Back in September I promised a series of contemporary interpretations of St. James Infirmary. We started with a young Rufus Wainwright. This is the second in that series and you will find two variations this time (plus a delightful interpretation of "Simple Twist of Fate").
First, David Mattson.
David Mattson on guitar
Now living in Largo, Florida, David has lived in all but one of the U.S. states, and a few other countries. He currently uses a Joe Beck alto guitar, made for him by a friend. His interpretation of SJI is a charming reimagining, with the refrain "her left hand brushing back her hair" transforming into a tender conclusion. He would use his rewritten SJI when doing soundchecks, or as an opener for gigs, allowing lots of room for improvisation.
This is a beautiful example of how SJI can be adapted by creative artists; always recognizable, always different.
Raygun Carver
Our second example.
Raygun Carver - a band name for Michael Soiseth - released his first album, "Moon Fields Yawning," in 2020. Raised around Port Angeles, he has an idiosyncratic sound, with refreshing interpretations and beautifully crafted originals. Of the latter, his "Everywhere You Go Is Where You'll Be," suggests that regardless of where we live, regardless of where we move, we remain who we are - changing the place does not change the person. Ahhhh, but maybe, changing the person can change the place?
His take on SJI is invigorating.
And, of course, not only traditional songs are open to interpretation. Raygun Carver's phrasing and timing on Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate" opens us up for a new listen. (For instance, cue in to Carver's song at about 1:10 - "like a freight train ...")
Inside cover of Denton & Haskins 1930 "St. James Infirmary." Item should enlarge if clicked on.
In this blog entry - and in more detail in I Went Down to St. James Infirmary - I write about a 1930 New York court case where Irving Mills' music company sued the music publisher Denton & Haskins.
Denton and Haskins (D&H) were selling a song, "St. James Infirmary," that Mills Music had been heavily promoting over the previous year. (These were the early days of song recording when sheet music outsold records.) While the song published by D&H had the SJI title, the lyrics were much different. D&H hired Claude Austin to write new music and William J. McKenna to write a new lyric. (D&H also included current lyrics inside the front cover; see first image.) D&H were really pushing this issue. The cover title was St. James Infirmary or The Gambler's Blues also known as St. Joe's Infirmary. These were different titles for more or less the same song. So, they were confident in their assertion that they could market a song with a title that was already in use.
Cover Denton&Haskins SJI
Mills Music argued that Denton & Haskins was taking unfair advantage of their advertising and promotion, and thereby profiting from Mills' investment in the song.
When I looked into this, the chief librarian at the New York Supreme Court kindly sent about 600 pages of testimony and legal argument. On trial and appeal Mills won the case, but when it was referred to the Appeals Court, he lost, and had to pay costs.
I had interpreted the judgements as supportive of Mills' claim, and only when I received an e-mail from a New York lawyer, Bruce R. Kraus, correcting my interpretation, did I realize that I had read the"dissenting opinion" as the court ruling.
Cover Mills Music SJI
Irving Mills did not appear in court, but submitted a signed affidavit. Among other admissions, he agreed that the song did not originate with him, or with Mills Music, or with "Joe Primrose." But since this was not a federal court, those admissions meant little as far as copyright and song ownership. As Kraus pointed out, this lawsuit served warning that Irving Mills and Mills Music were not to be fooled with; to challenge them could become an expensive proposition - Mills Music had deep pockets and were unafraid of confrontation.
Of course, this New York case was not about copyright, which is a federal and not a state matter. But, then again ... in the arguments for Mills Music, Irving was saying that I own this title, I have expended considerable effort, energy, and money in publicizing the song. It is unfair that another company gets to profit from my efforts.
Maybe it was due to this warning - the warning that Mills Music would aggressively challenge legal submissions - that the copyright for St. James Infirmary was never challenged in federal court, and Mills continued to profit from the song for many years.
As Bruce Kraus succinctly explained, "you cannot copyright a title." Copyright law considers titles or phrases to be too short; they contain insufficient creative effort to warrant copyright.
For instance, the Beatles famously recorded "The End" on Abbey Road in 1969. Two years earlier The Doors had recorded a song called "The End" on their 1967 eponymous debut
album. So did Pearl Jam (2009), Kings of Leon (2010), and quite a few others.
How many songs have been titled "I Love You"?
From Bob Dylan's 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year speech: “I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.” (italics extra)
"Everything belongs to everyone," Dylan said. Utopian. Undeniably true. And that's St. James Infirmary.
Some of the people involved in the complex and intriguing story of "St. James Infirmary."
MOMENTS BEFORE LAUNCHING INTO A PERFORMANCE of “St. James Infirmary” in 1941, jazz great Jack Teagarden referred to it as “the oldest blues I ever heard.” The first timeIheard the song, sixty years later, it sounded utterly contemporary.
I was alone in my apartment and listening to a new CD, The Finest in Jazz Vocalists. Lou Rawls was singing “St. James Infirmary.” I had been a Rawls fan as a teenager, and paid close attention. Rawls began with a mournful preamble, one that — I found out later — was written by Irving Mills in 1930 and is an infrequent addition to the song:
When will I ever stop moaning?
When will I ever smile?
My baby went away and she left me
She’ll be gone for a long, long while.
I feel so blue, I feel heartbroken
What am I living for?
My baby she went away and she left me
No no no never to come back no more.
The band picked up the tempo and launched into the body of that version of the song (there are many versions):
I went down to St. James Infirmary
I heard my baby groan
I felt so broken-hearted
She used to be my own.
Hearing that melody, I shot out of my chair and shouted into the empty room, “That’s ‘Blind Willie McTell’!” It brought to mind, with a jolt, the Bob Dylan song of that name. It’s not that the Rawls' melody was identical to Dylan's, but there were similarities. For instance, both songs use the same basic chords. Thousands of songs are based on those chords, however, so it was probably in the pulse or the phrasing that the similarities revealed themselves. I have played these two songs to friends, who often hear no resemblance. For me, it was a revelation.
Dylan recorded “Blind Willie McTell” in the spring of 1983 for his Infidels album, released in November of that year. “Blind Willie McTell” did not appear on the record, and neither did several others from those New York sessions ("Foot of Pride," "Someone's Got a Hold of my Heart"). “McTell” emerged on no official Dylan recording (bootlegs were another matter) until 1991, when Columbia released a three-CD set of alternate versions and previously unreleased material called The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1–3. This is where I first heard Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell.”
“Blind Willie McTell” is a magnificent piece of songcraft in which both the poetry and the music carry us into broad terrain. Dylan accomplishes this not through conventional narrative, but through a series of vignettes, a cascade of images that, coupled with a compelling melody, conveys a landscape of conflict and despair. The chorus summons the musician of the title: “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” Asked why he had omitted the song from his album, Dylan said he didn’t think he had recorded it right. The first time he performed the song in concert was August 5, 1997, at Montreal’s Du Maurier Stadium, fourteen years after recording it in the studio.
Standing there, listening to Lou Rawls, I remembered Dylan’s words near the end of “Blind Willie McTell” — “I’m gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel.” Here, in a song melodically reminiscent of “St. James Infirmary,” Dylan seemed to be paying homage. I made up my mind to find out more about “St. James Infirmary.” Little did I know that this was the beginning of a very long journey, eventually leading to I Went Down to St. James Infirmary.
As a music lover (and fellow Canadian), I need to mark Gordon Lightfoot's passing. He died yesterday, May 1, at the age of 84.
"Ring Them Bells"
Most remembrances will mention "In the Early Morning Rain," "If You Could Read My Mind," "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," and so on. He wrote hundreds of songs with nary a bad one among them. I prefer to include a couple of more obscure songs. His cover of Dylan's "Ring Them Bells," and "Black Day in July," a song that was banned in the U.S. due to sensitivity over the 1967 Detroit race riots (from which the city has not recovered).
"Black Day in July"
It is difficult to overestimate Lightfoot's importance to North American folk/popular music.
You're a singular talent, Gordon! Keep on singing!!!
On May 12, 2020 NPR published an article by Tom Moon titled, "Trickster Treat: Bob Dylan's New Song Sounds Awfully Old ... And Familiar." The article describes the musical similarities between Dylan's 2020 song, "False Prophet," on the CD Rough and Rowdy Ways, and Billy "The Kid" Emerson's 1954 song, "If Lovin' Is Believing," illustrated with sound files and an analysis of how the musical structures between the songs are both alike and different.
Moon concludes:
"These specific instances might be defined as thievery only by the narrowest definition. In a fundamental sense, popular music is an ongoing conversation between the creators of the present and those who came before -- a circuit of inspiration to which successive artists contribute some kernel of truth, some new way of looking at an enduring element of human nature."
"The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation -- everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It's a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music -- the great artistic experiment of our era.
"Plagiarism is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary - even admirable - tendency, and that is to steal ... to advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.
"... We musicians all stand on the shoulders of each other, our pirate pockets rattling with booty, our heads exploding with repurposed ideas."
Cave asked his collaborator, composer Warren Ellis, how much he has stolen: "Everything, absolutely everything."
Ray Manzarek explains how his band, The Doors, adapted "Ghost Riders In The Sky" to create "Riders On The Storm":
There are thousands of examples: Radiohead "Karma Police" vs The Beatles "Sexie Sadie." One Direction "One Thing" vs The Clash "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." R.E.M. "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" vs Bob Dylan "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Bob Dylan "Hard Times In New York Town" vs Traditional "Penny's Farm."
The Carter Family are famous for having copyrighted songs from the musical traditions of Appalachia after minimally modifying them, sometimes only changing a few words.
In 1931 Cab Calloway had a major hit with "Minnie the Moocher," the song by which he is best remembered today. Cab Calloway, Irving Mills, and Clarence Gaskill cobbled the song together with bailing twine. Its orchestration and melody were from Cab's earlier recording of "St. James Infirmary;" its lyrical content from a turn-of-the-century song about a chimney-sweep and his drug-induced dreams, "Willie the Weeper." ("Minnie the Moocher" told the story of a woman and her drug-induced dreams.)
Famously, George Harrison was found guilty of appropriating The Chiffons "He's So Fine" when writing "My Sweet Lord." Copyright lawyer Charles Cronin has a remarkable website detailing song copyright arguments. A small part of the final decision said:
"What happened? I conclude that the composer in seeking musical materials to clothe his thoughts, was working with various possibilities. As he tried this possibility and that, there came to the surface of his mind a particular combination that pleased him ... in other words, that this combination of sounds would work. Why? Because his subconscious knew it had already worked in a song and his conscious mind did not remember."
Nevertheless, in a judgement that remains controversial, Harrison was found guilty of infringing copyright law. He probably was not helped by his former band mate, John Lennon, saying:
"He must have known, you know. He's smarter than that ... George could have changed a few bars in that song and nobody could have even touched him ..."
"Could have changed a few bars ..."
It's not just popular music. Tchaikovsky based the opening theme of his piano concerto in B-flat major on the songs of blind beggars he'd heard in the Russian village of Kalemko. Vaughan Williams and Antonin Dvorak and Bela Bartok scoured the countryside as song collectors, incorporating borrowed melodies into their own compositions. An Alexander Borodin melody from his opera "Prince Igor" became the Tin Pan Alley tune "Stranger in Paradise."
In a 1916 edition of Green Book magazine (1909-1921) songwriter Irving Berlin wrote: "There has been a standing offer in Vienna, holding a large prize, to anyone who can write eight bars of original music. The offer has been up for over twenty-five years. Thousands of compositions have been submitted, but all of them have been traced back to some other melody."
Berlin continued, "Our work is to connect the old (musical) phrases in a new way ..."
Anything we create is built upon something previous. The initial aim of copyright law was to give people an incentive to create, and then to return that creation to the common ground for others to build upon. Everything is based on something that went before, and so everything belongs to our commonality. Creative people will create. That's the nature of things. Copyright is useful in providing them with income. Extend copyright restrictions too long, though, and it can stultify the creative process. (Present copyright laws are responses to corporate, not individual or public, needs.)
Which brings us back to the beginning of this entry. That someone found a link between a song Bob Dylan recorded and another song ... well, that's music. That's love and theft.
The lower half of page 29 of the Atlanta Constitution
newspaper, Sunday, July 14, 1895.
I wish I was in Dixie; Hooray hooray! In Dixie Land I'll take my stand To live and die in Dixie Away, away. away down south in Dixie
"Dixie" was a Confederate battlecry in the march against the Union. It had not been composed as a battle song, though.
Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904) premiered this song for a minstrel show a couple of years before the American Civil War broke out. As I documented in I Went Down to St. James Infirmary, while he was not the first blackface minstrel, Dan Emmett created the minstrel show(with his Virginia Minstrels) around 1841. At that time he wrote what is probably the United States' first homegrown popular hit, "Old Dan Tucker."
Audiences usually assumed that minstrel songs were either original "negro songs," or written in the "negro style." Really, most were probably modified Irish ballads and jigs. The lyrics were printed in a sort of vernacular, to reflect speech patterns of the slaves. For instance, "I wish I was in the land of cotton / Old times there are not forgotten ..." was written as, "I wish I was in de lan ob cotton / Ole times dar am not forgotten ..."
Emmett's Virginia Minstrels toured Europe (to great reviews) but were short-lived, and by 1859 Daniel Emmett was working with Bryant's Minstrels as songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. For a rousing close to their show the Bryant's asked him for a stirring melody, "a regular whopper that would wake things up." Emmett quickly composed "Dixie" (aka "Dixie's Land," "I Wish I Was In Dixie," etc.).
Two years after its composition, Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter and the Civil War was underway. The song, already popular, caught on like wildfire. Confederate soldiers, inspired by the thrilling strains of the chorus, rushed into battle "to live and die in Dixie."
Much of the lyric had changed in those two years. Racial references were erased, four-line stanzas became two-line stanzas, and the song's comic patter became racially indiscriminate. It had migrated from a "comic" minstrel stage performance into a folk song.
Regarding this, the July 14, 1895 edition of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper explained that, "the words of the song have undergone many additions and modifications during the thirty-six years of its existence, but a pencil copy in the author's own hand gives the following as the original version, as sung in New York in 1859."
And so we read, in one of the original verses, "In Dixie lan' de darkies grow / 'Ef white fo'kes only plants der toe / Dey wet the groun' wid 'backer smoke / An' up de darkie's head will poke / I wish I was in Dixie, etc."
Incredibly (a sad comment on the times they lived in) the article praised the lyrics as having considerable value: "Those who seek for literary excellence in the homely rhymes will be disappointed, but recognition of the author's design gives the key to their merit, and one sees in them unsurpassed reproduction of negro thought and versification."
"Unsurpassed reproduction of negro thought and versification." How could anyone, reading the lyrics, have even thought that, much less published it in a newspaper??
Although Emmett could be an absurdist (as illustrated by these lines from "Old Dan Tucker:" "Old Dan Tucker was a mighty man / Washed his face in a frying pan / Combed his hair with a wagon wheel / Died with a toothache in his heel"), his lyrics were often uncommonly denigrating (again, from "Old Dan Tucker": "Tucker on de wood pile - can't count 'lebben / Put in a fedder bed - him gwine to hebben / His nose so flat, his face so full / De top of his head like a bag ob wool").
Here, as reproduced by the Atlanta Constitution newspaper in 1895, are those original lyrics to "Dixie."
I wish I was in de lan’ ob
cotton;
Ole times dar am not forgotten —
In Dixie lan’ where I was bawn
in,
Early orn ne frosty mawin.’
I wish I was in Dixie — Away!
away!
In Dixie Lan’ I’ll take my
stan’,
To lib an’ die in Dixie.
Away! away! away down souph in
Dixie!
Away! away! away down souph in
Dixie!
In Dixie lan’ de darkies grow,
Ef white fo’kes only plants der
toe;
Dey wet de groun’ wid’ ’backer
smoke,
An’ up de darkey’s head will
poke.
I wish I was in Dixie, etc.
’Dey hoe an’ rake and dig de
lan’
An’ plant de cotton seed by
han’;
When master’s gone dey down will
sit,
De young folks dey git up an’
git.
I wish I was in Dixie, etc.
You court de gals right on de
squar’
An’ smoove de wool in deir curly
hair;
Dey am not drunk, dey am not
sober —
Dey try to faint, but dey fall
cl’ar ober.
I wish I was in Dixie, etc.
Ole Missis marry Will, de
weaber;
William was a gay deceaber;
When he put is arm aroun’ ’er,
He looks as fierce as a
forty-poun’er.
I wish I was in Dixie, etc.
When Missis libbed she libbed in
clobber;
When she died she died all ober.
Here’s a health to the nex’ old
Missis,
An’ all de gals dat want to kiss
us.
I wish I was in Dixie, etc. _____________________________________________ Here are two contemporary (and necessarily sanitized) versions of the two songs mentioned here. First, Bob Dylan, from his film Masked and Anonymous: And Bruce Springsteen, from a 2006 tour:
In each case, double-click to receive the full-frame video.
Bob Dylan was a central figure in the writing of my book I Went Down to St. James Infirmary; it was his "Blind Willie McTell" that set the ball rolling ("I'm gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel ..."). Here are three of my favourite Dylan songs. What would you include?
1. When the Deal Goes Down. 2006. In this song I imagine the singer at the bedside of a dying spouse, lover, holding her/his hand, and maybe whispering closely. ("I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true, I'll be with you when the deal goes down.")
2. Red River Shore. 1997. In which the girl on the Red River Shore represents a youthful ideal - say, a struggle towards understanding, or a religious striving, a Gurdjieffien goal, perhaps. But this is now lost to the aged singer. ("The dream dried up a long time ago; don't know where it is anymore ...")
3. Stormy Weather. 2017 - well, it was written in 1933 by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. When Dylan sings, "I'm weary all the time," you can feel it in your bones.
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