I first heard Townes Van Zandt on his live double album, which I borrowed from my sister’s erstwhile boyfriend, Kevin, who turned me on to a wide range of music I might otherwise have missed in the early 1980s: Public Image Limited’s Flowers of Romance, Rachel Sweet’s Protect the Innocent, the Cramps “Goo Goo Muck,” Johnny Rivers’ …and I Know You Wanna Dance (my introduction to Mose Allison‘s songwriting), and Townes’s Live at the Old Quarter. If memory serves, I was first attracted to that one because Townes did Van Ronk’s version of Cocaine Blues, and then by the low-key, down-beat feel of the performance — including the jokes, which over the years I would hear pretty much every time I saw him. The same couple of jokes, decade after decade, which shouldn’t have worked, but Townes was an unusual performer and his shows were reliably riveting.

He was not barrel of laughs, though I recall him on a bill with Eric Anderson and another singer-songwriter referring to himself as “the comic relief.” As far as I could tell, he meant it, but his affect was so blank that a lot of us figured he’d burnt himself out and was pretty much brain-dead at that point, recycling the same songs and jokes in a monotone, with no clue that the mind that had produced those songs was still in his body. Then, the next year, he came back through with a bunch of new songs that were just as good as the old ones, written by that mind, which clearly was very much still present, somewhere in there.

I think that may have been the year I went to see him with Bill Morrissey at Passim Coffeehouse, and we both sat, fascinated and devastated by the quality of his writing and the hypnotic power of his quietly mournful performance — and, later, Steve Morse, my editor at the Globe, told me about interviewing him back in the dressing room, with Townes apologizing as he spat blood into a paper cup. He’d been mythically killing himself since day one — Kevin spent an evening with him back when I borrowed that first album and reported Townes was drinking Pernod with Ouzo chasers, apparently because he liked watching the alcohol get cloudy as he poured water into it. At Passim he had a new joke: he’d been playing a Unitarian Church coffeehouse and the minister offering him a glass of sacramental wine, and he responded, “Father, I’m from Texas, and in Texas we don’t drink in church.”

I learned a bunch of Townes’s songs, and tried several of them out onstage, and mostly they didn’t work for me. When he sang “Kathleen,” the first verse was devastating:

It’s plain to see the sun won’t shine today,
But I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway.
Maybe I’ll go insane, I’ve got to stop the pain,
Or maybe I’ll go down and see Kathleen.

When I sang that first couplet, the couple of times I tried it, people giggled. Not everybody, but enough to throw me off and convince me I couldn’t make it work. Same with “Waiting Round to Die,” and with age and hindsight I’m beginning to think they were right, not only about me but about the song and that whole Baudelaire-Bukowski drunken depressed death trip, which seems so romantic to a lot of us when we’re 18 or 23.

And yet… Townes always made me believe, and not just me, but everyone in the room. I particularly remember seeing him on the main stage at the Vancouver Folk Festival, with Monte Jones, a close friend who is suitably acknowledged in a later post. Monte was an Indian ex-rodeo rider from the wilds of Calgary and Northern British Columbia, and Townes devastated him. He said Townes had to be half Indian, was obviously alcoholic and dying, looked just like his father, and part way through the show he had to leave because it was too painful.

There’s a smart, powerful documentary about Townes, Be Here to Love Me, and an earlier documentary about Texas songwriters, Heartworn Highways, in which he sings this one and explains that it was the first song he wrote. They’re both worth watching, and I still sing this sometimes for myself, though I haven’t tried it onstage since the early 1980s. I recorded Townes’s “Mister Mudd and Mister Gold,” which is fast and wordy and optimistic. I used to sing “Pancho and Lefty” with Monte, me singing Pancho’s part and him singing Lefty’s. The last time was at what was supposed to be our last gig, but he was too weak to play, so I just sang it for him. Great song, and I’ll put it up here when I get to that part of the story.

Meanwhile, here’s this one, as best I can do it. If it makes you giggle, I understand. I’m not Townes, and I don’t think anyone would want to be. But I sure wish I could see him do another show.

I ran into David Omar White pretty frequently when we were both knocking around Cambridge, and every time I’d make him sing me these three songs. He made them up in the 1940s, during his youth in North Dakota and points west, and sang them unaccompanied — he was a visual artist, best known for a John Fahey album cover, the murals in the  Club Casablanca, and the White Rabbit comic strip, and never fancied himself a singer or musician. He’d just knocked these off for fun, didn’t think much of them, and as far as I can tell most of his friends never heard them.

I happened to get lucky the first time I met Omar. It was at the Idler, a long-lamented club in Harvard Square, where I was playing thanks to Dave Van Ronk — he’d told the owner, Len Rothenberg,  that I was an up-and-comer, and Len booked me for a couple of opening acts, one with Spider John Koerner and the other with Paul Geremia. (I played a third time, alas, among the many performers at the Idler’s farewell concert in 1982.)

The Idler had a front room for drinking and talking, and a back room for drinking and listening to music, which meant you could go to hear your friends or favorites play, and if you got bored or just wanted to chat, you could go out to the front room and have a conversation without interrupting the music — and to make it even better, the music was piped into the front room, so if it got interesting, you could head back and pay attention. As a result, a lot of local musicians hung out there even when we weren’t working.

Bill Morrissey was a regular performer there, and the Koerner gig was notable because Bill came up and introduced himself after my set, beginning an enduring friendship and sometime partnership described in other posts. And at the Geremia gig I met Omar.

My recollection is that Omar was there to hear Paul, but he may have just dropped in for a drink. In any case, he sat down at our table and at some point was inspired to sing his three songs: “The Cowboy Song,” “Great Northern Line,” and “The Gondola Song.” I was entranced, partly because it’s the first and last time anyone has sung me three personal compositions I instantly wanted to learn, and partly because he was “the real thing,” an old guy from the West with some authentic Western folklore.  I was used to hearing easterners like myself pretending to sing like cowboys, and hearing Omar sing these in his dry, understated way, I felt like John Lomax… so, in that spirit, I decided to record him for posterity, and eventually did, though only on a cheap cassette recorder.

The songs are, in their way, typical cowboy/hobo fare, but Omar had a light and philosophical touch that carried over into every aspect of his art. He also kept that western feel through all his years in Cambridge: his White Rabbit comic strip was conceived in the spirit and tradition of Will Rogers, and I wish he was around now to comment on the political craziness — though, wry and pessimistic as he could be at times, I don’t think he would have enjoyed it much.

Along with his three songs, Omar would recite a pair of poems that he’d written in 1948 or ’49. The first went:

Last night in Washington DC
A young man from Kansas blew up the Capitol building,
And when they asked him why he did it,
He said he was just tired of the same old news day after day.
Now, I don’t know what they’re gonna do to him,
But I think they oughta give him
A good cigar, a kick in the ass, and three days in the pokey,
Because if there’s one thing this world needs
It’s for someone to smarten everybody up,
And although he may have gone too far
He sure had the right idea.

Now, way down in Arizona or New Mexico
There’s an Indian tribe that lives
Way down in the Colorado River Canyon
Where it ain’t even been charted yet,
And whenever any poor, stupid son of a bitch
Comes walking in with shoes on his feet,
They all stand around and shoot arrows at him.
I don’t know what it is,
But that sounds funny as hell to me.

The second was shorter:

I bought myself a bushel of beagle pups
Down at the five and dime,
And I put ’em behind the stove to incubate for a while.
And when they grew up
They had long ears and soft eyes,
And bit.

One of the great pleasures of living in Cambridge was hearing those again, during an accidental meeting on the sidewalk or over a cup of coffee. And looking at the murals in the Casablanca and knowing the guy who painted them. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him a lot, and he was always pleased to sing his songs one more time and recite his poems, and seemed pleased that I appreciated them and wanted to preserve them. So here they are.

For more about Omar, check out the online remembrance by David Wilson, publisher of the legendary Broadside of Boston.

I’ve rarely found songs that give equal play to my political and musical tastes, so I was thrilled to hear this one from George Gritzbach. I spent a weekend opening for George at the Caffe Lena in 1982 or thereabouts, and when I played Leon Rosselson’s “We Sell Everything,” he countered with this one off his Sweeper album. It was a similar piece of writing, a wittily worded satire of capitalist marketing and conspicuous consumption — except that it was cast in a blues framework. Aside from Mose Allison, I hadn’t heard any contemporary artists use blues to comment on political conditions, so I took to it immediately.

I took to George as well. He was a tall, solid, handsome guy who wrote well, played well, talked well, ate well, and drank well, and we hit it off because both of us were similarly cranky about the state of the folk scene, which was increasingly dominated by singer-songwriters — which is to say, generally sub-par poetry readings with guitar accompaniment. Gritz was a solid ragtime-blues guitarist, knew his Gary Davis backwards and forwards, but was also a smart writer who didn’t want to be known as just another blues revivalist. He was feeling inspired by what Waylon and Willie had done in Austin, and wanted to start an “outlaw folk” movement, and he seemed to think I might fit in as a kindred spirit. I was more than happy to go along with that, and he tried to get me booked on a bill with him at the Iron Horse in Northampton, which didn’t work out, then got me a gig opening for Odetta at the First Encounter, his home base on Cape Cod, which was a pleasure.

Along the way I learned a couple more of his songs — “The Sweeper and the Debutante,” a shaggy dog story complete with shaggy dog, and “American Car,” which I still think could have been a hit if he’d done it with an electric band, or gotten it into the hands of someone with connections. It was a wryly patriotic rock ‘n’ roller, with the catchy tag line, “Got to go fast, not far — need an American car.”

That came out on Gritz’s next album, All American Song, but with acoustic backing that didn’t do it justice. I sang it for a while, along with yet another topical offering, “Off the Wall Street Blues,” which started, “Wall Street fell again today — look out below!” Then I lost track of him. He was still on the Cape, as far as I could figure out, but there were problems of one kind and another, and my attempts to reconnect hit some dead ends, and that was that.

Thirty-some years later, I still play this song and still recall George with affection and admiration. I just looked up his fan page on the internet, and he seems to be going strong, fronting an electric rhythm & blues band and working regularly on the Cape. I wonder if he still does this one… it sure hasn’t lost any of its timeliness.

In a world full of stolidly written, didactic, and generally plodding political songs, it is a wonderful thing to come across an equally didactic leftist song that is clever and funny, and even has interesting chords. When I discovered this one, on an album called Love, Loneliness, Laundry, I instantly made it part of my repertoire, shortly followed by a bunch of other songs by its author, Leon Rosselson.

That would have been in the summer of 1982. I hitched from Seattle to Vancouver and settled in for what would be the first of many long stays with Maggie Benston, one of my favorite people ever. Maggie was a professor at Simon Fraser, the identical twin sister of one of my mother’s friends and collaborators back in Cambridge, and a member of a political singing group called the Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet. She drove a red sports car, juggled boyfriends with alacrity, baked a chicken dish with forty cloves of garlic, and let me stay in her guest space for weeks at a time, sometimes with her around, sometimes on my own with the cats.

I learned a lot of good music in Vancouver, and Maggie was responsible for more than her share of it. She was the first person to turn me on to Hawaiian slack-key guitar, the first person I knew who had Eric Bogle records, and the first person to mention Leon Rosselson. Leon was completely unknown to me, and to most everyone else in the United States — as I recall, he’d made his first Canadian appearances only the previous year, including the Vancouver Folk Festival. He was the most brilliant lefty political songwriter I’d heard in ages, and one of the cleverest writers of any sort, and Maggie had two or three of his balbums, as well as his first songbook.

I taped the former and xeroxed the songs I liked from the latter, and I see from my surviving set lists that I was playing three or four of them at shows during the following year. This song was by far my favorite, because it was smart and funny and had so many words in such quick succession — from “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” to “I’ve Been Everywhere,” I had an affection for fast patter songs, and “We Sell Everything” is still the most cogent tongue-twister I’ve found.

I had the pleasure of meeting Leon a couple of years later in Saratoga Springs. I’d been booked for a weekend at the Caffe Lena, and Leon was there the night before with Frankie Armstrong, a wonderful British ballad singer, so I went up early to catch their show and hang out. We got along fine, and the next couple of times he came through Boston, he stayed at my place. I also stayed one night at his place in Wembley, London, a few years later, when I was researching my Josh White book. By then he was devoting most of his efforts to children’s books, but he continues to perform and remains a singularly intelligent and reliably leftist voice. I recommend checking out his website, which has plenty of information on his recordings, books, and upcoming gigs.

As for Vancouver, I’ll get back to that subject shortly, but to wrap up one story line, Maggie died in 1992, and I see from her Wikipedia page that Simon Fraser now has a building dedicated to her memory — which is nice, in its way, but no consolation. She was wonderful, and I loved staying with her, and I miss her.

This song was first recorded by the Bahamian Blind Blake  and his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypsos, but a couple of the verses were current when I was in elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, to be strictly accurate, one of his verses (the sheep one) was current in my school, and another (the bear one) was current in my school but not on Blake’s recording, and I added it, because it fit.

Dave Van Ronk often argued that the only true example of folk music in his repertoire was “Shaving Cream,” a mildly dirty ditty he’d learned as a kid in Brooklyn, because unlike all the songs he’d learned from recordings or his fellow folksingers, it had been learned informally through the oral tradition in his home community and was the sort of music people in that community (in particular, pre-teen boys) sang for their own pleasure and entertainment.

When I’ve taught folk music classes, I regularly ask the students to sing or recite lyrics they’ve learned from friends and never heard on a recording or seen in print or video. Almost everybody has a few, and they tend to be mildly dirty — or sometimes not so mildly — in part because dirty lyrics are fun, and in part because the clean children’s rhymes get disseminated by other means.

I first heard this song from a Seattle street musician named Baby Gramps. It was the summer of 1982, as best I can figure, and I’d hitchhiked west and was wending my way to Vancouver, Canada, including a week or so playing on the street in Seattle. I did ok, and met a surprising number of people I’d known elsewhere (including a woman I’d known in Pakistan and one from Cambridge who’d almost led me astray in my innocent youth), but nothing to the crowds Gramps gathered. He was a local phenomenon, and I recall several dozen people sitting on a patch of grass and listening as he sat on a chair and ran through a full set.

That set included this song, and I loved it, so I went up afterwards and asked if he could give me the words. He grumbled, “No, I think of that as my song and don’t want other people doing it.” I replied that it sounded to me like a Blind Blake song — Gramps had kept the basic Bahamian rhythms, and it reminded me of the Blake songs I’d heard from Van Ronk (“Yas, Yas, Yas“) and Paul Geremia (“Jones, Oh Jones“). He grumbled, “Yeah, maybe that’s where I heard it…” but continued to demur.

Which, in the long run, may have been a good thing, since it pushed me to hunt up the Blind Blake record. But at the time I thought he was being an asshole, and ever since have made a point of cheerfully passing on any song I know to anyone else who wants to learn it. Because, much as I may like having a great song associated with me, if I can’t make my version special that’s my own fault, and I didn’t write any of this stuff, so what possible right do I have to treat it as my personal property? Which said, Gramps is a good musician and did a nice version of this, and that’s where I first heard it, and it’s a charming  ditty if ever there was one, and I found the Blake album easily enough… so all is well, and hats off to him, and thanks.

I met Perry Lederman for the first time at my brother Dave’s house in Oakland. He showed up with two bags of groceries, mentioned that he’d just talked a storekeeper out of them, and hung out for a while talking about this and that. He was a guitarist, seemed to know every musician I’d ever heard of, and had studied sarod for eight years with Ali Akbar Khan. So I was interested, and when I got back from India, flying via Bangkok to San Francisco, I asked if Perry was around… only to learn that in the interim he’d sold four hundred tabs of acid to a cop and left the state. Dave thought he was in upstate New York someplace, but wasn’t sure.

That was the spring of 1981, and I spent the first part of the summer hitchhiking across country and hopping freight trains back, then wound up spending a few days on  Dave Van Ronk’s couch in Greenwich Village. Walking down MacDougal Street one warm evening, I saw a guy playing guitar in a doorway. “Wouldn’t it be weird if that was Perry Lederman,” I thought to myself. Of course, it wasn’t — but I still had the thought in my mind when I turned onto Bleecker and passed a couple of guys sharing a joint in a doorway, and one of them was Perry.

He didn’t recognize me at first and was paranoid about being spotted, but I explained that I was Dave’s brother, and he told me he was crashing in SoHo, in a loft with eleven junkies, and wanted to get out of town. His total worldly possessions at that point were the clothes he was wearing — a pair of blue jeans, sneakers, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt — and a Gibson J-185 (vintage guitar folk will note the craziness of that). I was thrilled to have found him, and said if he could get to Cambridge he was welcome to come stay at my folks’ place.

Then I went back to Dave’s and told him who I’d met. “Oh, man! I remember Perry,” Dave said.” He came to me for a guitar lesson around 1958. He was a little skinny teenager, and said he’d been walking through Washington Square Park and saw Tom Paley playing, and wanted to learn to play like that, and Tom had suggested coming to me. So I asked what he wanted to learn, and he said, ‘Well, Paley was playing something like this…’ and played me a very fair version of ‘Buck Dancer’s Choice.’ I told him, ‘You don’t need lessons from me.'” Then Dave added, very seriously: “Don’t bring him here.”

A couple of weeks later, Perry turned up in Cambridge. He stayed with us for about a month, and the thing I remember best is that my grandmother liked him. My grandmother was suspicious of anyone outside the family, and especially anyone she thought might be taking advantage of me, and there was Perry, this little wizened character in a dirty sweatshirt and jeans who looked like a junkie… but she was a serious musician, and somehow — although she was deaf by then and our music was a long way from Chopin — concluded that he was also a very serious musician. She would watch us playing together, and she could see he was giving me something special and important, and she liked him.

After a month or so, Perry went up to visit friends in Vermont, then down to Woods Hole to stay with my ex-half-sister-in-law, Hazel (discussed in a previous post). He got a job with a local carpenter/contractor, Tom Renshaw, who was also a serious music fan. Hazel’s current boyfriend worked for Tom as well, and described the scene when a new guy would come on the crew: they’d be working on a roof in the hot sun, and Perry would be sitting under a tree in the shade playing guitar, and the new guy would ask, “Why is he getting paid to do this work, when he’s spending half his time playing guitar?” To which a more experienced crew member would reply: “He’s Perry Lederman.”

None of that gives a sense of what a great player Perry was, or how many people admired and learned from him over the years. The list would include John Fahey, Michael Bloomfield, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Garcia, to start with, and could go on and on — he was one of the great offstage guitarists of the 1960s, hanging out and playing at parties with friends who were more career-oriented. He was a particularly subtle virtuoso, going deeper and deeper into pieces he lived with throughout his life, largely drawn from Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, Sam McGee, and other early rural fingerstylists. Everyone remembers his tone and vibrato — he had unbelievably strong hands and could hold a bar chord and get shimmering vibrato on one string with his little finger. I don’t know how much of that came from his Indian classical music studies and how much he had from the beginning, but I’ve never heard anyone play like him.

Perry never made a formal album — he was a perfectionist and never felt quite ready — but in his final months we compiled a CD of his informal recordings, which has been issued by his wife Joan, with notes by the poet Al Young (and my song notes). I highly recommend that everybody pick up a copy — hearing me play Perry Lederman ain’t nothing to hearing Perry play Perry Lederman.

As for “Perry’s March,” it was one of his more approachable pieces, from my point of view, because it didn’t demand his incredible vibrato. The first part is adapted from Sam McGee’s “Franklin Blues,” and the main section was inspired by the Reverend Gary Davis’s take on a Sousa march. Perry didn’t have a name for it, so when I recorded it on my LP in 1984, I called and asked him how I should title it. He said he didn’t have a name for it, so I said I’d call it “Perry’s March,” and he said, “Yeah, that’s what Bloomfield called it.”

This year’s award for the most glaring irony in American folklore goes to the title line of this song:
“Michigan water tastes like sherry wine.”

Jelly Roll Morton’s lyric metaphorically summed up the central dream of the “great migration” — that black Americans could escape bad times down south for good times up north. It was not all that different from the dream that made a lot of poor Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans brave the dangers of steerage in search of streets paved with gold — or that made Okies leave the dust bowl for California, where you could pluck peaches off the trees.

Of course, none of those destinations were as pretty as they were painted, and racial discrimination made migration a more effective solution for some people than others. But for a lot of black southern expatriates, for quite a few decades, working for Ford or Chrysler provided a hell of a lot better life than sharecropping in Mississippi.

These days, things aren’t so clear. I recently heard an NPR interview with James Young, the black mayor of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were lynched during the Mississippi Summer of 1964, and it sounds like a lot has changed down there. Meanwhile, up in Michigan, the news has mostly been about water that by no means tastes like sherry wine.

I first heard this song either from Dave Van Ronk or on a Jelly Roll Morton album I borrowed from Dave. At the time, I doubt I gave much thought to its historical context, but looking through the program of the educational concert I gave at the India Institute of Technology in New Delhi back in 1981, I find that I juxtaposed the black and white southern working class experience in the early 20th century by playing this back-to-back with a version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “California Blues” that included a similar verse comparing the water in Georgia and California.

I hadn’t been playing this much in recent years, but the Flint situation brought it back to mind, and I was pleased to hear Jerron Paxton, my favorite current folk/blues/pop artist, sing it this summer with a new verse referring to the news… which, of course, I promptly stole. He plays it on piano, like it should be played, and if you don’t know his work, I strongly recommend checking him out, because he’s a monster on numerous instruments and a singularly compelling and entertaining performer.

I was back in the US for a year in 1979-80, then headed off to Europe again, busked up the money for a plane ticket to Pakistan, and flew Aeroflot from Paris to Karachi. I hitchhiked north to Lahore and Rawalpindi, then across the border to Amritsar, India…

…or, actually, to the road to Amritsar, where a Frenchman who had managed to get his Citroen 2CV all the way from France to India had the misfortune to let me take the wheel and I promptly totaled it in a head-on collision with a truck. The story is a bit more complicated than that, and it wasn’t entirely my fault, but the damage was done. So we spent a few days recovering in Amritsar, then I took a train to Delhi.

In Delhi I got a cheap bed in a shared room with a half-dozen dissolute hippies — among them the co-founder of Celestial Seasonings teas, which he’d started as Rocky Mountain Herbals, gathering the herbs himself.* He’d sold out to a partner and headed for Nepal and parts east, aiming to become an expert in opium. I don’t know how expert he was, but he took me along on one of his local buys, explaining that you shouldn’t smoke the Indian stuff because it was cut with plastic. So we ate it, and it was a very pleasant, low-key high…

…which is, more or less, how I would characterize my stay in Delhi, until the morning I woke up to find that someone had extracted all my money from the pocket of my jacket, despite the fact that I always rolled up the jacket and used it as a pillow.

That presented a bit of a problem, since none of the local hotels or restaurants would hire me to play unless I had a work permit, and the couple of times I tried busking the populace seemed to find me mildly amusing but did not subsidize my efforts. So then I got the bright idea of going to the US embassy and offering my talents to the United States Information Service as a cultural emissary who was already there, and hence cheap.

Oddly enough, they went for it. I designed a concert-cum-lecture in which I provided a capsule history of American music, from ballads and field hollers through blues, country, swing, rock ‘n’ roll, and a couple of hits of the 1960s — notably Otis Redding’s “(Sitting on) The Dock of the Bay.”

I’d worked out this guitar part more or less by accident: I was playing around with the idea of fingerpicking while slapping a steady rhythm on the downbeat, and it seemed to fit Redding’s song — which meant I practiced this a lot as an exercise but virtually never played it in public, because who needed another version of “Dock of the Bay”?

Answer: my audience at the India Institute of Technology. The concert went well, I got my first review ever, praising my “zest” and “educative quality,”** crashed for a few days with some students there, then played a second concert at a girls school, was paid a few hundred dollars by the USIS, and caught a train to Bombay (now Mumbai). In Bombay I did one more embassy-sponsored concert, picked up some work as an extra in Bollywood movies — that was me among the tourists on the runaway bus rescued by Mithun Chakraborty — and as a British policeman in Gandhi, standing on the dock with my back to the camera, restraining the surging crowds as the Mahatma arrived from South Africa.

Meanwhile, I spent my evenings on another dock, looking out towards the fort and playing for whoever wandered by — which, once again was unremunerative, but I met a lot of nice people, got stoned when interested, and even found a bed now and then.

As the song says, with allowances for distance:
“Eight thousand miles I’d roamed, just to make that dock my home…”

*I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that Rocky Mountain Herbals/ Celestial Seasonings story, nor do I remember the guy’s name. He did keep a voluminous scrapbook of philosophical quotations like the ones on the tea boxes, but that’s not exactly proof. I lost touch with him, aside from one postcard a year or so later, sent from a jail in Thailand.

**I take no responsibility for the odder bits of history in the review, or the description of African American work songs as expressing “a joy which no adversity could repress.”

This is one of the rarest songs I know; to the best of my knowledge, it has never been publicly available until now. Which is truly weird.

I heard it on a reel-to-reel tape in the position of Amy Cohen, the friend who introduced me to Dave Van Ronk, sometime in the mid-1970s. The tape was by Erik Frandsen, a terrific guitarist, songwriter, and performer, whom I later saw numerous times at Folk City and the Speakeasy, usually with Dave nodding approvingly at my elbow. I recall Dave explaining that Erik got so good by practicing in front of the television during all the Mets games, so I tried that for a while (albeit with the Red Sox), but never came close to his precision and virtuosity… and that’s not to mention the songwriting.

I don’t know how Amy came to have the tape, which  seems to have been recorded in Chris Smither’s apartment circa 1970 or thereabouts, but I was  mightily enamored of it. The songs included a sixties counterculture rewrite of “He’s in the Jailhouse Now“; a brief a cappella interlude celebrating the virtues of Bromo-Seltzer; Erik’s signature song of the time, “Drowning in Beer“; and this masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek Americana.

For a while I didn’t bother to learn this, because I thought of it as Erik’s song and didn’t see the point. But here we are, more than forty years later, and as far as I know it has never been recorded except for that stray tape. Erik never made an album — I have no idea why, and would encourage any producers out there to contact him and try to change that — though he did a few songs on the Speakeasy’s Fast Folk LPs and now has a bunch of videos online. But by the time I met him in the early 1980s, he’d dropped this from his repertoire.

So I started doing it, citing Erik as its originator, and only recently checked with him and learned that it was written by Tom Hobson — a name I had never heard, despite a lifetime burrowing around the folk and blues scenes. Hobson is no longer among us, but some friends have mounted a nice website in his memory, with several albums of his music and encomiums from associates and students including Jorma Kaukonen, Dan Hicks, and Steve Mann — and that’s another story worth investigating.

Hobson was a legendary Bay Area character who played brilliantly, was known and admired by all the musicians, but never really made a go of it as a performer (a description shared by my friend Perry Lederman, who I’ve written about in my post for “Perry’s March“). And to make the story even crazier, none of Hobson’s albums includes “Fancy-Pants Gambling Man,” nor do any of the remembrances even hint at its existence.

How the hell could a song like this be in the ether, performed by musicians of the quality of Hobson and Frandsen (and who knows, maybe a bunch of other people), and never get recorded? As best I can tell, I’m currently the only person on earth who knows it, and that just doesn’t seem right. So here it is.

(Incidentally, one of the reasons Erik is not better known as a musician is that he has dedicated most of his professional attention to acting — you’ve likely seen him in movies and on the Daily Show — and wrote an off-Broadway show, and all in all has kept pretty busy doing other stuff. Which said, I’m still waiting for that album.)

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

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

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

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

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

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