Like childhood crushes, I would fall in love with particular albums, listen to them over and over for days, weeks, or months, then abandon them and move on. The love affair with Peter LaFarge lasted at least a few months, and maybe even a couple of years. I learned a bunch of his songs — “Stampede,” “Move Over, Grab a Holt,” and of course “Ira Hayes” — but this is the only one I remember all the way through.

There was a moment in the early 1960s when some people in the New York Broadside magazine clique were mentioning him right up with Bob Dylan, who concurs, saying: “The guy who was best at protest-song writing was Peter LaFarge. We were pretty tight for a while…. Actually Peter is one of the great unsung heroes of the day. His style was just a little bit too erratic. But it wasn’t his fault, he was always hurting.”

LaFarge was admired by the other young Village musicians not only as a songwriter but as someone who had really lived the life: he’d grown up in the West, served in the Korean War, been a rodeo rider , and presented himself as Native American. That story got complicated, because he had no Native ancestry, though he had grown up with a lot of Indian friends — his father was a noted scholar of Native traditions — and had been adopted into the Tewa tribe. But until Buffy Sante-Marie appeared on the scene, he was the folk scene’s most outspoken advocate for Native issues.

LaFarge had come to New York on Josh White’s suggestion, then became close to Cisco Houston, and his style drew on both of theirs, with his own dramatic additions. It’s not a style I can listen to for very long anymore, but for a while I was completely smitten.

“Johnny Half-Breed” is fairly typical of LaFarge’s songwriting, which was workmanlike and tended to tell stories with straightforward messages. It only recently occurred to me that he probably wrote this one for Johnny Cash, who had recently recorded an album, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, with five of LaFarge’s songs on it, including the hit version of “Ira Hayes.” The timing is right, and the name, and Cash was presenting himself as part-Native, so it all makes sense.

Unfortunately, shortly after On the Warpath came out in 1965, LaFarge died of an overdose of thorazine. I’d always heard it was suicide, but there seems to be some doubt about that. On balance, he may have been more interesting as a person than as a musician, and I wish someone would get his story down. (In fact, maybe that’s another project I should consider…)

I don’t remember how I got Doc Watson’s first album, but I had it very early and it was one of my favorites. I loved his voice, his guitar playing, his harmonica, his banjo (the first banjo tune I remember learning was his “Georgia Buck”), and his taste in songs. At first most of the guitar parts were too complicated for me — not just at first, either; I eventually learned his arrangements of “Deep River Blues,” “Sitting on Top of the World,” and the instrumental “Doc’s Guitar,” but also learned I would never be a serious flatpicker during many hours trying to master “Black Mountain Rag.” Fortunately there were also some songs that depended more on the lyrics than the picking, in particular this one.

This song seems to have first been published in 1894 as “I Am a Highly Educated Man,” with lyrics by Harry C. Clyde and music by H. C. Verner, a pair of old-time pop music hacks — Verner, for example, was credited not only with 1893’s “Won’t You Be My Sweetheart?” but also “Yes, I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” (with Clyde) and “I Won’t Be Your Sweetheart Anymore.”

Their version shared about half the verses of Doc’s (which was titled “I Was Born About Six Thousand Years Ago”) and there were intermediary versions by many of the top early hillbilly stars, including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Vernon Dalhart, Uncle Dave Macon, and Charlie Poole, often titled “I’m the Man that Rode the Mule Around the World.”

I’d guess this was a minstrel show comedy number, since there were lots of blackface minstrel routines based on the idea that southern plantation dwellers had comically simplistic notions of Biblical history — indeed, there was a huge Broadway hit built on that foundation, Green Pastures, as well as the Gershwin brothers’ “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” But that’s just a guess.

Incidentally, the line about “Peter, Paul, and Moses playing ring-around-the-roses” is what inspired Peter, Paul, and Mary to call themselves that, requiring Noel Stookey to change his name. Also incidentally, I always thought of this as a southern song, so assumed General Hooker was southern — but it turns out that General Joseph Hooker was born in Hadley, Massachusetts, and served in the Union army during in the Civil War, leading troops in Tennessee, among other regions.

I don’t remember the chronology clearly, but I think I first got Pete Seeger and Julius Lester’s instruction book on how to play Lead Belly’s 12-string guitar style, and it was another few months or maybe even a year before I persuaded my mother to buy me a 12-string. Actually, it didn’t take much persuading, because she liked the sound of the octave bass strings even more than I did — or maybe I just had mixed feelings because of the struggle it took to play that particular guitar. It was a Yamaha, and it wasn’t terrible,  but I’ve tended to feel clumsy playing most 12-strings, and that one was no exception. I managed to get Lead Belly’s stuff sounding pretty good, but never could make anything else sound like much more than jangling mush.

Back when I was twelve, though, playing Lead Belly’s guitar style was an incredible thrill — it was a big, solid, macho sound, and I’m guessing it overwhelmed my singing, or with luck maybe even drowned it out entirely…

Be that as it may, this was one of the songs I learned from that book, and I can say with absolute assurance that I never would have learned it otherwise, what with being a Jew and an atheist, and the fact that it just never appealed to me much as a song. But it was one of the first guitar arrangements I learned that actually sounded like something I had on a record, especially when played on a 12-string. I haven’t owned a 12-string since getting rid of that Yamaha sometime in my late teens or twenties, but whenever I happen to get one in my hands I tend to play this, and still get a thrill from sounding like Lead Belly — though the next thing that always happens is I try to play a Willie McTell piece and get frustrated.

Incidentally — very incidentally — my father, who was a biologist, used to enjoy going through museums of European painting and noting how the new scientific consciousness of the late Renaissance led to a shift from painting crucifixion scenes with Christ’s wound on the right (the virtuous side of the body) to the left (the side where the heart is anatomically located).  I still can’t go through a museum without noting which side the wound is on, and checking dates — for example, here’s a painting by Joachim Patinir [1480-1524] with it on the left, but Rogier van de Weyden [1400-1464] still had it on the right.

Once again, I learned this from the Cisco Houston songbook, and still sing it almost exactly as printed there, and like a lot of songs in that book it still comes into my head with the accompanying illustration, of a man who is presumably a prison guard, standing with his rifle.

Of course, like everyone else, I soon heard one of Lead Belly’s versions, which was undoubtedly Cisco’s source as well, since he includes many of Lead Belly’s points of reference: Sugarland penitentiary, where Lead Belly was imprisoned from 1918 to 1925, and the sheriff of Houston, Texas, whose name Cisco’s book gave as Benson Brocker (which is what I sing), but Lead Belly’s biographers give as Bason and Brock, explaining that A.W. Brock was the chief of police, but not giving any info on Bason.

The song was apparently known throughout the South, and was recorded several times in the 1920s, first by a white Oklahoman named Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell in 1926, then a year later by Crying Sam Collins, a black guitarist and singer from Louisiana and Mississippi, who has some wonderful variations on the standard melody. Bruce Jackson and other scholars have listed this as a popular prison song, circulated in oral tradition, but I’m struck by how similar the early recordings are, and have to wonder whether it also circulated in some more formal way, as a song sheet or performed by a popular black (or white?) vaudeville entertainer — though I have no basis whatsoever for that guess, aside from the fact that some relatively generic-sounding verses seem to have been firmly attached to this song all across the South.

In any case, pretty much everyone who now sings it uses variants of Lead Belly’s verses, with their Texas references and the mention of “Jumpin’ Judy,” which Steve Calt glosses as a slang term for a woman who would have sex with lots of men — a reasonable guess, since the word “Judy” was already noted in 1810 as slang for prostitute or, to be precise, for a “blowen,” a wonderfully archaic Briticism.

Some sources add that there was a legend in Sugarland (or in other prisons) that if the light of the midnight train shone on a prisoner through his window, he would soon be released. I am not aware of any solid evidence for this, and as far as I know it may have been invented by an imaginative folklorist… but if anyone out there knows more, please fill me in.

I learned this from a Pete Seeger songbook, American Favorite Ballads, and it was at least a dozen years before I became aware of its author, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, a cowboy, hobo, and IWW singer who also wrote “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (as well as “The Trusty Lariat,” a.k.a. “The Cowboy Fireman“).

As usually sung, it’s in the genre of comic hobo songs, along with things like “I Just Don’t Want to Be Rich,” but the version we know is a censored shadow of what hobos actually sang — as McClintock explained, he had “to clean that song up; it wasn’t a parlor song, originally.”

As to what it was originally… that’s likely to remain a mystery. There is a story that McClintock  had to go to court to defend his copyright in the late 1920s, and established his authorship by explaining the story behind the original, but the quotations provided are instead quoted from an interview with Sam Eskin, issued by Folkways Records. McClintock explained that “the ambition of every hobo was to snare some kid to do his begging for him, among other things,” and when Eskin asked him to sing the original, uncensored version he declined. Presumably the lyrics related to those “other things” — specifically, serve as a “punk” — a word that by now has lost its original connotation of a boy kept for sexual purposes by an older man.

In American Songs of Protest, published in 1953, John Greenway wrote that McClintock sang an “original version of the song, which, despite the necessary expurgation, retains enough of the original significance to certify its precedence over other versions now current on family radio programs,” and quoted a different lyric than in McClintock’s recordings, including a final verse that went:

The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, “Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore,
I’ll be God damned if I hike any more,
To be    *     *     *     *     *     *     *      *
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

The problem with this ascription is that it is almost exactly the lyric printed by George Milburn in 1930, in The Hobo’s Handbook, and when Greenway recorded the song he filled the asterisks with the line in Milburn’s book: “To be a homeguard with a lemonade card.” So I doubt he actually got it from McClintock and there is no reason to think he knew a dirtier line.

Myriad internet sources and a few books and scholarly articles quote Greenway’s missing line as “To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore,” but that lyric is a good example of the internet echo chamber: it started in 2002 with a writer on the Mudcat folk music site suggesting that lyric would fit the rhyme and meter of Greenway’s missing phrase, was picked up and repeated on other sites, and by 2010 was being reposted on mudcat as established fact.

Dave Van Ronk quoted me an alternate line that would fit the scan and almost make a rhyme for the Greenway verse: “And be cornholed till my ass is raw.” But I have no reason to think that was not just another attempt to fill in the asterisks, whether by Dave or one of his Village compatriots.

I’ve never heard anyone sing either of those lines, and a lot of songbooks even expurgate the basic hobo fantasy elements, removing references to alcohol, getting out of jail, and hanging “the jerk who invented work.” One of my ongoing projects is exploring the censorship of our musical and cultural history — the first published fruit was The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, republishedin paperback as Talking ‘Bout Your Mama, and more recently a deep exploration of the original and censored lyrics of the Black sporting world, Jelly Roll Blues. In the process,  I’ve turned up even more graphic lyrics about hobos making use of young boys, which apparently was very common. McClintock described having to fight “like a wildcat” to protect himself from sexual assaults when he took to the road as a youth, and Ernest Hemingway traced his homophobia to similar experiences, writing:

I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women.

Of which more to come when I get around to that book (which will also explore plenty of lyrics that provide positive depictions of homosexuality, and sexuality of many and varied kinds)….

Meanwhile, I sing the Seeger verses.

I probably first heard this on Pete Seeger’s American Favorite Ballads, vol. 5, which was my source for a bunch of songs. It was composed around the turn of the twentieth century by “Haywire Mac ” McClintock, who recorded it in 1928, and I later heard Bruce “Utah” Phillips sing it many times — he tended to finish shows by asking the audience to sing along and recognize that we’re all bums — in a positive, IWW kind of way — and need to respect one another and treat each other right in recognition of that fellowship.

I was surprised at first, because I hadn’t taken the song seriously, but aside from the chorus, which parodies an old revival hymn, it’s a pretty straightforward and welcoming expression of hobo life. It’s also a reminder of the days when guys in search of a hand-out didn’t just stand on streetcorners saying “Spare change?” or holding up signs describing their plight, but wentfrom house to house in working class areas, asking for a meal, sometimes in return for chopping wood or some other brief job. Likewise, travelers would knock on a farmer’s door and ask for a place to sleep — there was a popular country song called, “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister.”

Unpleasant as that kind of begging could be — the refusals always outnumbered the acquiescences — it at least involved some communication with another human being. When I was a busker, I rather quickly stopped playing on the sidewalk with an open guitar case, and instead worked cafes, restaurants, and bars, where I would play and then go table to table, chatting briefly with people as they went through their pockets, and fairly often being invited for a drink. It made the whole experience more interesting and sociable, and also was good business — some regular customers got to thinking of me as their busker, and giving me an extra tip. When I was traveling, I would often combine passing the hat with asking for a place to stay, which may sound weird, but it worked fine. In Germany in the 1970s, I quickly learned not to ask for a place until I was done for the night, because I always found one in the first place I tried, and once someone had agreed to host me, they expected me to stick around and join the party. In the US it was harder, but especially in the South it tended to work out, and I met a lot of interesting people that way.

I never knocked on doors for food, but if you want a taste of that experience, and indeed of the whole hobo experience at the time McClintock was writing,I highly recommend Jack London’s autobiographical The Road (the whole book is online, for free — quite a change from the early 1980s, when I spent a couple of years searching for a copy). It’s a great read, and London traces his skills as a storyteller to his panhandling experience, writing:

I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door for grub.

Incidentally, the verse about “Jim Hill” refers to James J. Hill, the fabulously wealthy builder and owner of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad lines.

I first heard this from Woody Guthrie, but that just tells you where and when I started listening to southern rural music, not where the song comes from. If we were looking for the earliest form of blues, this song is as good a nominee as any, and by the turn of the twentieth century it seems to have been known all over the South.

It was first recorded by a Virginia singer named Henry Whitter late in 1923, as “Lonesome Road Blues,” but a version that sounds even older was done the next year by a singer and multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina named Samantha Bumgarner, who traveled to New York in 1924 and made a dozen sides on fiddle and banjo — by some reports the first southern mountain banjo recordings ever made. She called her version “The Worried Blues,” and it sounds to me like the sort of music that was played on banjo before guitars became common in the southern mountains, mostly by African American musicians. Bumgarner was born in 1878, and by the 1920s was considered a representative of older and potentially dying traditions. She performed every year at Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s folk music and dance festival in Asheville, and was one of the players who inspired a teenage Pete Seeger to take up the five-string banjo after his father brought him there in 1935.

This song is typical of the sort of proto-blues (clearly related to later blues, though not yet called by that name) that had been common in black communities in the later 19th century, but had largely fallen out of favor by the time recording arrived and is mostly known from the work of white singers — one of the quirks of American musical history is that, at least until the later 20th century, African Americans were rarely nostalgic for any “good old days,” while white southerners were deeply devoted to their region’s past, and as a result white artists often preserved archaic black styles.

Whitter’s version is a lot closer to Woody’s, and may well have been Woody’s source, since it was a very popular record. They sing a lot of the same verses, which is a pretty fair clue, since the form of the song is so simple that there were hundreds of verses circulating and people routinely made up new ones. Some of my favorites are from the version by John Jackson, titled “Going Down to Georgia on a Hog”… but I still sing it more or less like I learned it from Woody.

One of the pleasures of this project is learning the background of songs I’ve known all my life. For example, I’ve known “The Eddystone Light” since I was a kid, but knew nothing about the Eddystone Lighthouse, though it turns out to be the most famous lighthouse in the British Isles. Inaugurated in 1698, it was the first offshore lighthouse ever constructed, though the original structure lasted barely two years and there have been three others there since.

As for the song, it seems to have originated in a considerably longer version as “The Man at the Nore” — the Nore was a lightship, which was an alternative to building offshore lighthouses. Apparently “The Man at the Nore” was quite a hit in mid-19th century British music halls, sung, according to contemporary sheet music, “by Arthur Lloyd, with rapturous applause.” Lloyd was a specialist in comic songs and one of the biggest stars of the early music hall, and there is a voluminous site about him online. I also found a nice broadside of “The Man at the Nore,” which begins with the same verse as the later “Eddystone Light,” but extends the story at considerably greater length.

A shortened American version, titled “The Eddystone Light” and similar to the one I sing, though with a somewhat different story and chorus, was already turning up in university songbooks by the late 1800s. College singing sessions were an important though rarely-mentioned influence on the later folk revival. Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, one of the prime sources for mid-century folksingers, was largely compiled from musical get-togethers with students and professors, and that material was tailor-made for collegiate folk groups like the Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, and their ilk.

All of which said, the version everybody has sung since the 1950s came from the Weavers and Burl Ives — I’m not sure who did it first, but being from a good left-wing household I grew up on the Weavers recording.

I sing this in honor of my ex-half-sister-in-law Hazel, who will be mentioned frequently in later posts and who regularly requested it.

As best I can tell, I learned this simultaneously from Cisco Houston and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — the voice I hear singing it in my head is Jack’s, but I can also visualize the page in Cisco’s songbook.

I assumed it was an old cowboy song, but when I set out to learn more about it before writing these notes, no one seemed to be able to trace it further back than Cisco. The tune is old, most commonly used for a song called “State of Arkansas,” about how horrible life was for a settler in that territory, and the theme of “Diamond Joe” is similar enough to suggest that one was composed in emulation of the other — but I couldn’t find anything more about it, except that there are at least two other unrelated songs about a character named Diamond Joe.

However, when I posted the link to this page on Facebook, Andy Hedges alerted me to a post on Robert Waltz and David Engle’s Ballad Index site that tells the whole story: the song was written by Baldwin “Butch” Hawes of the Almanac Singers for one of Alan Lomax’s radio plays, to fit a character in the script named Diamond Joe, and he set it to the tune of “State of Arkansas” because Lee Hayes was scripted to sing it and that was one of Lee’s regular numbers. Cisco was a member of the cast, and started singing it regularly, and everyone else then got it from him.

Anyway, it’s a great lyric, which I’ve always thought of as a companion piece to “The Buffalo Skinners” — they are both eloquent antidotes to all the songs about ridin’ and ropin’ and beautiful sunsets on the prairie, instead focusing on how lousy cowboy work was and how common it was (and is) for bosses to cheat itinerant workers. And Ramblin’ Jack does a fine version of it, which inspired mine, more or less.

Once again, I’ve known this so long that I don’t remember where I first heard it, but I do know where I learned the lyrics: out of Pete Seeger’s Bells of Rhymney songbook. Pete only occasionally played blues — he had a blues banjo solo that he tended to recycle as needed — but he loved the form and was friends with quite a few major blues artists, including Big Bill Broonzy, who was his source for this one. Since I got it from Pete, I associated it with Broonzy, and it was probably another dozen years before I heard Leroy Carr’s original, and at least a dozen more before I realized how important Carr was, or how big a hit he had with “When the Sun Goes Down” (which was the original title).

Quite simply, Carr was the most influential male blues singer of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and arguably on into the ’50s and ’60s. His influence extended to the most isolated rural areas and the most sophisticated urban settings: from Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (both of whom recalled Carr’s “How Long–How Long” as their first song), it is hard to come up with male blues singers who did not perform his pieces, but his influence went far beyond blues. “When the Sun Goes Down” was recorded by the Ink Spots, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and later by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, and numerous gospel singers also trained on Carr’s records. Not to mention Pete Seeger.

Carr’s genius was to blend the blues tradition with the new style of “crooning” pop vocals. Previous singers had needed to have loud voices to be heard in theaters or on street corners without amplification, but Carr was primarily a recording artist and his most popular songs were intimate ballads: “When the Sun Goes Down” followed “How Long–How Long,” “Midnight Hour Blues,” and “Blues Before Sunrise,” all moody, impressionistic pieces to be played in a quiet apartment or cabin, or on a barroom jukebox late at night. He also recorded plenty of rowdy, upbeat songs, some of which also became standards, including “Sloppy Drunk” and a series of songs about a beleaguered husband, such as “Papa Wants a Cookie” and “Papa’s on the Housetop.” But it was the ballads that were remembered, and this was one of his best–as well as becoming a pattern for numerous later songs, including Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” which even mimicked the wordless, moaning break from Carr’s record.

I could go on and on about this — Carr is one of my passions — but just to show that I’m not alone: After I did my biography of Josh White, Society Blues, I was hired by Smithsonian/Folkways to write the notes for their Josh White CD, and mentioned Carr in those notes as the most influential male blues singer of the first half of the twentieth century. Kip Lornell, Lead Belly’s biographer and a very knowledgeable researcher, was assigned the task of fact-checking that booklet, and he called me up with a few questions and suggestions. I accepted most of them gratefully, but then he asked about my comment on Carr, suggesting it was a little over the top and I should tone it down to “one of the most influential.”

I said, “Sure, Kip, if you can come up with some others who were equally influential.”

There was a long pause… and then Kip said, “OK, I guess we’ll let that one stand.”