I don’t remember when, why, or how I learned “San Antonio Rose.” I assume I heard it on a Bob Wills record, but even that’s up for grabs — it’s been done by so many people, including people I would have seen live rather than hearing them on record. For example, John Lincoln Wright, who ruled the Boston Area country scene when I was coming up.

That’s not a scene most people are aware of — virtually nobody outside New England, and plenty of New Englanders missed it as well. But it was a solid bar-band scene in the 1970s, ’80s, maybe getting into the ’90s… though by then I remember Lincoln complaining that the line-dance craze was killing it.

I didn’t know Lincoln well, but I liked to drop in occasionally at the Plough and Stars — in memory, that was where I had my first drink of Irish whiskey, though the dates don’t work out; I’m guessing it was actually where I had my first legal drink of Irish whiskey in a bar, bought by my friend and washboard player Rob Forbes when I turned eighteen.  Anyway, that was Lincoln’s regular hang-out, and I hung out with him there a few times.

I admired Lincoln as a singer, bandleader, songwriter, and for nurturing a small, valuable scene. There were a lot of people who thought of him that way, and he knew and appreciated us, but he clearly thought he should have done better. He’d had his moment as a rock star back in the 1960s, when MGM tried to promote the “Bosstown Sound” as an East Coast parallel to the San Francisco scene. His band, the Beacon Street Union, was their flagship group, and got some brief attention, but the overblown promotion probably did them more harm than good. So he went back to country music, which he’d always loved, and I always had the sense that he felt he’d missed the brass ring.

That said, he always had good bands and a devoted audience. I saw him perform a bunch of times, in various settings, including one of his annual jamborees at Jonathan Swift’s in 1986, which was memorable because it included Treat Her Right, and I gave them one of their first reviews — I particularly remember Mark Sandman, later to form Morphine, singing a song called “Doreen,” which somehow never made it onto a record. He was another guy I ran into at the Plough, though we never hung out together; he wasn’t there as often as Lincoln, and wasn’t as sociable.

Lincoln was sociable, and endlessly supportive to young musicians — at least, that was my experience. At some point in the 1980s I briefly got a manager who knew nothing about the music business and as a result called Jack’s, a legendary Cambridge club that would never have hired me, and for some reason they did, and some friends showed up and joined me on a few songs, and the owner was there and liked it and hired me to host an “Elijah Wald and Friends night…” though after the first one, Jack’s burned down…

…but that one night was something. On a side note, I heard a terrific singer playing on the street in Harvard Square that afternoon and invited her down, and she was noncommittal and didn’t show, and that was the first time I heard Tracy Chapman. But Kenny Holladay did show, and we played a version of “Mustang Sally” that brought down the house, and my erstwhile manager was recording and was surprised to find that on tape it was a complete mess, which I could have told her — I’m no Wilson Pickett, and you had to be there, but if you were, the energy covered over the flaws. There were some horn players as well, and I’m sure Robbie Phillips was there, and I don’t remember who-all else, but it was a fun night.

Jack’s was just down the street from the Plough, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask Lincoln to perform on my show — he was a star, I wouldn’t have dared — but I mentioned it to him and he said he’d drop by. To my surprise, he did and asked if he could sing something, and I was thrilled. So he asked if I could play “San Antonio Rose” in G, and, as I wrote in the beginning, I don’t remember how or why I’d learned it, but I could and did, and he sang it beautifully.

It wasn’t just a one-off, either. I will always be grateful to Lincoln for the fact that, although I’m pretty sure he was first aware of me as a writer for the Globe, he always treated me as a musician. If we were in the Plough and he introduced me to someone, it would be as a guitar player, and when I did my CD release party at Johnny D’s — where he’d played regularly for years before it transitioned from a neighborhood place into a major touring venue — he showed up again and sang “San Antonio Rose.”

He might have done another song as well, or come up to sing with me on choruses; and I think we performed together at least one other time. He was generous that way, happy to do a guest spot or sing harmony with someone who wasn’t in his league.

He was a beautiful singer, and a sweet guy.  Too many long days and nights at the Plough didn’t help his health and he went way too soon, and I miss him, and think of him whenever I hear this song. I always liked playing it, and I enjoy singing it, but he sang it way better.

I was going to stop there, but came across this taste of Lincoln singing one of his classics, “Too Old to Die Young,” right at the end of his career… he wasn’t looking too good, but still sounded great, and I wish he’d lived to be a hundred years old, despite his doubts.

I wrote some initial thoughts about Leonard Cohen in my post for “Suzanne,” and don’t really need to expand on them, but what the hell…

The short version is, I’m at best agnostic about most of the hallowed singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s. I have nothing against them; I just didn’t listen to much of that music, so have no opinions about them. Cohen is a bit different because my friend and mentor, Dave Van Ronk, liked him and thought he was a good poet, and recorded a nice version of “Bird on a Wire…” which I learned and actually made into one of my showpieces back when I was 17 and full of nostalgie de la boue (a term I learned from Dave).

And, as I wrote before, I often was called upon to sing “Suzanne” when I was around French people (especially female French people). So I was somewhat interested in him, and read Beautiful Losers (about which I remember nothing) and some of his poetry (about which I remember less). And I read a few interviews, and sometimes found them interesting, and sometimes annoying…. bit too much the sensitive, tortured, handsome poet-man for my taste.

But I always thought “Sisters of Mercy” was a terrific song. Beautiful, evocative lyrics perfectly matched with a lovely melody. I’ve known it for over fifty years and still find new resonances in it. And that’s before mentioning the scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with the prostitutes trekking through the Alaskan wilderness as this song plays in the background. Ever since I saw that for the first time –and I’ve seen it multiple times since — a picture of that scene goes through my head when I sing this. All in all, it’s a deep and lovely piece of work. For me, it’s his masterpiece.

All of which said… Van Ronk always said that Cohen and Mitchell were more careful writers than Dylan — not more brilliant, but more willing to go back and work on their songs, and fix the lines that needed fixing. He thought Dylan was a genius, but, for example, “All Along the Watchtower” — he would point out that a watchtower isn’t a wall, it’s a tower, and you can’t go “along” it. In which spirit…

“They are not departed or gone…”? It scans nicely, but if they are departed they are gone, and if they are gone they are departed. There’s no “or” about it; it’s just repetitive. Albeit lovely. Poetic license, and all that. Best not to think too much.

(Oh, yes, and… I just went back to get a photo from that scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and find that it doesn’t look the way I remember it, and “Sisters of Mercy” is in a different part of the film. And it’s not set in Alaska, it’s in Washington state, though filmed in British Columbia. But I still see that scene in my head when I sing.)

(And… my rule for this project is that I do all the songs from memory — that’s the point; they are the songs in my head — and don’t check them before filming, and when I checked afterwards, I found that the lyric should be “they touched both my eyes…” not “both my hands.” It’s definitely better that way. He’s a poet; I’m not. Sorry.)

I have no idea where I learned this — definitely not from Merle Travis’s recording, which I only heard much later. My guess is that I just heard it around, which is something a lot of people don’t seem to understand about the folk revival and folk music in general.

I came along late enough that I got most of my repertoire off records, especially because by my time very few kids my age were into this kind of music. But there was still lots of it around. There were guys playing banjos and guitars and even the occasional autoharp on the street in Harvard Square, and local coffeehouses, and when I became a wandering busker at age 18, I often wound up staying with other musicians, or hanging out with them in all sorts of places, and picked up a bunch of songs that way.

That included some current busker standards like “The Boxer,” which I think I learned before I even knew it was by Paul Simon, and certainly before I was aware of hearing his version — but also lots of folk/blues/bluegrass songs, things we all kind of knew by osmosis, like this one. I actually hadn’t thought about this one in a while, but last fall I did a tour of the Czech Republic and one of the gigs was with Jiří Míža, a local singer-guitarist who sings a bunch of those songs with Czech lyrics, including this one and “Deep River Blues.” So we did some of them together, trading verses and languages, and  I was reminded of how much fun this is to play.

It was one of the songs Travis wrote when records by “folk singers” like Josh White, Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennett, and Susan Reed began selling in the 1940s. An A&R guy at Capitol records asked him to do a folk song album, and he responded that Ives and other people had already recorded all the folk songs — he was known for fancy guitar picking and upbeat hillbilly jazz like “Smoke, Smoke Smoke (That Cigarette)” and presumably thought he’d gotten past that kind of thing.  But the A&R guy said, “So, write some new ones,” and a gig was a gig, and he did. The results included this one, “Dark as a Dungeon,” “I Am a Pilgrim,”  and, most famously, “Sixteen Tons,” which was inspired by a couple of Josh White songs and became a huge hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I eventually heard Travis’s version of this, but only sing a couple of his verses — he sang four, including one that was pretty generic and a final one about making his tombstone from “number nine coal,” a phrase that also turns up in “Sixteen Tons.” I just got curious and looked it up; apparently it refers to a particular seam of coal in Kentucky, where he grew up in a mining family.

My other verses are maybe from Mississippi John Hurt or Lead Belly? I’m not sure, but they’re from the general pool of mining and railroad songs, reaching back to work songs men sang to keep their hammers falling in unison. The guitar breaks are just what I ended up playing because I ended up doing this in E; if I did it in another key, I’d play something else, but this felt comfortable.

Yet another from Joe Ely’s Honky Tonk Masquerade album, written by his buddy Butch Hancock. I’ve already done posts about a bunch ofsongs from that album, and from Joe’s other records, some of them written by Butch, some by Joe: “Boxcars,” “Because of the Wind,” “West Texas Waltz,” “Row of Dominoes,” “Me and Billy the Kid,” “Wishing for You…”

I’ve said it all before: Joe was a seminal artist for me, first on record and then live, many times, in all kinds of formats. I interviewed him several times, hung out with him a little, drove him to the airport once. I loved his music, liked him a lot as a person, was pleased that he liked Narcocorrido, was pleased that he recognized me when I turned up at shows, and dragged a lot of other people out to see those shows, because they were incredible.

I don’t think I ever learned this song, in the sense of sitting down and trying to; I just listened to that album enough that at some point I realized that I knew it. I don’t ever recall performing it onstage; it’s always just been something I played for my own pleasure. I don’t remember if I always played it with the Latin/Caribbean rhythm and half-assed rasgueados, but it makes sense for the same reasons it made sense when Joe started touring with a flamenco guitarist. The Texas sound has always been heavily Mexican, with a Gulf Coast/Caribbean tinge. (In fact, that Spanish/Mexican feel is a lot of what makes the “Western” part of Country and Western sound different from the eastern/Appalachian part.)

As for the lyrics, Butch often gives a twist of wry humor to failed romances, and sometimes even ridiculous humor: “I went through such a hassle trying to learn myself to float/ Cause every time I stormed your castle, I’d wind up in the moat.” That’s gorgeously silly, both the idea and the use of language, the “hassle/castle” rhyme and “learn” for “teach” — a classic bit of American slang that I grew up with from my father’s memories of Brooklyn.

So, to sum up: just a song I’ve been playing for almost fifty years, because it’s fun.

This is Gary Davis’s take on a couple of marches, which were, like everything he played, transformed in his hands. The second section is a loose paraphrase of John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March”; I don’t recognize the first section; if someone else does, please let me know and I’ll rewrite this.

Like most of Davis’s instrumentals, I first heard this on the LP The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis. I would have been maybe twelve years old  and have to admit I probably found this piece particularly appealing, maybe even more exciting than “Cincinnati Flow Rag” or “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing the Guitar at the Same Time), because I could identify it with something other than ragtime-blues guitar, and play it for people who weren’t into those styles, and they might be impressed.

It was also the first Davis instrumental I learned, thanks to Sing Out!, which printed tablature for it in 1972. As I’ve explained in a previous post, the Cambridge Public Library, which was right next to my high school, had a surprisingly good music department, and among other things subscribed to Sing Out! I didn’t get there till 1973, but they kept five years of back issues, and around that time I read in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book that libraries de-accessioned old magazines and would happily give them to anyone who asked, so I asked, and for the next couple of years got the six-year-old copies of old Sing Out! Then got a phone call that the library was stopping its subscription and I could pick up the whole remaining five years of copies…

…so I did, and still have them, including the one with tab for this, which it anachronistically titled “Civil War Parade.” The transcription was provided by Jack Baker, who I see is still giving guitar lessons and has tab online for lots of classic fingerstyle pieces, though not this one. I have no idea how accurate it is, since by the time I got serious about studying Davis’s playing, I was far more interested in his gospel and ragtime arrangements (like “Samson and Delilah,” “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” “You Got to Move,” “Cincinnati Flow” and a bunch of others), and I never went back to work out how he played this one — with the result that I would guess what I’m playing here is pretty much what I learned from Baker’s tab.

I’m not a fan of military marches and pretty much put this aside, but it had an important role in my education, since it was the first piece I ever learned in the key of F — which became one of my favorite fingerpicking keys — as well as being the inspiration for “Perry’s March,” by Perry Lederman, which I recorded on my lone LP. And, more than fifty years later, though I’ve forgotten lots of other pieces I learned over the years, I find that I still remember how to play it.

This is another song I picked up from the Greenbriar Boys’ Ragged But Right album. As I’ve explained in previous posts, I’m not a huge bluegrass fan but loved that group. It was partly John Herald’s voice, and the way Ralph Rinzler and Bob Yellin played mandolin and banjo, and partly the terrifically varied repertoire, mixing bluegrass and old-time country with ragtime and old-time pop tunes — but mostly it was the energy and humor. They were terrific musicians, but also sounded like they were having a terrific time, and not worrying about getting everything perfect. The title summed it up, as well as being a great song that I later used as my regular opening number when I was playing bar gigs.

I listened to that record over and over, and ended up knowing half the songs on it. (I’ve already posted versions of “Ragged But Right” and “Roll On, John,” as well as “Katy Clyne,” which I learned off the Greenbriars’ first recording.) As an inveterate show-off, I was particularly attracted to this one by its fast comic patter section, which the Greenbriars pulled off with fine diction and verve, and with the addition of a kazoo solo I made it a feature of my two-song set at a high school talent show (along with “San Francisco Bay Blues,” which I played with kazoo and harmonica). It was the first time I got onstage and performed anything resembling the kind of music I would end up playing professionally, and I was at least a moderate hit — the fast patter and kazoo solos in particular.

This song was composed in 1919, just before blues began being marketed on recordings by Black singers, and although a lot of historians date the heyday of the style from 1920, in terms of mainstream show business “blues” was already regarded as somewhat passé, mocked in songs like “Everybody’s Talking ‘Bout the Doggone Blues, But I’m Happy.” This comic novelty was instantly recorded by a couple of white vaudevillians and continued to be recorded by lots of other folks over the years, including an instrumental version by Sidney Bechet in 1951 and a version by the Kweskin Jug Band in the 1960s. I also just ran across a video of John Denver singing it while doing some of the lamest dancing ever, and playing the break on kazoo, which I’m assuming means he got it from the Kweskin bunch. I only heard their version later, and they don’t go for tongue-twisting speed on the patter chorus, which, for me, is the whole point (which is not to say I necessarily pull it off).

In any case… when I stopped playing kazoo — no doubt a relief to everyone — I dropped this from my repertoire because I no longer had an instrumental break for it. Then, when when my wife Sandrine and I began playing together, her clarinet solved that problem and I welcomed it back with open arms… and then, since she won’t do videos, I had to work out a guitar break. However one does it, it’s a remarkably silly song and what more need be said?

Dave Van Ronk was my mentor in so many ways: as a model of musical taste, a guitar teacher, a friend, a guide to fine writers and serious historians… It is not an exaggeration to say I have no idea who I would be or what I would be doing if I had not turned up on his doorstep at age seventeen, eager to learn whatever he was willing to teach.

I arrived at a good moment, from my point of view, and, in a way, from his. It was a bad time in his life, a low point when he was feeling like the world had passed him by, and there I was, an eager young acolyte. I had the right background: I auditioned at my first lesson with Willie McTell’s “Georgia Rag,” and had grown up on Woody Guthrie, and had read a lot of the right books (Mark Twain, for example), and was young and ready to spend long nights eating his amazing meals, listening to him talk for hour upon hour, and drinking in his wisdom (and less than my share of his whiskey).

Often, late in those evenings, he would put on music he thought I should hear. It was almost never blues or folk: the favorites were Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, the Koutev Ensemble’s recording of Balkan songs, and various pop singers he valued: Hoagy Carmichael, Jo Stafford, and, especially, Bing Crosby.

I hadn’t expected that. Crosby, to me, was a name from a distant and generally uninteresting past. I’d grown up in a world of folk, blues, jazz, rock, some country, some classical… but absolutely not what I and everyone around me regarded as pop tripe. No one in my world considered Sinatra hip; he was the antithesis of hip, a dinosaur symbolizing the boring, stultifying, conservative junk that all the musicians I liked were rejecting.

I don’t recall Dave ever having a good word for Sinatra, but Crosby was another story. He was one of Dave’s favorite singers, a pioneering white jazz artist who had come up alongside Bix Beiderbeck, Frankie Trumbauer, and the Dorsey Brothers. Dave also liked a lot of Crosby’s later recordings–he’d grown up with Crosby’s radio program and had a relationship that went beyond the music–just as he loved Louis Armstrong’s later recordings. He recorded several Crosby favorites over the years, including “Swinging on a Star” (twice), “Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive,” and a bunch more on his two swing albums, but the album he played for me was a selection of early jazz  cuts, on the Biograph label, which I knew from albums of Willie McTell, Skip James, and Gary Davis — again, not the company in which I would have expected to find Crosby. So I borrowed it, recorded it on cassette, and later bought my own copy.

In hindsight, I don’t remember much of that record, but I loved “My Honey’s Loving Arms,” and still do. A large part of the attraction was that the “band” that backed Crosby through much of it and took the first “instrumental” break was the Mills Brothers, doing their vocal imitations of horns and bass. I’d never heard them, didn’t realize at first that they weren’t in fact playing instruments, and was entranced. Crosby worked with them brilliantly, matching their relaxed swing and floating over their harmonies. Then, for the second break, the real instruments came in, with Joe Venuti and the Dorsey’s. All in all,  it’s a wonderful record.

The song itself is pretty standard fare, at least in terms of the lyrics. The chords are nice, and I think it was one of the first songs I worked up in F, when I was beginning to realize what a great key that is for fingerstyle swing.

Finally, I just looked up what a “Morris chair” is, and it turns out to be exactly what I imagined: an early sort of cushioned reclining chair, ideal for cuddling, which is the pleasant theme of this song.

First, the Midwest tour continues, tomorrow (Saturday) in Urbana; Sunday in Bloomington, Indiana; Wednesday in Chicago; Friday in Louisville (the latter two are Dylan-oriented, in the Dylan distilleries, with whiskey flights included). Details at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html

On to the music:

This is by a Uruguayan songwriter and singer, Daniel Viglietti. I learned this from Victor Jara‘s recording, and didn’t hear Viglietti’s until much later, but he was another prominent figure in the Latin American nueva cancion (new song) movement.

It is a Spanish “This Land Is Your Land,” a song against private property, borders, and capitalism. Alambre is Spanish for “wire,” and by extension, “fence” — in US border slang, undocumented immigrants were at times called alambristas, people who had crossed the fence — and to desalambrar is to tear down the fences:

I ask those present if they have never thought
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.
I ask whether on earth you have never thought
That if the hands are ours, so is what they produce.

Tear down the fences, tear down the fences
The earth is ours, yours, and theirs
Of Pedro and Maria, of Juan and Jose.

If my song bothers anyone who does not want to hear it
I assure you that they are a gringo or an owner/boss of this country.
And I ask of those present, or I tell you, in answer,
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.

Jara changed one phrase to make the song more universal rather than specifically about Uruguay, and I’ve changed a few words through tricks of memory, but that’s the theme — and it is more important than ever.

I’ve got another blog, The Pursuit of Happiness, where I write about borders and nationalism, the poison of our times. We are living in a period when, due to global warming, wars, despotic governments, and other causes, many millions of people have to leave the places where they are living. There are many ways to deal with that situation, but the first thing to understand is that its principle threat is to those people, not to those of us living in the countries to which they might wish to go.

The second thing is that building stronger borders to keep them out is a form of mass murder, in some situations rising to the level of genocide. It is not just a sin of omission, it is a murderous aggression — and for those of us who are only here because our parents (my mother, for example) were able to flee other places, it is an obligation to do what we can to tear down those borders.

Throughout human history, people have moved when the places they lived became unlivable; virtually all of us are descended from people who spread around the world in earlier times. National borders are not new, but in most periods and places they were not intended to keep people from moving, nor were they regularly patrolled — and, to the extent they were patrolled, it was typically to control the flow of goods, not of people. Passports, in the modern sense, are barely a century old.

Obviously, it is a problem when too many people move to an area that cannot support more people. But the richest countries, the countries most harshly opposing immigration, are not keeping people out because we cannot support them. On the contrary, the point is to trap them in places that are less able to support them, where they produce the raw materials and cheap goods that make it possible for us to live much better than them, and to maintain that imbalance rather than sharing the wealth.

The United States, while frequently led by people who fulminate about the danger of immigration, has been conducting an experiment for years in what happens if you allow large, free movements of people. Millions of us have moved and are currently moving in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, and for all sorts of reasons. We have seen numerous large migrations over the last century or so, including the Great Migration of Blacks from the Southeast, of Southwestern farmers out of the Dust Bowl… and when we wanted to stem those flows, have passed laws and established rights that somewhat equalized and balanced the push and pull factors. I’m not pretending that has always been a pretty story, but with some ghastly exceptions — none of them involving people of majority-European heritage — we have not tried to prevent those migrations by erecting borders and forbidding movement.

Bottom line: freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights. And… I’ve written a lot more about this, but Woody Guthrie and Daniel Viglietti said it all more eloquently and simply.

First, a note that I’m starting my brief Midwest tour tomorrow, Saturday, May 2, in St. Louis, followed by Thursday in Kansas City, Saturday, May 9 in Urbana, Sunday in Bloomington IN, and finally two Dylan oriented shows, Wednesday the 13th in Chicago and Friday the 15th in Louisville. Please spread the word — full info at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html

And on to the music:

I don’t remember where, when, or how I picked up the first New Folks LP, but I listened to it a lot. It may even have been my introduction to bluegrass, thanks to the Greenbriar Boys. I’m guessing it’s what prompted me to buy their Ragged But Right album, which gave me several of my early showstoppers and has a special place in my personal pantheon.

That album was foundational for me because the Greenbriars put no limits on the material they could play. They recorded bluegrass standards, old-time country, modern singer-songwriter compositions (they were the first to record Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum”), old pop songs, new pop songs, some original instrumentals… I’ve already done posts on “Ragged, But Right” and “Roll On, John,” and I’ll be posting “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” pretty soon. (I should also check if I still remember “Different Drum.”)

Along with the Greenbriars, the New Folks LP was my introduction to Jackie Washington (a.k.a. Jack Landron, now a longtime friend) and Hedy West, who should be much better remembered. (It also had five tracks by David Gude, but I have to admit I rarely listened to them.) The Greenbriars had five tracks, all pretty basic bluegrass, including a dazzling version of Bill Monroe’s instrumental, “Rawhide,” which may have convinced me I’d never play mandolin.

I fell instantly in love with this one, both because it’s a fun song — I file it alongside “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” which, come to think of it, also had Ralph Rinzler playing mandolin on the version that caught my attention — and because I imagined the name being spelled Katie Klein and thought if it as one of the few (only?) bluegrass songs about a nice Jewish girl.

I just went back and listened to the Greenbriars’ version, and find that in the second verse they sing that if they were a little bird they’d build their nest “in some tall yonder tree” rather than in their “sweet Katy’s breast,” so I didn’t get that from them. I didn’t make it up; it’s in other versions of that verse, if not other versions of this song. (I just found it in a version of “Free Little Bird,” which is pretty similar.) As for the third verse, I think I made it up to go with the second, but if anyone recognizes it from elsewhere, that wouldn’t surprise me.

As I wrote in the liner notes to my lone LP, more than forty years ago, I’ve never been a huge bluegrass fan but I liked the Greenbriar Boys just fine. They had great taste in songs, John Herald was a terrific singer, Bob Yellin was one of the more interesting banjo players, and… I’m not actually making a case, just describing a personal reaction from back when I was thirteen or fourteen, and paying tribute to a trio that turned me on to a lot of fun material.

Before getting to the post, a quick heads-up that I’m doing a small tour of the Midwest, starting next Saturday, May 2, in St. Louis, then hitting Kansas City, Urbana, Bloomington IN, Chicago, and Louisville. There’s a full schedule on my website at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html, and please spread the word.

As for the post…

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes luckier than anyone deserves. Back in 1990, I hitchhiked from South Africa up through Zimbabwe and Zambia to Zaire (not yet renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where I studied guitar for several months with Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo — about which I’ve written in a half-dozen previous posts, listed below — then on to Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and finally Kenya.

In Nairobi, I was hoping to find some of the musicians who had played on some wonderful acoustic guitar records that I’d heard on reissues from John Storm Roberts‘s Original Music record label. Those records had been recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I had no idea how to go about finding any of the artists, or even if they were still alive. So, since I had no other ideas, I went into a music store — looking online, I see the main one was Melodica, and that might have been right, though none of the photos seem to be from that period and I can’t be sure.

Anyway, I went in and there was an older-looking white (or maybe, if it was Melodica, South Asian) man behind the counter, and I went up and explained that I was trying to find some of the musicians who had recorded acoustic guitar music back thirty years earlier.

The man looked at me like it was kind of a crazy question, and said, “Like who?”

I didn’t remember a lot of names, but I said, “Well… like Herbert Misango, who recorded ‘Wazee Wa Kisa.”

And the man said, “He’s over there,” pointing to a man standing behind another counter on the other side of the store. And he was.

Misango wasn’t playing anymore, but he was friendly and agreed to meet me that Saturday and took me to a small nightclub in a field behind an apartment complex where another of the older musicians, John Nzenze, was performing with a small group. I should have interviewed both of them; I should have had a camera with me and taken pictures. I should have done all sorts of things…

…but I didn’t. I just enjoyed meeting them and spending some time with them, and John Nzenze gave me a phone number for Fadhili William, who had recorded “Malaika,” and now was working in a gas station in New Jersey, and I eventually did interview him, back in the States, for the Boston Globe.

And, back in the States, I buckled down and learned “Wazee Wa Kisa.” It’s the only guitar part I’ve ever learned by writing it out. I couldn’t figure out the rhythmic intricacies, how the bass worked against the treble, so I made some six-line tablature paper and wrote out the bass part, then wrote out the treble over it, then sat down with what I’d written and kind of got it, and went back to the record, and eventually worked it out. I showed it to my friend Dominic Kakolobango, who has also done a nice recording of it, and he translated the lyric for me, and a few years later I came up with an English translation to sing after the original Swahili.

And that’s about it, except that my wife, Sandrine Sheon, worked with me for a while as a duo, playing clarinet, and for this one she would play a clave rhythm on a coke bottle, and I miss having her on it.