was, after years of training playing live.
The approach here is based on the New Orleans style —
simultaneous improvisations and embroideries done as an ensemble. Here, Bechet
breaks out for good from that template. Jazz solos were largely ornamental or
gimmicky up to this point. Bechet maintains the internal logic of the
composition, but he puts his own cocky, whimsical “voice” into the mix. The idea
that a jazz solo could express an individual is revolutionary. Before, jazzmen
were talented if replaceable musicians; after, they were distinctive artists.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘Ma Rainey sings ‘See See Rider Blues.’
More than 100 years after its composition, 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' still has the power to provoke.
“Lift
Ev’ry Voice and Sing”
Words by James Weldon Johnson/Music by John Rosamond Johnson
Composed: 1905
First Recorded: April 1923
Performers: Manhattan Harmony Four
3:03
Recorded: 1990
Lead Performer: Melba Moore
5:53
(Recorded: 2011
Vocalist: Rene Marie
2:38)
This song, long known informally as “the Black National Anthem,”
resonates so strongly in the African-American part of our culture that it
merits examination through the lens of three different performances. (The first
two here are referenced in the Registry citation, but the third is for me most
compelling, emotionally and historically.)
It started as a poem, written by James Weldon Johnson, in 1900,
recited on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1900, by 500 schoolchildren in greeting to a
visiting Booker T. Washington. Five years later, his brother set the words to a
ringing, stately melody. By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People adopted it as the “Negro National Anthem.”
The lyrics merit examination:
Lift
every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark
past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present
has brought us, Facing the rising sun of our new day begun Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers
sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has
been watered, We have come, treading our path through the
blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is
cast.
God of
our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the
light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God,
where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the
world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand. True to our God, True to our native land.
Now this is an anthem! (In fact, Johnson himself referred to
it as a hymn, as he thought the descriptor “anthem” was too divisive.) Phrased
in King James style, it states the plain, bitter truth about everything
African-Americans suffered. In fact, many times the second verse, with its
mentions of the “chastening rod,” “hope unborn,” and “the blood of the
slaughtered,” is omitted. It’s not just a prayer, but a dialogue with God, and
in that bears resemblance to Jewish prayer. It implies an active and dynamic
relationship with the powers above. Its frankness commands attention.
The original recording by the Manhattan Harmony Four is
robust and stately. The second version referenced by the Registry is a vastly
more dynamic and sweeping version, led by Melba Moore, but including over a
dozen prominent R & B and gospel singers. (This was the age of
charity/advocacy songs recorded by roving gangs of celebrities.)
The third version is for me the most affecting. It’s a
simple, straightforward approach by jazz great Rene Marie, accompanied only by
piano and drum set, and she sets Johnson’s words to the tune of “The
Star-Spangled Banner.” This is what she did on July 1, 2008, to open Denver’s
mayor’s annual State of the City address. By imposing the lyrics on a national
anthem so familiar we sometimes take it for granted, Marie recontextualized the
words of Johnson’s poem and made listeners think, pointing out the cognitive
dissonance of “Banner”s message about “the land of the free” that necessitated
the concept of a second, black national anthem in the first place.
Many were offended by Marie’s performance, and her
unapologetic attitude about it. Few like to have their awareness ruffled unless
they are prepared for it. The singer defended herself ably, reminding
interviewers that Francis Scott Key, lyricist of the National Anthem, was a
slave-owner and abolitionist-fighting lawyer. “As for offending others with my
music, I cannot apologize for that. It goes with the risky territory of being
an artist,” she wrote.
And, in the midst of my research, I found myself standing
and singing the song with the crowd at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day
celebration. For better and for worse, its words are just as current as they
were when they were coined more than 100 years ago
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘Clarence Williams’ Blue Five plays ‘Wild
Cat Blues.’
Performers: Bessie Smith, singer; Clarence Williams, piano
3:26
Blues came crawling out of the backwoods. It had no designated father or mother; it just rose up, put itself together, and took over the world.
There is a hierarchy, however. There are the three Kings of the blues: Freddie, Albert, and B.B. Koko Taylor is known as the Queen of the Blues, although the original Queen was Ma Rainey. Rainey was also considered one of the “big three” of the blues in the 1920s, all vocalists, all women: herself, Lucille Bogan, and Bessie Smith. On this recording, her first ever, Smith elevated herself to the supreme position. She’s still known as the Empress of the Blues.
Smith is not the first to record the blues, or even the first black woman to do so (Mamie Smith did in 1920). But she is the best. Why? First, a little context.
Around the turn of the last century, the musical genre of the blues coalesced in Texas and the Deep South, first manifesting itself as a form of country music. Quickly the blues splintered into regional styles: Delta, Piedmont, Memphis. Published blues music appeared in 1912, and it began to spread.
By the 1920s, the blues had moved to urban centers like Chicago and New York, moving along with the millions of African-Americans who left the Deep South in the Great Migration away from impoverishment, abuse, and murder. Once established as entertainment in bars and nightclubs, the blues became acceptable for affluent white crowds as well. The main expositors of the day were black women, not only Smith, Bogan, and Rainey but Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Memphis Minnie, Ethel Waters, Sippie Wallace, and others. These singers worked primarily in vaudeville, and their prevalence live and on disc codified their particular approach to the music, making “vaudeville blues” the style known as the classic one today.
All three women were “shouters”; that is, they had powerful voices, usually accompanied only by piano, which could cut through to the back of a crowded room in the days before amplification, under any and all acoustic circumstances. All of these women had stage presence, magnetism, a directness worlds away from the shrinking-violet “proper” Caucasian female singers of the day (OK, not Sophie Tucker).
The blues was not background music. It was not the kind of thing you chatted during, unless you wanted the vocalist to throw her gin at your head. The performers demanded your attention. Their message was urgent. Their emotions were raw and powerful, with a sexual undercurrent, or just a flat-out live and sparking current of desire.
The three prima donnas of the blues stood on a sliding scale of mainstream acceptability. Ma Rainey was the most theatrical and restrained, and the most commercially successful in the long run. Bogan was considered a “dirty” blues singer, and eventually had to change her name to get more singing work. Smith was right in the middle — an imposing, charismatic figure who sang about earthy and transgressive topics but who was impossible to dismiss.
Besides possessing trumpet-like projection (remarkable considering she was the female equivalent of a bass), Smith knew how to phrase like no other. In fact, she worked within a narrow vocal range, but her command of rhythm and intonation was incomparable. One of the miracles of the blues is that it is so various and individual within strict structural limitations; Smith demonstrated that breadth of possibility at just the right time for the genre.
“Down-Hearted Blues” was written by two equally gifted black women — the singer Alberta Hunter and the composer/pianist/bandleader/arranger Lovie Austin. Unlike previous songs that attempted to frame a blues sequence within a “standard” song structure, Hunter and Austin launch into the heart of the matter. “Gee but it’s hard to love someone/When that someone don’t love you.” Smith sells the sadness, but she’s playful, too: she skips syncopatedly through the phrase “trouble’s going to follow me to my grave”; when she slides down on the “crazy” in “Once I was crazy about a man,” it’s like she’s rolling her eyes at herself. (It helps that her accompanist, Clarence Williams, has a sprightly, pointillistic attack on the piano keys -- trivia fans may note that he was the grandfather of the esteemed actor Clarence Williams III.)
She’s suffering, and yet she’s triumphing over the suffering by turning it into something beautiful and deeply felt. It’s weak-ass to term it “feeling,” but that’s what it is. (Racists often attributed more deeply “felt” art to minority artists, thinking them compensated with that for a supposed lack of intellect. Either that, or they said minority prowess was due to some inherited “natural” ability, another ridiculous and condescending stereotype.) Smith could and still does transmit feeling on a level so true and basic that it reaches everybody. Her amazing combination of confidence, assertion, pain, and vulnerability in the act of singing opens the door to the listener’s heart, strikes a resonance. In Smith, the blues become transformative.
Much has been made of Smith’s rags-to-riches-to-rags life, and her unorthodox and transgressive lifestyle. When her tragic death came in 1937, she was en route to a comeback; Rainey and Bogan had both retired five years previously. The kind of blues they sang was already out of style.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ the ‘black National Anthem.’
Performers: Thomas
‘Papa Mutt’ Carey, cornet; Oliver ‘Dink’ Johnson, clarinet; Fred Washington,
piano; Ed ‘Montudie’ Garland, bass; Kid Ory, trombone
3:13
Four years after the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band released
“Tiger Rag,” the first commercial jazz recording, the first black New Orleans
jazz ensemble finally got waxed.
The story of how that happened is conflicting and
convoluted. Two African-American brothers in Los Angeles, John and Benjamin
Spikes, decided to get into the record business, specifically the new and
popular jazz genre. Jazz talent on the West Coast was scarce, but they managed
to find a musician in Oakland who would make the trip south to their studio.
Fortunately, it was Kid Ory, who had just moved to the West Coast in 1919 after
a stellar career start in New Orleans jazz.
Either Ory or the brothers paid a Norwegian operatic tenor
named Arne Nordskog to use his crude Santa Monica sound studio, and then pasted
the brothers’ Sunshine label onto the discs. In June 1922, Ory, vocalists
Roberta Dudley and Ruth Lee, and four other musicians cut a number of sides, of
which only six survive.
The result is a classic rendition of first-generation jazz —
a regular square beat, carefully contained improvisations, and stand-alone four-count
solos. The sound quality of these discs is not great, but Ory and his group
really hop through the tune. It is full of the swooping trombone glissandos Ory
was famous for. (The style is termed “tailgate,” dating from the time jazz
bands would ride on wagons through town, and the trombonist would face
backwards on the tailgate so that he could manipulate his slide without
knocking a fellow musician senseless. Since then, any kind of showy,
exaggerated slide work bears the name.)
Ory’s place in jazz history took some time to be
re-estimated. He was discovered by the ultimate jazz progenitor, the legendary half-mad
trumpeter Buddy Bolden when he was a child; Ory’s sister wouldn’t let him play
due to his youth. However, soon enough he was the premiere bandleader in New
Orleans during the 1910’s, and several key figures — King Oliver, Louis
Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and others — all learned their craft under
him. Thus, his influence is baked into the genre as we conceive of it today.
Ory moved to Chicago in 1925, and worked extensively in the
music scene there. During the Depression he knocked off and ran a chicken farm.
He enjoyed a renaissance in the late 1940s, reaching a whole new generation when
Dixieland became popular again as a reaction to the out-there complexities of
bebop. He finally retired in 1966 and spent his last days in Hawaii, an
unusually happy ending but well-deserved for a seminal jazz musician.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one
writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording
Registry in chronological order. Up next: Bessie Smith’s “Down-Hearted Blues.”)
Performers: Lucie
Bernardo, Otto Rathke, and Felix Silbers
2:20
"Comedy is the salt of
civilization, its critical voice. The comic spirit is forgiving, stands up for
freedom and elasticity, and counters the corrosive powers of evil by refusing to acknowledge its claims over the
human spirit. Its real enemy is custom drained of significance; it is the
ability of life to assert its claims no matter what social forms dictate."
— Guy Davenport
OK, I’m not going to kid you. The best and most
comprehensive take on this interesting novelty recording is the analysis and
history written by Casey O’Dell for the National Recording Registry, which you can access here. All the vital facts are there, and
anything I might add would only be commentary.
Which has never stopped me before.
Boiled down, the facts are these: the original recording is
from Germany, recorded on the OKeh label in 1920 — which itself ripped off the
idea from Henry Klausen’s recording “The Misfortunes of Youth” in 1903. On the
Laughing Record (in German, Das Original
Lach Aufnahme), a cornetist tries gamely to play a serious solo, only to be
undermined by a giggling, then guffawing, woman. A man joins in the audible
hilarity, flummoxing the instrumentalist. At about the two-minute mark, the two
laughers finally settle down for a moment, and the horn player makes another
game effort. However, this triggers an even more raucous burst of laughter,
including snorts, gasps, and sighs, until the comic convulsions peter out.
That’s it. It sold more than a million copies in America.
Soon and often copied by other labels around the world, the recording and its
like popped up again and again.
O’Dell expertly traces the recording’s history and heritage.
He rightly adjudges the subjective experience of listening to the recording as
hovering between the “joyous” and “demonic.” O’Dell makes the case for it being
a precursor of the laugh track, and talks about our enjoyment of the forbidden
and unprofessional live crack-ups of stage and film (or “breaking,” or as the
British say, “corpsing”).
He even cites the recording as a proto-meme, and he’s right
in the sense that the piece transcends language, making it universally
comprehensible and contributing powerfully to its analog-era virality. It’s a
great piece of insight.
To it, I can only add some basic thoughts about comedy. Now:
nobody wants to talk about why something is funny. Trust me. In my Film Comedy
class at NYU, I was forced to read Freud’s Jokes
and Their Relation to the Subconscious. Not only wasn’t it compelling
reading, but there were no jokes worth cribbing from it. Analysis is death to
comedy, which, like horror and erotica, short-circuits a rational response for
a welcome burst of feeling, and unmediated response. (To complicate things, we
must factor in scholar Eric Griffiths’ statement, “It is important to remember
that laughter can express other emotions apart from amusement.”)
Now, Freud thought that comedy provided psychic relief, that
it is a safety valve that allows the expression of repressed, forbidden, or
social unacceptable ideas. This is also known as the “Hey, I was just kidding”
theory, and the reason why comics and satirists are usually the first to be
silenced when dictatorships rise.
The ancients proposed that laughter was a way of feeling
superior (anyone who has watched the Three Stooges has been exposed to this
theory). For them, the clown doing what was “wrong” was a way of reinforcing
what society deemed to be “right,” and reinforced adherence to normative
values. The incongruous juxtaposition theory, which would also be a great name
for an EDM outfit, simply states that humor is triggered when something is out
of place or context, or contravenes normal understanding. Surrealist humor such
as Magritte’s The Treachery of Images
(1929) illustrates the theory aptly.
A more recent and more compelling idea has evolved about
comedy, to do with the subversion of compassion. The philosopher Henri Bergson
declared that laughter required the elevation of the intellect over the sensibilities
— that it puts us at a remove that allows us to laugh. We laugh at things that,
if presented seriously, would trigger a compassionate response. As Mel Brooks
put it, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open
sewer and die.” Thinking of it in this way, comedy takes on tones of sadism.
From a practical standpoint, the perspective of 15 years on
stage as a comic taught me that comedy is fueled by a great deal of aggression,
sparked by a real grievance about the gap between things as they should be and
things as they are. There is an immense pleasure in sublimating this impulse to
the service of provoking laughter, and it promotes (temporarily at least) a
sense of power and control over the vagaries of human life, a way of both
naming what infuriates us and conquering it by laughing at it.
Bergson writes that laughter is inherently complicit; “laugh
and the world laughs with you,” as the saying goes. There is an element of
coercion to this, but also a spur to inclusivity. After all, if we’re in on the
joke, our position is privileged. We become, literally, the cognoscenti, people who know.
The Laughing Record works because it goads us into laughing
as well. It gives us a scenario in which we can side with anyone we hear. A
musician is attempting to play something straight — to celebrate staying within
the boundaries of taste, and the socially acceptable idea of what constitutes
entertainment. To the extent that any of us has had to stand up in front of
others and perform, our sympathies fly to the struggling cornetist. However, as
audience members who have had to sit through insufferable cultural experiences,
we side with the laughers as well. Who hasn’t wanted to crack up themselves in
such solemn intolerable moments?
There’s no resolution in the recording, no narrative save
that which the listener brings to it. Near its end, the cornetist tries to get
started again, but he can only blat out a couple of notes, struggling not to
laugh himself. And the sense The Laughing Record gives is, that’s OK. Laughter
is the solvent of pretension.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one
writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording
Registry in chronological order. Up next: “Ory’s Creole Trombone.”)
‘The Boys of the
Lough’/’The Humours of Ennistymon’
‘The Boys of the
Lough’
Recorded April 1922
Folk tune
Performed by Michael
Coleman; accompanied by J. Muller, piano
2:59
‘The Humours of Ennistymon’
Recorded April 1922
Folk tune
Performed by Michael
Coleman; piano accompanist unknown
3:01
In October 1914, a 23-year-old violin virtuoso left Ireland
and came to America. His archaic but lively style led to an enthusiastic
following. His recordings of traditional Irish music boomeranged back to the
Emerald Isle, inspiring both the preservation and the development of Gaelic
music, culture, and language.
Coleman came from a musical family in the Knockgrania, near
Ballymore in County Sligo. His father was a locally renowned traditional
flautist. Coleman was trained as a child both in fiddle playing and in step
dancing. This the fiddler of the time would combine in live performance,
roaming from town to town as an entertainer.
When the young man joined the vaudeville circuit in America,
he found a universe of “stage Irishmen.” The first massive wave of Irish
immigration to America took place in the 1850s, triggering the first of the
many anti-immigrant political movements in the United States. “No Irish need
apply” was a sign seen in many shop windows. In popular culture, the Irishman
was a boggy beast, a cartoonish figure who was uncouth, drunken, prone to
fisticuffs, and prolifically fertile. By the time Coleman made it over, despite
the integration of Irish-Americans into the culture and power structure, this
stereotype was still in place and beloved. “Throw ‘em Down M’Closkey” and “The
Mulligan Guards” resounded everywhere.
However, a New York City record-store owner named Ellen
O’Byrne thought she could sell authentic Irish music to those hungry for the
sounds of home. She encouraged Coleman, and they both cleaned up. “The Boys of
the Lough” has become an archetypal reel, and “Ennistymon” remains a
preeminent jig.
Coleman’s is what is now termed the Sligo style of Irish
fiddling, brisk and slashing, with lots of ornamental trills and triplets,
bursting into chords at the ends of lines, like someone wielding a firework in
the dark. This is not lyrical, legato stuff — it’s straight-up dance music, and
it’s easy to imagine the hammering beats of Coleman’s feet accompanying his
playing. There’s life in it. Most surprising of all, his records sold the most
in Ireland itself. As such, his work still stands as a bridge between ancient
tunes and modern times.
He preserved the old tunes, but he made them his own as
well, imprinting them with his unique style. (Observe the parallel with the
previous discussed Texas fiddler Eck Robertson, who performed a similar role
for American country music.) Ironically, his education in antique technique
turned out to be the sound of the future.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one
writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording
Registry in chronological order. Up next: The Okeh Laughing Record.
Music and lyrics attributed to
Col. Sanford Faulkner
Performed by Eck
Robertson and Henry Gilliland
3:03
‘Sallie Gooden’
Recorded July 1, 1922
Folk tune
Performed by Eck
Robertson
3:10
Where do folk songs come from? “No one knows, that’s why
they’re folk songs.” Yes, I know. However, we cultural spelunkers like the
opportunity to clamber deep inside the history of a song or melody and attempt
to trace it back as far as we can. Hey ho!
First things first, though. These are considered to be the
first recorded country songs (they would be classified as “hillbilly songs” for
some time; country music was niche music until the singing cowboys of screen
and radio brought into the popular culture), and Alexander Campbell “Eck”
Robertson (1887-1975) couldn’t have been picked more deliberately to represent
the development of traditional music.
He was born and grew up on a farm in the Texas panhandle, on
the flat, treeless plains of Llano Estacado. His grandfather was a competitive
fiddler, as were his father and uncles. By the time Eck was 16, he was making a
living as a musician. Eck traveled with medicine shows, performed in silent
movie theaters, played at fiddling contests. He worked up a routine of patter
and jokes, and fancy tricks, even coaxing speech sounds out of the instrument
with the aid of a metal contact.
He and fellow fiddler and Civil War vet Henry C. Gilliland
went to New York, auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and
recorded a few tunes. Robertson would record sporadically after that, but it
wasn’t until he was rediscovered during the urban folk boom of the early 1960s
that he was finally given some of the recognition and honor he deserved.
Robertson’s virtuosic technique is evident on both
recordings; in “Arkansas Traveler” he plays the high harmony to Gilliland’s
melody, and in “Sally Gooden,” he whips off the melody and a dozen variations
with seeming effortlessness and inventiveness, crashing along at a headstrong
pace, underlining all with a compelling, droning ground note. This is dance
music, social music, but there is a sense of pride and professionalism as well.
Robertson and Gilliland weren’t happened upon in the fields by a Lomax. Music
was their business, and in this way music that could almost be defined as
tribal moved out into the light and started mutating in response to commercial
pressures, technological considerations, and popular taste.
Unlike many American folk tunes, “The Arkansas Traveler”
comes with some documentation. It came to life as a result of a real-life
encounter (or least the embellished superstructure of one). Col. Sanford C.
“Sandy” Faulkner (1803-1874) was a prominent cotton planter in Chicot County,
Arkansas. In the 1840, he campaigned with some friendly politicians, canvassing
the hinterlands of the districts for votes. The party of five men got lost in
the backwoods of the Boston Mountains, located on the Ozark Plateau in the
northwest portion of the state.
They came upon the cabin of a squatter, and Faulkner was
nominated to ask directions. The exchange, accompanied by a two-part melody,
became a favorite story that Faulkner performed at dinners and functions, until
it jumped and spread by word of mouth. Eventually, it was written down; the
complete original text can be read here at Historic
Arkansas. The gist of the story that the traveler is thwarted time
and time again in his attempts to find out where he is, how he can get where he
needs to go, whether he and his friends can find food and shelter, or even to
establish some kind of communication.
Over and over again, the squatter shoots the traveler down
with sarcastic wit. “Does this road go all the way to Little Rock?” “It ain’t
gone nowhere yet.” “Have you lived here all your life?” “Not yet.” “You’re not
very smart, are you?” “No. But I ain’t lost.” Each squatter response is
punctuated with the repetitive sawing of the signature phrase on his fiddle.
(All former children will recognize the tune as carrying the later lyrics,
“Pickin’ up a baby bumblebee/Won’t my mommy be so proud of me!” etc.)
Finally the traveler says, “Why don’t you play the rest of
that tune?” Squatter says, “I don’t know it.” The traveler takes the fiddle and
completes the song with a flourish . . . and suddenly the squatter knows how to
get to Little Rock, and has room for the strangers, and plenty of food, and a
bit of whiskey as well.
Washburn's 1858 painting, The Arkansas Traveler
The story is solid and well-crafted, punctuated with a
string of jokes funny in themselves before the big payoff, musically and comedically.
The conflict between the “civilized” person and the simple-acting-but-sly
country bumpkin is ancient and easily understood. In 1858, Edward Washburn
created a painting depicting the story; it became popular by virtue of being
reproduced as an inexpensive Currier & Ives lithograph. It became a vaudeville
sketch in 1869, and played on national stages for 20 years. Charles Ives
incorporated the tune into his Country
Band March (1905), skewering it in the process. Since then, the song has
been covered countless times, most notably by Pete Seeger on Frontier Ballads (1954) and Jerry Garcia
and David Grisman on Not for Kids Only
(1993).
“Sallie Gooden” has a more ambiguous origin story. It can be
searched for under a number of variant names — Sally, Sallie, Goodin, Gooden,
Goodwin, Godwin. The tune is a simple reel, the kind played at dances or
“play-parties,” the latter being social events for teens in pre-technology
days. The titular heroine is the object of both affection and teasing — “Had a
piece of pie, had a piece of puddin’/Gave ‘em both away just to see Sally
Goodin”; “Sally is my darlin’, Sally is my daisy/When she says she hates me, I
think I’m going crazy”, and on and on, with hundreds of improvised couplets
that can be tacked on as long as breath lasts. It is said that the original
Sally Goodin ran a beloved boarding house on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky
during the Civil War, and was commemorated by Confederate soldiers stationed
there.
Under the words is the melody, which swings brightly and
merrily in a major mode, a simple seesaw that’s easy to learn and build on.
Peel back further and you’ll find a darker, quieter source for the song. Before
“Sallie Gooden” had lyrics, it was known as “Boatin’ Up Sandy,” when the river
was the quickest and easiest path to take north to Ohio, and bore the bulk of
commercial trade in the region. “Sandy” is housed in the minor key, a shambling
and melancholy piece that aches with loneliness. Leave it to humankind’s
natural inclination to leaven such sentiments with humor and energy,
transforming a haunting tune into something more upbeat and memorable.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one
writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording
Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘The Boys of the Lough/The Humours of Ennistymon.’
