A touch of early Tom Waits, and an apt follow-up to last week’s “Ace in the Hole,” with a similar blend of hipster slang and nostalgie de la boue. When I headed off to Europe at age 18, I had two or three Waits cuts on the handful of cassettes I brought with me. I wasn’t really equipped to learn them, since in those days I was easily confused by any song with more than a basic I-IV-V or circle of fifths chord pattern, but I have a keen memory of spending a late night in Paris working out the chords to “Drunk on the Moon” — not that I got them right, but it was a memorable attempt.

I lived in Paris off and on over several years, staying with a woman who had been a grad student of my mom’s — she let me sleep on a mattress in the living room of her small apartment on Rue du Père Corentin, near Porte d’Orléans,  and I did the cooking and read a bunch of her books, including medieval history, psychology, and other stuff I would not have read in another situation but am grateful to have explored. It was a relaxed, comfortable situation, and that apartment was a regular base as I moved between summers in northern Europe and winters in Spain, Italy, and North Africa.

I was indulging in romantic fantasies shared by a lot of rambling young folks in that period, inspired by legends of Woody Guthrie, Hemingway, and all sorts of other characters who lived hobo or boho lives and nourished themselves on whiskey and nostalgie de la boue. Waits was an obvious avatar, slouching drunkenly around the stage in a cloud of cigarette smoke, mumbling disjointed verses, or fingering slow jazz tunes on an upright piano, his lyrics limning the lives of small-time hustlers, hookers, diner waitresses, petty criminals, and other creatures of the urban night.

There was an off-hand, half-formed quality to a lot of his lyrics, as if he was improvising them as he went along, and I spent a few nights improvising my own songs into a cassette recorder, under his spell and fueled by a liberal infusion of alcohol. I remember one effort that began:

I know I’m drunk today, was drunk yesterday too,
I know it’s my own problem, got nothing to do with you.
It ain’t because you left me that I’m feeling this way,
Though I ain’t saying it wouldn’t have been different if you’d stayed…

I hadn’t yet been seriously involved with a woman, had no memories to fit that lyric, but hell, I was a rambling musician, drinking deeply and wandering the night-time streets of Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Budapest, Copenhagen… a romantic character in my own mind and playing the part convincingly for people who led more prosaic lives.

In keeping with the rest of this series, I’m playing this song as I remember it. I’m sure the chords aren’t exactly what Waits played, though they’re certainly closer than what I figured out in my teens, and the lyrics include some words and phrases I misheard and some that have evolved in my memory, as well as some I may have heard right, but wonder about, like the line I hear as “Come schemers and dancers, chary the light,” meaning, to me, seeking the comfort of darkness — the internet experts transcribe the last bit as “cherry delight,” which it surely isn’t, and prove they aren’t reliable by following with “I’ve hawked all my yesterdays,” which obviously should read “I’ve hocked all my yesterdays,” a perfect Waits phrase.

Anyway… I can still picture myself learning this late at night in that Paris apartment, a soft glow coming through the glass doors leading to the balcony, cross-legged on my mattress on the floor, my guitar in my lap, whispering along in an approximation of Waits’s midnight rasp so as not to bother my host, and pleasantly drunk on French wine and moonlight.

I first heard “Ace in the Hole” on Dave Van Ronk’s 1963 album with the Red Onion Jazz Band, In the Tradition. It was written around 1909 by a couple of obscure songwriters, James Dempsey and George Mitchell, and is a musical evocation of the New York borderline underworld limned by Damon Runyon in the stories that inspired Guys and Dolls. Dave was a devotee of this kind of New Yorkiana — his rock band, the Hudson Dusters, was named for a notorious street gang of the 1800s — so he naturally jumped on it.

I’m pretty sure Dave picked it up from Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, a San Francisco group that was one of the first and best white trad revival bands, who recorded it in the 1940s with the New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson — Watters’s outfit is not well remembered these days, but Dave was a dedicated “moldy fig” traditionalist in his teens, devoted to Bunk’s work, and developed an appreciation for the San Francisco bands during a shore visit in his brief period as a merchant seaman.

I’d heard Dave’s version and knew that provenance, but thought of it as an obscurity until I did some research for this post and found it was recorded by over a hundred groups and artists, starting with a bunch of minor white jazz bands in the 1920s, including one in Berlin, then various western and hillbilly swing bands, then Frankie Laine, Connie Francis, Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer, Judy Henske, and a lot of others, including a bizarre version from 1969 by the honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson, rewritten as a critique of hippies, protesters, and other good folks of that time, which could easily be revived by the Trump crowd today. (I’m not linking it, but it’s available online if you want to check it out.)

Dave’s original recording only had the one verse and one and a half choruses, with the rest of the space taken up by solos from the band, and he never played it solo until near the end of his life. Then he worked up a really nice guitar chart, wrote a second verse, and filled out the second chorus — as I’ve noted in my posts for “That’ll Never Happen No More” and “Somebody Else, Not Me,” he regularly wrote additional lyrics for songs he thought needed some help. I never learned his new verse, but use his extra lyric for the second chorus, though I’ve changed one line that didn’t seem to fit the theme, staying true to his memory by using the term clydes, meaning “squares,” which I learned from him.

Speaking of archaic hipster argot: a Missouri bankroll was a roll of one dollar bills (or sometimes paper cut to the same size) with a couple of high-denomination bills on the outside, flashed to create the illusion that the bearer was loaded. Tenderloin was a common term in the late 19th and early 20th century for prostitution districts, extrapolated from the original Tenderloin, the Manhattan prostitution district running from about 14th to 42th Streets between 6th and 8th Avenues, so named (according to a popular legend) when a new police captain was assigned to that district, which like all such districts was famous for bribery, and commented that he’d been eating chuck steak all his life and was looking forward to some tenderloin.

I started playing this when Sandrine and I were living in New Orleans in the early 2000s, staying with David and Roselyn, and jamming with them and whoever else dropped by in the evenings. They had a fake book with this in it, and no one else knew it until one night a trumpet player showed up who was from the Bay Area, so we played it and I’ve been messing with it ever since.

Like most people who weren’t hardcore fans, I first heard “Me and Paul” on the Wanted: The Outlaws compilation. That’s also where I first heard “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and became a lifelong Waylon Jennings fan — I enjoyed Willie, but only bought a couple of his albums, while I got a stack of Waylon’s… but albums aren’t the whole story, by a long shot.

I know a bunch of Willie’s songs — “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls” — and appreciate the odd ways he makes words fit together, and fits them into tunes, and the one time I saw him live in a relatively small club was one of my all-time favorite concerts. It was his usual group, with his sister Bobbie on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and Paul English on drums, and they played a long set, following a great opening set by Billy Joe Shaver, which also had Raphael and maybe English, and all that was great, so we called Willie back for an encore… and he played for another forty minutes. The other players looked exhausted, and you could see them exchanging looks as he’d finish one song and go into yet another, but he was having fun, taking long, imaginative guitar solos, totally into being up there playing music, looking like he’d happily keep going all night.

That’s the feeling I get from this song. It’s not about any of the things songs are usually about; it’s just about being out on the road playing music with friends, and not even celebratory about that, like “On the Road Again.” It’s just about taking the ride, ups and downs included, and looking back on both with wry enjoyment. Who ever wrote a better line than “After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound”? Perfectly formed, with alliteration, assonance, that internal rhyme… and smart, and odd, and personal.

Paul, in case anyone doesn’t know, was Paul English, Willie’s drummer for virtually his entire career, and bookkeeper, paymaster, and, in the early days, sometime enforcer. English actually drummed for the first time backing Willie on the radio, having never done it before, and never did anything fancy — he typically just played a single snare, and kept the beat, and that was it. He looked like Waylon, or, according to some reports, Waylon looked like him, adopting his outlaw black hat and clothing, and his Satanic beard and mustache.

The lyric is about their life on the road, all of it apparently based on real events, back when smoking dope and looking like hippies was a bigger deal and could get you in trouble, and a country music package show could still include Kitty Wells, and Willie and Paul were among the tiny handful of people who overlapped those worlds.

And finally I’d just note that looking like a hippie no long means what it used to, and a lot of people who look like Willie and Paul are backing Trump and all kinds of conservative bullshit, but Willie has been pretty consistently on the side of the underdogs, speaking up for immigrants, cutting a duet of the gay-friendly “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” (with a wonderful video), and generally standing up and out. He’s in his nineties and still on the road, still doing fine shows, still one of the good guys.

“Ni el dinero ni nada” is a Mexican counterpart of “Down in the Boondocks” (last week’s post) and “Mansion on the Hill,” a song in the voice of a poor boy speaking to the rich girl he loves and cannot win.

Because I am as I am, without reason you disdain me
Because you live among people who say, “He is not on your level.”
You don’t let me sing at your window grill, as others sing,
Nor let me cry out that I love you with deep tenderness.

It was composed by the grand master of ranchera songwriting, José Alfredo Jiménez, who was also one of Mexico’s most loved and respected singers. There is no real Anglo equivalent; maybe Hank Williams, but it’s bigger than that: imagine Frank Sinatra had not only recorded a definitive portion of the American songbook, but composed a large proportion of the songs — by some counts over a thousand — and you’ve got something like the idea.

José Alfredo wrote many kinds of songs, about many subjects, but for many fans his specialty was songs about guys drinking to forget and celebrate the ups and downs of their lives — the most famous example  is “El Rey,” and if you were looking for a Mexican parallel to “One for My Baby and One for the Road,” an obvious nominee would be “El ultimo trago” (“the last swallow,” as in “have this bottle with me, and with the last swallow we’ll leave”);  instead of singing to the bartender about the woman who has left him, he is drinking a last drink with her, but a classic photo shows him alone at the bar, and that’s the image that lingers.

I learned “Ni el dinero ni nada” from the same Flaco Jiménez album that gave me “Gritenme piedras del campo” and “Tu nuevo cariñito” — it was my basic introduction to the great Mexican songbook, and a very good beginning. At that point I had never heard of José Alfredo, or Paulino Vargas, or even Los Tigres del Norte… it was back in the 1980s, before I’d spent any time traveling around Mexico, and I learned those songs before hitching down there in 1986, a story I’ve told in a previous post.

As for this song, here’s my rough translation of the other verses, giving the sense, if not the poetry:

Because I am as I am, I am losing your affection
Because I have made no money, they disparage me
I have no right to anything, because I am a vagabond
But I know that in the depth of your heart, you still adore me

I cannot think that your love for me will end
Neither money, nor anything, or anyone can separate us
Some memories can never be erased, and ours are like that
To be able to forget so many things, they would have to kill us.

If you are truly leaving, tell me in person
If you are thinking of sending me a letter, better not even to write it
Your goodbye, my heart, I demand looking you in the face
And if now there is no love in your eyes, I’ll go out of your life.

I must have heard Billy Joe Royal’s hit version of “Down in the Boondocks” in the 1970s, when I was often listening to my local oldies station, WROR — “the golden great 98” — but I don’t remember taking much notice of it, since I was mostly listening for when they played classic doo-wop, or  the Coasters, Chuck Berry… I was more into the ’50s stuff. Then in the 1980s, while I was wandering around Europe and had lots of time to experiment with guitar techniques while waiting for hitchhiking rides and walking down country roads, I began fooling around with this arrangement and found that although I’d never tried to learn it, I knew all the words — one sure sign of a well-written song.

Good as it is, I thought of it more as a guitar exercise than anything else — I’d worked out my Congolese-flavored version of “Iko Iko” and was trying to come up with other ways to play Caribbean and Latin-flavored rhythms, and I guess this was my attempt at a kind of half-assed reggae feel. Anyway, I never performed it but always enjoyed playing it, without knowing anything more about it.

So I only just found out that it was written by Joe South, a southern guitar and songwriting maverick who’s probably best known for his hit, “The Games People Play,” but also wrote this one and lots of others, and produced Royal’s record, and played guitar on a bunch of sessions, including the memorable tremolo intro on Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.”

Other than that, the song pretty much speaks for itself: it’s a classic poor-boy-in-love-with-rich-girl story, somewhat more optimistic than Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill,” and it’s fun to dig into the lyric… but I still mostly play it because it took a long time to get the guitar technique so it felt moderately comfortable, and I love the way the slapping/picking feels under my hands and haven’t found another song that fits as well with this style.

I have no idea where or when I learned this song, and research provides no clues, because it’s been done by everyone from Mamie Smith to Willie Nelson–including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cliff Bruner, and a duet version by Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin. So this post is all going to be background, starting with “jelly roll.” I cover the subject more thoroughly in my latest book, Jelly Roll Blues, which focuses on Jelly Roll Morton but ranges fairly widely, but for the moment…

Of course, the term  refers to a baked good made by spreading jelly on a sheet of sponge cake and rolling it up into a roll. The verse of this song (which I never learned and only recently heard) explains that it’s about a greedy little boy named Willie Green from New Orleans, who has received a nice jelly roll as a present from his mother and refuses to share it with the other kids, and the cover of the original sheet music, back in 1919, portrayed that scene.

Much as it pains me to suggest an alternate meaning, an early scholar of Black folk song named Guy Johnson wrote in 1927 that “jelly roll” was “by far the most common” sexual euphemism in blues lyrics, and “stands for the vagina, or for the female genitalia in general, and sometimes for sexual intercourse.” If, for a moment, we consider that interpretation, it suggests some ambiguity in little Willie’s gender identification… but the term was to some extent polymorphous and the lyric I sing includes the gender-balanced line (assuming I’m singing about a het [though not necessarily cis] couple), “your jelly sure is fine, but you ain’t getting none of mine…” which leads to a minor mystery, because I haven’t been able to find that line in any other version. (Steve Mann’s version is somewhat similar, and I love his guitar part, so maybe I adapted his lyric, but if someone knows a closer source, please let me know.)

As for the song itself, it was and is a very popular trad jazz number,  composed by Clarence and Spencer Williams, who both were Louisianans, but not related to each other.

Spencer was the elder, most likely born in 1886 in Alabama (likely Selma, though his parents also lived in Birmingham and Montgomery), though at times he claimed to have been born in New Orleans “as long ago as 1880.” He also claimed to have been a nephew of Lulu White, the most famous Black madame in the red light district remembered as Storyville, and to have lived as a teenager in her famous Mahogany Hall — which sounds like a colorful invention, but White  does seem to have been his aunt, or at least a near relation, and he does seem to have spent time with her in New Orleans. Be that as it may, he was in Chicago by 1908 and began publishing songs shortly thereafter — hundreds of them, eventually, with over a hundred different collaborators, including “Mahogany Hall Stomp,”  “Royal Garden Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,”  this one, and the similarly-themed “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” He also made some records, including naughty double-entendre duets with the guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Teddy Bunn, backed by James P. Johnson on piano — which may be more than you needed to know, but it’s a hell of a resume.

Clarence Williams was less prolific as a songwriter, but a good deal more prosperous, since he was also a successful publisher, made hundreds of records, managed a bunch of bands and produced a bunch of blues singers — one of his bands had Louis Armstrong on trumpet and one of the singers was Bessie Smith — and, all in all, was one of the most important figures on the New York jazz and blues scene. His compositional talents are a bit hard to judge, since he also put his name on a lot of tunes he bought or “borrowed” from other people, but he and Spencer seem to have been genuine collaborators and there’s no reason to doubt he had a hand in this one. He also made a nice recording of it — maybe my favorite — in 1934, with the versatile Roy Smeck on guitar.

To my eternal regret, I never met Smeck, though I easily could have; he was giving guitar lessons in New York when I was there studying with Dave Van Ronk. I do not regret a minute spent with Dave, but if I’d suggested taking some supplementary lessons from Smeck, Dave would have heartily encouraged me… ah, well. I did get to see him live once, and he was terrific: his finale was a version of “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” chording on a harmonica held in his mouth without a rack and playing the melody and variations on a ukulele, while moving it like a canoe paddle. Ars longa, and all that…

This is another from Bill Morrissey, written after he spent a summer working on a purse seiner out of Ketchikan, Alaska. That used to be a pretty common thing; I knew a bunch of musicians who went to Alaska to work the fishing and save some money to tide them over while they tried to get their performing careers going. When I met him back in the early 1980s, this was one of Bill’s strongest songs, introduced with stories of freezing, scuffling, and drinking during his time ashore at a place called the Shamrock Topless Bar and Laundromat.

I sang this a lot when I was touring — not as often as “Oil Money” or “My Baby and Me,” but more often than any  of Bill’s other songs. I even recorded a version for my LP, with Bill producing, but it seemed kind of silly for me to do it when it was also on Bill’s record, and one of his friends said I made it sound like a Leonard Cohen song, which I didn’t take that as a compliment. So it stayed in the can and I did “Soldier’s Pay” — which might also have sounded like Cohen, but Bill wasn’t recording it and someone had to.

This was a favorite of my friend Monte‘s, and it reminds me of him because he was from northern British Columbia, which is the closest I ever got to Alaska. That’s another story: when Bill was booked to play the Vancouver Folk Festival, I gave him Monte’s number. I thought they’d get along, but Bill came home kind of disgruntled, asking, “Who is that guy?”

Turned out that Monte had been giving him a tour of the local hang-outs and it started to rain; Monte didn’t want Bill to get wet, so insisted he wait in a bar; then Monte pulled up a few minutes later in a long black Chevrolet. He gestured for Bill to get in, but Bill knew Monte didn’t live nearby, so asked: “Where’d you get the car?”

Monte gestured again and said, “Don’t worry about it. Get in!”

Bill did worry about it, and didn’t get in.

I asked Monte about that story the next time I saw him, and he chuckled and explained, “It was raining.” He wanted to be a good host, he was going to return the car when they were done, and he hadn’t realized Bill was going to be twitchy about a little thing like “borrowing” a car, what with all the hardscrabble songs.

The only time Monte made it to the east coast was a year or so later, for our album release concert, when Bill and I had Reckless Records, producing our first albums and one from Dave Van Ronk. Monte played with Dave at the show, and he and Bill were polite to each other, but they couldn’t get over the car incident.

Bill Morrissey sounded like an old man long before he was one, which was weird, because he looked like a teenager long after he was one.  When I met him, he was about thirty years old, fresh-faced, with the semi-long hair that went with being a high school student in the 1970s — my time, ten years younger — and that craggy old man’s voice.

He aged into the voice, sooner than he should have. Too much whiskey was part of it, but there are always reasons for the whiskey, and so many of his songs express a deep loneliness. I don’t know where that came from, and at some level I can’t regret it, since it gave the songs their depth and power, but that’s a hell of a trade.

This is one of his shorter songs, and a favorite of mine, because of the deft use of language and the way it sneaks up on you. Dave Van Ronk, a mentor and influence for both of us and the person who told us about each other, used to talk about Brecht’s theory of alienation, which in Dave’s interpretation worked by pairing a bleak lyric with a cheery tune, so it caught you off guard rather than letting you relax into it.

This is one of the best examples I know of that effect, and in the right setting it’s a killer… but Bill found it didn’t work for him onstage, so he never recorded it and if I hadn’t happened to sit him down in front of a tape recorder during the brief period when he was playing it, no one would know it existed. I played it onstage a couple of times, which pleased him, but it didn’t work for me either, back then.

Maybe we were too young. It’s an older man’s song, and works fine for me now. I wish he were around to give it another try.

(Bill was a good friend, partner, and inspiration to me, and I know a lot of his songs. I’ve already posted “Small Town on the River,” “Texas Blues,” “Barstow,” “My Baby and Me,” “Oil Money,” “King Jelly’s Good Morning Irene Song,” “Candlepin Swing,” “Soldier’s Pay,” and “Night Shift,” with more to come.)

I was recently exchanging emails with a relative who is a longtime liberal but also a supporter of Israel, and I asked if she was not bothered by the horrors of the Israeli prison camps — the amputations, starvation, torture, and deaths — and she responded that she didn’t know about that…

…which immediately made me think of Tom Paxton‘s song, “We Didn’t Know.” It is an angry, satiric song — and I should add, for folks who want trigger warnings, that the second verse portrays a character who uses the n-word. I’ve known it since I was a kid, when my parents and others were caught up in the struggle to end the Vietnam War and told about the “good Germans”– an ironic cliché, meaning the Germans who didn’t like Hitler, didn’t support the extermination of the Jews, and later insisted they would have been horrified if they had known what was going on… but said they only learned about those horrors after the war… even though all their Jewish neighbors were disappearing and never returning, and the Gestapo was breaking down doors and hauling people away. Like many other people in many other situations, they managed to convince themselves that war is always terrible, and of course a nation at war will do dreadful things, but Germany was still essentially a good nation, even in these dark times, and they were essentially good people… and, in any case, what could they have done?

A lot of Americans felt that way about the Vietnam War. Some actively supported the US invasion; many more believed it was terrible but necessary, and never called it an invasion; many thought it was a mistake, but managed to ignore the brutality and horror the US was inflicting on a small, faraway nation — because, after all, we were the leaders of the free world, defending democracy, as we had when we defeated the Nazis and liberated the concentration camps, just twenty years earlier. The soldiers of WWII were only in their forties and that was their youth; they considered themselves the opposite of the Germans: the people who had fought and died to stop that horror.

Paxton wrote his song in 1965, when both major political parties and the mass of Americans were still backing the invasion, the bombing, the killing and dying to prevent the spread of Communism… and had not yet had their noses rubbed in the senseless, racist, brutality we were inflicting on people we were trained to think were not like us.

By the time Pete Seeger wrote “Last Train to Nuremberg,” it was 1970 and we knew about the My Lai massacre. If you are too young to remember, the short version is that in March, 1968, US troops under the command of the men named in the first verse of Seeger’s song — Lieutenant William Calley, Captain Ernest Medina, and Major General Samuel Koster — entered the small village of My Lai, searching for Viet Cong troops; found no soldiers or men of military age; and burned the village to the ground, while slaughtering some five hundred women, children, and old men, after raping many of the women, including girls as young as ten or twelve. Despite the testimony of a few horrified soldiers who protested and managed to save some people, those facts were suppressed, Medina was given a medal, and the story only became public a year and a half later. The army, which originally reported the massacre as a battle in which “128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians” had been killed, eventually court-martialed and convicted Calley, but not his superiors — and went from denying what had happened in My Lai to claiming it was a unique incident, despite investigations that turned up numerous similar massacres. The song, of course, is referring to the Nuremberg war crimes trials following the Nazi Holocaust.

I grew up with these songs and stories, and the lesson that in many situations, ignorance is chosen and is complicity. When I talk to people who say they don’t know about the horrors of the Israeli prison camps; choose to frame the genocidal bombing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza as defensive, or as normal horrors of war; or accept claims that the IDF is targeting only combatants, these are the songs and stories that come back to me.

We are in a dark time, growing darker. I live in a neighborhood full of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. I have no idea how many of them have green cards or citizenship, or what will happen if the local equivalent of the Gestapo starts breaking down doors on my street — or what I will do, how far I will go, to protect and help them.

I grew up on stories of the Underground Railroad — of people who risked their homes, families, and freedom to aid people escaping slavery. I grew up on stories of people who hid Jews during the Nazi holocaust and helped my mother and her relatives to escape Nazi Vienna. My mother helped a friend’s daughter who was underground in the US, hiding from the FBI. My uncle was with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano and Huey Newton’s link from prison to the outside world. I have marched, gone to meetings, gone briefly to jail, but have done far less — and sometimes felt I was doing less because the situation was less dire, because there was less that an ordinary person could do.

I fear we will soon be facing situations in which many of us “ordinary people” will have only the choice of risking our freedom, homes, and potentially our lives or being remembered as “good Germans,” who looked away and went along.  I just saw a note Pete Seeger wrote, I’m not sure when, or to whom, but it feels like something to share:
Some of the “small things” do not feel small; some can feel dangerous or difficult. Some are, in fact, dangerous — the “good Germans” were facing real pressures, real dangers to themselves and their families if they did what all of us in hindsight agree would have been the right thing. I understand why they felt they were not to blame; I understand why some people may argue they were not to blame. But I was raised on stories of my relatives who were on the cattle cars, shipped east to be exterminated while the “good Germans” pretended not to know what was happening; and the lesson was that there is nothing worse than that.

These songs are not masterpieces; I left out a couple of verses of Seeger’s, because I had forgotten one and another seemed to weaken the message. I’ve never performed them and hadn’t posted them here because they felt like minor artifacts of my distant past… but that exchange with my Israeli relative brought them back into my head, and I can’t get them out. Far from feeling like historical artifacts, they now feel like some of the most timely songs I know.

I first learned this when I was immersing myself in the guitar style of Joseph Spence, preparatory to making an instructional video on his playing — but at the time I had no idea it was more than a charming little ditty with a bunch of sections and variations. On the album I had, it was titled “Don’t Let Nobody Burn Down Burma Road,” which is testimony to the fact that the producers couldn’t understand Spence’s Bahamian accent and didn’t have the internet handy to fill them in on the song’s history… which turns out to be interesting and to give the lyric a deeper meaning than they or I understood.

The first section is a verse that was already described as an “old song” when a Virginia newspaper printed it in 1868:

A bull-frog dressed in soldier’s clothes,
Went out one day to shoot some crows,
The crows smelt powder, and all flew away,
And the bull-frog had no sport that day.¹

The paper printed that verse as a satiric commentary on a senator who had offered the assistance of the state militia to help oust President Andrew Johnson, and it resurfaced from time to time over the following decades in similarly mocking contexts, especially when white soldiers or militias were sent against Black communities — the uniformed frogs firing ineffectually on the black crows… which brings us to the Bahamas.

The first recording of this lyric in the islands seems to be from 1935, when Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle recorded it on Cat Island from a man named Wilberforce Swain, and it was recorded in the 1950s as a popular record by Delbon Johnson — but Spence’s version is specifically connected to a major event in Bahamian history, the Burma Road riots.

The short version of that story is that in the summer of 1942, as the United States entered WWII, two major air bases were under construction in the Bahamas by a mix of imported workers from the US and local hands, and it turned out that the Bahamian workers were being paid only a third (or a half, or a quarter — the reports vary) of the hourly wage paid to the Americans.

The Bahamians protested, their protests were ignored, they finally marched to the government offices in Nassau, and on gaining no compromise, they rioted. At least two protestors were killed, many more were wounded, and over a hundred were arrested, some serving almost ten years in prison. The immediate result was a slight increase in pay and meals supplied by the employers. The longer-term result was the formation of the People’s Labour Party, and the riots are often cited as beginning the movement that led to Bahamian independence.

This brings us to Ronnie Butler, “the Godfather of Bahamian Music,” who recorded a song called “Burma Road” commemorating the riots, which included the old bullfrog and crows verse as one of its various sections. Another section went “Do wa Nanny, how you do?” I have no idea how that related to the theme, nor is it clear when Butler made the record — some sources say 1964, though the version I find online sounds somewhat later — or whether he or other singers were performing versions of the same medley years earlier, maybe even back to the immediate aftermath of the riots.

It’s also possible that Butler got the song from Spence: I assumed Spence was copying his record, since in the “Burma Road” section he sings “Don’t lick nobody” and his back-up singers respond “Burma Road,” as a sort of refrain, and Spence retained that pairing, though the phrases don’t follow logically in one voice — but when I talked about this in an interview for a Bahamian documentary on Spence, the interviewer said Butler was a big fan of Spence’s music and might have adapted his longer version from Spence’s, which, again, could easily be a survival of something sung back in the 1940s.

In any case, it’s a fun song to play, and a good story.

(As for Spence and his guitar style, I have already posted lots of pieces by and about him, including a Spence guitar medley, “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” “Happy Meeting in Glory,” “Brownskin Girl,” “Glory of Love,” and “Sloop John B.”)