February 2007 – Page 3 – The Celestial Monochord

I’m a Stern Old Bachelor

Stern Old Bachelor

Over the past few months, I’ve bought nine inexpensive 78 rpm records — the first 78’s in my music collection.

Most of my 78’s relate to my research into Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, although I don’t yet have “Moonshiners Dance” (Gennett 6305) — if you own it, please contact me. One of the “extracurricular” records is by Chubby Parker, which I bought just because he’s a denizen of Harry Smith’s Anthology.

It’s an odd buy, since the label is the same on both sides. It claims to be two helpings of the B-side, “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor,” although playing the record reveals it actually has the correct A-side, “Oh Suzanna.” And in fact, the “Oh Suzanna” side is considerably more worn than the “Bachelor” side, so I guess Gennett chose their A’s and B’s correctly. Presumably, somewhere in the world, there’s a Chubby Parker 78 claiming to have two sides of “Oh Suzanna.”

“I’m a Stern Old Bachelor” is a comic novelty song, which celebrates the delights of being unbound by holy wedlock. (I wish I could make an MP3 for you, but I don’t have the technology.) Parker recorded it for Gennett on February 26, 1927 … in a couple weeks from now, it will be the 80th anniversary of that recording, but I need something to write about TODAY.

It seems to have been one of Chubby’s signatures on the WLS Barn Dance radio show, although “Nickety Nackety Now Now Now” was really his theme. (You may remember “Nickety Nackety” better from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds). Both were later reissued on Slivertone, the record label of Sears Roebuck (the worlds largest store, hence the WLS call letters).

Next, “Bachelor” showed up in John Lomax’s 1934 book, “American Ballads and Folk Songs.” In June 1938, the original Carter Family recorded the song on their last recording session before taking off for Texas and Mexico to be on border radio with XERA. Because the Lomax and Carter texts share a couple extra verses not found on Parker’s recording, I assume the Carters got the song primarily from Lomax. In any case, it’s an uncharacteristically silly performance by Sara and Maybelle.

Here are the lyrics to “Stern Old Bachelor”. The lines in italics are sung by the Carters, but not by Chubby Parker.

I am a stern old bachelor
My age is forty-four
I do declare, I’ll never live
With women anymore

I have a stove that’s worth ten cents
A table worth fifteen
I cook my gruel in oyster cans
And keep my things so clean

[chorus]
Oh little sod shanty
Little sod shanty give to me
For I’m a stern old bachelor
From matrimony free

When I come home at night I have no fear
I smile and walk right in
I never hear a voice yell out
Or say where have you been

On a cold and stormy night
In a cozy little shack
I sing my songs and think my thoughts
With no one to talk back

I go to bed when ever I please
And get up just the same
I change my socks three times a year
With no one to complain

At night when I’m on peaceful sleep
My snores can do no harm
I never have to walk the floor
With an infant [a baby] in my arms

And when I die and go to heaven
As all good bachelors do
I will not have to grieve for fear
My wife will get there too

When I first heard Parker’s recording — despite his high nasal voice and crisp banjo picking — I immediately thought of the Tom Waits song, “Better Off Without a Wife.” You know the one:

I like to sleep until the crack of noon
Midnight howling at the moon
Going out when I want to
Coming home when I please
Don’t have to ask permission
If I want to go out fishing
Never have to ask for the keys

They’re more or less the same song … well, I should say that “Better Off Without a Wife” could easily be a thorough re-imagining of “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor.” I believe Waits used to do this often — take a good old folksong, boil it down to the essence of whatever makes it good, and then build an entirely new song around that same essence. See my post on “Cold Cold Ground.”

Now, you may ask whether, in 1973, Tom Waits was listening to Chubby Parker or Sara and Maybelle Carter, or reading song books by John Lomax. It’s a little-known fact that Waits started out at California folk clubs like the Troubadour and the Heritage. Apparently, Waits and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would occasionally hang out together in the 1970’s (one suspects a nightcap or two may have been involved).

In any case, although my evidence for a direct link between the two songs is slim — and there must be dozens of other comic bachelor songs for Waits to take some cues from — there’s no reason to doubt that Waits and the music of the Carters or Chubby Parker could easily have crossed paths in the early 1970’s.

Editor’s Note: This is the 8th day of my 28-day experiment. I’m trying to post something every day for the whole month of February. If it’s something worth reading, well … all the better.

Drone! Drone! Drone! Pilotless Airplane!

Astronaut diaper
Get it?

When I founded this journal in March 2005, I got a little purple notebook in which to keep ideas for future entries. On the first page, between two ideas I never used — “Skin, Gut, Wood, Bone, & Metal in Banjos” and “Chemistry of Red Clay Halos” — is the following idea, also unused: “Astronauts in Diapers”.

So, before moving on to more recent news, let me recap where my head was at — what I would have written — 22 months ago.

Nobody loves the space program more than I do, I would have written. I grew up with my room wallpapered with galaxy posters and, at one point, I listened to little else but Vangelis. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as I wrote more recently, was an early cornerstone of what you might call my spiritual life. Every solid body in the solar system should be crawling with Spirits and Opportunities, I would have argued.

And this would’ve been a bargain, if we would only shut down the “manned” space program, which I found increasingly pointless and grotesque.

It’s true that if the Galileo spacecraft had carried a crew, they could have climbed out and shook loose that stuck umbrella antenna, giving us orders of magnitude more data from that mission. On the other hand, for what it would cost to feed the mission’s astronauts, supply them with air, give them a way to crap and pee and take a shower, entertain them, satisfy their sex drives, keep them from killing each other — I would have written — we could have had a flotilla of 500 Galileo spacecraft, of varying design, that would have swarmed around Jupiter like bees around a nest.

And nobody would have died. The main reason for maintaining the Shuttle Program is to finish the wildly over-budget, useless Space Station Freedom, my argument would have gone. The claim that we need the station for scientific purposes would have been called a lie — the only thing we could learn from that station that we couldn’t learn more easily, cheaply, and safely in other ways would be how to keep people floating around in space.

Why do we keep hurling these brave, bright, strong, idealistic people up on these monsters designed in 1970 to play nurse maid to billion-dollar junior-high-school science-fair ant farms? Just to have them die painful, fiery, long, terrifying, lonely deaths? Or for a massive welfare program for defense contractors? Have we no shame? Is nothing sacred? … I would have asked, had I written that post 22 months ago.

The argument is often made that “the young people of today” need heros to look up to and to stimulate their imaginations. Again, a concept from 1970. (Aaaahhh, remember when “disposable” was synonymous with “expensive”?) Young people today find it wildly stimulating to sit behind a computer, issuing commands to robots. They may well find it irrational and regressive — backward and idiotic, even — to risk death just to fly around in circles in the dark. Or so I might have speculated, had I written that post.

And the emblem for all these ideas would have been The Diaper. Yes, those brave explorers spacewalking in the new frontier are wearing DIAPERS (which really inspires the teenagers, in my experience.)

Well, I could go on … I mean, I could have gone on … like this forever, oh so long ago. I think you can see why I never wrote that entry — hysterical rants are simply against the editorial standards of The Celestial Monochord, which attempts to put forth a rational, contemplative exploration of ideas. When one of our writing staff submits such a screed, the Editorial Board politely rejects it.

Anyway, that’s where I was before this week. Then, two news items caught my eye.

First, the pilotless drone story. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle started using messages that readers leave on the paper’s voice mail for the Chronicle’s podcast. The first such experiment became a huge internet phenomenon. It was a guy enraged by the Chronicle’s use of the phrase “pilotless drone” — a drone, you see, already implies the lack of a pilot. The caller’s off-the-rails tirade (“DRONE! DRONE! DRONE! Pilotless airplane! GET IT?”) is hilarious, as is the attention it has received.

Mostly, I like the way the caller’s hysterical chanting roughly reflects my actual position on an important public policy issue.

And then there’s Lisa Nowak. Yes indeed. As I write this, I haven’t yet seen what fun the late-night comics will make of her. The woman is clearly having what used be called, in the old days, a “nervous breakdown” and I don’t want to exploit her mental health crisis. Leave the exploitation to the cable news networks and the Florida prosecutors.

But I can’t help pointing out that I was right — and what’s a blog for, except to point out the rare occasions on which you were right — about astronauts and diapers. Something needs a second look here. Maybe we need to go focus on real knowledge, on missions like the Voyager Spacecraft, which to my generation were so inspiring, so beautiful, and so dignified.

Editor’s Note: This is installment seven of my increasingly bizarre attempt to post one entry every day for a whole month. THIS month, as a matter of fact.

My Dodo

Dodo
(photo from Wikipedia)

The January 22 issue of The New Yorker featured an article on the dodo, the large bird that became extinct around 1690. Its only habitat was the island of Mauritius, on which no human beings ever lived until the Dutch landed in 1590. It therefore took just one century of carelessness, and wee bit of malice, to wipe the species out. “Nor were they afraid of us,” a contemporary wrote, “but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death.”

The New Yorker article mostly concerns the history of dodo skeletons and the men who love them. But just as with most pieces in that magazine, other stories come rushing in once the door is left open. Well-meaning scientists are caught up in post-colonial cultural politics. Local politicians argue that the dodo’s extinction was the best thing to ever happen to the Mauritius tourist trade. A lone, obsessive amateur tries to redirect the wide world’s attention toward his curious little plot of ground.

Naturally, it was this last story with which I identified most:

Alan Grihault, a retired teacher … was surprised to learn that there was no standard glossy dodo book … He began to gather material for one. He, too, found his way to the Mare aux Songes [a site with many underground dodo skeletons] and, in his mind, became the site’s unofficial caretaker. “It was my place, a tranquil place,” Grihault said … [His wife] told me that her husband’s dodo interest “sometimes gets to be a bit too much. Only two of us at home, so I hear everything, and sometimes twice, when he explains it to friends. Luckily I have the ability to switch off.”

And believe me, my wife identifies with this story, too. She and I both immediately recognized that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are like this for me — they are my dodo.

After my hundreds of research hours and all the conclusions I’ve drawn, my most pressing conclusion that almost nothing is known about virtually everything — certainly these old musicians remain almost wholly ignored. I would have guessed, for example, that there would be several people in the United States working on each and every performer on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. There isn’t.

When I bought the Anthology in 1997, the authoritative heft of the thing left me with the sense that there was little more to say. Surely, the Smithsonian must be delivering to us the limits of what is knowable, particularly given all those citations to scholarly journals. That’s really why it took me nine years to finally try a little research on my own. But when I did, I was stunned to realize that nobody had bothered to do even the laziest, most casual investigation. Even after discovering a second researcher interested in Cloutier and the Victoria, I still find that … well, I’m it. I’m the world’s leading expert.

Mountains of undiscovered material are waiting to be unearthed about an infinite variety of the past’s important people and events. One reason for all this ignorance may be we’ve been tricked into thinking it’s been researched. We picture Sherlock Holmes, with the hat and the pipe, or we Google up all sorts of interesing sites, and we think everything’s been sorted out already. Well, it hasn’t.

Maybe this sad, universal forgetfulness is due to everybody trying to make a living and reproduce themselves. Who’s got the time? More likely, I think it’s just a rare personality trait, to want to know everything that is knowable about one thing.

Minnesota Public Radio recently broadcast an interview with the author of an illustrated biography of Django Reinhardt. You can almost hear MPR reporter Tom Crann struggling to understand how someone can focus on one idea — one story — for most of his life. He seems to ask Michael Dregni the same sort of question, over and over, again and again, finding new ways to ask it until he finally blurts out, “Why do you care about him so much?”

It could easily be my imagination, but what I hear is a reporter — someone who tells at least one new story every day — struggling to come to terms with why someone would choose to know everything about one subject. Dregni is very gracious in his response, but I want him to just say, “Look, Crann. Django’s my dodo, OK?”

Editor’s Note: Today was the coldest day in three years here in Minnesota. And you wonder why I chose February to sit behind my computer and try to write one post every stinking day all month long. This is the sixth installment. Do you hear those helicopters?

Countdown to the Battle of the Jug Bands

The Celestial Monochord
(my card)

Alright, now that the Super Bowl is over, America can focus on its more pressing business — The Annual Battle of the Jug Bands!

As I described earlier, it takes place at the Cabooze in Minneapolis on the first Sunday after every Super Bowl Sunday, which I’m told was yesterday (I watched the Puppy Bowl instead). Like the equinoxes and solstices, the Battle of the Jug Bands will continue to happen on that Sunday even after the cockroaches have long ago taken over the world.

And that’s fine with me. One night last June, my wife and I had martinis and frickles at the Town Talk Diner. Afterwards, we drove north up Hiawatha and took the 94 West exit to get back to our Uptown pad. As you take that exit, you get a commanding view of the Cabooze, as if you were circling the bar in a helicopter. At the sight of it, I was suddenly very wistful — I yearned for the Annual Battle of the Jug Bands and I wished it was February right then and there. February in Minnesota. And I wished this in June.

The first year I attended The Battle, there was a jug band that had a toddler in its line-up. She was maybe 2, I guess, and during each song she sat on stage trying to out-shout the band with her high-pitched babbling. I believe she was singing. In any case, the sound almost exactly reproduced that of the old Skillet Lickers recordings from the 1920’s, with Gid Tanner singing his falsetto backup, all out of tune and off tempo. It was uncanny, as if something long dead had inadvertently been brought back to life.

In 2007, the Battle will be a quarter century old and it’s bigger than ever. And lately, it’s actually evolved into a real competition. For a long time, the 20 or so bands that competed over the 8-hour show were really more like 10 bands, with a lot of promiscuous recombination going on to make it seem like more bands. But the last two years, more real bands entered the competition than the Battle could accommodate, and they literally put names into a hat and randomly chose the entrants.

The judging has changed a bit, too. Now — for the first time — last year’s winning jug band chooses this year’s panel of judges. I gave those so-called “winners” multiple copies of my card at last year’s Battle, but they still have not contacted me. And, well … I will most definitely be judging them anyway, believe you me.

This year’s winners be forewarned: Choose me as thy judge, lest ye be judged with a can of genuine Celestial Monochord whoop-ass!

See you there …

Editor’s Note: This must be the hundredth installment … no, wait, it’s the 5th installment of The Celestial Monochord’s attempt to post one entry every day for an entire month. What was I thinking???

Crumb

Back in March, a magazine called Exclaim! (which I take to be sort of a Canadian Mojo) published an article about the rising popularity among young folks of collecting 78 rpm records.

It was written by Jason Schneider, who seems to be a little like me — a turn-of-the-century convert to early 20th Century blues and country. Schneider’s article is well worth the read, so I forwarded it to a Monochord reader who’s a very experienced 78 collector.

He and I enjoyed picking at the article, finding various things to admire and attack in it. In particular, my correspondent would like to urgently warn new 78 collectors NOT to play their records on old “gramophones.” You can, and should, buy a modern record player with a 78 rpm setting, instead of ruining your 78’s with 100-year-old technology. These are not floppy disks — you don’t need an out-dated playback device for this out-dated medium.

Another interesting passage in Schneider’s article is this:

Robert Crumb especially has had a profound influence since the acclaimed 1994 documentary about his life fully illuminated his obsession with 78 collecting and old time music’s ongoing hold on his psyche. In fact, the best introduction to the music is still Crumb’s series of blues and country “trading cards” that provide bios of his favourite artists. [link added]

I wouldn’t know where to start in confirming whether or not Crumb really has had any such profound influence … and I wonder whether Schneider can confirm it, and how. The main difficulty of Schneider’s article is his “authoritative” point of view. Instead of staying close to his experience, he wants to use an omniscient voice — and ironically, this can actually strip your writing of its most useful information.

So let me do what Schneider should have done, possibly, and ponder Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb — which I saw early in my interest in the old music — as I, personally, actually experienced it.

A girlfriend suggested I see Crumb because R. Crumb and his family were so much like me and mine. Someone else suggested this was a stupid and cruel thing to say. So, I saw Crumb in a questioning frame of mind — How is this like looking into a mirror? Does it represent me? Misrepresent me? What here should I embrace? But, to an extent, maybe that’s how we always go to the movies.

Over the previous year or two, I had bought a lot of CD reissues of old blues, but R. Crumb was the first 78 record collector I ever “met.” There isn’t much music heard in the film, the main exception being a moment with R. Crumb sitting on the floor listening to an old Geechie Wiley 78. But for me, that scene is the film’s most persistent memory. When I think of Crumb, that’s what I see.

Much more important, though, were his drawings of street lamps. At some point, R. Crumb says he and a photographer friend drove around taking photos of ordinary lamp posts and other municipal and commercial fixtures and structures — the only way he could later manage to draw them into his cartoons. We live in a civilization so soulless and ugly and forgettable that we can’t even remember what it looks like.

And that was like looking into a mirror, so much so that I could almost feel my mind reorganizing itself to accommodate the experience of having these private thoughts so vividly projected onto the big screen. My previous experience with the old music had carried some of that sense — of these old musicians being forgotten by an ugly culture, of all the real greatness in the world collecting dust somewhere, of the lives of people like Harry Smith and the Crumb family being examples of what happens to the best minds of my generation and yours.

So it would be false, outright, to say Crumb introduced me to the old music. You might possibly say that the film made it “cool” to be into the music. It would be best to say that the film was one of several things that modeled for me a possible relationship with the music, a way of fitting the music into a worldview that mattered, a way the music could be employed in the job of making sense of things.

To make the strongest possible claim for it, maybe Crumb was the last straw — it aided and abetted, giving me permission to just go ahead and finally become that dusty old crank obsessed with old music who I’d begun to glimpse in the mirror.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of my attempt to post something every damned day for a whole month … it is not a coincidence that I chose the shortest month of the year. But is it short enough to preserve my sanity? Stay tuned!

Also, anybody know where the photo from this post is from?

First Lady of the Air

The first review of a Bob Dylan concert ever published in the New York Times (maybe the first ever published anywhere) was written by Robert Shelton in September 1961, and it’s become a minor legend all its own. When Dylan first met producer John Hammond, Dylan immediately slapped the review into Hammond’s hand. By the end of that first meeting, Dylan was a “Columbia recording artist,” as they still declare at the start of his concerts today. Anyway, that’s a version of the lore.

I just realized today that, in that 1961 review, Shelton ends with a short description of the headliner of the bill that night — a Greenwich Village bluegrass band called The Greenbriar Boys. I got into them a few years go because the band’s mandolin player, Ralph Rinzler, went on to rekindle Bill Monroe’s career as his manager, and then went on to become one of the most important folklorists of the century.

Shelton even mentions one of the songs in the Greenbriar Boys’ repertoire, “Farewell, Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air” (the correct title is “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight”). The song is one of those tragic, tear-jerkin’ country ballads I always make fun of by adopting a phony southern accent and saying “That song always makes me cry!”

But in this case, it really does always make me cry. It’s become a real favorite of mine over the past two years — I even played it on the radio when I was on Dave Hull’s show in August. The Ditch Lilies, an all-woman Minnesota oldtime/bluegrass band, sometimes do their rendition of it at their gigs … if the audience is lucky. Here are the lyrics as the Greenbriar Boys sing them on their “best of” collection:

A ship out on the ocean, just a speck against the sky
Amelia Earhart flying that sad day
With her partner, Captain Noonan, on the second of July
Her plane fell in the ocean, far away

Chorus:
There’s a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, First Lady of the Air

Well, a half an hour later an SOS was heard
The signal weak, but still her voice was brave
Oh, in shark-infested waters her plane went down that night
In the deep Pacific, to a watery grave. [Chorus]

Well, now you have heard my story of that awful tragedy
We pray that she might fly home safe again
Oh, in years to come though others blaze a trail across the sea
We’ll ne’er forget Amelia and her plane. [Chorus]

OK now — here, at long last, is the real point. A biography of Charles Lindbergh’s wife has recently been released, and the author is making the rounds — I heard her on Minnesota Public Radio recently, for example. The book is called “Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air.”

Hey! Amelia Earhart already has a claim on the knickname of First Lady of the Air! It’s right there, prominently placed as the hook in the chorus of a great song! Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a skunk! … why, if Anne and Amelia had met back in 1929, I’d imagine they’d have a tremendous wrestling match! The Lindbergh-Earhart SMACKDOWN! … maybe wearing jodhpurs and those boots …

Anyway, no, seriously, maybe Anne Morrow Lindbergh was called “the first lady of the air” too — possibly with the idea that her husband Charles was a kind of President of the air? And a little Googling suggests neither Earhart nor Lindbergh can claim to be the “first” First Lady of the Air. It seems one Harriet Quimby was given this title immediately upon becoming the first woman to fly across the English Channel back in 1913, at least 15 years before Lindbergh and Earhart became famous.

And so I … Is it only February 3? Thank God it’s not a leap year!

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of The Celestial Monochord’s historic attempt to post every day during the month of February — almost like a REAL blog!

Old Dog Blue

I often wonder what I’ll do when my song-by-song series on Diamonds in the Rough comes to an end. I’d love to work on another album, but the only one that seems worthy is Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But given the pace at which I’ve run through Diamonds, I calculate The Anthology would take me about ten years. Besides, what can I say about something like “Old Dog Blue” that hasn’t been said before (and better)? For example, Robert Cantwell, in his book “When We Were Good,” writes beautifully about it.

But today is the 79th anniversary of the recording of Old Dog Blue on February 2, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee on the Victor label. To commemorate that great event, here’s a couple notions …

When I first heard Jim Jackson sing Old Dog Blue, my reaction was to regret its sexism. In the first verse, the singer off-handedly mentions the recent death of his wife, and then goes on to mourn the death of his dog, movingly, in verse after verse after verse:

I’m going back where I come
I’m going back where I come
I’m going back to Giles County
My wife died and left me a bounty
Me and them pretty girls ganged around
That’s the reason I’m going to Giles County

Had an old dog whose name was Blue
You know Blue was mighty true
You know Blue was a good old dog
Blue treed a possum in a hollow log
You know from that he’s a good old dog

Do we take this as a joke about the relative importance of wives and dogs?

I’ve seen (can’t remember where) the explanation that the song is hard to sort out because it’s really two or more songs spliced together. The line mentioning his wife is like a vestigial organ, left over from some previous stage in the song’s evolution. There’s some support for this view. Later, in the middle of everything, we get this strange non-sequitur:

Blue treed a possum out on a limb
Blue looked at me and I looked at him
Grabbed that possum, put him in a sack
Don’t move, Blue, ’til I get back.

It rained, it rained, yeah
It rained, it rained, yeah

Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on
Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on

Is the dog wearing a dress? No, this verse about a girl in a red dress waiting for the singer appears often in old folk and blues songs — so, it’s what’s called a “floating stanza.”

But I think it’s slightly condescending, a little dismissive of Jim Jackson’s artistry, to think as if he’s just a passive antenna through which floating stanzas appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. I trust my own aesthetics here — this performance of this text is heartbreaking, and increasingly so each time I hear it, year after year. Jackson chose his words to move us, and it works.

Once you accept that the text is very deliberate, the song comes into focus as brilliant psychological observation. It’s a study of grief, the way it really works in a real brain. It hits with the force it does because it mirrors sorrow as we actually experience it. Do we really always mourn the most obvious things, or do we sometimes focus on proxies, fetishes, or symbols instead?

Jackson’s character’s wife has just died, so he’s decided to go back to a place of his youth, before he was married, to relive happier days. It seems rather optimistic, even desperate — Jackson’s character doesn’t sound so young now.

Blue, too, seems to have been gone for a long time — so long that you’d expect a grown man to have gotten over it a bit. And I suspect he has. What I hear is a mind returning to everything its ever lost, trying to reconnect with it all both physically and emotionally.

By so vividly recalling this dog, by revisiting that intense ENCOUNTER between species (“Blue looked at me and I looked at him”), the singer is tracing his own edges, the limits and contours of his own identity. He is refamiliarizing himself with his manhood and his humanity, through memory.

In this way, Jackson’s character is like the later folk revivalists of the 1950’s and after, about whom Cantwell writes so beautifully. They renounced their identities, abandoned all hope, denied their inheritances, and then — through song — rebuilt themselves. They invented themselves as a new cast of characters meant to inhabit a new world, which they then also built, on a foundation of reinvented memories.

Editor’s Note: This is the second … jeez, only SECOND? … installment of an experiment — The Celestial Monochord is posting one entry every day during the month of February 2007.

Also, note that the lyrics to this song are notoriously hard to get exactly right.

When My Willie Come Home

Recently, Hillary Clinton made a cutesy Lockhorns-ish joke about her husband Bill being a bad and evil man, presumably thinking of the Monica Lewinsky incident, among others. And, you know, all the pundits got busy on it.

Personally … maybe it’s me … what I thought of was a cut on Mike Seeger’s “Southern Banjo Sounds” — the one called “Last Night When My Willie Come Home.” It’s one of my favorite cuts on a CD full of brilliant recordings.

It’s a lively performance, sweet and funny, punctuated by quills — bamboo pan pipes, basically, which Mike wears the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonicas. At the same time, Mike accompanies himself on banjo, sounding absolutely effortless, natural. But the liner notes inform us that he’s alternating between SIX different styles of banjo picking based on the playing of Sam McGee, Virgil Anderson, Maybelle Carter, and Charlie Poole.

The lyrics begin:

Well, it was late last night when my Willie come home
Heard a mighty rappin’ at the door
Slippin and a-sliding with his new shoes on
Oh Willie, don’t you ramble no more

Of course, Bill Clinton was called “Slick Willie” back in 1992, and the Willie in Seeger’s song is “slipping and sliding”. Maybe that’s more than enough of an association.

But when Seeger refers to “my Willie” in the first line, it always carries an unfortunate penile image for me, and I have to remind myself that the speaker is Willie’s long-suffering woman. Then again, the Starr Report conjured a lot of similarly unfortunate images, and the experience of trying to shake them from my head only reiterates the association, in my twisted mind, between these Willies.

More to the point, this is a rounder song — a song about a wastrel, “one who,” according to my desk dictionary, “dissipates resources foolishly and self-indulgently.” Willie’s slippery new shoes are the central theme of all rounder songs — he lives high, spends a lot of capital on all the wrong things, and is ultimately a tragic figure. His shoes are new, but he’s dangerously rootless.

Like a lot of these old songs, the point of view careens from one character to another recklessly and without warning. In the chorus, Willie speaks:

And it’s “Oh me” and it’s “Oh my”
What’s gunna become of me?
For I’m down in town just a-fooling around
No one’s gunna stand my bond.

The song is sympathetic to Willie’s wife, but also to Willie — it understands his fear and regret:

Well the last time I seen my own true love
She was a-standing in the door
She threw her arms all around my neck
Saying “Honey, don’t you go”

I don’t have a “message” here, at least not about politics. Seeger’s “Last Night When My Willie Come Home” is ill-suited to the politics you typically find today on TV and, come to think of it, in blogs. The point of view shifts (and is shared) among the characters, and the song doesn’t bother much to identify the guilty and innocent. The song’s affectation is light and comic, but the emotional lives of the characters are intense, sincerely felt (the inverse of what you might find on FOX chat shows).

Presidential candidates always promise to change the tenor of political debate and Hillary frames her campaign as a “conversation” — just the form in which this song comes at you. I wonder if she’s looking for a campaign song …

I’ll love you, dear girl, till the sea runs dry
Rocks all dissolved by the sun
I’ll love you dear girl till the day I die
And then, Oh Lord, I’m done

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a grand experiment! The Celestial Monochord will attempt to post one entry EVERY DAY during the month of February 2007. Pray for Mojo!