Yo Yo Ma, Rhiannon Giddens, Michael Ward-Bergeman, The Silk Road Ensemble, and St. James Infirmary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Readers of this blog might recall an entry, three years ago, about a gypsy variation of St. James Infirmary.  The New Orleans composer, accordionist (well, multi-instrumentalist), and performer Michael Ward-Bergeman wrote to me back then: "when I started doing 'St. James' I always felt there was a gypsy music connection both spirit and music-wise." As you can hear on his GIG 365 CD, "St. James Infirmary" sounds ready-made for gypsy musicians. As in much Roma music this SJI begins slow and melancholy, eventually opening into an exuberant, energizing celebration of life that will have you dancing in the streets (or in your living room) - reminiscent of New Orleans funeral music, although with different instrumentation.

Yo Yo Ma and his Silk Road Project commissioned Ward-Bergeman to arrange a version for them. With Yo Yo Ma on cello, Ward-Bergeman on accordion, the Silk Road Ensemble on an assortment of world instruments (for instance, the Roma cymbalom was replaced with a combination of marimba and yangqin, a Chinese hammered dulcimer), and Rhiannon Giddens on vocals, they collaborated on a penetrating version of SJI that transcends both time and place.

The musicians of Silk Road Ensemble are international and eclectic, presenting an amalgam of music that reflects our multicultural world. This new album from Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble will be available April 22. Called Sing Me Home, guest artists include many favourites of mine, including African Kora master Toumani Diabete, North Indian sitarist Shujaat Khan, U.S. banjoist Abigail Washburn, and many many other outstanding musicians from around the globe.

As a taste, here is a just-released video of Yo Yo Ma, Rhiannon Giddens, Michael Ward-Bergeman, and the Silk Road Ensemble performing St. James Infirmary. If this is any indication, the album will be outstanding!


(If you double-click on the video below, you can see it in its proper proportion.)

The Second Edition of IWDtSJI is now available!

Cover (and interior) design
by Pamela Woodland

Finally, seven years after the first edition and eleven years after their precursor, A Rake's Progress, the second (and definitely final) edition of I Went Down to St. James Infirmary has returned from the printer. This edition is 75 pages longer, includes a comprehensive index, and has been extensively rewritten. Information not available back in 2008 has been stirred in. We are very proud of this book.
It is available through our website for $20 plus $9.50 shipping and handling (regardless of destination), or through amazon.com for $35.

Yet another article about copyright

How long can you own a song?
image © Robert W Harwood  ; )

Writing about a song like "St. James Infirmary" inevitably leads one to consider the nature of copyright, including how copyright law relates to societal well-being. This is because SJI never had an original composer, and yet was saddled by copyright restrictions for decades. Those with a financial interest in copyright generally argue that its protection should be extended in order to protect the creative community. The artist is an original talent, this argument often goes, who should be rewarded; that will stimulate others to contribute their original creations.

But there are no original creations.

In January 2016 the "Association of Research Libraries" published a document illustrating where many creative ideas originated. Twain, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolkein, Bowie, Bach, Beethoven, Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, JayZ, Michelangelo, Manet, Picasso are among those cited. (Their 15 page pdf, a very engaging read, can be downloaded here: Nothing-New-Under-the-Sun.)

"... authors do not create in a vacuum" the document asserts. "The raw material for their creativity is existing works. Artists borrow themes, styles, structures, tropes, and phrases from works that inspire them. And if copyright overprotects existing works—if it restricts authors’ ability to build on the creative output of authors who came before them—it will be more difficult for authors to create."

Overprotection by copyright inhibits creative growth; it weakens our society.

In 1988 the U.S. House of Representatives published the following:
"Under the U.S. constitution, the primary objective of copyright law is not to reward the author, but rather to secure for the public the benefits derived from the author's labors. By giving authors an incentive to create, the public benefits in two ways: when the original expression is created and ... when the limited term ... expires and the creation is added to the public domain."

Internationally, the original intent of copyright law was to enrich the public - and so limits were placed on the period in which a creation was protected.

"St. James Infirmary" was removed from the public domain in 1929.Were it not for the fact that it so obviously is not an original composition, it would still be under copyright until 2024. If Irving Mills had been able to copyright the song under today's laws, the date it returns to the public domain would be 2055 - seventy years after his death, 127 years after its initial copyright. This is much too long.

(Mickey Mouse was copyrighted one year before "St. James Infirmary." You can read about that here: How-Mickey-Mouse-Evades-the-Public-Domain.)

COMING SOON: The second edition of IWDtSJI

Portrait of author by Pamela Woodland

We here at Harland Press are excited. We are just about to send the revised edition of I Went Down to St. James Infirmary to the printer. This edition is much expanded, with new information and a full index.

We anticipate that this second edition will be available by late November. Advance orders can be made through the IWDtSJI website - click here. (It will be a few more weeks before the new edition is also available at amazon.com.)

Of the first edition, we received reviews that included the following:

"A goldmine of information, with an amazing cast of characters. The definitive statement on the subject – and a very entertaining read to boot"
— Rob Walker, author of Buying In and Letters from New Orleans

"What better way to honor a great song than to tell a great story about it?"
— David Fulmer, author of  The Blue Door and Chasing the Devil's Tail

"...a fascinating study and anyone who has an interest in the way songs evolve and are passed along through history will find it an utterly compelling read. This critic ... devoured it with relish over a few days, though it will retain a favourite place in his library and remain a reference for years to come."
— Barry Hammond, Penguin Eggs music magazine

"No biography of (Irving) Mills has been written. The best short treatment of his life and work is in Harwood."
— Terry Teachout in his book Duke: The Life of Duke Ellington

"A fascinating and well-written book ... Robert Harwood's book is not the first devoted to one song, but it is the first to cross so many stylistic fences in its attempt to trace the origins of a tune, one which is lost in the mists of time."
— Mark Berresford, VJM's Blues and Jazz Mart


In celebration of this second edition, here's a treat. From the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center earlier this month. (Double click to receive the proper video dimension.)

Have you seen this? Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase dance SJI

Televised in 1958, on the first of Astaire's NBC variety shows ("An Evening With Fred Astaire"). Jonah Jones supplied trumpet and vocals.

Astaire would have been 59 when this was televised. Barrie Chase was 24.

(Double-click on the video to see the full frame.)

A new album to celebrate Groanbox's tenth anniversary!

The roots / world music band, Groanbox, has long been a friend of this blog. If you search through these pages you will find them playing “St. James Infirmary” with flair and authority. You will find (from when they were a duo called “The Goanbox Boys”) a song called “Darling Lou,” which has SJI as its base. You will find Groanbox accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman performing SJI with a gypsy band in Bucharest, and with an experimental classical chamber group in Chicago. And now, Groanbox – grown into a quartet – are celebrating their tenth anniversary with the release of a self-titled CD.

This might be the strangest, the most ambitious of their six releases – and also their most accessible. Two years in the making, it started in 2013 in the forests of Northern Ontario where they found inspiration in the percussive possibilities of fallen trees. “Deep tree diving, oh.” In the echoes of deep bat-rich caves. “Adios Plato.” In the sounds and the quiet of the wild spaces, where a chipmunk took them far from the noise of the Demon Trucks that carry away the harvest of the forest. “Ohhh don’t press your luck, run run away from the demon truck.” In an encounter with a boulder split by the slow-growing root of a tree. “The prisoner of war will break free of the stocks/The root will one day split the rock.” Time spent in an abandoned cabin, said to have once been a hideout for Al Capone. “We’re all dressed in our best luck ... In the older days this room would be filled with smoke ... Ah, I just need a blanket for these bloody finches in my head.” And then into New Orleans earlier this year with its famous ninth ward that is still recovering from catastrophic flooding a decade ago. “Barefoot in the ninth....” With its continuing echoes of Katrina. “Katrina, I wish you’d come and listen to the music coming up through the floor.” That song features guest musician, New Orleans trumpeter Kenneth Terry (written about previously on this blog). Velvet-voiced Venezuelan singer Yulene Velasquez adds vocal flourishes that shape the “The Face That You Deserve” into a sweet exotic charmer. “Each and every drop never stops, till it’s found it’s way/Every single beam finds its meaning in another’s eye.”

There are four instrumental pieces on this album of eleven songs. With titles like “Orchestrated Entropy” and “Graveyard of Pines,” they bristle with original ideas, unusual transitions, atypical harmonies. And with an instrumental arsenal that includes banjo, guitar, assorted hand percussion, accordion, trombone, bells, fife, throat-singing, thumb piano, bird calls, fiddle, piano, and the famous Freedom Boot, these multi-instrumentalists have created a sound that rewards close listening. This is stellar musicianship in which one can hear touches of Eric Satie, gypsy music, African and Middle Eastern rhythms and melodies, blues, New Orleans roustabouts, avant-garde experimentation ... and  much more.

Groanbox took a big risk here. Most of this album was recorded extemporaneously, and the band has rewoven the fabric of their music.

(You can investigate further at the Groanbox site.)


Below, I have been given permission to post an as yet unreleased video about the making of this album. Double-click in order to view it full-frame, or go to YouTube.

And here is Hairy Holler (from Oshawa, Ontario)

To tell you the truth, I have never thought of Oshawa as a hotbed of musical inspiration. Located about 60 kilometers east of Toronto it has a population of 150,000 - including the eight musicians in Hairy Holler.

They have a rip-roaring version of "St. James Infirmary," which I encourage you to watch. It's a treat. A short and informative article about them, along with the video stream, can be found by clicking here. (excerpt: "Fusing folk, punk, blues, jazz, Roma and swing sounds into their unique music, the new video is an equally celebratory affair.")

It sounds like SJI will be part of their second CD release, later this year. Their first album is sold on the Bandcamp site. You can get a sense of their range by listening to, say, the samples for "Bourbon Blues" followed by "Love Is A Dog From Hell." The video below shows off their enthusiasm and musicianship. (Videos embedded on this site are usually truncated, losing some of the right-side edge. So, you might want to watch it on YouTube or at the Canadian music magazine site, exclaim . . . or, double-click on the video feed below.)

This is exciting. And, you know, they might not be out of place in New Orleans.

A Merry Prankster riffs off St. James Infirmary

In this video Ken Babbs (Merry Prankster who was engineer and chief conspirator on that "psychedelic bus" called Further that rolled across America in the 1960s spreading a message that there are many many ways in which we can view our world) riffs off "St. James Infirmary." His lyric recalls his good friend and fellow Prankster Ken Kesey. Kesey died in 2001 at the age of 66. Babbs is still a force to be reckoned with at 76.

Babbs and Kesey are probably best remembered through Tom Wolfe's account of their journeys, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And so they are both forever linked to the popularization of LSD in Amerika. I think they felt that the country and the world, everybody, was in very deep trouble and needed a quick wake-up. They did not hold any notion that this substance could be used for entertainment; rather they saw it as a way of helping us see the urgency of our situation, and the need for personal change.

"Where is the Revolution at?" Babbs asks in this video:

Mercy comes before justice
The carrot comes before the stick
And Love is the only compass
You can trust to guide you
Down the mean muddy mad streets
Of Mainstreet America.

(You can see this full-frame at YouTube by clicking here)

Neil McCormick's 100 Greatest Songs

Neil McCormick - musician and music critic for the Telegraph - recently listed, with comment, his 100 greatest popular songs of all time. "Any such list will always be personal rather than definitive," he wrote, "we all have songs that sing in our hearts."

Not only do we find the usual names from these sorts of lists - Bob Dylan, The Beatles, David Bowie, and so on - but also Vera Lynn, Chet Baker, Julie London, etc.

Way up there at the number 7 spot is a song from 1928: Louis Armstrong and "St. James Infirmary."

Ahhh, Neil, you are a man of taste.

Interested? Click HERE for the link.

Ward-Bergeman and eighth blackbird at the Curtis Institute of Music

I know noble accents
And lucid inescapable rhythms:
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

That is the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

The chamber group, eighth blackbird (lower case is deliberate), are an adventurous sextet with three Grammy trophies who explore the edges of the modern repertoire, from Reich and Lerdahl to, well, "St. James Infirmary." Clarinet, flute, violin, viola, percussion, piano, cello . . . this is a virtuosic ensemble of great depth and feeling.

Recently they met with composer, singer, accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Chicago, for a rendition of a Ward-Bergeman arrangement of SJI. Readers of this blog know of Michael Ward-Bergeman as an accomplished composer of contemporary classical music, as well as a musician deeply committed to roots music, blues, Americana ...

The link below is via YouTube. You can also access this video through Ward-Bergeman's site at http://compmjwb.blogspot.ca/ In fact, he has recently posted the score for this performance on his site. You can read it by clicking here. The performance is eight minutes of stellar musicianship and takes us to many places, including a lively gypsy campfire.

Porter Grainger on film?

Porter Grainger pops up frequently on this blog, partly as the composer of "Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues," partly because so little is known about him, and I hold hope that someone will come forward with more information.

I am aware of only two photographs of Grainger - in one of them he is part of a large group of black composers in the 1930s, including Jelly Roll Morton and W.C. Handy. It is likely that he also appeared in a short film.

Yesterday I was reading an updated Wikipedia entry on Grainger which included these words: "He was also Mamie Smith's accompanist in the 1929 film short Jailhouse Blues." I found the video on YouTube, as an Italian upload. The pianist is briefly visible at the beginning of the film. So ... what do you think? Is this Porter Grainger?

The film lasts just over one minute. Smith was forty-six when this film was made. She was one of the pioneers of early blues recording; in her heyday she was immensely popular, appearing on stage in extravagant dresses while dancers and acrobats spun around her. Grainger was thirty-eight, and at the height of his career.

More on Blair Thomas, puppeteer

Puppeteer Blair Thomas in front of his
stage. (Image captured from Vimeo.)

A year ago I wrote two posts about puppeteer Blair Thomas who, among many ambitious undertakings (such as an adaptation of Moby Dick), has developed a St. James Infirmary puppet show. You can find my original postings here, including one in which Thomas explains his approach to the SJI show.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a video on Vimeo. It is almost half-an-hour long, and documents an entire SJI performance.

Blair Thomas, in white-face, is in front of the stage playing multiple instruments (and, I think, creating sound loops that play on while he attends to the puppet characters), carrying a coffin on his back, flying the unfortunate woman up to heaven. And, of course, he is also behind the stage, pulling the strings that animate the characters in front of a rolling backdrop.

It is a complicated choreography, and a most engaging performance. It makes me aware of how much puppetry has changed since, as a small lad in Belfast, I watched "Punch and Judy" in the park. (Here, in this SJI performance, Thomas references early puppetry techniques. In other works his approach can be very different.)

This is really interesting!  You can watch the video here: Vimeo - Blair Thomas and St. James Infirmary.

Cory Seznec: Beauty In The Dirt

The roots-music group, Groanbox, has been a friend of this blog for some time now. You can find them on YouTube performing versions of "St. James Infirmary," or their own variation, "DarlingLou." Each member of the trio are accomplished musicians (accordionist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Ward-Bergeman, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Paul Clifford, and guitarist/banjoist and multi-instrumentalist Cory Seznec) who branch out into multiple projects of their own, some of them of a most esoteric nature. Earlier this year Seznec released his first solo album, Beauty In The Dirt.

Two of the songs on this album are covers - "East. St. Louis Blues" was written by Blind Willie McTell, and recorded by him in 1933. "East Virginia" is a traditional song with very long roots, recorded by- among many others- banjoist Buell Kazee in 1927 and guitarist David Bromberg in 2007. Seznec credits the influence of string duo The Alabama Sheiks' "Travelin' Railroad Blues"  on his song "(21st Century) Traveling Man." Well, the Alabama Sheiks were in the studio in 1931 for that one. (The Alabama Sheiks recorded a total of four songs - you don't get much more obscure than that.)

I mention this because while Seznec did not include "St. James Infirmary" on this disc, the blog you are reading covers not only the song itself, but the period in which it found popularity. And this, from the blues to Appalachia, is the musical period that resonates throughout Beauty In The Dirt. 

The CD opens with a brief instrumental, "Southern Bound 1" which, in variations, appears three more times as a kind of unifying theme. And then . . . "Dragon Tree." As with many of these songs you might find  yourself scratching your head and searching your memory: it sounds familiar, like a traditional song from the early days of American settlement. But it is an original composition. And so it goes, song after song.

For instance, "Sisyphus" opens with a traditional sort of lyric/melody:

You know I feel the spirit and I'm so glad
You know I feel the spirit and I'm so glad
You know I feel the spirit and I'm so glad
The world can't do me no harm

And then:

The stolen throne of Sisyphus hath crumbled beneath his feet
Condemned to push a giant boulder borne of his own greed and deceit

Even with a lyric like this, the song feels as if it had been written in a bygone time.

There is also a significant African influence here, both in the strength of his melodies and in the restrained use of percussion. Seznec - who spends much of his time in Africa - plays ngoni, a sort of gourd-lute, on some of these songs.

This might be the best album I have heard this year, with superlative musicianship throughout. A chorus from Seznec's "Dragon Tree" gives a hint of how we might approach these songs:

Hey children let's go down

Down to the creek get mud on our feet
Hey children let's go down
And leave the future behind us

To put a bit more of an SJI spin on this, two of the early musicians mentioned earlier, Buell Kazee and Blind Willie McTell, recorded their own versions of "St. James Infirmary." Buell Kazee was - in 1928 - the second person to record the song, which he titled "Gambling Blues." Blind Willie McTell recorded SJI for record shop owner Ed Rhodes in 1956. That recording has never been released.