Category: Harry Smith Anthology

Orphan Songs, Part 5:
Row Us Over The Tide

Kelly Harrell, a Virginia textile factory worker, never learned to play an instrument. But when he heard Charlie Poole’s popular stringband records of 1925, Harrell decided he could sing better than Poole. He took some musicians with him to audition for the Victor label.

The resulting 43 records over the next 4 years are wildly uneven. As I hear them, two-thirds just don’t stand up over time — not well chosen, awkwardly arranged, listlessly sung. But sometimes … sometimes something magical happens in the recording room. Everything comes together, and those recordings are some of the best ever recorded. It is a mysterious and wonderous thing.

On August 12, 1927, Harrell recorded “Row Us Over The Tide” as a duet with Henry Norton, a tenor he had never met before and would never meet again. They’re accompanied by banjo, guitar, and the strange and beautiful fiddling of Lonnie Austin. The vocals are corny and maudlin, even humorous. But I also find them uncannily moving.

The song seems to have been a widely-known gospel tune, dating from around the Civil War. In it, two children beg a mysterious boatman to row them over a mysterious tide. It’s hard to avoid the interepretation that the exhausted Orphans are begging to be taken to Heaven — that is, they’re begging to die:

Two little children were strolling one day
Down by the river side.
One stepped up to the boatman and said,
“Row us over the tide.”

Chorus:
“Row us over the tide,
Row us over the tide,”
One stepped up to the boatman and said,
“Row us over the tide.”

“Be kind to us, mister, dear Mother is dead;
We have no place to abide.
Our father’s a gambler and cares not for us,
Please row us over the tide.”

“The angels took Mother to her heavenly home,
There with the saints to abide.
Our father’s forsaken us, he’s left us alone,
Please row us over the tide.”

“Mama and Papa told Willie one day,
Jesus would come for their child.
We are so tired of waiting so long,
Row us over the tide.”

Thinking of this song, with its dream-like detachment from any specific time and place, I’m often reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s recurring dream. He talked about it at his last cabinet meeting, only hours before he was shot at Ford’s Theater. In the dream, according to Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”

As a money-saving measure, record labels increasingly preferred to pay for solo acts instead of bands. But as a matter of pride, Kelly Harrell refused to learn an instrument, which ended his recording career.

On July 9, 1942, to show his co-workers how fit he was despite being 52 years old, Harrell hopped out of the first-story window of the textile factory where he worked onto the sidewalk below. He took a couple steps, collapsed, and died. According to his wife, Lula, “He never was a farsighted man.”

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

Black Jug Bands: K. C. Moan

As I said before, some lines in the old songs seem to just keep ringing on and on in my head, providing hours of pleasurable work.

Take “K. C. Moan” from 1929, by the Memphis Jug Band. You have to hear it for yourself — the sound they achieve is sweet and relaxed and floating, but also very down-homey, mournful, and weighty.

“K.C.” refers to a train on the Kansas City train line. I think it’s a prison song, maybe a convict worksong. The first stanza goes:

I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
She blowed like my woman’s on board

The singer is not hearing the sound of the Kansas City train whistle. He is remembering a time in the past when he mistakenly thought he heard that train whistle. This imagined train did not have the woman he loves aboard — the sound he remembers having thought he heard was the sound a train might have made if it did carry the woman he loves.

Love, pleasure, freedom are removed from the here-and-now on one level after another, after another — deferred into desire, imagination, and memory.

Listening to this recording always reinvigorates that maybe too-familiar poem Langston Hughes wrote, I think in 1950:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Orphan Songs
Part 2: Why so many?

Orphanage
Children in yard of Home for the Friendless
New York City, about 1870

I’ve cataloged a lot of songs about orphans (or the death of parents) from the old 78s of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as later songs inspired by them. I’ve begun to wonder — why are there so many of these songs?

For starters, there simply used to be a lot of orphans around to sing about. Today, I suppose they would be in state-run foster care systems and wouldn’t be called “orphans” at all. Contraception and safe and legal abortions probably keep their numbers down. Certainly, parents are kept alive and families are kept together longer by less dangerous childbirth, safer working conditions, and a longer life expectancy.

But there must be a more permanent reason to sing about orphans, considering that the songs are still well-loved today. Maybe it’s that, as I said in Part 1, parents usually die before their children, so we are almost all “orphaned” at some point. And most of us, in turn, make more orphans when we die. It’s almost the fabled “universal experience.”

These songs seem to have blossomed in the 1800’s, when Americans had a peculiar obsession with Death, fetishizing and sentimentalizing it in ways rarely seen today. The outpouring of public grief over the death of Abraham Lincoln was an expression of this, as were momento mori, the gothic novel, and the many sentimental death-songs that appeared then. The artists of the 1920s and 1930s plundered the sheet music of the 1800s in search of material for the new recording industry, so I think a lot of these attitudes got a “second wind” as a result.

Most of all, though, I think life in pre-WWII America was just plain lonesome and arduous for most people. Feelings of abandonment are part of what it means to be poor, especially in a country so full of other promises. It would seem natural to empathize with The Orphan.

America was, and is, a place of hard work, empty spaces, and physical displacement. It’s no wonder we love media like recorded music like we do — they keep us company. When they brought songs about how “sometimes I feel like a motherless child” and how “motherless children have a hard time,” wondering “will the circle be unbroken,” it’s no wonder they were welcomed into the home and taken to heart.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

Segregation and The Anthology

Segregation

When I first heard the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was stunned by its implication that the folk music of The South has always been deeply de-segregated. It makes no mention of race at all, and it’s often hard to tell whether a performer is black or white. At least in the North, this was much of its impact when it was first released in 1952.

But after 7 years of thinking and reading, The Anthology has begun to change my notions of what Southern (and Northern) segregation were really about.

I grew up outside Chicago, historically one of the most segregated cities in America. You had to get in a car and really drive to see any African Americans. Drinking fountains labeled “Colored” and “White” would have been absurd in my hometown — not due to our great enlightenment, but just because our drinking fountains would have to wait years before ever seeing a black face.

I now see that there was rarely any place in The South so segregated in quite this way. Historically, the African American experience there has been largely rural (hard to picture for me), so rural whites and blacks breathed the same air, however uneasily. It wasn’t unusual for white children to be raised, to a degree, by black servants.

Many linguists even believe that the various “Southern accents” derive some of their characteristics from West African languages. If this is true, Northerners have no Southern accent because they have so few African influences.

Chicago was segregated geographically, physically, bodily. The South was more segregated by custom and law. It’s no wonder that the musical intimacy of blacks and whites in The South came as a shock to me. It didn’t square with my experience as a Northerner, studying old photographs of those drinking fountains labeled “White” and “Colored”.

Orphan Songs, Part 1: Poor Orphan Child

The Carter Family’s “Poor Orphan Child” is a catchy, jaunty jingle about how Death kills absolutely everybody.

The Carter Family’s 1927 “Poor Orphan Child” is a jaunty jingle about how Death kills everybody. The sound of the recording — its melody, tempo, harmonies — is as friendly and memorable as any advertising jingle. But the lyrics build a morbid argument:

Think of the many children, now
poor little boys and girls
who once had mother’s loving hands
to smooth their golden curls

The verses of the song obsess over the lonesomeness and poverty that result when dead parents leave orphans behind. And its chorus prays for those orphans to muddle along until they themselves “all reach that glittering strand” — that is, until the orphans themselves are dead.

It’s hard to think of a more pessimistic sentiment. It lays everyone to waste. But then, come to think of it, so does Death. Doesn’t Death turn almost everyone into orphans eventually? And don’t most of us wind up orphaning children of our own, in turn?

Remember: the Carters sing it with an irresistible jauntiness.

It’s amazingly common for the old folk/blues records of the 1920s to have some kind of startling friction between their “sound” and their meaning. So often, the performances seem to have a kind of public face at odds with an interior life, revealed only when you take the time to really think about them. That is, the things you notice on first listening (the arrangement, the key, the affect of the singers, etc.) begin to seem alien to their own song once you’ve paused to “get” the lyrics.

I’d like more of this in contemporary music, please. I’ll write more about it on another day.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

John Johanna’s Telescope

There’s nothing explicitly about science in the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music, even though I’ve named this science/music blog after an illustration on The Anthology’s cover.

The closest thing to an exception I can recall is Kelly Harrell’s “My Name is John Johanna,” a song about what a rotten place Arkansas is ( … alleged to be). After listing the horrors he witnessed there, the singer vows that if he ever sees Arkansas again, it’ll be through a telescope.

It’s a funny line to me, I suppose partly because I’m used to thinking of telescopes as a way of overcoming distance, not of enforcing it.

For lyrics, see Page 1 and Page 2.

Dreaming of the Hillbilly Blues

In the early stages of my … condition, I had a CD changer that held six CDs. I’d put the entire Anthology of American Folk Music on repeat, place a speaker next to my pillow (since the original 78s were in mono, one speaker would suffice), and just let The Anthology seep all the way deep down into my skull while I slept, soaking the reptilian core of my brainstem, all night long, every night, for months. After a while, I expected Amnesty International to break down my door.

The next CD I bought after The Anthology was Dock Boggs’ 1960’s recordings. I brought it home, put it on the stereo, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I burst into tears, just sobbed openly for a while … until I suddenly thought, “My musical tastes have CHANGED.” Maybe it was like admitting to yourself for the first time that you’re gay — realizing you’re someone other than who you thought you were. I mean, what should I tell the wife? The judge will surely side with HER! You should really be careful what music you mainline directly into your subconscious.

Years later, I hit the bunk in the army barracks at American Banjo Camp, at 2 in the morning, a little whiskey in me, after five hours of jamming and listening in on jams … fiddles, guitars, accordions, two doghouse basses, three dozen banjos. I slept like the dead, so deep and contented, drifting off with the sound-memory of old-time music so bright and benevolent and everlasting inside my head … Brilliancy Medley, June Apple, Sally in the Garden, Ducks on the Millpond, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Soldier’s Joy, Sail Away Ladies, Liberty, Devil’s Dream …