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| Photo from Jon Batiste's album cover for Hollywood Africans |
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“Thank you again for your tireless work to not only create the most exhaustive resource in existence for the history of this one particular song, but also for opening up a whole fascinating world of folk music to interested inquirers like myself.”
So ended a letter from Stephen Brannen, in which he wrote about a visit to
New Orleans, an encounter with “St. James Infirmary,” and a project that saw him recording songs about “bodily death, corpses, funerals, and graves.”
Mr. Brannen wrote that contemporary society has sterilized death, and removed it from our shared experience. We no longer, for example, sit with the body while family and neighbours gather around. This has had a pivotal effect on our society, on our philosophy, and on our relationships.
He wrote: “Your work helped to spur me on to a project that I titled ‘Mortal Remains’ (somewhat cheekily after the final vignette from the movie ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’). A blog post explaining the project is here…. Some of these songs have their roots in the 18th century or earlier, some were composed well into the 20th; but they all boldly describe a time before the industrialization of human corpse disposal and the ‘disappearance of death.’”
Mr. Brannen has a nice, light touch when performing these songs. They are well worth listening to.
Thank you, Stephen.
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This is the third of three consecutive entries that look at the influence Lesley Riddle exerted on The Carter Family's musical repertoire, and on the development of country music.
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| Lesley Riddle (on right) with Brownie McGhee |
Ralph Peer, on the other hand, was very interested in copyright. He had offered RCA his services for an annual salary of $1, provided he could retain the song copyrights. At this early stage even the top executives at RCA did not recognize their value, and granted Peer his wish. When Peer, at the legendary 1927 "Bristol Sessions," discovered the Carters, he gave them fifty dollars per recording.
In a 1959 recorded interview, Peer stated that he received royalty earnings of a quarter million dollars for three months in 1928 alone. That would be the equivalent of five million dollars today. You can hear him in the short video below.
Before meeting Peer, A.P. Carter was a farmer in Poor Valley, Virginia. When he had free time he loved to disappear, to walk the mountain trails, work odd jobs, meet strangers, listen to their music. And so, when Ralph Peer asked him to collect songs that the Carters could record and copyright, A.P. was doing something he already enjoyed.
This pursuit took him, in that first year, to the black section of Kingsport, about 80 miles from Ashville, North Carolina. Somebody had told him that John Henry Lyons had a song he should hear, “Motherless Children Sees a Hard Time.” Lesley Riddle, a young black guitar player, was visiting John Henry when A.P. showed up.
Lesley (friends called him Esley) played a few songs for A.P., including the traditional song The Cannonball which A.P would record and copyright in 1930: “Oh listen to the train/Coming down the line/Trying to make up/For all of my lost time/From Buffalo to Washington.”
Probably excited by Riddle’s extended repertoire, A.P. invited him to his home in Maces Spring, Virginia, where Esley stayed a week performing songs for the Carter Family. Esley showed Maybelle his manner of playing bottle-neck guitar, and his picking styles. He later told Mike Seeger that he didn’t actually teach Maybelle anything, “she would just watch and learn. She was that good.” Esley later said that he rarely heard the Carters play for him; they were more interested in the songs he knew.
This was the start of a long friendship and collaboration between Esley and A.P. They embarked on about fifteen song-collecting journeys together between 1928 and, possibly, 1936, sometimes for as long as three weeks.
Esley had an excellent musical memory. While A.P. would write down the lyrics, Esley would work out the melody on guitar and later play it back for Sara and Maybelle. The Carters then developed their own arrangements. None of them could read musical notation, but they would (usually minimally) modify the lyrics and add their own interpretations to the tunes.
Between 1927 and 1941 the original Carter Family recorded over 240 songs.
In the chart below I perused copyright records, looking for songs the Carters copyrighted between 1927 and 1931. (The list should expand if you click on it.)
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| A (probably partial) list of songs copyrighted under the name A.P. Carter between 1927 and 1931. By 1941 the list grew to over 240 songs. |
While Ralph Peer had many clients, including Jimmie Rodgers, he made millions of dollars from the Carter copyrights alone. The Carters made $50 per recorded side, and a 0.5 cent royalty on each song sold. Which would be a large figure in those days - enough to afford land, cars, fancy clothes ... but it did not come close to Peer's earnings. Riddle received no song writing royalties from his ventures with A.P. across Appalachia. There is a rumor that either A.P or Maybelle gave Esley a new artificial leg in way of thanks.
I doubt any of them thought much about this at the time. Ralph Peer was certainly happy with the arrangement. The Carters were thankful for the money and the security it afforded. A.P. Carter and Esley Riddle acted out of friendship for each other. For instance if, while going to a restaurant during their travels, Esley was refused a place in the dining room, A.P. would walk out. Friendship knew no colour, and they enjoyed each others' company.
When not travelling with A.P., Esley worked as a shoe-shine boy at a barber shop in Kingsport. He continued that career most of his life, coupling it with crossing guard after he and his wife moved to New York. Esley’s employment opportunities were limited by education and physical disability (as you can read in an earlier post, Riddle had lost two fingers in a gun incident, as well as a leg in an workplace accident).
Esley made no recordings until Mike Seeger
tracked him down in the mid 1960s, and made several recordings of him over the
following years. One album, “Step By Step,” is easily available. Other
recordings and interviews are in the archives of the Mike Seeger collection at
the American Folklife Centre. The elderly Riddle plays bottleneck slide, he
picks intricate melodies, he plays piano. His voice, understated, communicates with the
songs, resides within them while not drawing attention to itself.
It was when he started receiving royalties from his work with Seeger that Riddle began to wonder if he should have been compensated for his contributions those many years earlier.
From their earliest recordings in 1927 to their final recordings in 1941 the Carter Family performed their songs with such a deep honesty that they held much of the country enthralled. The Carters adapted songs of trouble and woe and love and death and family for their contemporary rural audience, who listened and knew they were hearing truths. Life is hard. We are equal, all of us, because beneath and above us lies death. But there is real love in the world. There is community and family and our relationships with each other, and THAT is our saving grace. Motherless children have a hard time ... and don’t we all?? We need each other.
At the beginning of their careers, the Carter Family was made up of four people: A.P., Sarah, Maybelle, and Esley. For those first few years they needed Esley Riddle. It would be a blunder to forget him.
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| Lesley Riddle photo by Mike Seeger |
This is the second in three consecutive entries that discuss the influence Lesley Riddle exerted on The Carter Family's musical repertoire, and on the development of country music.
There are about eight billion people in the world today. In all time, perhaps one hundred ten billion have lived on this planet. There are a minuscule few who escape anonymity.
Sometimes, though, we can build a
memory of one of these disregarded. We can recover fragments of documents,
recount the words of friends, review the historical landscape for a dent, for an
impression of an almost forgotten one.
Lesley Riddle was born on June 13, 1905 in
Burnsville, North Carolina to Hattie Griffith and Edward Riddle. Three years later his mother, along with Lesley and his little brother Grady, moved
in with her father, a farmer. There were eleven people
in that household.
It is uncertain whether his father, Edward, died or left. The 1910 census lists Hattie as a widow. Census reports can be unreliable, though. She might have felt it prudent to be checked off on the form as widowed rather than divorced (the choices were limited: Single, Married, Widowed, Divorced).
On Christmas Eve, 1924, a newspaper report mentions an Edward Riddle who was partying in a house behind the Clinchfield Cement Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. The Kingsport Times reported a shooting: “Oscar Wortham (colored) was shot and instantly killed about 11 o’clock Christmas Eve while he and others were gambling.” Ed Riddle was one of the gamblers and, with a Tom Riddle, declared that the murdered man “did not have any sort of weapon about his body. They further testified that on leaving the body and returning in about 15 minutes, they found a gun in (the murdered man’s) hands.”
It is possible, and reasonable, that
Lesley’s father had a job at that same Clinchfield Cement Plant, and that’s who Lesley
was visiting when he lost his right leg.
We don’t know much about this, but during a
visit to the plant Lesley Riddle tripped and an auger so damaged his leg that
it had to be amputated at the knee. During recovery, he focused on playing his
guitar.
Not long afterwards, maybe two or three
years, he lost two fingers of his right hand. He was nineteen. According to the Kingsport Times, Lesley got
into an argument with his step-grandfather which carried on for hours, starting
on the morning of July 4, 1924. Had they started drinking early to celebrate
Independence Day? Lesley, sporting a 32-caliber Colt automatic, was shooting at
his step-father. Lesley got four shots off inside the house (piercing the front
door) and the argument continued outside where Lesley shot three more bullets.
His step-grandfather then grabbed his double-barrel shotgun and fired a shot to
Riddle’s right hand that blew away his pistol. The Kingsport Times reported, “One
finger was torn entirely off by the shot, and it was found necessary to
amputate another finger at the hospital where he was taken directly after the
shooting affray. ...”
And still he played his guitar, developing a picking style that suited the remaining fingers of his right hand. In 1928 he was playing music with friends in Kingsport, North Carolina when A.P. Carter walked through the door.
More about Riddle and the Carters next time.
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| A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter The original Carter Family |
More about Lesley Riddle next time.
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| Clay sculpture by P.J. Woodland |
O’Reilly reported that Simon wrote this during the much-delayed completion of the Simon and Garfunkel album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Art Garfunkel was pursuing an acting career, and Simon realized this was the end of their partnership.
He wrote “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” which wasn’t about Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a “so long” to Art Garfunkel.
Billie Holiday was born 111 years ago this month. She really liked St. James Infirmary and wanted something similar but ‘original’ that she could take into the recording studio. The result was a song called Tell Me More based on SJI but with writing credit to Holiday herself. Holiday recorded the song in 1940.
In his book Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, Donald Clarke quotes songwriter Arthur Herzog. Herzog is recalling the encounter between Billie Holiday, himself, and his songwriting partner Danny Mendelsohn which led to the writing of the ‘new’ song (all of the following is from Donald Clarke’s book):
I forget where she was living at the time. It made no difference to her because she lived all over the place. She popped up once living a floor under my younger son. He had an apartment on the west 80’s and discovered one day he was living above Billie.
She came rushing in to Danny. She was a great artist. Creative? No. She said to Danny, “Danny, I’ve got a great tune. Take it down for me.”
And she sings da-daing St. James Infirmary. So Danny says, “Yes Billie it’s a great tune but it’s St. James Infirmary.”
“Oh Danny bend it a little for me. Bend it.”
So Danny took out his pencil. Put it in blues time 4:4. Attached a bridge to it and said, “Alright Arthur, give me some words.”
So I popped the first thing that came into my mind “Tell Me More And More And Then Some.” Inane kind of thing. So we scratched this underneath and forgot about it completely.
Six months went by and there’s a record out. “Tell Me More” words and music by Billie Holiday, sung by Billie Holiday, accompanied by the Billie Holiday Orchestra, of which there was no such thing of course. There it was.
“Danny what are we gonna do about this?” This idiot friend has done this to us, and the song isn’t worth a goddamn. I mean St. James Infirmary.”
After she dies Herbie Marks [probably Herzog’s employer/publisher of the Edward B. Marks Music Company] called me up and said, “I seem to remember that you had something to do with this song?” And I’d like to do something with it.
And I said, “Herbie, I can’t prove anything but this song was written by yours truly and the late Danny Mendelsohn.” That’s how it happened. It never made any money.
Herzog is being unfair to their own “hack work.” To say nothing of using the word creative in a very limited sense. Lady had commissioned the song and even told them how to write it. Of course they should’ve got some credit. The song has a strong blues feeling and its lingering resemblance to St. James Infirmary doesn’t hurt a bit — so that it sounds as if you’ve heard it before, but you can’t remember where.
The way the words fall is pleasing and with the arrangements stop time movements and solo from Teddy (Wilson on piano), it’s an unusual love song and a nice record.
The versions of “St. James Infirmary” that appeared in Carl Sandburg’s collection of traditional American songs (The American Songbag – ©1927) were written in 6/8 time. They were ballads, or dirges. One of the significant differences between these songs and the recordings that both included and followed the 1928 Louis Armstrong recording was a change in rhythm – to 4/4 time. With this change the song became danceable. One could dance the foxtrot to it.
The foxtrot originated around 1914 in vaudeville, by dancer Harry Fox. As part of his act Fox was executing trotting steps to ragtime music. Referred to as “Fox’s trot” the dance was set to a broken rhythm (slow-slow-quick-quick). Bit by bit the dance moves changed, and with remarkable speed the foxtrot came to dominate the dancehalls and the music scene—becoming the dance phenomenon of the 1920s. And the 1930s. And the 1940s. One could whirl around the dance floor, or one could execute the steps in the crush of a crowded venue, dancing (oh, dear!) close together and more or less in place. (From the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati: “… there are certain houses appropriate for such dances; but those houses have been closed by law.”)
December 1962, a folk trio performed in Threadgill’s Tavern, in Austin Texas. An Amex portable reel-to-reel tape recorder caught part of their performance, which included “St. James Infirmary.” The trio, The Waller Creek Boys Plus One, consisted of Lanny Wiggins on guitar, Powell St. John playing harmonica, and Janis Joplin on guitar, autoharp, and vocals.
The three were students at the University of Texas. Joplin was nineteen years old, and five years away from the release of her first album.
A dozen years ago I found a physical copy of this song. It was on a flexi-disc, available from Tokyo. Recently I had it copied as a WAV file, and now as a much smaller MP3.
Here it is, below, along with the clinking of glasses and an abbreviated "Walk Right In." The latter was first recorded by Cannon’s Jug Stompers in 1929 and became a big hit for The Rooftop Singers in 1963.
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Janis Joplin at UT in 1962 |
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| Irving Mills and the New York skyline in the 1920s |
Even as vice-president of Mills Music, president of Gotham Music Service, and music impresario extraordinaire, Irving Mills remained a song plugger at heart. He was a teenager when he first got into the music business and, together with his brother Jack, spent his early years pushing for the success of newly published songs. In 1919 Jack received a $500 bonus for his efforts in publicizing the song Dardanella (and creating, in the process, possibly the first sheet music million-copy seller). This became the seed money for Mills Music, Inc.
In the late 19th century pluggers were known as "boomers," for their ability to belt out a song that could be heard over long distances. They would often sing through megaphones, with racks of sheet music for sale in front of them. Or sit at pianos behind 40 foot counters at the back of a department store, where shoppers could ask to hear samples of the sheet music on sale. By Mills' day the boomer had become a plugger. A good one would become a sort of advertising whirlwind who, in the words of Isaac Goldberg, "by all the arts of persuasion, intrigue, bribery, mayhem, malfeasance, cajolery, entreaty, threat, insinuation, persistence and whatever else he has, sees to it that his employer's music shall be heard." A plugger might go to a concert and start singing loudly along with a song’s chorus, with the hope that the audience will pay attention, maybe sing along … and then go out to buy the record.
One of the tools at Mills' command was the recording studio and radio. In 1925 he became probably the first to advertise a song over the radio when he and his co-writer for the song, Jimmy McHugh, calling themselves "The Hotsy Totsy Boys," performed "Everything is Hotsy Totsy Now." Song plugging for the new electronic age.
In 1925 alone, “Everything is Hotsy Totsy Now” was covered by Gene Austin, The California Ramblers, Coon-Sanders Nighthawks, The Keystone Serenaders, Eddie Frazier and his Plantation Orchestra, and others. They made the song into a really big hit. Here is Mills’ client, Duke Ellington, on piano, and Irving Mills on vocals and kazoo.
Once he secured the copyright to "St. James Infirmary" Mills ensured that it received the widest possible airplay - the greater the number of recordings out there the more likely it would be played, the more popular it would become, and the more copies it would sell. (Mills looked at popular music as having a very short shelf life.) So, between his copyright in March of 1929 and the end of 1930, at least 19 versions of the song were recorded. These included two by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra - managed by Mills. For these recordings they were known as the Ten Black Berries, and the Harlem Hot Chocolates. Irving Mills served as vocalist for that last one. Mills Merry Makers (created for recording purposes only), with musicians including Charlie and Jack Teagarden, Harry Goodman (brother of Benny), and Ruby Weinstein recorded a version. Mills could not have had any idea how eternally popular the song would become.
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| The lower half of page 29 of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, Sunday, July 14, 1895. |
