I thought I got this from Cisco Houston, yet again, because his name was on the record jacket… but that was just Everest Records’ way of getting extra mileage from the Asch/Stinson catalog. Their Cisco Houston album was a collection of folk songs  recorded by Cisco with Woody Guthrie, usually with Woody singing lead, and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” also has Sonny Terry playing harmonica and whooping in the background.

Aside from that, I just went back and listened to their recording and find that I mostly sing different verses, which suggests that although I heard it on this record, I learned the lyric elsewhere. That’s not surprising at all, because it was a big favorite by the Carter Family, and their records were picked up as sources for singers all over the South — and since Henry Whitter recorded it shortly before they did, it may have already been common before that. I assume the Carters were Woody’s source, since he sang so many of their songs, even though they sing different verses — closer to the ones I sing, as it happens. They also sing a different chorus, which I switched to last year after playing a gig with a Carter Family tribute band, the Wayworn Travelers: I had always sung “Bury me beneath the willow,” but the Carters sing “Bury me under the weeping willow,” and although that feels less “poetic” and doesn’t scan as well, I just found it felt right for me.

Another song I’ve always known — I’m sure we sang it in school, I’m sure we sang it at the children’s sing-along evenings in Woods Hole, I’m sure I heard it sung by Pete Seeger, and the Weavers, and lots of other people, before I knew who Lead Belly was. Along with “Tennessee Waltz,” “Goodnight, Irene” was one of the two biggest hits of 1950, reaching the Billboard magazine Top Ten in versions by the Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, and Ernest Tubb with Red Foley — for people who haven’t heard all of those, I recommend checking out the Tubb/Foley record, which sounds a good deal folkier than the Weavers with their elegant string section.

Of course, once I heard Lead Belly’s version, I adopted it, and sing all the downbeat verses and “I’ll get you in my dreams” rather than “I’ll kiss you…” Some scholars have argued that he is actually saying “I’ll guess you in my dreams,” which they say is a regional/rural term meaning “imagine,” but the main reasoning behind that argument seems to be that they don’t like to think of him singing about “getting” a girl in his dreams, which they consider unromantic — a pretty damning commentary on the scholarly concept of romance.

There is also a scholarly discourse about the roots of the song, but it doesn’t really add much to the story. Basically, there were various waltzes called “Irene” in the 19th century, including one called “Irene, Good Night,” by the black pop/minstrel song composer Gussie Davis, which has a somewhat similar melody, though no shared lyrics beyond the title phrase. My relatively informed guess is that Leadbelly’s uncle, who taught him the song (or someone else, who passed it on to Lead Belly’s uncle), heard the Davis song, liked it, but didn’t remember much of it, so came up with their own song, inspired by it, but quite different.

That was (and is) very common in oral cultures — someone will hear a song they like, and keep singing a snatch of it, and eventually it gets melded with other bits and pieces, and ends up bearing little or no resemblance to the earlier model. (A good example is “Fishing Blues,” which almost everyone knows in a version Henry Thomas created from his vague memory of Chris Smith’s sheet music composition.) As for the bits and pieces, the “Sometimes I live in the country” verse was collected in Tennessee in 1909, so presumably was floating around the South by the turn of the century, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others were as well.

In any case, it’s a beautiful tune, with a lyric that both fits and undercuts the gentleness of the melody — having been a romantic young man myself, I recognize the pleasure of contemplating suicide if one’s love is rejected, and god knows it was a cliche of romantic fiction back to Goethe’s Werther, but most modern songwriters steer away from that particular romantic fantasy.

And for those who want to hear a snatch of the original, here it is:

I have a vague memory of hearing some older guys — they were probably all of 16 or 17 — playing guitars on the steps of the Woods Hole Community Hall, and one of them sang this, and it sounded familiar, so I went home and found it… but I can’t remember if I found it in a songbook or on a record, or which songbook or record it would have been… and the whole memory may be wrong anyway.

In any case this was one of the first blues songs I learned, so long ago that I don’t remember the details. I do remember seeing the composer’s name attached to it fairly early, Richard M. Jones, and not having the faintest idea who he was for a good many years after that.

That’s not surprising, because I was into folk or country blues, and Jones was very much an urbanite and a businessman. After playing piano with various groups around New Orleans, he moved to Chicago in 1919 to work as a music publisher and then as a record producer, in charge of the local wing of OKeh records “race” division, where he had the idea of bringing Louis Armstrong into the studio as leader of a small group, the legendary “Hot Five.”

Jones also made dozens (maybe hundreds) of records with various female blues singers, accompanying them on piano and often providing material, most famously “Trouble In Mind,” which he first recorded in 1924 with Thelma La Vizzo (an otherwise unknown singer) and again in 1927 with Bertha “Chippie” Hill singing and Armstrong playing cornet. Though he recorded it in Chicago, the lyric places it in Louisiana with the reference to the 219 train, which ran from New Orleans into Texas.

The song has been recorded by hundreds of artists, from blues singers like Victoria Spivey and Georgia White to Bob Wills, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, and the Everly Brothers. I probably had Big Bill Broonzy’s version fairly early, and certainly had Otis Spann doing it on his Archive of Folk Music LP — though I can’t remember ever listening to the Spann record, since I was totally into guitar, except for Memphis Slim — and probably had the Brownie and Sonny LP in that series as well… but I’m guessing a more likely candidate was, once again, Cisco Houston. I have no recollection of his version, but find that he recorded it on an album that I listened to a lot in my distant youth.

In any case, “Trouble in Mind” would have been my introduction to the golden age of blues as black pop music, along with “In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down” — though I would have been horrified if anyone had described it that way, because I thought of it as an old folk blues, the sort of thing guitarists played outside their rural shacks… which it was, too, because guitarists all over the South picked up songs from the urban recording stars and both of those songs quickly became ubiquitous in country and city alike.

I’m pretty sure I learned this from Pete Seeger’s American Favorite Ballads songbook, which has it on page 69, accompanied by a couple of  drawings of stereotyped hillbillies and the note, “A famous late-at-night howler.” Seeger lists his source as John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs, which is apparently the first documented source, but the song was known all over the South and Southwest, and far beyond that if one counts the numerous variants, like “Wagoner’s Lad” and “Jack of Diamonds” — the latter being essentially the same song, about the same lifestyle, with emphasis on the card playing rather than the whiskey. I could also count “The Cuckoo,” which I recorded early in this project, and “Kentucky Moonshiner,” which I’ll probably get to at some point — all are dipped from the same deep pool of floating verses, modified to fit tastes, situations, or the quirks of memory.

As to the guitar arrangement: I’ve been saying for years that the point of learning how to play the guitar style of Joseph Spence, the Bahamian master who is one of my favorite musicians ever, was not so much to play his music as to break old habits and come up with new approaches to other songs… but this is one of the first times I’ve put that into practice in an obvious way. It doesn’t sound all that much like Spence, but the guitar vocabulary is straight out of his bag, and I’m really happy with how it came together.

I started singing this when I was a kid, having only the vaguest idea about what rye whiskey might be, and continued singing it on occasion as I aged and began drinking Irish, then Scotch, then Bourbon and other whiskeys… but it was only a few years ago that I consciously tasted rye, and (due to a recommendation from Marty’s Liquors in Newton, based on my stated preference for Laphroig, which was getting priced out of my range) made it my regular choice in the high-proof brown category. As far as I can recall, I have only drunk the branded varieties and my moonshine experience is limited to wheat and corn whiskeys, but I am open to broader experience in this field, should anyone care to take my further education in hand.

I will admit one cavil: why, given the option of the ocean being whiskey and oneself being a duck, would one bother to dive to the bottom, much less to remain there, rather than simply sipping at will from the surface while bobbing pleasantly along?

Another by Buffy Sainte-Marie, though, like a lot of people, I thought it was an old folk song that I just happened to learn from her recording. The story is certainly old, and I also do a Caribbean version called “Shame and Scandal in the Family,” but this version doesn’t seem to trace any further back than Buffy.

I listened to Sainte-Marie way more often than to Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, or any of the other women on the sixties folk scene. There was something about her voice that grabbed me, and her arrangements ranged from nice solo guitar and mouth bow to country bands and some synthesizer experiments that worked better than most of that stuff. I also loved her songwriting — her most famous songs were political: “Universal Soldier” and her Native American protest songs “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone” and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,”  but she also wrote romantic songs, rowdy songs, sexy songs, weird mystical/psychedelic songs, and songs that sounded a lot more authentically traditional than most of the pseudo-trad confections on that scene.

“Johnny Be Fair” has been generally accepted as an Irish folk ditty — I thought it was Irish, a lot of people on the internet think it’s Irish, and she sings it in Irish style — but she is credited as the songwriter and no one seems to be able to find a version that predates hers, so unless somebody informs me otherwise, I’m gonna assume she wrote it. A lot of people on the early folk scene believed that that songs with staying power would gradually become part of the broad, anonymous oral tradition — but this is one of the few examples that has actually made that transition.

And now, my apologies for writing an exegesis that is far longer than the song itself, and far duller… and I recommend that anyone who hasn’t listened to Sainte-Marie’s work take some time to check her out.

Buffy Sainte-Marie was one of my favorite songwriters of the 1960s, and I learned at least a half-dozen of her songs — but, for some reason, my favorites tended to be songs that made little or no sense for a man to sing, like “I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again” and “Soulful Shade of Blue,” which is a plea to her dressmaker to make her a lovely dress that will attract the man she loves.

“Cod’ine” is also from a woman’s point of view, but strong enough to be sung by anybody… the problem being that none of us will ever sing it as well as Sainte-Marie did. This was probably the song that first attracted me to her work, through the devastating performance she gave on a Newport Folk Festival anthology LP.

In a parallel to current oxycodone and Oxycontin addiction, codeine is an opioid that was a common ingredient in cough medicine, sold legally in drugstores, but frequently used to get high. There were monographs on the dangers of codeine addiction as early as the 1930s, but it continued to be widely prescribed and also used in many over-the-counter cough medicines. Sainte-Marie herself was prescribed it for a throat problem in 1963 and apparently became addicted, though not to the extent of the character in her song.

In any case, I learned the song but never performed it, because I was so captivated by her performance — I would try to sing it the way she did, and I couldn’t come close. But for this project I figured I might introduce the song to some listeners who didn’t know it… so here it is. And, now that you’re here, I recommend checking out the original. A terrific, though excerpted, version was filmed at Newport:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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