{"id":5634,"date":"2025-02-01T17:54:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-01T22:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5634"},"modified":"2025-02-01T17:54:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T22:54:47","slug":"flying-dutchman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/flying-dutchman\/","title":{"rendered":"Flying Dutchman (Bill Morrissey)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Flying Dutchman (Bill Morrissey)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ug5ctJKDP5Q?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Bill Morrissey sounded like an old man long before he was one, which was weird, because he looked like a teenager long after he was one.\u00a0 When I met him, he was about thirty years old, fresh-faced, with the semi-long hair that went with being a high school student in the 1970s &#8212; my time, ten years younger &#8212; and that craggy old man&#8217;s voice.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5635\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/older-bill-morrissey.webp?resize=193%2C282&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"193\" height=\"282\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/older-bill-morrissey.webp?w=288&amp;ssl=1 288w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/older-bill-morrissey.webp?resize=205%2C300&amp;ssl=1 205w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 193px) 100vw, 193px\" \/>He aged into the voice, sooner than he should have. Too much whiskey was part of it, but there are always reasons for the whiskey, and so many of his songs express a deep loneliness. I don&#8217;t know where that came from, and at some level I can&#8217;t regret it, since it gave the songs their depth and power, but that&#8217;s a hell of a trade.<\/p>\n<p>This is one of his shorter songs, and a favorite of mine, because of the deft use of language and the way it sneaks up on you. Dave Van Ronk, a mentor and influence for both of us and the person who told us about each other, used to talk about Brecht&#8217;s theory of alienation, which in Dave&#8217;s interpretation worked by pairing a bleak lyric with a cheery tune, so it caught you off guard rather than letting you relax into it.<\/p>\n<p>This is one of the best examples I know of that effect, and in the right setting it&#8217;s a killer&#8230; but Bill found it didn&#8217;t work for him onstage, so he never recorded it and if I hadn&#8217;t happened to sit him down in front of a tape recorder during the brief period when he was playing it, no one would know it existed. I played it onstage a couple of times, which pleased him, but it didn&#8217;t work for me either, back then.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe we were too young. It&#8217;s an older man&#8217;s song, and works fine for me now. I wish he were around to give it another try.<\/p>\n<p>(Bill was a good friend, partner, and inspiration to me, and I know a lot of his songs. I&#8217;ve already posted \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/small-town-river\/\">Small Town on the River<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/texas-blues\/\">Texas Blues<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/barstow\/\">Barstow<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/my-baby-and-me\/\">My Baby and Me<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/oil-money\/\">Oil Money<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/king-jelly\/\">King Jelly\u2019s Good Morning Irene Song<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/candlepin-swing\/\">Candlepin Swing<\/a>,\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/soldiers-pay-morrissey\/\">Soldier\u2019s Pay<\/a>,\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/night-shift\/\">Night Shift<\/a>,\u201d with more to come.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bill Morrissey sounded like an old man long before he was one, which was weird, because he looked like a teenager long after he was one.\u00a0 When I met him, he was about thirty years old, fresh-faced, with the semi-long hair that went with being a high school student in the 1970s &#8212; my time, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/flying-dutchman\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Flying Dutchman (Bill Morrissey)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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It was exhaustingly slow going, but Dave Van Ronk was helpful as ever and gave me an enthusiastic introduction to Len Rothenberg, who had a club in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Bill Morrissey LP","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Bill-Morrissey-LP-300x299.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5512,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/barstow\/","url_meta":{"origin":5634,"position":1},"title":"Barstow (Bill Morrissey)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 1, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I have a lot of favorite Bill Morrissey songs, and this is near the top of the list. I was sitting at the dining room table on Appleton Road with Jeff McLaughlin one afternoon, when Bill came downstairs and sang this for us. He'd been working on it for a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Bob-and-Diana-Suckiel.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":156,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hard-aint-hard\/","url_meta":{"origin":5634,"position":2},"title":"Hard, Ain&#8217;t It Hard (Woody and Cisco)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"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...","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Woody archive of folk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Woody-archive-of-folk.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2627,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/king-jelly\/","url_meta":{"origin":5634,"position":3},"title":"King Jelly&#8217;s Good Morning Irene Song (Bill Morrissey)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 11, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"So there I was opening for Mose Allison at Palms Playhouse in Davis, California, back in 1983, and I wanted to play something appropriate for his audience and obviously couldn't fall back on \"Everybody Cryin' Mercy...\" so I turned to Bill Morrissey. Bill was one of my closest friends at\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Elijah-Wald-rayograph-blog.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2938,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/rosie\/","url_meta":{"origin":5634,"position":4},"title":"Rosie (Bill Morrissey, with a story about Monte)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 22, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"This is another from Bill Morrissey, written after he spent a summer working on a purse seiner out of Ketchikan, Alaska. That used to be a pretty common thing; I knew a bunch of musicians who went to Alaska to work the fishing and save some money to tide them\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Monte-photo-by-Maryse-Zeidler.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2828,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/soldiers-pay-morrissey\/","url_meta":{"origin":5634,"position":5},"title":"Soldier&#8217;s Pay (Bill Morrissey)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Bill Morrissey wrote this around 1982, but it never worked the way he wanted onstage, so he pretty much left it to me, and I only performed it\u00a0 occasionally when I had the right audience. It's like a Raymond Carver story set to music, the kind of songwriting Bill did\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Bill-Morrissey-with-Studs-Terkel.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5634"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5642,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634\/revisions\/5642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}