I got this one in the authentic oral tradition: my father used to sing it at the dinner table, along with “Sheik of Araby” and “Oh, By Jingo,” and “Lena Was the Queen o’ Palestina” (just because she played the concertina). There were lots of others, including some that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere and that may have died with him. For example, a fake Russian number with the immortal couplet:

Like a balalaika moaning in a minor key,
Some of our friends are sipping samovar tea.
(That’s “bala-like-a” and “some of our tea.” Get it?)

Anyway, this was one of his favorites, and I’m pretty sure it started out being a favorite because his first wife was named Frances and he used to sing it to her. I was from the second family, and the break-up had not been amicable, but he kept singing the song.

I can still sing lots of songs I learned from my father, as well as telling his jokes and reciting his Yiddish dialect recitations. Speaking of which, I really should pronounce the last line of this song in proper Brooklynese: “I wear a skoit that’s got two hundred slits” — like “Dere was toity doity boids at toity-toid and toid street.” Brooklyn was the mythic wonderland of my childhood, and this song was a notable part of the soundtrack.

If you want another touch of my father’s Brooklyn repertoire, I’ve got a dialect transcription of “Jake the Plumber,” his Jewish parody on “The Face On the Barroom Floor,” on my regular website. And if you want to know more about him, I’ve got a page about his life, with links to a couple of his speeches. He was a biologist and professor, as was my mother, and when I took up folksinging people acted like I took a sharply divergent path from my parents. By me, I was just carrying on his tradition.

“The Cuckoo” is another one I got from Jack Elliott, and I still play it more or less the way he did. The liner notes to his record say he learned it from Derroll Adams and got the guitar part from Doc Watson.

The ultimate source for all three would have been the North Carolina banjo player Clarence “Tom” Ashley, who recorded it in 1929. Ashley’s record was pretty popular, and Adams may have picked it up from the 78, or from another banjo player, or from the anthology American Folk Music, compiled by Harry Smith in the early 1950s and issued by Folkways. But Watson would have got it directly from Ashley, who lived down the road from him and sometimes hired him as a guitar player — northern folk revivalists first became aware of Watson when they went in search of Ashley.

As for the song, it’s a compendium of verses from various other songs, but the subtext is a series of oblique references to cuckoldry. The word cuckold is derived from cuckoo — by way of the French cocu and coucou — and the former (a husband whose wife is cheating on him) apparently was named after the latter because the female cuckoo lays her eggs in the nests of other birds, who care for them, leaving her free to go her merry way.

Nothing in the song’s cuckoo-related verses imply that connection, but the reference to building a log cabin on the mountain so that the singer “can see Willie when he goes riding by” suggests a theme like the blues lyric about a singer moving his wife to “the outskirts of town” (another song I’ll get around to at some point) — i.e., worries about male competition. Unless, of course, the singer is a woman and she wants to build a cabin on the mountain so she can see her lover coming, and the cuckoo is just in there because it’s a pretty bird that wobbles as it flies and displays its French heritage in a taste for wine.

As for that wobble… there is a tendency of later singers to shift it to “warble,” but the description of a bird that “wobbles as it flies” makes good sense, while if it was warbling all the time, how does that fit with the claim that it never sings “cuckoo” till the fourth day of July? Besides, another singer on the Harry Smith anthology makes a similar reference — Dick Justice in “Henry Lee,” sings the threat to a little bird: “If I had my bending bow, my arrow and my string/ I’d pierce a dart so nigh your heart your wobble would be in vain.”

From Woody and Cisco, it was an easy and obvious step to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — I don’t remember how that step got made, but my guess is that I was just thumbing through the records at Minuteman or the Coop, reading liner notes, and this one caught my eye. I still sing eight of the twelve songs on this record, and I’m still amazed at the quirkiness of Jack’s taste — he has been typed as an acolyte of Woody’s and a ramblin’ cowboy singer, but this album includes hillbilly yodeling, string band trios, a Ray Charles medley, a comic Scots dialect song and monologue, “San Francisco Bay Blues” — which most of us heard from Jack before hearing Jesse Fuller’s version — and Rev. Gary Davis’s “Candyman,” which I thought I first heard from Van Ronk, but clearly heard from Jack before that.

Jack remains one of my favorite guitar players, and “Railroad Bill” is one of his classic arrangements. I’m sure I’ve changed it some over the years, but it was the early pieces that got me comfortable with the rudiments of fingerpicking, and a piece that pretty much every urban fingerpicker learned to play in the generation before mine, right after “Freight Train” and before “Buckdancer’s Choice.”

I originally suggested Jack’s source was presumably an obscure black singer and guitarist named Will Bennett, who recorded only two songs, “Railroad Bill” and “Real Estate Blues” in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1929. That’s about all I know about Bennett, but I was recently at the Knoxville Stomp, an event celebrating the early recording sessions there, and people seem to be turning over a lot of rocks, so hopefully we will learn more.

A couple of years later, an internet friend named Paul Stamler pointed out that Jack’s source was undoubtedly Hobart Smith, whose guitar arrangement is obviously what Jack, I, and pretty much everybody else plays. I have no idea if Smith got it from Bennett’s recording, or Frank Hutchison’s, or if it was just floating around the Tennessee/Carolina/West Virginia region. In any case, it’s a great song.

This was the first guitar solo I ever learned, through an odd confluence of coincidences. I got Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire LP in Falmouth, where the record store on Main St. had a discount bin and I could easily persuade my mother to take chances on unfamiliar material. Cash was definitely that, for us, and when we got home and listened, my mother was instantly turned off — she didn’t like his hyper-macho voice and the overblown arrangements, and her dislike was cemented by the lyrics of “Remember the Alamo”: “Hey, Santy Ana, we’re killing your soldiers below/ So men wherever they go/ Will remember the Alamo.”

Be that as it may, I listened to it sometimes, and then I was over at Seth Shulman’s house — the one time I ever recall visiting him. Seth had blown me away in fourth grade by bringing his guitar for “show and tell,” and performing a Beatles song. I don’t remember which Beatles song, but it was way beyond my abilities, as was the whole idea of performing anything on guitar — I had one already, but could barely pick out simple melodies. Seth and I were not super-close friends, but we were always friendly and I had huge respect for his guitaristic abilities, which is probably why I was invited over to his house.

I think I was only there once, and we went up to his room and played guitar, and he had the Newport Folk Festival Songbook, which I had never seen. We were going through it, and it had “Tennessee Flat-Top Box” — not only the words and melody, but the guitar solo. It was just an extension of a basic bass run in C, and I could read enough music to figure it out, so I did. Seth and I played together for an hour or so, and then we went downstairs and played for his mother, and then I went home, and that was that — except that almost fifty years later, I still know the damn thing.

Incidentally, Seth is now a respected science journalist, with multiple books to his credit, and he lives in Western Mass, and we really should get together one of these days. I have no idea if he still plays guitar.

This is another I picked up from Sam Hinton’s Song of Men LP — I don’t recall listening to that record much, but when I look back at it, I remember a surprising number of the songs — which I guess means I didn’t love his performances, but appreciated his taste.

This is one of many funny hobo songs that circulated in the early 20th century, of which the most famous were “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” I haven’t found any earlier source for this song than Hinton, who wrote that he’d learned it from his uncle Bubba in Oklahoma, around 1928. [Later: see below*]

Hinton was a popular left-wing folksinger on the West Coast, more or less in the Pete Seeger mold, and I honestly don’t know much about him, except that he was a Marine biologist and a good harmonica player, and happened to lend his guitar to Bob Dylan for the morning ballad workshop at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.

I grew up on stories of bright lads leaving home to seek their fortunes, as did Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Woody Guthrie before them. A lot of people enjoyed those stories without following through on the urge to live that life, and when I took it up for about a dozen years I discovered that respectable people with good jobs often picked me up hitchhiking and went into long soliloquies about how they wished they could pack it all in, hit the road, and be free like me. This lyric exemplifies that attitude, while simultaneously poking fun at it, and is a nice antidote to all the songs about the loneliness of the open road — which is not to say it is more accurate.

As for the line about eating from a tin can — during my wandering years I often carried a can of baked beans in my pack for nights when I got stuck out on the road and wanted something in my stomach. So, during my brief period of riding the rails, I ended up on the yards in Pasco, Washington, with some old hobos, and got out my can of beans, and offered to share, and they were all horrified that I wasn’t taking the trouble to make a fire and heat the can, because they didn’t see why anyone would want to eat cold beans. I’m not sure what the moral of that story is, and hadn’t thought about it in years, but this song reminded me.

* More than a year after I first posted this, Paul Stamler alerted me to an online discussion I’d missed, which sent me to the original recording by Carson Robison, titled “Naw! I Don’t Wanta Be Rich.” Apparently this was also released as “You Wonder Why I’m a Hobo,” though I can’t find any solid evidence of that version… and listening to Robison’s 1930 version on Youtube I find that most of the lyrics are different, so maybe he also recorded a different version, or maybe Sam Hinton’s uncle got it from a different source, or maybe Hinton or his uncle did some lyric doctoring.

One of many songs about the rapacity of millers, notorious back to Chaucer’s time and probably long before.

Along with the singers who became my personal models and heroes, there were some  I just happened to see in concert, or who recorded a song or album that caught my fancy. I think I first heard Sam Hinton on a Newport Folk Festival LP, where he did “The Arkansas Traveler,” playing the fiddle part on harmonica. (I later learned that he held the harmonica in his mouth without a holder, while simultaneously playing guitar.) Then I picked up his Song of Men LP, and learned a few songs from it, including “The Miller’s Will” and a minor masterpiece called “It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus” — Hinton worked at the Scripps Institute of marine biology in San Diego, and the song was apparently composed at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories, where my parents worked in the summer. It was the kind of thing college students composed to amuse one another, back when they were making up silly songs rather than silly raps, and was full of ornate scientific terminology: “A fishlike thing appeared among the anilids one day/ It hadn’t any parapods or cetae to display…” and so forth, as I recall, though I may not recall very well.

Hinton wrote that he learned “The Miller’s Will” in East Texas and its melody resembled “the fine old fiddle tune known as ‘The Pigtown Hoedown.'” I like its critique of filthy capitalists, and also the rhyme of “Ralph” with “half,” a British pronunciation that has died out except among old-school traditionalists like Ralph Fiennes, and which I can’t sing without it sounding weird.

It’s Mardi Gras, so chronology be damned…

The first time I went to New Orleans was in 1987. I hitchhiked down the east coast, hugging the shore most of the way, and it took a few weeks, during which I fronted a country band in Southport, North Carolina; played oldies in a biker bar in Myrtle Beach; jammed with a Dixieland band in Charleston; painted a house in the Georgia Sea Islands; slept in a park in Savannah until the sprinklers came on; had my first taste of boiled peanuts at a roadside stand outside Boston (the Boston near Waycross); sang the requisite Jimmie Buffett songs in a bayside bar in Choctaw Beach, Florida; and don’t remember anything about the rides through Alabama or Mississippi.

In New Orleans, I cadged a bed from my sister’s partner’s mom’s apartment-sitter and hit the streets in hopes of making a little money from the tourists, only to discover how hopeless it was to work the French Quarter solo with an acoustic guitar. Fortunately, I met David and Roselyn…

They were living in a Dodge van with their two youngest kids, Autumn and Stormy, and taking showers at the apartment their middle daughter, Arlee, was renting in the Quarter. They knew nothing about me except that I had just got to town and was stuck, but loaned me a battery-powered amplifier so I could compete with the noise on Bourbon St., and I teamed up with a pair of tap dancers who figured live music might be a good gimmick, and we did OK.

That was the first of many visits — the next time was for Jazzfest, sleeping in a tent in a vacant lot owned by Alan Toussaint, next to the van where Toussaint’s juggling teacher slept.  Then David and Roselyn got a house in the Upper Ninth ward, and that’s where they are still, except when they’re on tour or visiting one of their kids. They celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary a half-dozen years ago, and when Sandrine and I decided to get married, we figured it would be good luck to have them officiate, and they were kind enough to come up to Boston and do the honors.

We’re long overdue for the next visit, and so is everyone else who doesn’t live there — especially today, when David and Roselyn are riding with Rex in the Mardi Gras parade.

If you’ve got the money or the connections, hire them! They’re great! There’s lots more about them on their website.

As for “Iko, Iko,” I’m pretty sure the first version I heard was by the Dixie Cups, and I’m pretty sure it’s still my favorite. This is also the song that sent me to the Congo to study with Jean-Bosco Mwenda — I spent many roadside hours on that hitchhiking trip trying to figure out how to fingerpick this rhythm, and decided I needed help.

This was one of the many songs Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston recorded together, with Woody typically singing lead. My mother was good about buying me records, and among the first I persuaded her to get were the Woody and Cisco albums issued in the Archive of Folk Music series, a budget series mostly made up of old Stinson recordings, from which I also got the Sonny Terry, Memphis Slim, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Leadbelly, Jack Elliott, and Champion Jack Dupree LPs.  The crediting often had little to do with who was singing lead on them — the Sonny Terry, I later learned, was an album called Chain Gang, with Woody in charge–and the Woody and Cisco albums both had songs with both of them, so I had to check to see which this was on. It was Woody’s, which may well have been the first LP of his I ever owned, and he’s the voice I hear in my head, but the verses I sing are from Cisco’s songbook.

Those guys were kind of like my imaginary friends, and I was far from alone: when I met Bill Morrissey many years later, we could harmonize on all the Woody and Cisco songs, and that was also the repertoire Bob Dylan and Jim Kweskin sang when they did gigs together in the early 1960s. In the new millennium, it seems to have become fashionable to refer to Harry Smith’s anthology as the Bible of the folk revival, but in breadth of influence that set never came close to Woody and Cisco.

Most of this material — Woody and Cisco knocking out old songs they both knew — is now available on Smithsonian/Folkways, sounding better than ever, and I wish it was getting more attention. These days Woody seems to mostly be appreciated for his songwriting, and I don’t hear a lot of people talking about his recordings of old-time country music. Of course he was a great songwriter, but what changed my life was his singing and playing — not just guitar, but harmonica, mandolin, and fiddle — and the way he and Cisco worked together.

I play this in an African-influenced guitar style I developed much later, but it is one of those songs I “always” knew. My original source was Phyllis Switzer (later Goldstein), who led a folksong singalong for kids at the MBL (Marine Biological Laboratories) Club in Woods Hole every summer. Phyllis’s repertoire was overwhelmingly drawn from Pete Seeger, so she probably got this from him or the Weavers. They presumably got it from Alan Lomax, who recorded a version from dock workers in Georgia in the 1940s for the Library of Congress, or from Lydia Parrish’s book, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands, or both.

I don’t remember how much Phyllis told us about the song, but she would have connected it to broader labor issues, and very likely to civil rights. I can still picture her standing in the MBL Club, with all of us sitting in a semi-circle on the floor around her, acting the part of the giant in Pete’s story of “Abiyoyo,” or leading us in “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” — an internationalist children’s ditty, consisting of the title phrase sung in various languages, of which my unreliable memory has retained only one verse, which mutates from Japanese into French…

Phyllis also teamed up with Liz Davis to produce annual Gilbert and Sullivan operettas — the one time I took part, I was part of a Japanese chorus in The Mikado, wearing a black stocking to simulate a pigtail. Not a particularly fond memory, though I still remember a lot of the lyrics, but I owe Phyllis the rest of my life because she took a few of us kids to see a concert by Pete and the crew of the sloop Clearwater when they docked in Woods Hole for a couple of days. I remember Lou Killen singing a song about soccer (I’m guessing it was “Footba’ Crazy”) and Jimmy Collier and the Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick singing “Everybody’s Got a Right to Live.” I don’t remember what Pete sang, but seeing him onstage was what made me decide to be a professional folksinger.

In my memory, I was seven when Phyllis took us to that concert, and it was what first got me into folksinging, but according to the history books it must have been 1969, which means I would have been ten and had already been playing guitar for a couple of years. Maybe Phyllis knew that, and that’s why she took me? In any case, it changed my life, and I am forever in her debt.

What better song for a wintry February day than a doleful waltz about a lonely waitress lamenting the tragic death of her sweetheart, on his way home from their final tryst…

This is another I got from Cisco — I’d heard it before I discovered him, sung by Oscar Brand on Everybody Sing! Songs for Juniors, and vaguely recall a verse in which, after the logger freezes to death, they stick him outside as a hitching post — but the version I learned was from Cisco’s songbook, and I still picture the accompanying illustration when I think of it.

I always enjoyed the story, but never gave a thought to who might have written it or why until now — and I’m pleased to find that the author, James Stevens, a self-described “hobo laborer with wishful literary yearning,” actually spent some of his youth working in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest, wrote multiple books about Paul Bunyan, and became the public relations director for the West Coast Lumberman’s Association.

In “Bunk Shanty Ballads and Tales,” a talk for the Oregon Historical Society, Stevens explained that  he composed “The Frozen Logger” for a radio program of Paul Bunyan stories in 1929. The talk also includes a nice example of who the anti-immigrant crowd was targeting back in the 1920s, recalling an editor friend in Oregon receiving “a triumphal poem on the fact that a bunch of dusky foreigners had been fired from a sawmill, leaving only one-hundred percent Nordic type Caucasoid millhands on the pay-roll.” The last verse boasted:

Now our mothers and wives can go and get themselves a seat
In our motion picture show without setting next to a Greek.