A common delusion among young artists is that if you get within range of some potential discoverers, you’ll get discovered. I spent much of my late teens and early twenties subscribing to this delusion, and shortly after returning from Europe in 1979 I attempted to give fate a nudge by dropping off an audition cassette at the Folkways Records office in New York. I figured if I went there myself I might run into the legendary Moe Asch and charm him into recording me…

…and as a perfect example of just how delusional I was, one of the items on that audition tape was my version of one of the most over-recorded songs in the American folk pantheon: “Frankie and Johnny.”

Of course, I wasn’t just singing any old version of “Frankie and Johnny” — I had found a racy version in a book illustrated by the New Yorker cartoonist John Held, Jr., that included explicit lines about Frankie working in a crib house and Johnny spending her money on parlor house whores. I figured the gritty realism of this lyric would catch Asch’s attention — that is, I figured Asch, who had recorded Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, would be impressed by the gritty realism of a lyric learned from a New Yorker cartoonist. Or to put the issue more plainly, I was a pretentious young idiot.

So I went by the Folkways offices, and of course Moe Asch was in a back office to which I never penetrated, but I dropped off the tape and the nice woman in the front office promised he’d listen to it. I noticed a lot of African art around, so I went home and studied up on that, figuring if I managed to meet him the next time I could make an impression by having an intelligent conversation about Dogon masks and Senufo birds. And a month or so later I went back, and the nice woman gave back my cassette — I don’t know if Asch had listened, but if not he’d at least had the decency to fast-forward it to the end of side one, as if he’d listened. And that was that. I never got to meet him, and had to start my own record label a few years later to inflict my music on the world.

So that’s my story, and now I’m a considerably older idiot and suitably embarrassed by my youthful naivete, but I still like this lyric and love Held’s woodcuts. I recently checked the book and find that I cut the lyric down quite a bit and forgot some of the goofier verses, but I still do it pretty much the way I did then.

If I were to try to do an authentic version today I would take a different tack, tracing the court records of the historical murder and at least singing the male protagonist’s name as “Albert,” the way John Hurt did, or maybe even “Allen, which was his real name. He was Allen Britt, shot by Frankie Baker in St Louis in 1899, and there are myriad websites detailing the story in more or less garish detail. But what the hell… I got it from John Held, and I’m ready to confess the fact and recommend his book. It’s been reprinted at least once, and is well worth tracking down, if only for his wonderful illustrations.

I’m pretty sure it was the late fall of 1979 that Dave Van Ronk played Passim Coffeehouse with a younger guitarist named John Miller as the opening act. Dave knew John already, and I had seen John’s two albums on the Blue Goose label, though I hadn’t heard them. Both consisted mainly of country blues, and in the cover photos John looked like a bearded student type, an impression reinforced when I learned that he was based in Ithaca.

None of that fit the man and music I heard at Passim. John had shaved his beard and was playing songs off his latest album. It was called Biding My Time, and consisted entirely of George Gershwin songs, some performed as instrumentals and others sung. Dave and I stood in the back of the room and exchanged sympathetic glances as John redefined our understanding of how a guitarist could negotiate that material. He had none of the kitschy Chet Atkins style, his rhythm was impeccable, and his singing was understated but consistently tuneful and beautifully phrased.

I particularly remember Dave’s expression as John sang the opening verse to “Of Thee I Sing,” treating the lyric with graceful sincerity,  and then, where the melody makes a tricky key change, plucked a bar chord, reached up with his right hand to shift the capo from the second to the fourth fret, and went on playing in the new key. Dave made his most mooselike moue. He wanted to call it cheating, but was also consumed with regret that he hadn’t thought of it first.

I bought the album, enjoyed it, and was inspired to learn the title song — not John’s arrangement, which was way beyond my skills, but taking his performances as a model. I worked out my own chart for this, and then for “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and — getting away from Gershwin — “Taking a Chance on Love” which was my moment of victory, because when I played it for Dave he thought it was John’s. A few years later I found John’s book of the Gershwin arrangements and struggled with it for a while, but they never felt smooth under my fingers. So I stuck with my own charts, and even self-published a book of them, Swing Songs for the Moderate Fingerpicker.

Four decades later, I only play a couple of those arrangements, but this one stuck with me, and always reminds me of seeing John that night at Passim. I’ve met him since and taught alongside him at the Port Townsend Blues Week, and he continues to be best known as a scholar and adept of rural blues guitar styles, but I still think of him as the master of Gershwin.

It must have been the winter of 1979-80 when I was browsing through a music store and came across Keola Beamer’s instruction book, Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar. I’d never heard of the style — an extension of the parlor guitar style of “Spanish Fandango,” favoring a variety of open and other “slacked” string tunings — but it looked approachable and there was a little plastic record included, so I picked it up and learned two or three of the pieces. This one in particular caught my fancy, and I recall practicing it in Dave Van Ronk’s living room one afternoon when he was in the kitchen cooking dinner, and him coming in and saying, “If you don’t watch out, you might play something pretty” — which was his way of saying he was pleasantly surprised.

I was still playing it when I ended up in Vancouver for the first time a few months later on my first extended stateside hitchhiking trip, and my hostess there turned out to have spent a lot of time in Hawaii and had records by Ray Kane, Gabby Pahinui, and Atta Isaacs. I taped them all, listened to them quite a lot for a couple of months, and then moved on… it was pretty, indeed, but I had the same problem with it that I later had with bossa nova — I bought a couple of Baden Powell records and some Joao Gilberto, enjoyed them for a while, and then I wanted to hear something grittier.

Many years later, I was writing for the Boston Globe and got the first releases from George Winston’s Dancing Cat record label, a half-dozen Hawaiian slack-key CDs, and called Winston to do a story on them, and he was so excited that anyone at a major newspaper knew anything about slack-key that he sent me a box of about thirty cassettes, of everything currently available in Hawaii. And then I got to interview Ray Kane, who was wonderful, and Ledward Kaapana, who blew me away both as a guitarist and as a live performer. And around the same time I happened to be back in Utah Phillips’s dressing room, and he was warming up by playing a slack-key instrumental and said that was the first way he learned to play guitar.

So I had a second wave of interest in the style. Ray Kane convinced me that the singing was a big part of the tradition, and the traditional singing, unlike the guitar playing, was not a pretty sound that non-Hawaiians could embrace as background music. Like, for example:

But I wasn’t going to start singing in Hawaiian, and even to play the instrumental style, by that time I’d realized I should have used Beamer’s tablature as a starting point for my own explorations, rather than just learning “Manu Kai” note for note. So that was that, for me… but it’s still a pretty little guitar piece.

The Chilean coup was a palpable force in my house. My father was excited by Salvador Allende’s election and spent several weeks in Chile, meeting Pablo Neruda and others. So when the coup shattered that dream, it was a direct blow. Then I went with Eqbal Ahmad, a family friend who had fought in the Algerian revolution, to a concert/benefit for Chile featuring Joan Baez where Orlando Letelier, a friend of Eqbal’s, was the guest of honor, and spent most of the after-party hanging out with them… and a few weeks later Letelier was assassinated by Chilean government agents in Washington.

The Victor Jara albums came into our house during that period, as an expression of solidarity, though I don’t recall listening to them often until I’d spent some years in Europe and understood Spanish. Meanwhile, in 1974 Phil Ochs had organized a Chile benefit concert in New York that included Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, and asked Dave to sing “He Was a Friend of Mine” in memory of Jara. And then in 1976 Phil died, and Dave started singing the song in his memory, after telling the story of Jara’s murder in the football stadium in Santiago.

Thousands of people were rounded up in the days after the coup and held in that stadium, and on the second or third day Jara was recognized by an officer and publicly tortured. Descriptions differ as to whether the soldiers smashed or cut off his fingers before breaking his wrists with rifle butts, then asking sarcastically if he could still play and sing for them… and he responded by calling on the other prisoners and leading them in a song, before he was beaten to the ground and shot over forty times.

Dave told that story for years before singing “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and when I got back from Europe and booked a first gig at the Nameless Coffeehouse, I told it as well, then sang “Te Recuerdo Amanda.” It was the only song I sang in a language other than English, and I would first recite a translation:

“I remember you, Amanda; the wet streets; running to the factory; where Manuel was working.

“Your wide smile; the rain in your hair; it didn’t matter; you were going to meet him.

“Just five minutes; life is eternal in five minutes; the siren blows; time to return to work; and you walking along; you light up everything; those five minutes; have made you flower.

“I remember you, Amanda; the wet streets; running to the factory; where Manuel was working.

“Your wide smile; the rain in your hair; it didn’t matter; you were going to meet him.

“Who went away to the mountains; who never harmed anyone; who went away to the mountains; and in five minutes; it was destroyed; the siren blows; time to return to work; many did not return; nor did Manuel.”

For anyone who doesn’t know the history: the Chilean coup was actively supported by the CIA, part of the ongoing US policy of destroying any democratic government that potentially threatened the profits American businesses were extracting from the developing world. My father recalled with bitter amusement a huge sign outside the American Screw Company’s compound in the Chilean countryside: “American Screw Chile.”

Jara was one of the founding figures of the Latin American nueva cancion, or “new song” movement, and although he was murdered over forty years ago, that story goes on: in June a Florida court handed down a civil judgment against a Chilean military officer for his murder — like many henchmen of the right-wing dictatorships that decimated Latin America in that period, he is now a US citizen — but the US Department of Justice continues to reject the Chilean government’s requests for his extradition.

I remember knowing in a vague sort of way that this was by Jesse Winchester, but I didn’t know anything more about him and don’t have any memory of hearing him sing it, or indeed of hearing anyone sing it. I obviously must have heard it somewhere — most likely numerous somewheres —  performed by various someones at various coffeehouses and on various street corners… but I have no recollection of the experience.

Which said, I clearly remember how  I learned it. The Cambridge Public Library had a subscription to Sing Out! magazine, and Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book had a great tip about library subscriptions: libraries typically keep only five years of back issues, and if you ask them to give you the old ones when they do their annual cull, they are happy to oblige. As outlined in previous posts, I had become an habitué of the CPL’s music room during high school, and I put in a request for their discarded Sing Out!s each year, along with a guitar magazine whose title I have since forgotten.

That went on for three or four years, and then sometime in the late 1970s I got a call saying, “We’ve discontinued our subscription to Sing Out! — do you want the back issues?” I did, of course, and hurried over to get them, which gave me a complete run through the decade.

That was not as exciting as a full run through the 1960s would have been, because the magazine’s aesthetic and mine had gradually diverged. They were increasingly focused on singer-songwriters, and even their tastes in traditional and international music tended to differ from mine. But they still had occasional blues tablature, and once in a while a current composition separated itself from the pack.

Like, for example, this one. Winchester always said it was the first song he wrote — a daunting thought for anyone who wants to be a songwriter — and he later described it as “cryptic,” saying he stopped writing this way because he wanted to be more clear and direct. I understand what he meant, but by Dylan/ Mitchell/ Cohen standards it never seemed particularly cryptic — I took it as a modern variation on the gallows farewell ballad, sung by an outlaw facing execution, and what particularly caught my attention was the wry perfection of the unpoetic word “literally” in the phrase, “literally waltzing on air.”

So I learned it, and although I don’t ever recall performing it, I continue to sing it now and then for my own pleasure, and here it is. Hell of a good piece of writing.

There were a couple of anti-war songs floating around Europe in the late 1970s that were so striking that if you heard them once they stuck with you: “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and a song variously called “The Flowers of the Forest,”  “No Man’s Land” and “The Green Fields of France.” I heard them over and over, from amateurs and professionals throughout northern Europe, though I don’t think I learned either until I got back to the States and found the lyrics to this one in Sing Out!

At the time I had no idea that both were written by the same man, a Scottish singer based in Australia named Eric Bogle. In the 1970s Bogle hadn’t yet made his first record* and pretty much everyone learned his songs from recordings by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, June Tabor, Priscilla Herdman, or other more familiar figures, and passed them along without any sense of the writer — an example of the enduring oral tradition in the days of phonographs and radio, but before the internet.

I finally heard an album by Bogle himself, in Vancouver, Canada, around 1982 or ’83 and was startled to find that he was ridiculously, raucously funny — I recall in particular a song mocking serious folksingers, “You’re a Bloody Rotten Audience (Whilst I am very good).” He was acutely aware of the discrepancy: when I eventually saw him live, I remember him singing an incredibly moving, heartbreaking song, followed by stunned silence, then a thunderous ovation… after which he mopped his brow and remarked: “I think I’ll stop writing songs and just hit myself over the head instead.”

All of which is by the way, because this song speaks for itself: a simple, brutal story that remains painfully relevant.

*A German reader, Manfred Helfert, corrects me, noting that three Bogle records were recorded and released there following his 1976 tour, on the “seedy” Autogram label. Helfert  quotes Bogle’s opinion:
“These… were recorded during my first tour of Germany in 1976. Only the first one [Live in Person] was authorised, the other two are bootleg. Some of the songs were recorded ‘live’, the rest are obviously quite dead. If you ever come across a copy of any of these L.P.s, melt it down and fashion an ashtray out of it.”

I’m pretty sure I first heard this done by Paul Geremia, who recorded it on his first LP, and got some version of the lyric from Sing Out! magazine. I’m guessing Paul got it from Pink Anderson, but that’s just a guess, since it was recorded by numerous blues and hillbilly performers in the 1920s, including Jim Jackson, Luke Jordan, Coley Jones, Henry Whitter, and Prince Albert Hunt.

The original lyric/title seems to have been “Travelin’ Coon,” which was how Jordan sang it — Anderson changed that to “a man named Coon” — and that’s an apt reminder of how much early blues overlapped minstrel and ragtime traditions. I was aware of that, but was still startled  recently by the details, outlined in an upcoming book by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville.

Based on decades of research in African American newspapers, they trace a history of blues performers who were nationally famous in black theaters before the dawn of recording. Among their more startling revelations is that the earliest stars who were advertised or described as singing blues were men, and specifically male comedians in blackface make-up — the pioneer was Butler “String Beans” May, and his followers included artists like Charles Anderson, a yodeling female impersonator, who was the first to feature “St. Louis Blues.” (Ethel Waters mentions this in her autobiography, writing that after Anderson made it famous, she was the first woman to do the song.)

Another startling fact is that virtually all the great southern singers we remember as “blues queens” were advertised as “coon shouters” in their early years. Perry Bradford, who went on to compose and produce the first blues record by a black singer, celebrated Bessie Smith as “the best coon shouter I ever heard,” and Ma Rainey’s husband, advertising their touring troupe, wrote: “Mrs. Gertrude Rainie [sic], our coon shouter, never fails to leave the house in an uproar.”

Abbott and Seroff trace an evolution over the course of the 19-teens, from blues being regarded as comedy or a new kind of ragtime to a majestic style performed by “queens” in gorgeous gowns.

Meanwhile, in rural minstrel and medicine shows, on street corners, in barbershops, and wherever else black guitarists and banjo players worked throughout the rural South, influences from touring shows and vaudeville mingled with influences from local, vernacular traditions… including vernacular traditions that drew on earlier minstrel and theater performances that were based on rural vernacular traditions…

None of which I knew when I heard Paul Geremia sing “Travelin’ Man” and picked it up as a fun, upbeat number about a clever trickster who could outrun falling water, outswim sharks, and magically vanish from the docket.

When I got back from Europe toward the end of 1979, I set out to make a reputation on the US folk scene. It was exhaustingly slow going, but Dave Van Ronk was helpful as ever and gave me an enthusiastic introduction to Len Rothenberg, who had a club in Cambridge called the Idler. The result was a couple of gigs opening for Paul Geremia and then for John Koerner. I don’t remember anything significant about what I, Paul, or John played, but after one of those gigs a small, quiet guy came up and introduced himself. He said his name was Bill Morrissey and Dave had told him to check me out, and invited me to come see him when he played the Idler in a couple of weeks.

So I did, and it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.

For people who didn’t see Bill perform at the dawn of the 1980s, it is impossible to convey what he did onstage. In a lot of ways the shows were similar to what he did for packed clubs and concert halls after writing a couple of sappy romantic songs and getting national radio play ten years later. But in other ways, they were utterly different. He was fresh off the New Hampshire bar circuit, and had developed a show that would kill in a smoky, noisy bar where the patrons had come to talk with each other while some kid with a guitar sang Simon and Garfunkel or Beatles songs in the background.

Bill would mesmerize those bar crowds, playing whole sets of original songs. His method was to intersperse comic monologues that were ferocious, smart, nasty, insightful and passionately local with songs that were about the kinds of folks who were listening — and who had never heard anyone actually sing about their world. He wrote about dead-end lives in New England mill towns from the inside, with infinite empathy, moments of wary optimism, and a lot of dogged fatalism. (Along with this song, check out “Oil Money” and “Soldier’s Pay.”) He once told me that bar owners loved him, because his sad songs made the guys switch from beer to whiskey and his perky songs gave them the energy to get up and order another.

The perky songs tended to be equally inside and local, for instance “My Baby and Me“:

Baby’s wearing make-up, got on Chanel Number Five,
Put on a dress with a little frill.
I’ve got a jacket and a tie, I splashed on some Hoppe’s Number Nine,
I guess you could say I was dressed to kill.

Bill’s masterpiece at that point was “Small Town on the River,” which he always introduced as a fictional history of Newmarket, New Hampshire. It blew me away when he played it that first night, but pretty much everything about that night blew me away and I only realized how good it was a couple of months later, when I discovered that after hearing him sing it three or four times at live shows I knew it all the way through. That’s never happened to me before or since — five verses of dense poetry, stuck in my head because they were so perfectly crafted that each line led to the next, inevitably and unforgettably.

Bill and I spent a lot of time together over the next few years, drinking and talking late into the night, kidding around, listening to music, and eventually forming a record company and producing each other’s first albums. As an artist, he was striking not only for his talent but for his diligence: I remember him spending almost a month writing the song “Barstow,” sitting at the typewriter every morning for several hours, writing and throwing away and writing some more, and eventually coming downstairs and singing it for us.

So one day I was doing an interview on WERS and got to talking about Bill, and I went on a long peroration about the amount of hard work he put into his art, and as an example said, “I mean, a song like ‘Small Town on the River’ doesn’t just pop into your head as you’re walking down the street.”

A few minutes after I got home, the phone rang and it was Bill. “Thanks for what you said on the radio,” he said. “And you’re right, but… I’ve got to tell you: I made up ‘Small Town’ while driving into town to get cigarettes, and I’ve never changed a word.”

(One note, which Bill always provided when he sang this: the P.A.C., mentioned in the last verse, was the Polish American Club in Newmarket, where he liked to drink and shoot pool and listen to the old guys’ stories.)

This was another song I’d taped for my European rambles, but it wasn’t till near the end that I felt ready to work out Blind Blake’s guitar part. It was by far the trickiest arrangement I’d attempted up to that time, but I finally got it more or less to my satisfaction — not exactly the way Blake played it, but a decent simulacrum.

So then I flew back to the United States. I’d been away for a bit over two years, and in those days before the internet that meant I’d been out of touch with all but the few friends who were willing to put up with the vagaries of transatlantic mail and the possibility that their missives would end up unclaimed in some poste restante bin.

The first thing I did was check in with Dave Van Ronk — I flew into New York from Brussels, called him from the airport, and he gave me couch space for a couple of days. I don’t remember if it was on that visit or shortly afterwards that he told me about a new organization called Hey Rube!, which was trying to function as a sort of folksingers’ guild or union. They were holding a fundraising weekend at the Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY, featuring U. Utah Phillips, and Dave suggested I go, if only to meet Utah.

So I did, and met Utah, who over the years became a close friend, as well as Jane Voss and Hoyle Osborne, and Andy Cohen, who had hitchhiked over from his home in Kent, Ohio. Andy was and is a terrific ragtime-blues player, and I immediately gravitated to him, and we played a couple of things, and then he asked, “You play any Blind Blake?” I was primed and ready, but before I could respond, he added, “And don’t say ‘Diddy Wa Diddy.'”

Alas, Ry Cooder and Leon Redbone had both recently cut that song and their myriad fleet-fingered acolytes had picked it up and recycled it ad infinitum, so the serious blues aficionados were heartily sick of it. And that was that. I assembled a repertoire of more obscure songs, kept this around as a finger exercise, and by now my version has drifted quite a way from Blake’s original. It’s still a fun song, though,  and an enduring mystery…

Public performance is always a reciprocal process– the performer does something, the audience reacts, the performer reacts, and so on, in a comodius vicus of recirculation. So when every so often someone says, “Play your favorite song,” my reaction — though I sometimes try to be polite and not express it — is to think the request is ridiculous.

What they mean is, “Play what you love to play for your own pleasure.” But what I love to play for my own pleasure — in the sense of what I’d play if I were by myself, with no pressure to please someone else — is usually something I’m working on or trying to learn, not something I want to play with other people around.

By contrast, my pleasure when I’m playing for other people is to find something that pleases them and me both, which may be a song I would not have the slightest interest in singing if they were not there. Which, in numerous instances, was “The Boxer.”

I hadn’t heard that song (or at least hadn’t noticed it) before getting to Europe in the late 1970s. I inevitably knew some of Simon and Garfunkel’s music, could play “Sounds of Silence,” had heard “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” “America,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Me and Julio,” and some other stuff, and we even had the Bookends album at home. But “The Boxer” was part of my European experience, along with “Heart of Gold” (which I hope I never hear again) — and in both cases, that experience was hearing buskers and infinite amateur guitarists singing those songs in their various voices, with their various skills.

I’m guessing I learned “The Boxer” from Doug, who played bass with Vince and me on the Paris subway trains, because it was his stock in trade — some people actually called him “The Boxer,” because for a while he made his living by getting on a train, singing this song, passing the hat, going to the next car, singing it again, passing the hat, and so on. (I similarly knew a guy who made his living in the London tube singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”) The logic was simple: it was no fun playing on the trains, so you might as well maximize the economic returns, and this was the song that got the most money.

As I explain in the video, “The Boxer” was particularly popular in Europe because everyone knew it and the chorus just went “Li, li, li,” so they could sing along without knowing any English. And it was a well-written song, with some interesting lines, so I picked it up.

I didn’t play it all that much, because I generally found I did better by singing and playing old pop tunes, thus distinguishing myself from the hordes of people singing Dylan, Beatles, and Simon & Garfunkel. But, especially when I went around the bars late in the evening, someone might request this, and I’d do it, and everyone would sing along, and it was fun — at those moments it was one of my favorite songs, because it’s a nice feeling to get a whole room of people exuberantly singing together.