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.

That trip through Morocco in the winter of 1978 ended with my guitar being stolen, then a week in Agadir as guest of Rudy Leal Villareal, a Chicano hashish smuggler from San Antonio, Texas, with whom I traveled back to Spain. I went on from there to northern Europe, he went to Madrid, then jail, then was deported to France… and at some point I ran into him in Paris and he brought me to Le Mazet.

Le Mazet was the buskers’ bar, on the rue Saint André des Arts, down a passageway from the Odéon metro station. It was populated by male musicians from various countries and teenage French girls  who worked as “bottlers,” collecting the money. The musicians were basically lazy, and would play the trains for a couple of hours, then come back to the Mazet, change their coins into bills, and have a few beers. Some of the girls were harder workers and would do their two hours, then trade in a tired busker for a fresh one from the bar and head back to the trains. The money was split evenly, half for the busker and half for the bottler, so the busier bottlers were doing pretty well.

Le Mazet did pretty well, too, since it had a captive clientele — the only other place that would change a big haul of coins into paper money was the National Bank, which was open only for limited hours and didn’t serve beer. At the Mazet you would ask the bartender for a tray, arrange your money on it in ten-franc piles, and he’d give you the notes. Then, late in the evening when the banks were closed, the waiters from the nearby cafés would come to Le Mazet for change.

I spent many happy hours drinking, chatting, and trading tunes in the Mazet, and sent Van Ronk there when he had a gig in Paris, and he wrote a funny piece about it in his (entirely fictitious) notes to my LP. Almost forty years later, I’m still in some kind of touch with a couple of musicians who were regular habitues. In particular  Vince McCann, a tall, sharp-nosed, longhaired Irishman who took pleasure in being as insulting as possible and is a fine honky-tonk country singer. We teamed up with a bass player named Doug Ley, from Ithaca, NY, and worked the trains as a trio: Vince and I would sing something together with Doug harmonizing on the choruses, then one of us would sing while the other bottled the car. Doug played stand-up bass and we figured a lot of people paid us extra out of sympathy for him hauling it on and off the trains.

They were right to sympathize, since we maximized our profits by only working a short segment of the Metro, from Odéon to Porte d’Orléans and back. That route was perfect for our purposes, because it divided neatly into three segments with a major station followed by two or three minor stations, so you could do a eight- or nine-minute set for a captive audience, bottle them, change cars, do another set… and then you had to climb up and down the stairs to change directions, with poor Doug schlepping that bass. Odéon to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, Montparnasse to Denfert-Rochereau, Denfert to Porte d’Orléans, then back again, over and over till we got tired and headed to the Mazet for another beer.

It was work, not art, and Vince and sang the same two numbers, train after train: “Good-Hearted Woman” and “Truck Driving Man.” Both were from Vince’s repertoire, the first learned from Willie and Waylon, and the second presumably from Buck Owens, though a lot of other people had recorded it, including a memorable version by Leon Russell. Neither became part of my solo repertoire, but we played them day in and day out for long enough that both are permanently wedged in my memory.

This was Dave Van Ronk’s first venture into classic ragtime, and spawned an entire generation of ragtime guitar virtuosos. Dave Laibman, Eric Schoenberg, Ton Von Bergeyk, Leo Wijnkamp, Guy Van Duser… they all started out with “St. Louis Tickle.” Dave had been singing and playing the second section since the late 1950s, as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,”  then worked up the next two sections as a solo guitar instrumental, which he recorded in 1963 for his In the Tradition LP. That’s the best-known version, which most people play, but the following year he formed a band with Barry Kornfeld on banjo, Artie Rose on mandolin, and Danny Kalb on guitar (along with Sam Charters on jug, washboard, and vocals), and they worked up all four sections for their Ragtime Jug Stompers album — after which Dave buckled down and charted the remaining parts for solo guitar, though he only recorded that version for the CDs accompanying his guitar instruction book.

I learned the full version from Dave, but frankly was more excited by his arrangements of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Pearls,” which seemed more intricate and sophisticated. But one night in  Málaga a flamenco aficionado invited me to a late-night basement tablao, and at some point I ended up with a guitar in my hands, and I tried to find something they would appreciate and kept striking out (though they were polite about it) until I played “St. Louis Tickle.” At that point, everybody got quiet and paid attention, and said nice things afterwards. I figured if they liked this, they’d love “Maple Leaf Rag,” but I was wrong — they were polite, again, but this was the one that struck them as something special.

I still don’t understand that, but it happened again in Morocco, under even more striking conditions. I was hitchhiking from Casablanca to Agadir in the winter of 1978, and stopped in a tiny roadside village — I don’t remember the details, but someone invited me to spend the night, and we had a fabulous meal, all the men seated around a large earthenware stew dish, eating with our hands and mopping up with hunks of fresh, flat bread. (Incidentally, that bread was the universal stomach-filler in every Moroccan home I visited — I only saw couscous in restaurants and when some French hippies had me to dinner in their van.) (And yes, it was just the men eating in the main room. The women and children presumably ate in the kitchen; I only once stayed long enough in a home that I was accepted as family and ate with everybody.)

Anyway, after dinner they asked me to play some music, and I sang various things, and they were polite about it… and then I tried “St. Louis Tickle,” and the old men got up and started dancing. So I played another ragtime piece, and they sat down again and were polite. And damned if that didn’t happen all the way through Morocco: I never found another tune anyone would dance to, but whenever I played this one, if there were old men around they would get up and start shuffling in a circle, like they recognized it as a traditional village tune.

I still can’t explain that, but it sure made Dave happy when I told him the story.

One of the differences between the 1960s or 1970s and later decades was that there were a few basic guitar pieces that were pretty much universal. If you were a folk-blues player in the US, you knew “Freight Train,” “Buckdancer’s Choice,” and Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues.” In Northern Europe, those tunes might show up as well, but if you had the chops you were also expected to play “Angie,” or in France might substitute “Windy and Warm.” Those were a little fancier, and I actually don’t remember that many people doing them, but I sure was asked for them all the time. That first two-year journey, I didn’t yet know “Windy and Warm,” but I’d picked up the basics of “Angie” with the help of a Happy Traum book — my memory is that I hadn’t actually heard it when I picked up a version from his tablature, and only later found a copy of Bert Jansch’s recording somewhere and made a cassette tape of it.

I knew Jansch’s work from Pentangle, though what particularly struck me was his singing. I had heard and loved John Renbourn’s Sir John Alot of Merrie England LP before I knew about any of the other English guitar masters of that generation, Jansch’s playing didn’t grab me the same way, and in those days there was no way to find Davey Graham recordings in the US and damn hard to find any in England — I knew Graham’s name but it was probably another thirty years before I got a chance to hear his original version of “Anji” (as he spelled it).

Nonetheless, by the time I went to Europe I had a sort of half-assed version of Jansch’s version and pulled it out now and then when someone asked for it or something like it — in France, for example, it tended to satisfy requests for “something from Marcel Dadi,” though I don’t think Dadi actually recorded it. And I remember playing it in Spain that first winter for the family that worked as guides to the prehistoric paintings in the Cueva de la Pileta near Ronda, and them saying it sounded like Paco de Lucia. So it basically served as my generic contemporary European-sounding guitar showpiece.

I was still playing a pretty messed up version, but got lucky when I was back in Málaga in the winter of 1978-79. I showed up at the house of some friends, Kika and Eugene Huellin, who rented rooms to young women studying Spanish, and one of that year’s young women turned out to play guitar. She asked me to play “Angie,”  and then asked why I didn’t play the last section, and I said I didn’t know it, so she showed it to me — she’d learned it off the Paul Simon version, on Sounds of Silence, which I didn’t even know existed.

So that’s that story, until the incredible resurfacing of Davey Graham recordings in the 21st century. His version of “Anji” is the least of it — the stuff that blows me away is his ability to get all the rhythm, soul, and virtuosity of hard bop: Junior Mance’s “Jubilation,” Carl Perkins’s “Grooveyard,” the Adderley Brothers’ “Work Song,”  Horace Silver’s “The Preacher,” Art Blakey’s “Buhaina Chant,” Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue.” It’s one of my favorite bodies of guitar work ever, especially the live recordings at Hull University and the St. Andrews Folk Club, which show him in full flight in a way the studio albums never quite manage.

Which said, although I learned a few of Renbourn’s pieces and have listened assiduously to Graham, what sticks in my fingers is pretty much Jansch’s version of “Angie.”

Though Dave Van Ronk was not principally known as a songwriter, he wrote some damn good songs. But before he got into songwriting in more ambitious ways, he recorded a handful of blues songs for which he took author credit. He didn’t consider these fully original compositions, since they had a mix of old and new verses, some adapted, some borrowed, set to guitar parts and melodies that were likewise a mix of traditional influences and personal quirks. They were original (or unoriginal) the way a lot of blues songs are original: as he liked to put it, “Blues is like a kielbasa — you don’t sing a whole one, you just cut off a section.”

This was one of those original blues, which he recorded a couple of times in the mid-1960s, on his Just Dave Van Ronk album and more powerfully on an Elektra sampler of the current blues scene titled The Blues Project. (One of the featured artists was Danny Kalb, who shortly copped the album’s name for his blues-rock band.)

Like “Keep It Clean,” this was one of the arrangements Dave did during his transitory love affair with open tunings, and was likewise dropped from his repertoire when he decided re-tuning was too much trouble. The odd thing about both pieces is that the tuning gave them a distinctive flavor, but the basic arrangements were clearly based on standard-tuning models, and he could easily have come up with something suitable in standard had he cared to. This one is reminiscent of some of Mississippi John Hurt’s charts in E, and I just took that route.

As I recall, I didn’t actually learn this one. I just happened to think of it one day during that winter in Spain, and started fooling around with it, and found that I knew most of the verses. I’ve always thought that was the mark of a particularly well-written song: it sticks in your head, because the pieces fit together so neatly that one reminds you of the next. When I heard Dave do this I don’t remember noticing that it was more than a loose assemblage of generic verses, but when I started singing it, they all fell into place in a particular order, and if I’ve sometimes left one or two out and needed to jog my memory, they’ve mostly stuck.

As for Dave’s more ambitious compositions, I’ve posted a bunch of them: “Sunday Street,” “Another Time and Place,” “Losers,” “Gaslight Rag,” “Blood Red Moon,” and the instrumental “Antelope Rag.”