Youthful prejudices surface yet again… Going back to Pete Seeger’s Gazette LP, I was surprised to find “Roll On, Columbia,” since I thought it was something I’d learned in elementary school music classes, along with “This Land Is Your Land,” and had filed it among the wildly overdone Woody songs that I’d better avoid.  But, since I was doing a bunch of other songs off that LP, I figured I’d give this a try, and realized why it got overdone… it’s so much damn fun to sing.

Plus, singing through the verses, I remembered the thrill I got when I first traveled through the Columbia River Gorge, recognizing all those names from Woody’s song: Bonneville, Hood River, the Snake River…

It was 1980, and I was seeing it the right way, riding a freight train out of Portland. I did most of that trip with a Black hobo named Joe, and skin color provides a punchline to this story — because that was about five months after Mount St. Helens erupted, the ground was still covered with ash, we were riding a flatcar, and by the time we reached Pasco we were both the same uniform shade of gray.

Fortunately, Joe knew a flophouse near the yards in Pasco where we could get showers — but that showed me one of the disadvantages of riding the rails: it’s more picturesque than hitchhiking, but you get into town looking like you’ve been riding a freight train.

Speaking of race… while researching these notes, I listened to Woody’s recording, and realized that I have no memory of ever hearing it — in particular, I have no memory of the patriotic verse about US troops executing Native American captives:

Remember the trial when the battle was won,
The wild Indian warriors to the tall timber run,
We hung every Indian with smoke in his gun;
Roll on, Columbia, Roll on!

Which I guess goes to show that even a dedicated leftist who by then had become an ardent believer in civil rights for Black Americans could revert to his white Oklahoma pioneer youth… or that taking a job writing propaganda for US government engineering projects can short circuit someone’s other beliefs… (Woody wrote this one on a government contract, and was being provided with background materials by other people involved in the project.) It’s a pretty weird anomaly in his repertoire, and I just called Woody’s biographer, Ed Cray, to get his thoughts, and he was as nonplussed as I was. I also talked to Joe Seamons, who has been working on a project about Woody’s Bonneville Power Administration songs, and he suggested that someone else may have contributed the Indian-killing verses, as well as the one about Tom Jefferson’s empire-building vision. I’m guessing Woody probably wrote them, and he certainly sang them, but we all owe Pete Seeger a debt for intelligent editing of the version we sing today.

Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 1, issued by Folkways Records in 1958, was one of the first Pete Seeger LPs I owned—maybe the very first. I don’t know why or how I chose it, but I listened to it over and over, and learned most of the songs by heart. Not all of them were masterpieces, by any means—like Broadside magazine, which Pete co-founded a few years later, Gazette was meant to encourage people to write songs about what was happening in the world around them. It was apparently intended as the first issue of a sort of musical newsletter in which Pete would present current topical songs on a regular basis, though it was several years before he released Gazette, Vol. 2, and there was no third volume — by the early 1960s Broadside had picked up the baton and young singers were recording their own songs.

There were some forgettable songs on Gazette—I’m guessing no one on the planet can sing “The TVA Song” or “The Demi Song,” or “Teachers Blues,” or “The Ballad of Sherman Wu,” and I’m one of the few who knows “Martian Love Song” —but also some that every folksinger with left-wing inclinations learned and many of us still remember, like “Pretty Boy Floyd” and this one.

“Banks of Marble” was written in 1948 by Les Rice, an apple grower in Newburgh, New York, and introduced by Pete at a hootenanny within the next year or so. To give an idea of how young I was when I learned this, I pictured the “banks” as banks of a river or canal — which makes no sense at all, but I still have that picture in my mind, of sloping marble banks with water running between them.

The song is a more didactic “This Land Is Your Land,” and I haven’t heard anyone sing it since I was a kid, but when you picture the young Communists gathered around the fountain in Washington Square Park circa 1958, singing songs of the working class struggle, this is what they were singing — and now that “socialism” seems to be an acceptable term in American politics, maybe we’ll be getting some new songs like this.

As through this world you travel, you’ll meet lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.

These days I hear those lines in Woody Guthrie’s voice, but the first time I heard “Pretty Boy Floyd” was on Pete Seeger’s Gazette LP, and I’m guessing that was true for a lot of people in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Pete recorded Gazette in 1958, shortly after splitting with the Weavers for the last time. He was waiting to go on trial for contempt of Congress, after refusing to testify about his politics or his friends — and unlike virtually all the other “unfriendly” witnesses, he set a unique precedent by basing his refusal on the First Amendment, arguing that freedom of speech includes the right to be silent.

It was a tough time for him in a lot of ways, but also liberating: he had stood up to the witch-hunters and was probably headed for jail, so he had nothing to lose by speaking his mind. The result was his first full album of topical songs since leaving the Almanac Singers in the early 1940s. Most of the songs were recent compositions—and if you were looking for the beginning of the protest song and singer-songwriter movements that blossomed in the 1960s, Gazette is as good a starting point as any.

“Pretty Boy Floyd” was the first song on that album, and there were two other Guthrie songs, along with one by Malvina Reynolds, one by Tom Lehrer, and a lot by people whose names and songs  are little remembered, like Vern Partlow and Les Rice. It was on Folkways Records, with a particularly good booklet giving notes and context for each song. “Pretty Boy Floyd” was accompanied by newspaper clippings about Floyd’s death at the hands of Federal agents and a quote from Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath:

I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…. He done a little bad thing an’ they hurt ‘im, caught ‘im an’ hurt him so he was mad, an’ the nex’ bad thing he done was mad, an’ they hurt ‘im again. An’ purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint, an’ he shot back, an’ they they run him like a coyote, an’ him a-snappin’ an’ a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An’ he was mad. He wasn’t no boy or no man no more, he was jus’ a walkin’ chunk a mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn’ t hurt ‘im. He wasn’ mad at them.

I only met Phil Ochs once, at a counter-bicentennial rally in Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1975. My father and I were at the corner pizza place and heard an announcement on the radio about a free concert in Concord with Pete Seeger and Phil and various other artists, and we decided to go, and then we got home and someone had called asking if my father would speak at the rally, which turned out to be what was actually happening. (My father was a regular anti-war speaker — I’ve posted his most famous talk, A Generation in Search of a Future, on my website.)

So off we went to Concord, and we were in the speakers/ performers area, and I don’t remember what my father did for the next couple of hours, because it was my chance to hang out with Phil Ochs. I was a fan, knew a bunch of his songs, and loved the way he sang, the way he wrote, and the cleverness of the spoken introductions on his live album.

Phil had just come back east from a couple of months in a detox facility in California, and he was looking fit and sounding great, and drinking rum out of a pint bottle. There was a tent to the left of the stage, and he sat in a folding chair with his guitar, and two or three of us sat around him, and he sang for us while the speeches were going on, or maybe while we were waiting for the speeches to begin. I don’t remember what he sang, except one song he said was the first he ever wrote, which was impressive as a first effort, and not political, and which I’ve never heard since.

After a while we moved out front—maybe when Pete Seeger sang—and then my father came on to talk. It was one of his best performances—other speakers had been droning on as usual, saying fine things but at too great length, but he understood that the crowd was mostly there for the music, so he kept it short and passionate. A young man standing near us was caught up in his words, and said what a great man my father was—not knowing who I was—and Phil winked at me and said, “Aw, I don’t think he’s so great,” and the young guy was horrified.

The only sour note was when my father said, “My son tells me that the man who wrote ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore’ is here, and I want to say that’s all wrong. We can’t get discouraged; we have to keep marching, wherever and whenever we can.” Or words to that effect; the only thing I remember clearly was my embarrassment.

Phil went up and did two or three songs, including “I Ain’t Marching,” and I was standing with my father, and he turned to me and said, “I had that all wrong, didn’t I?” Which he had, but they both were great that night.

Within a year Phil was dead, and I gather that was one of his last really good nights. And a year after that I was in New York, studying with Dave Van Ronk, who told me lots of Phil Ochs stories — one had Phil wandering home down Bleecker at some crazy hour of the morning, and the owner of one of the local bars corralled him to help move the body of a drunk who had died, so it wouldn’t be found in the bar and cause trouble. In Dave’s version, Phil got Dylan to help carry the body, but I’m guessing that was just added to make it funnier. Dave loved Phil, and loved to argue with him about politics, and considered him brilliant and dedicated and naive in a uniquely American way — Dave said Phil always believed that if he could have a private talk with John Wayne, he could win Wayne over for the revolution.

For a while I wanted to write Phil’s biography, but I was too young to be writing books, and by the time I was old enough someone else had written one. My idea had been to make his life an allegory of the 1960s: young and optimistic, passionately activist, then disillusioned, then dead. Which, in hindsight, was pretentious horseshit… but he was a good writer, and a nice guy the one time I met him, and he had strong beliefs and cared about them, and I wish he’d stuck around.

One of Woody Guthrie’s most timeless songs, unfortunately…

Like most people, I first heard this from Pete Seeger, since although Woody wrote the lyric, he never sang it. He wrote it as a poem, which was set to music by Martin Hoffman, a student at Colorado State University, who sang it for Seeger in 1957 at a party after a concert in Fort Collins.  (Hoffman would go on to be an early inspiration for Judy Collins, who wrote a song for him after his death in the 1970s.)

The poem was inspired by news reports of a plane that crashed near Coalinga, California, on January 28, 1948, carrying a group of 28 Mexican migrant farm workers who had come to the United States as part of the bracero program and were being deported. The dead were buried in a mass grave, with a headstone naming the members of the Anglo crew, but not the Mexicans — hence, “you won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane.” Woody added some names, to personalize the people who died, but only in the last few years have the actual names been publicized, thanks to a poet, writer, and performance artist named Tim Z. Hernandez.

Hernandez is working on a book and documentary film, All They Will Call You, about the crash, the song, and the stories of the people who were killed, and there are numerous articles on the web giving more information about his project, such as this one. Hernandez’s family came to the United States as migrant workers, and he has made it his mission to find descendants of the people who died in the crash, as well as letters and photographs. He was also instrumental in getting a new headstone placed at their grave, with all 28 names:

Miguel Negrete Álvarez – Tomás Aviña de Gracia – Francisco Dúran Llamas – Santiago Elizondo Garcia – Rosalio Padilla Estrada – Tomás Márquez Padilla – Bernabé Garcia López – Salvador Hernández Sandoval – Severo Lára Medina – Elias Macias Trujillo – José Macias Rodriguez – Luis Medina López – Manuel Merino Calderón – Luis Miranda Cuevas – Martin Razo Navarro – Ignacio Navarro Pérez – Román Ochoa Ochoa – Ramon Paredes Gonzalez – Guadalupe Ramirez Lára – Apolonio Placencia Ramirez – Alberto Carlos Raygoza – Guadalupe Rodriguez – Maria Rodriguez Santana – Juan Ruiz Valenzuela – Wenceslao Ruiz Flores – Jóse Valdivia Sánchez – Jésus Santos Meza – Baldomero Marcos Torres

I got this from Cisco, again, as far as I can remember — it’s on his Songs of the Open Road, which was one of my favorite albums, and I can’t think where else I would have heard it.

I always liked the odd juxtaposition of the pretty, gentle lullaby melody and the verse about the policemen — radicals need to be comforted sometimes, same as everybody else. I thought the verse about “in her heart your mother loves you” was kind of sappy, but it seems less so with the passing of years.

This was composed by a Texas singer and hobo named Goebel Reeves, who had a brief run of record and radio success after Jimmie Rodgers made yodeling western songs popular. He wisely headed for New York, presented himself as an authentic western hobo, and was romantically billed as “The Texas Drifter,” “The Broadway Wrangler,” and “The Singing Bum.” He was a pretty singer, and apparently a good entertainer, but these days most of us just remember him for writing this song.

This was the lead song on one of my favorite Pete Seeger albums, 3 Saints, 4 Sinners and 6 Other People — though when I recorded the video I misremembered it as being on Favorite American Folksongs. I also remembered the parenthetic note “yodel learned from the Sons of the Pioneers” as being attached to this title, though it was actually how he labeled the same yodel on his recording of “The Goofing-Off Suite.” Such are the vicissitudes of memory.

In any case, I always liked this one, and tried for many years to do the yodel at least competently, but failed… so I never performed it, because the yodel is kind of basic to the arrangement. But, damn it, I like the song, so I picked it up again for this project and decided to play the yodel sections as instrumental breaks — not a perfect solution, but better than dropping the song completely.

The rest of my spoken introduction is accurate: When I was learning songs from Pete’s records, I had no idea who the Sons of the Pioneers were, and when I first heard them I didn’t appreciate them. I liked Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston (who apparently taught this song to Pete), and their Hollywood cowboy sound was too slick for my taste. (My film tastes were similar, since I had grown up in the later era of westerns, when cowboys no longer harmonized between gunfights.) I still don’t have any of their records and can’t think of a mood when I’d toss one on if I had it, but they harmonized beautifully and Bob Nolan, who formed the group with Tim Spencer and Leonard Slye, wrote some classic western-pop songs, including “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water,” and this one. Plus, I just found out that he spent his middle school years in Boston, en route from his Canadian birthplace to high school in Tucson.

There are a couple of nice videos online of Pete singing this, including one where he and Arlo Guthrie do harmony yodeling, and I still really like the way he does it.  But if you want to go back to the roots, here’s a clip of the Sons themselves doing the yodel and a couple of verses  in one of their earliest films, just before Leonard Slye left the group to make a solo career as Roy Rogers:

Another from the IWW’s red songbook, written by Joe Hill to the tune of the pop song “Casey Jones” — except, like a lot of people on the folk scene, I heard the union parody before hearing the original song, and I still don’t think  I’ve heard the pop song all the way through. Like most people, I got this from Pete Seeger, who I assume got it from the songbook, which was a model for him and the Almanac Singers when they began writing union songs.

It was one of Hill’s first songs to be published, in 1911 or so, and he wrote it for a strike on the Southern Pacific Railroad, though there’s apparently some question about exactly which strike. In his book on Joe Hill, Gibbs Smith says it was almost certainly written for a strike of 35,000 shopmen on the Illinois Central and Harriman lines, the latter including the SP, which lasted from 1911 through 1915.

Smith writes that trains kept running because the train operators — engineers, firemen, and brakemen — belonged to a company union and refused to join the strike, which is the theme of the lyric. He also writes that several trains exploded during that period due to poor maintenance by inexperienced strikebreakers, and quotes a union bulletin on that subject:

Engine 4037 exploded on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Miscellaneous repairs had been made on it by the strikebreakers (scabs) who are employed by this company — an aggregation of moral germs who know no more about a locomotive and its requirements than the cave dwellers knew about the higher principles of mathematics… The engine had been in for repairs. A number of staybolts had been applied, and the engine turned out of the shops without any of these staybolts being riveted. The crew riding in the engine was killed by the explosion.

Once again, an old song that remains all too applicable in the present. The union-busting of the last forty years has brought us back damn near to Joe Hill’s situation — and much as I appreciate some of the rhetoric I’m hearing in the current election cycle, “income inequality” is not going to be seriously addressed from the top down by politicians, unless there is a hell of a lot of pressure on them from the people at the bottom of that equation, which means organizing, which means unions.

Yet another I got from Cisco Houston, written to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” by T-Bone Slim, one of the most popular I.W.W. songwriters, and published in the “Little Red Songbook” around 1920.

Like everyone on the folk scene, I grew up with romantic legends of the “wobblies,” and at some point in the 1980s I even signed up and paid my dues for a while. I think it was Utah Phillips who signed me up — he stayed with me pretty often when he was in Boston, and I stayed with him in Spokane, and he was an outspoken advocate for the O.B.U. (One Big Union). A few years later, I had developed a more cynical view and one evening I was over at Dave Van Ronk’s apartment, and we were well into the Irish whiskey, and I made a slighting remark about lost-cause romanticism in general, and Phillips and the Wobblies in particular. Dave hove himself up from his place on the couch, stomped into his bedroom, stomped back, and slapped his I.W.W. dues book on the coffee table. (I immediately checked to see if he was paid up, and of course he wasn’t, but he considered that the mark of a true wobbly, and he was probably right.)

The Wobblies were strongest in the western logging and mining states, so I’d always assumed T-Bone Slim was from that part of the country, but it turns out he was a Hudson River barge captain. Apparently his name was Matt Velentine Huhta and he was a Finnish immigrant, or at least from a Finnish immigrant family, but that’s about all anyone knows. As his 1942 obituary in The Industrial Worker put it, “Having lived almost a full life of anonymity, Fellow Worker Huhta died that way and was buried that way. We have an idea that’s the way he wanted it to be.”

Like his more famous predecessor, Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim wrote his songs to familiar tunes, the idea being that people who couldn’t read music would be able to pick up a songbook or lyric sheet and already know the melody. It wasn’t just the Wobblies who did that — songwriters of all kinds, including writers of Christian hymns, regularly set new lyrics to old tunes, and in those days no one took them to court for copyright violation.

“The Girl I Left Behind Me” is a popular song and fiddle tune that goes back at least to the 18th century and has been found through much of the English-speaking world. It seems better suited to fiddling than singing, since the notes tumble after one another so quickly that there’s no space to breathe, but it was clearly a favorite of amateur singers — the evidence being eight pages of filthy parodies in Vance Randolph’s collection of bawdy Ozark folklore. (I would print some here, but better to send you all to the library — there are many happy hours to be spent in Randolph’s pages.)

Like pretty much everybody, I got this from Jean Ritchie. I never actually had any Jean Ritchie albums — I don’t know why, since I liked her singing, but that’s how it was — but this was on a four-LP anthology called The Folk Box. I must have got that set fairly early, because I can’t remember not having it, and I have very clear memories of working my way through the accompanying booklet, which had photographs of all the musicians and lyrics to all the songs. It had Dave Van Ronk singing “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” which I knew at one point, and when I look through the titles most of them are familiar, but this is the only song I remember well enough to perform.

Given the eerie lyric, I was charmed when I began investigating and the first evidence I could find of this song was from a book published in 1911 by the Transylvania Printing Company — but, sadly, that turned out to just be the press of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Further investigation — with thanks to the Mudcat discussion group — turned up a broadside titled “The Old Gray Mare” in the Library of Congress, which has a very similar lyric performed by a comedian named W.B. Cavanagh at Barnum’s Museum. Slightly more investigation revealed that Cavanagh was a professional stage Irishman and minstrel, author of plays and folios including Jennie Angel’s Shamrock Songster (1867) and “the laughable farce…entitled Jim Crowe, Alive Again” (1869). And that’s as far back as I’ve been able to trace it.

I find numerous sources that suggest one could trace “Nottamun Town” much further and farther, to the British Isles, some giving regions and dates for its possible origin, and many suggesting it is a survival of old mummers’ rituals. But none seem to include any solid evidence of its existence there before it was reintroduced by Ritchie (or, for the more scholarly, by Cecil Sharp’s Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians — which at first glance seems an earlier source, since he published in 1932, but he collected the song from Jean’s sister and cousin, so the Ritchie women still seem to have a good claim), and all the British versions I’ve seen are clearly descended from hers.  If someone out there finds a pre-Ritchie British version of a substantially similar song — not just a nonsense song with a few overlapping lines, but something at least as close as “The Old Gray Mare” — please let me know.