celestialmonochord

Einstein and Folkways Records

Einsteinviolin

If a movie was ever made about the early years of Folkways Records, someone would have to play Albert Einstein.

It would only be a cameo and its true importance is hard to assess, but nevertheless there is an anecdote that links the father of modern physics with the label that brought us Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the New Lost City Ramblers.

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My research is in its early stages. But it keeps getting clearer and clearer to me that Folkways Records wasn’t just a label that released folk records. It has been a significant force in shaping the way music listeners in the United States and beyond think about their culture and their past.

For example, Woody Guthrie has sometimes seemed to me, and others, as some kind of mythical legendary superfolk. Much of the reason is that Pete Seeger consciously set out to make sure he was remembered this way. But it seems very doubtful that either Pete or Woody would have had the careers they had without Folkways.

Also, as I understand it, Leadbelly had such a degrading experience under management of the Lomaxes that it’s unclear how much recording he would have done if Folkways founder Moses Asch hadn’t brought him into the studio.

And Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music came out on Folkways and continues to be a major conduit between Americans and their own musical heritage. But when Smith walked into the Folkways offices, all he wanted to do was sell them his old record collection. Having Harry put together an anthology was the idea of Moses Asch.

And remember that the very first LP of bluegrass music ever released was on the Folkways label.

And on page 15 of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Dylan tells us why he went to New York: “I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label I wanted to be on. That was the label that put out all the great records.”

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Here’s what I know about Einstein’s role — plus a little of what I don’t know.

Moe Asch was the son of Shalom Asch, perhaps the best-known novelist writing in Yiddish and a leading leftist intellectual. He and Albert Einstein were acquaintances. In the late 1930s, both men were actively trying to rescue German and other European Jews endangered by the Third Reich. They encouraged and enabled Jews to leave Europe and tried to get reluctant governments, including the U.S., to accept Jewish refugees.

The young Moe Asch had recently acquired a new “portable” audio recording machine (an enormous, weighty beast in the 1930s). At this point, accounts vary in certain details. Usually, Shalom Asch brings his son and his son’s machine to Princeton, NJ to record a message from Einstein about European Jews for later radio broadcast. In one version, Einstein visits the Asches in their home for the same purpose.

At some point, Einstein apparently asked the young Asch what he wanted to do for a living, and Moe offered that he might like to be a mathematician. (I can imagine a young man answering this way in hopes of pleasing Einstein, then one of the most famous celebrities on Earth.) After the recording was finished, Einstein told Moe Asch that his recording machine was a better path to follow if he wanted a creative and prosperous future.

In some accounts, Einstein speaks expansively about the machine’s potential to record and preserve global civilization. In some accounts, it’s Asch who speaks of starting a company that would “describe the human race, the sound it makes, what it creates,” and Einstein reacts encouragingly. According to Moe Asch himself, Einstein told him:

It’s very important for the 20th Century to have someone like me who understood the intellect and who understood the changes of the 20th Century and who understood folk and dissemination.

Given the very real and immediate threat to Western Civilization that was the very reason for their meeting, it’s not hard to imagine any of these scenarios.

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A little harder to imagine, in detail, is the account Pete Seeger liked to tell his audiences. Seeger was close to Moe Asch and knew him well, but he was also a better entertainer and myth-maker than he was a historian:

… and then over supper, Einstein says, “Well young Mr. Asch, what do you do for a living?” And Mo says, “Well, I make a living installing public address systems into hotels, but I’ve just bought this recording machine, and I’m fascinated with what it can do. And in New York, I’ve met a Negro musician named Leadbelly who’s a fantastic musician but nobody’s recording him. They say he’s not commercial. But I think this is American culture and it should be recorded. Down in the Library of Congress they record things and just put it on the shelf there and only a few people ever hear them.”

Well, Einstein says, “You’re exactly right. Americans don’t appreciate their culture. It’ll be a Polish Jew like you who will do the job.”

I doubt Pete Seeger’s account, but mostly because there’s too much truth packed into it.

The genius of Folkways Records was that it was the fabled “cool corporation.” Asch turned his back on the risky business of making “hits” and instead focused on a sure bet — if you record something great and rare, somebody will want it eventually. So he recorded whatever seemed to be in the spirit of his conversation with Einstein, gave it excellent and exhaustive liner notes, and kept it in print forever. (The “Sounds of North American Frogs” has been available continuously since 1958 — and in 1998 it was even digitally remastered and released on CD.)

I’ve also recently come to really appreciate the vital roles that Europeans played in preserving American folk music, Northerners played in preserving the sounds of the South, whites have played in keeping black musical traditions alive and kicking … and so on, ad infinitum. The Celestial Monochord is lousy with such stories if you know where to look. In researching these curious histories, one finds Folkways Records almost continuously at the center of the action.

Aschsonnybrownie
Moses Asch, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in 1958 (from a 1-megabyte article from the National Yiddish Book Center, available as a PDF.)

The Frying Pan

John Prine writes a song like The Frying Pan now and then — strong shades of parody, joyously silly (even stupid), and irresistibly appealing. “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” and “Aw Heck” and the next song on Diamonds in the Rough, “Yes, I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You,” are like that. Should we think seriously about a song that couldn’t even get recorded with a straight face?

The lyrics to The Frying Pan are wildly unambitious and seem like they may have been made up on the spot. They relate the tragic tale of a man who comes home from work to find that his wife has left him. He grieves. And that’s about the extent of it.

There are a few telling details. The wife leaves her goodbye note in the frying pan, presumably to make the point that she was appreciated neither very deeply nor for the right things:

I come home from a-work this evening
There was a note in the frying pan
It said, “Fix your own supper, babe.
I run off with the Fuller Brush man.”

The song doesn’t say whether he actually makes his supper in that pan – a bitterly seasoned meal indeed! Prine’s character then “commenced a-carrying on”:

And I miss the way she used to yell at me
The way she used to cuss and moan
And if I ever go out and get married again
I’ll never leave my wife at home

So the character grows, and his future wives may find him somewhat more attentive.

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John Prine understands that the ordinary details of everyday life are where all the drama and meaning are. But the details of everyday life keep changing with surprising speed –- you realize this more the older you get. I think this is why the songs on Diamonds in the Rough seem so meaningfully, precisely, poignantly located at a specific point in the past.

The last door-to-door salesman I remember seeing was an actual Fuller Brush Man who came to our door when I was around nine. I dimly remember his case full of brushes, as well as the feeling he created that buying some brushes was absolutely inescapable. I very distinctly recall my mother once asking me to tell him I was home alone while she was, in fact, hiding nearby. I guess I may be from the last generation of John Prine listeners who will have direct experience with Fuller Brush men at the door.

Appreciating a Prine song – or any song – requires more and more research, explanation, and imagination the older the song gets. It requires more and more of the listener’s participation and knowledge to make the full meaning and pleasure happen. That’s why it makes sense to me, at least, that popular song might first have become accepted as high art in the context of a Folk Revival.

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Bluegrass is lurking in all the arrangements on Diamonds in the Rough, but only The Frying Pan puts it at center stage. Everything is there, except maybe a fiddle.

David Bromberg’s mandolin “chops” the rhythm and then does lightning-fast runs. Steve Goodman provides the requisite smokin’ bluesy guitar solo and high-lonesome backup vocals. Steve Burgh provides standup bass. And Dave Prine plays the most recognized of all bluegrass signatures — a 5-string banjo with a resonator back, played with three fingers and finger picks. The solo spot after each chorus is taken by another instrument, passing the spotlight around from one bandmember to another. It’s bluegrass.

There’s just one thing. I’m used to thinking of bluegrass in a smooth, fast 4/4 time — each beat in the measure emphasized (or de-emphasized) the same. This open, spacious, adaptable meter is what allows the complex, syncopating, polyphonic, collective noodling of a bluegrass band — and it also allows that band to “stay together,” to remain in close conversation with itself. The 4/4 meter was Bill Monroe’s main and final insight, learned from the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, and it completed his creation of bluegrass music.

The Frying Pan, as I hear it, is in the meter Bill Monroe finally left behind –- the 2/4 time that’s closely associated with oldtime stringband music and that gives it an easy, front porch, loping feel. Instead of the banjo skittering, independent as a hog on ice, across the surface of an open 4/4 time, Dave Prine’s playing sounds cramped inside the ONE two THREE four oldtime beat. The result is a banjo that sounds simple, old, and sincere, if somewhat bound by circumstances. It also sounds like the banjo-playing that David Akeman and Earl Scuggs did in Monroe’s band in 1945 and 1946. The Frying Pan sounds like a portrait of bluegrass represented exactly at the moment it became itself.

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody * The Torch Singer * Souvenirs * The Late John Garfield Blues * Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum * The Frying Pan * Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You * Take the Star Out of the Window * The Great Compromise * Clocks and Spoons * Rocky Mountain Time * Diamonds in the Rough)

The Old Negro Space Program

My wife has just made me aware of a lost chapter of American history that is at once uplifting and downcasting, both inspiring and … sort of not inspiring.

A new documentary by Ken Burns (not really) tells the story of the old Negro space program, in large part through interviews with the original Blackstronauts themselves:

A lot of people today, they don’t think about it. They say “Oh, they’re putting a man on the moon” or “Oh, they’re putting up another space shuttle.” But you see, they don’t realize that in the early days of the space program, NASA was whites-only … It was it a different time, you understand. See, in 1957 if you were black — and if you were an astronaut — you were out of work.

You can watch the nearly 11-minute film (which was excluded from the Sundance Film Festival on the pretense that it was not submitted to the Sundance Film Festival) at www.negrospaceprogram.com.

Those U.S. State Department Blues

I just read an essay by Paul Oliver, one of the best-known historians of the blues, about why it is that much of the best and earliest work on the blues had long been done by Europeans.

Swedes, Belgians, Germans, French, Englishmen and others wrote exhaustive studies of the meanings of blues songs, compiled 2000-page catalogs of blues 78s, founded some of the first magazines anywhere devoted to blues — all of this long before America had a "blues revival."

Charles Delaunay had to write "Hot Discography" secretly, on onion skin, because he was in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France. When Paul Oliver (a Brit) wrote "The Blues Fell This Morning," Martin Luther King wrote the introduction.

In 1960 — the year "The Blues Fell This Morning" was published — Paul Oliver finally scraped up enough money to actually visit the United States, the birthplaces of the blues he loved so much. He traveled to Washington, New York, Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, Shreveport, Dallas and various parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. He stayed with Muddy Waters in Chicago and traveled with Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie records using some of the recordings they made. The impact of the trip on Oliver’s life and scholarship was incalculable.

The trip was made possible by a very small grant from the U.S. Department of State — a grant "for leaders and specialists."

I don’t know whether such grants still come out of the State Department or from anywhere else in the U.S. government anymore. I do hear frequent stories of scholars having to give presentations to conferences in the U.S. via telephone or satellite hook-up due to difficulties getting temporary visas to travel here — and I mean British astronomers and Swedish music historians and the like. I often read about such incidents in left-wing rags like … Sky and Telescope, for example. Bad times, bad times.

Editor’s Note: Paul Oliver’s essay is in "Sounds of the South," a collection of papers from a conference celebrating the 1989 opening of the Southern Folklife Collection at Chapel Hill. It was edited by Daniel W. Patterson … and I’m finding it really interesing. Also, thanks to reader Bill B. for, among other things, correcting my spelling of Chris Strachwitz’s name.

Billy The Bum

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About 15 years ago, a friend of mine wanted to cite an example of a bad John Prine song, so he chose Billy The Bum, calling it “a shambles of a song.” At the time, it seemed like a good example to me, mostly because the song’s shameless sentimentality made me cringe. But I’ve gone through a lot since then.

Around 1999, after I’d pretty much memorized the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was starving for more blues and hillbilly recordings from the 1920’s. So I sought out recordings by many of the same performers Harry Smith had put in his collection. And there, beyond the Anthology, were many astonishing surprises for which the Anthology had not really prepared me.

Chief among them, initially, was how often these performers had recorded extremely sentimental 19th century “parlor songs,” as I call them. These earnest, stiff numbers told tales full of pathos about drowning sailors, dying orphans, childhood cottages never seen again. Maybe Harry Smith had mostly ignored them because they weren’t “folk songs” in a certain sense — most were relatively new compositions from the late 1800’s, widely sold as sheet music for middle-class homes. In the late 1920’s, white folk musicians made sound recordings of them for the first time, their original copyright status long forgotten.

Initially, I was a little impatient with them — a bit embarrassed, disappointed, and amused by their commercialism and their hokiness. But after listening closely to dozens of them, researching the origins of several of them, and having a few conversion experiences with them (I guess you’d say), I’ve come to love them. There’s Charlie Poole’s “Baltimore Fire”:

It was on a silver falls by a narrow
That I heard a cry I ever will remember
The fire sent and cast its burning embers
On another faded city of our land

Fire! Fire! I heard the cry
On every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity
Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to Heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore, our beautiful city

There’s Buell Kazee’s “If You Love Your Mother”:

In a lonely graveyard many miles away
Lies your own dear mother slumbering ‘neath the clay
Or have you forgotten all her tears and sighs
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

She is waiting for you in that happy home
Turn from sin’s dark pathway to no longer roam
Give your heart to Jesus, upward lift your eyes
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

And then there’s the Carter Family, whose influence now seems to me ubiquitous in John Prine’s music (and who provided the title song for Diamonds in the Rough). The Carters recorded these sentimental parlor songs more often and more movingly than anybody ever has. Their “Engine 143” did make it onto The Anthology:

Georgie’s mother came to him with a bucket on her arm
Saying my darling son be careful how you run
For many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time
And if you run your engine right you’ll get there just on time

Up the road he darted, against the rocks he crushed
Upside down the engine turned and Georgie’s breast did smash
His head was against the firebox door the flames are rolling high
I’m glad I was born for an engineer to die on the C&O road

I’ve come to appreciate these songs as beautifully written and recorded, often, but also as an important part of the roots of American music. In no small part through the influence of the Carter Family, country music is heavily based on them (what do you get when you play a country record backwards?).

Billy The Bum, which I’ve known for over 30 years, is today a completely new song to me. I hear it within a tradition that’s well over a hundred years old and that I’ve taken deeply, if cautiously, into my emotional, intellectual, and maybe spiritual life.

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Billy The Bum is another of Diamonds In The Rough’s country waltzes. The first verse again establishes John Prine’s firm flat-picking, accompanied by David Bromberg on a second acoustic guitar. Bromberg plays mostly bass runs, but strums often to help keep the beat. I’d say he plays “oldtime guitar” — an art that’s been essentially lost to the upright bass, on the one hand, and bluegrass guitar on the other.

With the first statement of the chorus, Bromberg begins dubbing over (I assume, unless he’s playing with his toes) the sliding dobro that gives the song much of its countrified twang. Also on each chorus Dave Prine enters, turned down very low in the mix, singing back-up vocals in a strained, high-lonesome wail, like a far-off cry in the wilderness.

As I understand the lyrics, Billy always fantasized about riding the rails as a hobo, but because his legs had been twisted by polio, he could only hop a train in his imagination:

Billy the Bum lived by the thumb
Sang of the hobo’s delight
He’d prove he could run twice as fast as the sun
By losing his shadow with night

He loved every girl in this curly-headed world
But no one will know, it seems
For two twisted legs and a childhood disease
Left Billy just a bum in his dreams

It’s interesting that even in the 20’s and 30’s — presumably the heyday of hobo culture — films and songs romanticized the lifestyle, seducing many young people into riding the rails. In other words, hobos were already a dream even back when they were still a reality. Billy was only one of millions who dreamed of riding the blinds. There’s a sad irony and richness here — his polio made him a bum in his own eyes, unable to attain his dreams, which included being a real bum on the open road:

He lived all alone in a run-down home
Near the side of the old railroad track
Where the trains used to run carrying freight by the ton
And blow the whistle as Billy waved back

It seems fairly clear to me that John Prine has always believed in Jesus Christ, that he’s a christian. But if this is right, his work presents us with a rare and fearsome portrait of a blazingly angry and disappointed, public-spirited, and wildly playful faith. Prine’s first album is all about spirituality, if you look at it just so, and is big enough to contain everything from “Eat a lotta peaches, try to find Jesus” to “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes — Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

If Prine were an atheist like myself, it would be a different matter. But given Prine’s long and powerful history of working out his thoughts about faith in song, I don’t take lightly his portrait of the song’s townspeople, whose children “seemed to have nothing better to do than to run around his house with their tongues from their mouths.”

Now some folks’ll wait and some folks’ll pray
For Jesus to rise up again
But none of these folks in their holy cloaks
Ever took Billy on as a friend

For pity’s a crime and ain’t worth a dime
To a person who’s really in need
Just treat ’em the same as you would your own name
Next time that your heart starts to bleed

It’s easy enough, if you prefer, to hear easy platitudes and a certain self-righteousness in this indictment. But given Prine’s body of work and the religious themes he’s explored so frankly, I think we’re bound to take this portrait seriously. Trapped among such people by his physical disabilities and his shame, Billy, a real fluorescent light, cried pennies on Sunday morning.

By this point, I’ve come to decide that it’s a defense mechanism, this tendency not to really hear the lyrics of these old-style sentimental songs. If we took them literally, pictured them, read them over, took them at their word, they’d cut too close to the bone. They’d go places we’ve decided, as a culture, we don’t want to go.

It’s no wonder that generation after generation of Americans experience a recurring “Folk Revival” in which young people rediscover acts like the Carter Family. And, regardless of what else might be said about them, it’s no wonder that these Revivals are continually experienced by their participants as a burning away of some vast, heavy haze of sanitized corporate nonsense to reveal something that finally, at long last, matters.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

The comments below were originally submitted to another entry — a really excellent one, I think.

I got tired of seeing that original post diluted by an unrelated question, so I created a space for these comments.

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I have been listening to Bob Dylan’s “Lay down your weary tune, lay down.” Somewhere back in my childhood (I’m 80 yrs old now) I think I sang that song, or at least the melody, as a hymn. Have you come across any info on this song? OTM

Posted by: Orville Murphy | November 13, 2005 at 10:47 PM

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Hi Orville,

Thanks for visiting The Celestial Monochord.

Sadly, I don’t have an answer for you. There is a wonderful community of people who often have answers for very difficult questions about folk music, although their site can be a little confusing and sometimes slow. Maybe you should check them out and ask around at Mudcat. They’re at:

www.mudcat.org

I’ve done you the favor of looking there for the answer, and all I’ve found is several OTHER people struggling to find the answer to the same question.

Dylan apparently has said that he heard the tune either on the BBC while visiting the UK or at Joan Baez’s house on a record. It may have been an old bagpipe tune and/or Scottish hymn. In any case, it had no words, so he wrote some and probably adapted the tune somewhat. Seeing as he only heard the tune once, he had no choice but to sort of make some of it up.

Some at Mudcat say that the melody resembles The Water is Wide. Others say it resembles How Can I keep from Singing. In any case, a lot of old hymns have the same chord structure and the same pattern of syllables, which makes them easy for a congregation to sing. It may sound like a 1000 songs.

Also, note that more than a few songs have the phrase “lay down your weary” something-or-other. For example, one version of Barbara Allen (the oldest song in the whole world) contains:

She walked over yon garden field
She heard the dead-bell knelling
And every stroke that the dead-bell gave
It cried, “Woe be to you now, Ellen.”

As she walked over the garden field
She saw his corpse a-comin’,
“Lay down, lay down your weary load
Until I get to look upon him.”

Sorry I couldn’t help more! Good luck in your search!

Kurt G.

Posted by: The Celestial Monochord | November 14, 2005 at 07:39 PM

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Regarding ‘Lay down your weary tune’: I note on the Biograph notes that he found a Scottish ballad without lyrics and used the melody.

There is some simularity to the sound you may hear when Gaelic psalms are sung (cf. Scottish tradition Vol.6 Gaelic Psalms from Lewis. GreenTrax recordings)

I note from a much earlier time in Celtic past that singing was done to sound like the cadence of the sea and of its waves rolling in.

Posted by: Mike | May 19, 2007 at 09:37 AM

Kitten Astronauts as “The Other”

My cats Georgia (top) and Henry (middle) enjoy their new toy, a small fishbowl. Georgia puts her head inside while also kicking and grabbing at other toys, while Henry’s more apt to just sit placidly with his head in the bowl, looking around. They stay there for long periods of time, Henry often for up to 45 minutes, his breath steaming up the glass.

I don’t know why. And so, Houston, we have a problem:

Maybe they like the sonic environment it creates — a world where the only sound is their own breathing, like nursing with their mother. On the other hand, they don’t purr or knead when they do this (for a change — they are avid nursers).

Maybe the glass distorts the room, making things look “weird” — and certainly, they like their world when it’s defamiliarized. Georgia, who often seems a little bored, likes touring the apartment atop my shoulders. On the other hand, she uses the bowl for shorter periods than Henry and does less “looking” while she’s there. Henry, who’s less bored with his surroundings, enjoys the view more.

Therefore, my pet theory (sorry for the pun) is that they’re pretending that they’re astronauts (e.g., John Glenn, also shown above for easy comparison). I believe they imagine themselves to be in Outer Space. They must appreciate this, as I do, as a metaphor for their status as The Other, as representatives from outside of language and discourse, emissaries from a place beyond history and culture.

Sour Grapes

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(illustration by Sally Minker)

Two songs ago, on Souvenirs, Steve Goodman’s guitar work was very hard to peel apart from John Prine’s. But Prine’s guitar picking pattern here on Sour Grapes seems very close to that on Souvenirs, but without Goodman’s embroidery. You can use Sour Grapes as a tool to get a better handle on what Prine’s right hand is up to on Souvenirs.

More importantly, Prine’s relatively unadorned, unsupported guitar work here also gives the song a spare regularity, like the lonesome ticking of an old mantel clock. Sour Grapes is mood song — in fact, it’s remarkable how many songs from Diamonds in the Rough can be summed up as “a mood put across in lyric and melody.”

The mood in Sour Grapes seems familiar enough, and that familiarity makes the song seem funny, like a silly little tune. Which I think is perfectly true.

But simply taking the words seriously and literally leads me to ask what else is happening. The speaker of the song has retained some friends solely to prevent other people from thinking he’s mentally ill, for example. Is Prine’s deadpan humor more funny than it is chilling?

I don’t care if the sun don’t shine
But it better, or people will wonder

Even when he writes a tossed-off song, Prine leaves you wondering …

The Late John Garfield Blues

Garfield before HUAC (via Citizen Screen)

John Prine is often misunderstood — I mean the guy mumbles, and so you get the lyrics wrong. Among hard-core fans, these misunderstandings can be a kind of a sport and a badge of honor. The lyrics to “The Late John Garfield Blues” are especially tough to make out, so everybody hears a slightly different song.

I used to hear a song in which “wind-blow scarves and top-down cars all share one western tree” and in which “the men on The El (Chicago’s elevated train) sit perfectly still.” Prine tells a joke in the song, but I never got it — “Two men were standing upon a bridge, one jumped and screamed yoo-hoo!”?

Each listener creates the song’s meaning anew. Everybody has a hand in writing the “The Late John Garfield Blues.”

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Only about seven years before “The Late John Garfield Blues” was recorded, Bob Dylan had finally figured out how to mix 20th-century Modernism with popular song.

John Prine learned this trick from Dylan more naturally and vividly than most songwriters, and was one of many whom the press called “The Next Bob Dylan.” (Today, of course, we know the next Bob Dylan always turns out to be Bob Dylan himself, and Prine has now become The First John Prine.)

With “The Late John Garfield Blues,” Prine jumps headlong into Dylan’s Modernism more completely than anywhere else in his first two albums:

The fish don’t bite but once a night
By the cold light of the moon
The horses screamed, the nightmares dreamed
And the dead men all wear shoes
Cuz everybody’s dancing
Those late John Garfield blues

As I see it, Dylan’s main insight was that making sense of a song — what’s happening, who it’s happening to, why it matters — should be a job shared with the listener. A song’s meaning shouldn’t be complete, an inanimate object lying dead inside the song. It should be a process that happens when the song and the listener sit down together and share the same space for a minute or two.

And if it’s partly our job to help make the meaning of a song, then my attitude is that we should try to do it well. Shouldn’t we bring to the job the best of what have to offer?

“The Late John Garfield Blues” certainly needs us to participate, since the lyrics don’t make make sense all by themselves. They have no real characters, very little setting, no train of thought, few hints of an “occasion.”

The lyrics are all mood. In fact, Prine claims that he mostly just wanted to capture a mood — specifically, that of a late Sunday night when there’s nothing on television but an old John Garfield movie. The song is “not so much” about the actor, Prine says, and more about a feeling — the actor is used, if anything, as a vehicle to get to the mood. Even the word “late” refers to the time of day as much as to Garfield’s being dead.

But I hear that very same mood much more clearly at the end of The Torch Singer than here. What I hear instead is John Garfield’s 1952 funeral.

Garfield had been admired by all sorts of people — he was the son of poor Urkranian-Jewish immigrants, a former boxer, a movie heart-throb, and the screen’s first rebel without a cause. When he died at age 39, his funeral was a mob scene the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Rudolph Valentino’s funeral in 1926::

Black faces pressed against the glass
Where the rain has pressed its weight
Wind-blown scarves in top-down cars
All share one western trait

Saddness leaks through tear-stained cheeks
From winos to dime-store Jews
Probly don’t know they gave me
These late John Garfield blues

Garfield was a staunch liberal and became a victim of McCarthy’s blacklist. Unable to find work in Hollywood and obsessed with a sense of betrayal by his own country, Garfield became unhinged, obsessively sifting through his personal papers for evidence of his innocence, and descending into substance abuse and some sort of clinical depression.

Two men were standing upon a bridge
One jumped and screamed “You lose.”
Just left the odd man holding
Those late John Garfield blues

Old man sleeps with his conscience at night
Young kid sleeps with his dreams
While the mentally ill sit perfectly still
And live through lives in between
[some sources say “And live through life’s in-between”]

The recording’s musical arrangement, too, makes me think more about history and the life of John Garfield than Prine would suggest.

The first two stanzas (the first 50 seconds) are again a duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. Prine, as usual, plays acoustic guitar, emphasizing with his bass strings the first beats in the meter of this country waltz and decorating the rest with his high strings.

But during these two stanzas, Steve Goodman is just strumming on an electric guitar. His solid, slow, ringing strumming sound like church bells, like funeral bells.

This is an old trick (i.e., this has a long tradition). Bob Dylan uses it in “Queen Jane Approximately,” when nearly the identical guitar sound is used, particularly near the end of the song, to ironically emphasize the song’s marriage motif.

I’ve always felt certain that Dylan (or his band) got the idea from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in which Jefferson brings the song to a complete stop to imitate the sound of a funeral bell with the bass string of his guitar. The song was recorded at Blind Lemon Jefferson’s last recording session and was covered by Dylan on his very first album.

In Prine’s recording, I hear the guitars being used to put the song in conversation with Dylan and Blind Lemon Jefferson, just as its lyrics borrow from that very same lineage in the way they make meaning. The song conjures up a string of old movies, and it conjures up a mood we’ve all felt late at night, and it asks us to make our own sense.

There are quite a lot of roads into and out of this song, and it’s no wonder we recognize it as a point of departure.

The Singing Swinging Banjo

I found "The Singing Swinging Banjo" in a used vinyl-record store in Minneapolis. Released in 1959 on the cheap, short-lived Riviera label, the album consists of studio musicians slogging through bland, quasi-Dixieland renditions of standards such as "Buffalo Gal," "Grand Old Flag," "Saints Come Marching In," and "Clementine."

But of course, I bought the album for the cover. The clerk at the counter shook his head, saying "A lot of records have a hot chick on the cover to get people to buy. What were these people thinking?" That’s pretty much what I wondered — what were they thinking, how did this cover photo look to people in 1959? Today, it seems like the queerest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, but in 1959, could the record company or its customers have missed the sexuality-related content in the photo?

Of course, the cover photo must be from Mardi Gras in New Orleans. (For one thing, the banjo is a Weymann Style 6, suitable for early styles of New Orleans jazz.) I believe that some people — especially back then — thought of Mardi Gras as a mere costume party, and its drag queens as something like the war-time skits in which soldiers wore drag, and this may have "protected" them from an awareness of the sexual context of the photo. But don’t kid yourself — even during skits in WWII, people knew what drag was about. In any case, this is the basic problem in trying to see this album cover through 1959 eyes — what would have been consciously known, what was unknown, and what was known but repressed?

(Incidentally, let me point out a couple of details that may be difficult to pick out. Yes, that’s a lighthouse motif in the middle of the structure like a peacock-tail attached to his back. It’s hard to see here, but there are two seagulls made of gold glitter flying next to the lighthouse. Note the roiling seas at the foot of the lighthouse. Also, notice that the strap around his neck holding the banjo is made of the same silver-blue satin material that makes up the rest of his costume. Somebody really thought this through.)

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of about three or four posts on banjos and the psychoanalytic idea of repression … yes, really.)