RIP Leo Crandall

Celebrated innovative cellist, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Leo Crandall died on May 29. Obituary.

In memory, here is a performance with The Gonstermachers of St. James Infirmary.

The Carter Family, Ralph Peer, copyright ... and, oh, Lesley Riddle

A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter
The original Carter Family

The Carter Family, immensely popular musicians a century ago, helped usher in "Country Music." At the time it was labelled "Hillbilly Music." They have a fascinating history, including a long stay in Mexico where they performed live on a radio station owned by an entrepreneur who made most of his fortune by enticing men to travel to his "hospital" near the radio station, and have goat gonads implanted in their scrotums. A cure for impotence. Following a few deaths (and a few miraculous cures) Dr. Brinley lost his fortune and his radio station. The Carter's were popular draws to the station; adverts recommended the treatments.

The Carter Family might be best remembered these days from their relationship with Johnny Cash. Johnny married June Carter; but she insisted he kick his drug addictions first. At one point the Carters, with rifles at the ready, kept dealers away while Johnny went cold turkey.

 The Carter Family was managed by music publisher Ralph Peer, from the time he "discovered" them in 1927. Not long before, Peer had signed a contract with the Victor Recording Company through which he received an annual salary of one dollar but, "my publishing firm would own the copyrights, and thus I would be compensated by the royalties resulting from the compositions that I would select for recording purposes."

In order to make money Peer needed clients who wrote their own songs (and who would sign over to him ownership of their material). This worked well for his client, Jimmie Rodgers, who wrote his own material. But the Carters - Alvin Pleasant (A.P.), Maybelle, and Sara - were not songwriters. They were expert at interpreting Appalachian songs they had been brought up with. Peer instructed them to find and modify already existing songs. These would be copyrighted as new songs, with A.P listed as the composer of both words and melody. The royalties did not come directly to the Carters, though. The money was funneled through Ralph Peer. He gave the Carters a portion of the funds, enough to keep them loyal.

Because of this arrangement with Ralph Peer, A.P. Carter went on many journeys through Appalachia in search of songs they could add to the Carter's copyrights. A.P. found the material in people's backyards and kitchens and front porches, where they played the songs of their ancestors. He found them in hymnals and songbooks. The old songs that survived in the Carters' home state of Virginia and surrounding territory were raw material.

The original Carter Family made over 240 records between 1927 and their break-up in 1943. Almost all of these were based upon songs they did not write themselves (you can count exceptions on the fingers of one hand).

As an example, "Bury Me Beneath the Willow" was based upon a traditional folk song called "Under the Willow Tree."

Here is the opening verse and the chorus from the original:

My heart is broken, I am in sorrow
For the only one I love
I ne'er shall see his face again
Unless we meet in heaven above

Chorus: Then bury me beneath the willow
Beneath the weeping willow tree
And when he knows that I am sleeping
Then perhaps he'll come and weep for me

Here is the opening verse and the chorus from the Carter Family variation:

My heart is sad and I'm in sorrow
For the only one I love
When shall I see him, oh, no, never
Till I meet him in heaven above

Chorus
Oh, bury me under the weeping willow
Yes, under the weeping willow tree
So he may know where I am sleeping
And perhaps he will weep for me

Many, maybe most, Carter songs were like this. The cash machine kept dinging for Ralph Peer, and the Carters received a bit of the profits. Enough to keep them loyal.

For a few years A.P travelled through Appalachia in search of "new" songs he could transcribe and copyright. For much of this time he travelled with his friend Lesley Riddle. Riddle was an innovative guitarist with a prodigious musical memory (A.P. had neither). Riddle taught A.P. to play guitar - but A.P. never progressed beyond rudiments. Riddle taught Maybelle a picking method which became famous as "the Carter scratch," which became the basis for Johnny Cash's musical style. In the Appalachian homes they visited, A.P. scribbled down the lyrics while Riddle memorized the melody and the chord changes, and then taught them to Maybelle and Sara. Riddle (who we shall revisit in an upcoming entry) was black and, due to his association with the Carters, one of the formative personalities in Country music. He is not much remembered today, though. I wonder why?

Bob Dylan, Jimmie Rodgers, Duke Ellington, etc., and the story of St. James Infirmary

Some of the characters who inhabit
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary

The history of St. James Infirmary is fascinating and complicated. Some years ago I put together an image (based on a painting by Albert Gleizes) showing a few of the people who have been central to the song, its history and its evolution. Some of the faces will be familiar to you. In no particular order the ones portrayed here are Phil Baxter, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie McTell, Don Redman, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Carl 'The Squeakin' Deacon' Moore, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Mamie Smith, Emmett Miller, Irving Mills, Duke Ellington, Porter Grainger, Jimmie 'Blue Yodeler' Rodgers. The picture also references the road, the city, sex, fate, magic, OKeh records (who introduced the notion of blues/race music to the world), mountains of mystery, trial, possibility...and music.

Here are excerpts from reviews of I Went Down to St. James Infirmary:

"A sparkling book."

"A goldmine of information."

"This is not the first book 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."

"The definitive statement on the subject - and a very entertaining read."

"It will retain a favourite place in my library."

"The book: wow. I'd picked up bits of the story from the blog, but the book was an absolute feast. These are wonderful stories and you tell them so beautifully."

"This work is unique, so if you don't have it, get it."

"I am thrilled beyond belief at your great story. You found things out about (my husband) Carl Moore that I didn't even know."

"The best treatment of Irving Mills life and work is in this book."

The book can, of course, be purchased here: I Went Down to St. James Infirmary

Irving Mills' Relentless Drive to Promote the Best Jazz Music

 

Irving Mills (c. 1982)
by Bruce Fessier

I have exchanged emails with Irving Mills' granddaughter, Beverly Mills Keys, for over a decade. Ms. Keys recently sent me a link to a remarkable article about Irving Mills by writer Tracy Conrad. 

 

Irving Mills, as you know, was the pseudonymous Joe Primrose, supposed composer of "St. James Infirmary." He was also a tireless promoter of musicians, a successful song publisher, and so on. Mills is part of a fascinating tale, recounted in my book  I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. 

 

Anecdotes about Mills are not easy to come by. He kept much of his life private, and so it is a pleasure to read about him. He was a significant force in the shaping of American music. Ms. Conrad has kindly permitted me to reprint her article on this blog:

* * *

Newspaperman Bruce Fessier chronicled an amazing story in 1982 as told to him by his friend Irving Mills. By then, Mills had retired to a big house in the south of Palm Springs and would regale Fessier with stories of the golden age of jazz. After all, Mills had been there for some of the most important moments, or really, had worked tirelessly to make many of those moments happen. 

For instance, Mills wrote the lyrics to “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) in 1929, but as Fessier recorded, Mills said it happened by accident. “‘I had an engagement in Chicago for a café roadhouse that opened in the summer, and prior to the opening, he (Ellington) played for six weeks in theaters. After six weeks, doing four shows a day, five on Sundays, they became very stagey. I noticed the dancers weren’t dancing right. It wasn’t Duke Ellington’s dance music.’ Shocked after his first viewing, Mills said he ‘ran back to the dressing room’ and asked Ellington why he had changed his music. Ellington said the people liked it, but Mills told him to stop. "I said, 'It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,'" he recalled. And he said, “You know, Irving, you’ve got a lyric there. Let’s write it up." 

And write it up they sure did. Mills added some more lines, and Ellington’s trumpet player Cootie Williams came in with the music, "Do-whacka-do-whacka-do-whacka-do."
 

Born at the end of the 19th century in Ukraine and having immigrated to the United States as a child, Mills had a spectacular, if unlikely, career. His father was a milliner who died in 1905 when Mills was just 11 years old, forcing him and his brother Jack to work at exceedingly odd jobs including busboy, wallpaper salesman, telephone operator, and “song demonstrator” to support the family. 

By 1919, Irving and Jack Mills were in business together publishing music. Soon, they were the kings of Tin Pan Alley, cultivating songwriters and then hawking those tunes to radio stations. Both Irving and Jack discovered a number of first-rate songwriters like Sammy Fain, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. (Carmichael and McHugh would also retire to the desert.)

But Mills also had a keen eye for performers, and started, or boosted, the careers of Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, Lena Horne and the Dorsey Brothers. But most importantly, one evening in New York around 1925, Mills went to the Club Kentucky on West 49th between 7th and Broadway. Playing there was a small band of six musicians in from Washington, D.C., led by Duke Ellington. According to lore, Mills promptly signed Ellington, launching his career by managing to get the band booked uptown at the Cotton Club, and broadcasting those shows on radio.

Fessier noted that Mills did more than almost anybody to promote black musicians and singers. He was one of the first to record black and white musicians together, using twelve white musicians and the Duke Ellington Orchestra for a recording of “St. Louis Blues,” and was powerful enough to force the music label to release the record over their objections. He booked previously all-white auditoriums for black performers. Fessier recounts that one of the finest things he thinks Mills ever did was to hire a private Pullman car, with proper dining room and sleeping quarters, to take the Ellington band through southern states in order to spare them from having to endure the harsh segregation of restaurants and hotels. (Many Ellington compositions are known for conjuring train imagery.)

As was the practice at the time, many of Ellington’s most famous tunes were also credited to Mills, who was an able lyricist, including “Mood Indigo,” “(In My) Solitude” and “Sophisticated Lady.”

Mills only produced a single movie, “Stormy Weather” in 1943 for 20th Century Fox starring an all-black cast including Lena Horne, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.

In addition to relentless promotion of the best talent, black or white, Mills was an innovator. He printed “small orchestrations” transcribed off a record, so that non-professional musicians could see how great improvised solos were constructed. And he conceived of the concept of a band within a band, a rhythm section who could go into the studio without the full orchestra and lay down cutting-edge sounds.

Mills was constantly making records, arranging tunes, selling and merging companies, until he was the head of what would become Columbia Records. At the time of his last sale, the total catalog of songs was estimated to number in excess of 25,000, of which, 1,500 were still producing royalties. In 1964, Mills was enjoying royalties in excess of one million dollars per year, equivalent to about eleven million today, and the company encompassed 20 music publishing subsidiaries as well as outlets in Britain, Brazil, Canada, France, then West Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain.

After that spectacular career, Mills retired to Palm Springs, but was still busy creating. Fessier recalls, “I was at Irving's house one night in December of 1981 when Hoagy Carmichael called. Irving had published Hoagy's ‘Stardust’ in 1929 after challenging his stable of lyricists to come up with the right words for Hoagy's beautiful melody. In the late 1970s, Irving said he couldn't find the right piano jazz for the kind of cocktail parties he liked to throw, so he produced a series of 15 albums featuring the music of some of his favorite jazz and pop composers. He called them ‘Musical Cocktail Records’ (a phrase he trademarked) featuring great pianists playing the music of Hoagy, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Jimmy Van Heusen.”

Fessier continues, “Irving went into business mode when Hoagy called, telling him he wanted to promote the record he had made with him, featuring Paul Smith. Irving didn't get the response he wanted and I asked him what Hoagy said. He said Hoagy's reaction was, ‘Irving, are you still working?’” Indeed, he was. Nice work if you can get it.

Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.

STACK-O-LEE - a new history

 

Image, 1910, courtesy Eric McHenry

SJI, of course, is not the only song with a long and convoluted history.

I thought I had tracked the earliest sheet music for "Stack-O-Lee Blues." I had discovered a silly song, copyrighted in 1920, showing that "Stack-O-Lee" or "Stagger Lee" or any variation of these titles had been performed long before anything else had been printed or recorded. It was an old old song.

But, from the 1920 sheet music, it was obviously already well-known:

"Stack O' Lee Blues. Play it over for me, I go crazy when I hear it, anywhere I may be, I long to hear them play that Stack O' Lee. Eeny, meeny, miney mo, they'll play some more, now let us catch a nigger by the toe."

And so on. Horrible.

A couple of days ago a friend sent me a really interesting article from The American Scholar website, detailing Eric McHenry's search for the origins of "Stack-O-Lee Blues." This is brilliant stuff, and a tale more than well worth the read!

Was Lee Shelton (aka Stacka Lee) really a bad man, the devil that Mississippi John Hurt portrayed? Did he ever exist? Was the man he killed, William Lyons, a real person? Did Lyons really have "two little babies and a darlin'' lovin' wife"?

McHenry pulls back the covers. Thank you.

Cab Calloway, The Beatles, St. James Infirmary

A young Cab Calloway

A friend sent a link to Cab Calloway and multiple video versions of his song "Minnie the Moocher." Check it out, it's a lot of fun: Minnie the Moocher.

Calloway's theme song was once "St. James Infirmary," but when he became the feature performer at Harlem's prestigious The Cotton Club, he wanted a song that was more, uhm, original. As detailed in my book, I Went Down to St. James Infirmary, he and manager Irving Mills cobbled together something that borrowed the orchestration and melody of "St. James Infirmary" and the lyrics of a traditional American song about drug dreams called "Willie the Weeper."

It was the biggest chart success of the year. 1931.

Three decades later, February 23 1964, Calloway appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to perform, not "Minnie the Moocher," but "St. James Infirmary."

The Beatles were on that same Ed Sullivan TV show - performing three songs, including this:

It was an exciting Sunday night. Like most people I (and my family, parents included) were tuned in for the Beatles. Calloway was a diversion, a fill-in, as were the other acts that evening. When Sullivan introduced Calloway, though, he reminisced about the fantastic days when Cab captured everyone's imagination.

St. James Infirmary - musical mystery story

1925 cover of Baxter & Moore's
 Gambler's Blues sheet music

On the left you can see the 1925 cover for the original sheet music for Gambler's Blues, which later became known as St. James Infirmary. The song had long been popular, but it developed through an oral rather than a written tradition. 

Ostensibly composed by Carl Moore (lyricist) and Phil Baxter (music), this first sheet music is one small step in the evolution of the song we know now as St. James Infirmary.

Both Moore and Baxter are fascinating characters who figure largely in my book I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. They are the first in a long line of musicians claiming ownership of the song Gambler's Blues / St. James Infirmary. However, they were certainly not the composers ... but, then, where did the song come from?

Baxter and Moore copyrighted Gambler's Blues in 1925 (in Little Rock, Arkansas), three years before Louis Armstrong released his definitive version in 1928; Armstrong's was the first recording released with the title St. James Infirmary. Two titles, basically the same song.

The first-ever recording was by Fess Williams and His Royal Flush Orchestra in 1927, using the Moore/Baxter arrangement; it was a kind of tragi-comic interpretation, and still a pleasure to listen to.

A year later the Appalachian banjoist Buell Kazee put the song out with the title Gambling Blues, probably taking his version from Carl Sandburg's book of traditional songs The American Songbag (1927). But SJI had to wait for Louis Armstrong before it sped down the freeway.

Was the song always presented with different names, in the years before records, when it was played in disreputable bars and rode the band circuits from hall to hall across the continent? When did it receive it's definitive title, and who was responsible? It turns into a musical detective story.

The origins and popularization of St James Infirmary is a fascinating tale. Here we have less than scratched the surface. You can read more here, in my book I Went down to St. James Infirmary.

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Sample of Kudos for the book:

"The book is one of a kind. Bob Harwood states that this is the end of the story, as far as he has it in him to tell it. This work is unique, so if you don’t have it, get it.” — Malcolm Shaw, Editor of Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897-1942), 

“Mr Harwood opened up so many musical alleys to explore. A sparkling book!” — “Digger,”

"What bettter way to honour a great song than to tell a great story about it!" David Fulmer, author of The Dying Crapshooter's Blues and The Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries.

"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 Letters from New Orleans and The Art of Noticing

"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, review for VJM’s Blues and Jazz Mart

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 If you are interested in the sheet music for Moore/Baxter's "Gambler's Blues," you can find it elsewhere on this blog. (Type into the search area "Gambler's Blues," or even "sheet music," for there is a lot of that here.)