At the time, I wasn’t sure what that last phrase meant. But looking into it a bit, I found that Mr. Sims, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., has been a composer of microtonal music since 1960 or thereabouts. He has also written and lectured in a variety of settings, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. I tracked Mr. Sims down and dropped him a line. He was receptive -- but I had a problem. The piece of his that I felt I most needed to hear, “Sextet,” wasn’t particularly easy to get hold of. I was living near New York City at the time, and while the library there did own a copy, they were in the midst of some sort of reorganization of that particular part of their collection, and I was told I would have to wait “several months.”

I was in the middle of some projects myself, one of which was moving to Savannah. Somewhere along the way, however, I was finally able to obtain “Sextet” by other means: The Avant Garde Project ("a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs"), which makes available "Sextet" and several other Sims pieces, along with links that allowed even someone like me to figure out what software I needed to get and, and how to get it, in order to acquire the (digital) piece.

Plus I got hold of a relevant article that Mr. Sims had told me about: A piece he wrote for Computer Music Journal (Winter 1988 issue) called “Yet Another 72-Noter,” in which he discussed microtonal music, Louis Armstrong’s version of “St. James Infirmary,” and his piece “Sextet” – which he describes as being “based on” Armstrong’s performance. (That is to say, it’s not a “cover version.”)

This was helpful (and entertaining) but parts of it did raise another problem, which is that I don’t really read music. So having absorbed all I could, I got in touch with Mr. Sims again, and we arranged a time to chat via phone.

An edited transcript of that conversation follows.

Q: In “Yet Another 72-Noter,” you start with a brief introduction to your history with microtonal music, and in one of the amusing passages you say that by 1960 you could “no longer avoid joining the lunatic fringe.” That being how microtone enthusiasts seemed to you then, and maybe how they still looked to many people, as of 1988, at least. So how would you explain to someone like me: What is microtonal music -- and what’s lunatic fringe-y about it?

A: [Laughs] Well, to start off, microtonal music requires, for its proper notation, pitches that are not on the piano. Things in the cracks, in other words. Lots of people sing things in the cracks -- and that’s just called “out of tune.” [Laughs] But you know, to really write down, for example, Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary,” and be able to reproduce it, you must be able to indicate much smaller intervals than the half-steps that are on the piano, much smaller increments.

A lot of people write music that, in its notation, requires only the notes that are on the piano, but played in one fancy tuning or another, so that the sound is actually different from the piano, but they are still writing a diatonic C-major music. That to me is not microtones, it’s tuning. Microtonal compositions need all of the those differences available at any moment, for structural reasons.

So the “lunatic fringe” aspect of it was just that it struck most of us that the people who went in for sixth of tones and twelfths of tones and thirteenths of tones and the like — generally were just a bit crazy. It was looked at as madness to try to ask people to play these other notes. For instance, Julián Carrillo, who for a while conducted the Mexico City Symphony at the turn of the 20th Century, he went overboard — he had a concerto for piano and strings and the piano is so tuned that the whole keyboard comprised one octave. That means there are 81 notes in his octave. If you were into microtones, you were almost certain of people saying, “Oh him, well -- he’s a quarter-tone guy. He’s just one of those crazies.”

I resisted it for a long time until it became obvious that I needed it -- or I wouldn’t write at all.

And since 1960 or 1961 or so, most of your writing has been done with a 72-note division of the octave?

Yes. It all depended on my finally coming to some rationalizing of it and finding some, oh, theory behind it all.

But my ear led me to it, through having sung classical music in choruses. Our conductor made us push tones up or down depending on what their--their destination was.

Yes, this is in the essay – Hugh Thomas, I think, at Birmingham-Southern. You wrote of that experience: “A few years of this and … you are liable to find it hard ever again to believe … that there is, for example, one thing which is G-sharp, one frequency that defines it for ever and ever, Amen.”

And also, though I had never been a great devote of blues, of course I went to high school dances and danced to Glenn Miller and all of that -- and view that music as kind of one of my early influences, in a way. As I was working out my theory, I began to realize that the notes I was asking for really were the ones I had heard people like Armstrong, Memphis Minnie, and others sing. They were using this kind of thing because that’s the way the music is right to them. It is curious way of finding a justification of it, you know, that authentication of the technique.

So to a lay listener someone like me who listens to music a lot, but I’m not a composer and I’m not a musician -- is there something that might sound different about a piece that’s explicitly written with a 72-note octave?

Of course to me, the music I write is the music I have to write, and so it sounds ordinary. Maybe you are in a better place to answer that question than I -- does “Sextet” sound different?

It does, but you know I’m not coming to it very purely. I’m coming to it knowing in advance that it’s written this way --and so I’m thinking, “Hmm what’s different here? This sounds different to me, why is that?” So it’s hard for me to judge but my instinct is that if I just had randomly heard it, something would make it sound -- there would be something about that would make me pause.

I suppose any real music should do that anyhow -- it should catch your attention, make it hold up just a moment. But I can say this. Back in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s even, I had my successes with two audiences. With the converted -- the people who had spent enough time trying to work out microtonal music on their own, and they thought mine worked rather well. And then with innocent audiences, who didn’t pay any attention to that kind of thing at all, and just took to the music. So I’m sure it sounds odd, but I have a lot of people who remark on the pieces not in terms of any acoustical oddness, but in the fact that it tends to have a certain sense of its own of direction. As one friend said, it’s not that the music followed itself, had its own strong direction, it was that it picked you up and carried you to the end. And I don’t know whether she recognizes the odd tunings or not.

The people that I had the most trouble with were certain kinds of strict musicians, and a critic here in town who complained because essentially he had managed to teach himself a kind of rough absolute pitch, and here I came along and called it all into question and made all of his efforts … nugatory, shall we say? [Laughs]

I had some difficulties, back then, in the ’60s and ’70s. It could be hard to find players that would play it. There’s was one player here in Boston, a first fiddle in one of the string quartets, who will not play me because it upsets his tuning, his fingering. He has to think about my notes, and in order to play in tune he has to not be thinking about it.

But nowadays, the youngsters, the younger players are taking to it very easily.

Was there something in particular that drew you to that Armstrong recording of “St. James Infirmary”? You were mentioning those high school dances – where was that, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Alabama. Most of my practical experience then was – well, I played bass fiddle and played in orchestras, but my work was as a choral singer, and a choral director. And it was in the matter of tuning in chorus being so much more physical and intimate a thing, in a way, than tuning an instrument. The clarinet, there’s only so much you can push it around. Whereas the voice -- you have to be careful all the time.

So that was where I grew up and the background I had. This was in the ’40s, so it was big band time. It was only later that I realized that of course they played a somewhat elaborated tuning, that quite often there were certain clichés that involved a small minor-third and then a bigger ba-deee-a-de-a-dum, that kind of thing. And all of that was working without my realizing it.

I didn’t know “St. James Infirmary” until quite late. It was after I had been to Japan -- that would put it ’65, ’66, ’67, in there. I was visiting a friend in New York who had just gotten a standup Victrola. He was very proud of it, and he had found a prized source for steel needles, and the first thing he played me was “St. James Infirmary” -- Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary.” By then I had been working enough with my scales and the like to be able to hear that it was just obvious that Armstrong and I were using the same thing. And that’s when it all happened.

Wow. That’s a nice moment.

Well it was a great one indeed. [Laughs]

But the “Sextet” wasn’t until considerably later.

The “Sextet” was 1981. It was preceded by “Celebration of Dead Ladies,” which I wrote in 1976. That’s a very different piece from the “Sextet,” and much more elaborate and harder to bring off, so I felt that I could safely use the same material again to different ends.

I had spent some time realizing that obviously the folk and blues traditions use these pitches and use them systematically. By then I had heard Odetta. I loved her work -- I still like it very much -- but when she was young and it was all new to us, “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos” moved me immensely. When I’d first heard her work, I had not analyzed it. I just knew that it was exactly what I wanted to hear. I’m not an absolute pitch type myself, so I would have needed to test, as I did with “St. James Infirmary,” at something like the monochord level, to make absolutely certain what pitch she was singing.

In the “Sextet,” there is a moment where there’s a little trio -- the clarinet, horn, and sax in the slow movement where the horn is playing a version of “St. James” and the sax is playing a version of “Ain’t No more Cane on the Brazos.” And they lay over each other meshing, matching and not matching, you know.

Would you expect a lay listener to hear “St. James Infirmary” in “Sextet”?

Well, there is my shame: By the time I got around to writing both of those pieces, I had been far enough and long enough away from the Armstrong recording and to -- as a composer will do – remake the tune in my mind. So what I called “St. James Infirmary” in both of those pieces is the same tune, but it has been somewhat … developed, changed, varied. It’s -- it’s mine now; it’s not precisely “St. James Infirmary.”

Yes. But I think that’s kind of appropriate, both because this in particular has been reinvented a number of times, in descending from a folk song in Ireland. And also, so much creation happens just the way you’re describing.

You think you’re remembering something, but your mind is working on it all the time, and turns it into its own thing, yes.

I know that it’s not as if you were setting out to make a statement about “St. James Infirmary” when you did this. But it’s pretty fascinating to me how it all worked out, particularly given the song’s history.

It is. And the important thing about it to me -- aside from the fact that the tune has stuck in my head the way it does in so many other people’s, and one of them would be you -- is what it did, in an odd way, through that particular performance. I’ve heard some performances that were just straight on the piano and absolutely useless. But that Armstrong was – well, a justification of my own instincts. I’ve always been pleased by that.

Thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure chatting with you.

I hope we do it again.

No Notes offers sincere thanks to Mr. Ezra Sims for his time and generosity. His music is published by Frog Peak Music and Diapason Press. Recordings of some of his works are also available from New World Records.

Among his current projects is a commission from the Boston Microtonal Society, involving, believe it or not, the poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche! The Boston Microtonal Society's site also has an interview with Mr. Sims that delves into the nature of his work with a great deal more musical sophistication than I'm capable of, and, on this page, you can listen to a sample of one of his compositions, "Night Piece."

Finally, as noted earlier, Mr. Sims has his own site: EzraSims.com.

First, one of the versions he said he'd played, and that I didn't know, was by Tony Rice. (Rice's work "spans the range of acoustic music, from straight-ahead bluegrass to jazz-influenced new acoustic music, to songwriter-oriented folk," according to his site). Upon inquiry, I was informed that it was very, very similar to "Doc Watson's 1964 version" -- which I didn' know either. I've now gotten hold of and listened to both, and it's true, they are much the same. For one thing, while both use the title "St. James Hospital," both are actually the tune and lyrics more commonly title "One Morning In May," far closer "The Unfortunate Rake" than to "SJI." (I believe Watson has also recorded "SJI" a couple of times, but that will have to wait.) Both go with the singer/one guitar arrangement; Rice's version is a bit more upbeat and sort of a gallop. Neither, however, was really my kind of thing.

Lastly, Baldinger mentioned a rendition of "Those Gamblers Blues" by Elton Britt, which was "just a slight varient" on Jimmie Rodgers take. And indeed this bio on the CMT site starts off by noting Britt's "Jimmie Rodgers imitation." He had hits of his own, and is alleged to have been a better yodeler than Rodgers, but the bottom line is I haven't tracked down this version yet. Baldinger's description did add that it's "a little peppy country-politan number complete with the Jordinaires," which sounds worth hearing but ... well, I'll get to it at some point, I guess.

"St. James Hospital," Doc Watson

"St. James Hospital," Tony Rice

Recently, the author of the novel on which that movie is based, Mark Harris, passed away. And I got an email from Mr. Rod Nelson of The Society for American Baseball Research. In passing along Mr. Harris's obituary to members of that group's email list, Mr. Nelson had apparently made mention of the connection to "The Streets of Laredo." Of course I've not spent much time on that song here, since it's basically only related to "SJI" by common lineage to "The Unfortunate Rake" (and so far as I know, no version of "SJI" actually uses the "beat/bang the drum slowly" line), but still I was curious for a detail or two, which Mr. Nelson graciously supplied:

The story is about the fictional relationship between pitcher Henry Wiggen, (aka Author, who narrates in the movie and writes in the first person in the book) and his catcher, who is found to have a terminal illness. The song is performed [in the movie] by Piney Woods, the catcher called up from Texas to replace him... It really works in the movie. Great song, great scene.

A bit of further poking around finds that there are two movie versions: A one-hour 1956 adaptation produced for the U.S. Steel Hour, with George Peppard as Piney Woods, and the 1973 big-screen version with Michael Moriarty, Robert De Niro, and, in the role of Piney Woods, Tom Ligon.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson.

The bit that surprised me the most in our exchange was that one song I hadn't recognized, a version of "I Awoke One Morning In May," by Didier Hébert, was something I actually owned: Baldinger informed me that it's part of Harry Smith's famous Anthology of American Folk Music collection.

Well, after a considerable delay, I've now taken the time to track this down and give it a fresh listen.

Here, via Mudcat, is one set of lyrics to "One Morning In May." Hébert is singing in French, so I have no idea if his match these. The performance is very spare, almost primitive, and quite morose. In fact, to be honest, it's a bit of a drag. And I can't honestly say that I'm hearing anything in the melody that comes close to "SJI," or even "The Unfortunate Rake," or versions of that tune that I've heard.

For the most part, I've stayed away from dwelling on the less-"SJI"-related branches of the "Rake" cycle, for the obvious reason that I'm wasting enough timem on this shit as it is. But back in February 2006, I wrote about Barbara Dane, who recorded "One Morning In May" (which she had learned "off a Library of Congress record in 1946") with the title "When I Was a Young Girl," back in 1959. More recently, Feist did a version also titled "When I Was a Young Girl," in 2005 (and released a version "remixed by VV" in 2006). Each of these is quite pleasing in one way or another. Dane's is the most haunting, Feist's goes down a little bit too bit too smooth for a song about a doomed girl, but that's interesting in a way, and the remix borders on novelty territory with its quasi-disco sound.

Anyway: The Hébert song has left me a bit puzzled. I don't know if I should even be writing about it here. I'm not sure that it isn't a completely unrelated song with some title similarities.

I turned to Smith's notes to see if they offered any clues. The song is one of several Cajun selections in The Anthology, but as I guess I've strongly hinted, it's not among my favorites. "The almost conversational performance in this song of unhappy love is more restrained in range than most Arcadian singing," Smith wrote. "Its even, powerful rhythm, and clear voice however are ... very typical of Louisiana." Smith also notes that Hébert was blind.

But the most interesting tidbit to me was the recording date: December 10, 1929. In other words, despite its ragged, almost backwoods sound, this was recorded about a year after Armstrong's definitive version of "St. James Infirmary." Suprising. And where was it recorded? New Orleans, of all places...

"One Morning In May," Didier Hébert

"When I Was A Young Girl," Barbara Dane

"When I Was a Young Girl," Feist

"When I Was A Young Girl (remix)," Feist

First: Who was it that came up with the earliest trace of the "Rake," believed to date to 1790? It was Irish musicologist P.W. Joyce, the piece, by Mike Morris, says.

Second: Toward the end of his piece, as Morris notes the "Streets of Laredo," "St. James Infirmary," and "Gamblers Blues" variations, he also mentions the song "eventually making it to California, where a migrant named Herman Davis stumbled through a dirge to his fate entitled Barroom Blues." Following that link leads to a Library of Congress page that is part of a "Voices from the Dust Bowl" project, and it seems that Davis (who I'd of course never heard of) recorded a sort of Woody Guthrie-ish version in 1941, at the "Arvin FSA Camp." There's an MP3 to listen to, and I think Morris is right in using the word "stumbled" to describe Davis's performance.

Finallly, Morris has a couple of interesting related links at the end: to The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads collection; and The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection.

Of course it was the last bit that really got my attention. Figuring it never hurts to try, I sent him an email. The reply was much more than I could have reasonably hoped for. He sent back a wonderful letter telling the full, and fascinating, story of his relationship to New Orleans, to the blues, and to "St. James Infirmary." With his permission, I quote from that email below, drawing also on some of the information from his site to fill in certain details.

I don't know exactly where to start, so let's go back to 1971-72 in New Orleans. At the time, I was playing my 2nd season in the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra (which hasn't existed since sometime in the 80s; now it is the Louisiana Philharmonic). I was living on Ursuline Street between Bourbon and Royal. Ah, what memories..... N.O had not yet attracted the college spring break set, so Mardi Gras was mostly us locals -- only the Quarter was jammed.

With one of his friends and colleagues from the symphony (1st French horn), Galasso started going over to the Quarter to hear Ellis Marsalis and the French brothers (Bob and George), among others.

In 1971, there were no jazz clubs in New Orleans! All of these great musicians were playing for the tourists at this place called the Storyville Club, and they were the Storyville Jazz Band. We got to be friends .... After awhile, we started asking if we could jam. But there was no where to go! We had met a folk singer who was playing down Bourbon in a folk club (it was 1971), so we went down there at 2 a.m. after they had finished at Storyville. That is how I learned to improvise -- including "St James Infirmary." Now, it is not easy for a classical violinist to learn how to improvise or play the blues. But I started there. I mean, I learned from Ellis Marsalis!

In the summer of 1972, Mr. Galasso left New Orleans, selling off everything (except his violin) and heading for Europe. There he met Robert Wilson, a life-changing encounter that led to his becoming a composer, collaborating with Wilson and others on an impressive variety of projects. (Just this past summer, for instance, a production of Peer Gynt conceived and directed by Wilson, with a score by Galasso, was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) His most recent album, High Lines, was released last year.

Back to "St. James Infirmary," and Galasso's "Blue." You might want to click here for a sound clip, lasting about a minute, of "Blue," before moving on to Galasso's comments on this particular piece. Turns out that this takes us back to New Orleans in the early 1970s, when he was learning to improvise and play the blues with Ellis Marsalis and the French brothers:

I remember Ellis and the French brothers saying "St. Jame Infirmary" was an old song from like 1908-1912 that guys used to play in New Orleans, and that Louis Armstrong learned it there. Nobody knew who wrote it, except they used to say it was the 1st blues song."Blue" starts really like "St James Infirmary", but doesn't follow the exact chords or melody after that until it resolves at the end. ... To me, in music, the basic thing is the chords. Melodies come after. (All of this is a huge simplification.) So my song is something between "St James Infirmary" and some other blues song. "St James Infirmary" is close to my heart and soul. It took me a long time to be able to play the blues.

"Blue" was recorded in October 1998, and first heard publicly the following month, in Stockholm, as part of the score for a production of Strindberg's "A Dreamplay". My Swedish musicians were classical players, and the basic instruments were lutes, all kinds of recorders (especially a "flauto dolce basso"), therebo (bass lute), violin, viola da gamba and Baroque cello, percussion, and an instrument called the nykelharpa -- a Swedish violin that is something between a violin and a piano -- that's the weird sounding violin on "Blue."

Now, when I heard "Blue," I really liked it, and I knew it was because of the combination of the way it was familiar and original at the same time. Would I have predicted that it came from a blues-loving Louisiana-bred classical composer and violinist who encountered a traditional melody in a French Quarter bar and returned to it and reworked it a couple of decades and half a world later? No, I would not have predicted it. But maybe I should have.

As a final note: He lives in Paris now, but remains very much in touch with those musical (and familial) Louisiana roots, and was as affected and moved by the Katrina events as you would expect. In fact he's currently doing some work that explores those very things, and when there is more to tell you about that, I will tell you.

My thanks to Mr. Galasso for his generosity in sharing his story.

Albert Ayler was a saxophone player known, among other things, for his "free jazz" work. Among those who have admired that work quite a bit is another free-jazz saxophone (and other instrument) player, Peter Brötzmann. I have a little familiarity with Ayler, but had never heard of Brötzmann. Ayler had what I guess could safely be described as a troubled life, which ended with his body being found in the East River, in 1970, when he was in his mid 30s.

Brötzmann, along with Toshinori Kondo, William Parker, and Hamid Drake, performed a kind of tribute to Ayler's work under the name Die Like A Dog. Kondo handles the trumpet, and some electronics, and Mr. Mannix assures me that bassist Parker and drummer Drake constitute "the baddest rhythm section in improv music." A CD recording of the quartet's performance on August 19, 1993 (at "the townhall charlottenburg, berlin," the credits say) describes the four long pieces performed as "fragments of music, life and death of Albert Ayler."

The four pieces are titled No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4. It's definitely a free-jazz context, and most of the disc draws on what the notes call "very short quotations out of Albert Ayler's music in different variations (prophet, ghosts, spirits, bells and others)." The bit that Mr. Mannix wrote me about is No. 2 -- "a 16-minute improv that Brötzmann divides into parts A, B, and C, where A and C are listed as 'St. James Infirmary.'" And indeed, the opening four minutes, and the final minute and a half, are in fact that very melody -- played quite freely, to be sure, but also unmistakably.

I wouldn't normally associate a song like "St. James Infirmary" with free jazz. I asked Mr. Mannix, who knows that world far better than I do, why he thought Brötzmann would make that choice, if there was some reason to connect the tune to Ayler. He wasn't certain either of what the connection might be -- "at least not beyond the general heaviness of finality." Actually, that's a good point. Given the heaviness of the title "Die Like a Dog," and the heaviness of the way Ayler died. I've obviously dwelled in the past on the contrasts built into the way the song tends to be performed in New Orleans: The dirge-like start, building to a wild climax. (A similar contrast is there in the lyrics, too, but we happen to be dealing with an instrumental take here.) In the notes, Brötzmann writes of Ayler: "During his last years, the discrepancy between his will and his existence became increasingly recognizable: on one side the attempt to open the music to everybody, to let everybody participate in his experiences, his wild energy, his love, to give everybody a part of his imagination. On the other hand poverty that comes with repression." Perhaps there's a clue in that: Not just the heaviness and finality, but the sense of contrasts at the heart of the song. In any case, it's an extremely interesting listen.

Here is a brief chunk, about 45 seconds long, of the point when the band transitions from "St. James Infirmary" into improv.

A final note: Brötzmann's album, like the original physical record version of "St. James Infirmary" itself, credits the tune to Don Redman.

Sincere thanks, Mr. Mannix.

The way we first connected, as I recall, is that you helped me out with an open question I'd had in early versions of the "St. James Infirmary" essay, about who on earth "Moore-Baxter" (credited as the writer on Fess Williams' 1927 recording of "Gambler’s Blues") might be. As you write in A Rake's Progress, Moore-Baxter refers to Carl "Squeakin' Deacon" Moore and Phil Baxter. Moore, a drummer, and Baxter, a band-leader best known for writing novelties.

I was curious about this Moore-Baxter credit for the Fess Williams song, of course, but was unable to find very much. But one day I got lucky while searching the web. Just happened to put in the right request. I came across a remarkable site devoted to old hillbilly music (Hillbilly-Music.com) which, even now, is the only one I've found with any information about Moore. It also made mention of Baxter -- and he was a bit easier to research, although he's something of a forgotten jazz man. They both have interesting stories. I really left it at that for a year or so, until my curiosity resurfaced. I mean, what if they did actually write the song? It seemed unlikely, but Baxter had penned some famous (at the time) tunes, that were performed by a wide range of artists -- Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Rudy Vallee, Benny Goodman, Bob Wills . . . But there's a big divide between "Gambler's Blues" and "Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas," or "Faded Summer Love." And, you know, "Gambler's Blues" just doesn't sound like a composed song. But, who knows? Much is made of Armstrong's 1928 "St. James Infirmary" and Ellington's and . . . but this was the first known recording of it, and it's been virtually ignored. Did Irving Mills actually steal the song from Moore and Baxter? I tried to find out.

My first step was to contact the webmaster, Dave Sichak, of that hillbilly site. It's amazing how helpful people can be. He sent me scans of some articles about Carl Moore and, in a later email, asked if I was aware of a recent book called Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop -- A History, in which Baxter is mentioned (very briefly) as the author of “G.B.” I ordered the book, tracked down one of the authors, Chuck Haddix, who -- again remarkably helpful -- mailed me some old news clippings about Phil Baxter and directed me to a Kansas City librarian, Mary Beveridge. So now I had information that Baxter claimed he had privately published "Gambler's Blues" in Texas, possibly in 1926, and that he was in some litigation with a New York publisher over the copyright.

Following that I have exchanged emails with quite a few people, hoping to track down Baxter's original score. Some of these people are authorities on the music of the time -- who did, more often than not, refer me to other experts. One of these, Bruce Nemerov, informed me that "privately published" could well mean little more than paying a publishing house to print out a handful of copies for personal distribution. So it's been a real needle-in-a-haystack search. And not very fruitful. But I still have a few inquiries out there.

One afternoon it occurred to me that, perhaps, I was looking in the wrong place.

A kind of serendipity led me to a law librarian at the New York City Appellate Court. He was, again, more helpful than I had any right to expect. Now I have copies of court rulings from the early 30s that, although they don't much illuminate the Moore-Baxter question, do cast some light on "St. James Infirmary" as an owned song. I don't want to reveal more than that, as the pieces are still coming together. But it has spurred me on to rewriting A Rake's Progress -- the title might have to change, though, as “SJI” has emerged as the real core of the book.

And then, Rob, you reminded me of Carl Sandburg's American Songbag which, while published in 1927, was completed by 1926. The Songbag features three versions of "Those Gambler's Blues." Since Sandburg was collecting traditional folk songs for this book, it is indeed unlikely that anyone as recent as Carl Moore and Phil Baxter could have created it. Your postings of those 1924 "Charleston Cabin" recordings reinforces that. There is so little known of “SJI” prior to its first recordings. As you wrote about "SJI" in Letters From New Orleans, "It's startling to look back less than 100 years in search of answers, only to confront the unknowable."

(By the way, you can't find any CDs today with Moore's music, although a few old recordings do exist. Baxter can be found on CDs like Jazz The World Forgot or Hottest Stuff You Never Heard. Neither recorded "Gambler's Blues.")

And finally: What do you do when you're not researching the "St. James Infirmary" and “Gambler’s Blues” and related matters?

What do I do? After writing the book, I started to teach myself how to play guitar, and now can manage (easily arguable, this) a reasonable facsimile of "Gambler's Blues" -- my approach to the song keeps changing. For the past half-dozen years I've worked in an outpatient rehabilitation clinic specializing in geriatrics; the best staff I've ever worked with, and the clientele are a delight (a goodly number remember “SJI,” but are more likely to have been familiar with Cab Calloway. That is, even though many are in their 80s, “St. James Infirmary” was a bit before their time, and so the 1940s music of Cab Calloway and his contemporaries (Benny Goodman, et al) was something they were more likely to have paid attention to). I take many, many photographs (and have actually sold a handful). I live with my 19-year-old son and my wife (we will be celebrating our first anniversary in May) in southern Ontario.

My sincere thanks to Robert Harwood for his thoughtful answers to my barrage of questions. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to the revised and expanded version of his book A Rake’s Progress (perhaps under a new title), which he aims to complete in the fall, or thereabouts. To be notified when it is done and available for purchase at a very reasonable price, contact him at robertharwood@rogers.com. I recommend this.

Q: One of the most interesting passages in your book, to me, concerns Jimmie Rodgers. His "Gambler's Blues" version is one of my favorites, but I have only passing knowledge of him, so I was quite interested to learn that at one point he "toured with various minstrel groups, performing comedy routines and singing in blackface." And that Louis Armstrong plays on "Blue Yodel #9"! There may not be more to say about any of this, but just out of curiosity, did you come across more regarding any relationship/interaction between Rodgers and Armstrong? And is there more to be said -- even in the form of reckless speculation -- about where Rodgers might have come upon "Gambler's Blues"?

A: This is what I know of the Armstrong/Rodgers collaboration, and it isn't much: In 1930, Louis came to L.A., to work at the New Sebastian Cotton Club -- and his first film appearance in the drama Ex-Flame. (The film was released in 1931, but no copies survive -- I suspect Louis made a cameo appearance, probably as a club performer.) His first recording session after his arrival in L.A. was with Jimmie Rodgers, on "Blue Yodel No. 9," but as far as I'm aware nobody knows how this pairing happened. I have the impression that he was brought in as a session musician. However, Rodgers’ producer, Ralph Peers, was once a talent scout for OKeh records, and as Nolan Porterfield points out in his biography, Jimmie Rodgers, Peers knew Armstrong from that time (and in later years boasted that he'd "invented Louis Armstrong") -- so perhaps it was simply Peers’ relationship with both men that brought them together in a happy coincidence of time and place.

(As I explain in the book, Peers met Rodgers while acting as a talent scout for Victor when, in 1927, he set up auditions in an empty warehouse in Bristol, Tennessee. Victor had decided to test the sales potential of country music This time, Rodgers passed the test, and so began his recording career. Previously, in 1925, on the top floor of the Vanderbilt Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, OKeh records (with Peers as the talent scout) set up a studio for recordings and auditions. There is some dispute as to whether Rodgers was there, but a blackface singer named Emmett Miller was. One can be pretty sure that Rodgers developed his famous yodel through listening to Miller -- and Miller's version of "Lovesick Blues" (co-written, by the way, by Irving Mills) was later adapted by Hank Williams, and is the song that propelled Williams to stardom.)

Anyway, back to the question. It seems that Armstrong's contribution to the recording went unacknowledged until 1949, when Louis identified his playing while listening to the record with Max Jones and other collectors. A photograph of this 1949 event appears in Max Jones' and John Chilton's 1971 biography Louis. Armstrong could recall making the record, but not the circumstances that led up to it. The pianist on the record has been identified as Lil Armstrong, Louis' ex-wife.

About how Rodgers encountered "Gambler's Blues" -- your guess is as good as mine. As you know, his initial version of the song was recorded in 1930, and then he co-wrote a variation, "Gambling Barroom Blues," that he recorded two years later. So, this was very close to the genesis of the "Gambler's Blues"/"St. James Infirmary" songs in popular recordings. We just don't know how familiar people were with this song before Williams and then Armstrong submitted the first recordings, or how many variations were floating around. For instance, The Hokum Boys recorded two wonderful -- musically similar but lyrically very different -- variations of the song during the last half of 1929, but where did they come from? Did they modify the lyrics themselves, or did the songs already exist in that form?

This, I think, leads us towards the notion that "Gambler's Blues" germinated within black America. Certainly Rodgers was one of the first, if not the first, white artist to record this song. White performers had been making records for decades, but nothing like "Gambler's Blues" had been pressed into wax until black musicians started making recordings as featured artists.

Tomorrow: Part Four, Fess Williams, legal complications, and some hints at the latest developments in Mr. Harwood’s research. He is working on a revised and expanded version of his book A Rake’s Progress, which he aims to complete in the fall, or thereabouts. To be notified when it is done and available for purchase at a very reasonable price, contact him at robertharwood@rogers.com. I recommend this.

Q: The first section of the book contains a wealth of contextual material about the early recording industry, and how black jazz and blues performers fit into that (or didn't). Was that already an area of interest for you, or a result of this project? I guess another way of getting at this is the more direct: So what's your record collection like?

A: Again, the answer will have to be, "a bit of both, actually." By the time I first heard "St. James Infirmary," I was listening to what we refer to these days as roots music. Like many people, I've gone through stages of musical interest. Popular music when I was younger, then classical, jazz, and so on . . . But Dylan was always there. Over the past few years my wife and I have immersed ourselves in earlier blues, jazz and folk recordings. Much of it from the teens and twenties of the last century. Our record collection . . . well, I sold all my records a couple of years ago. Our CD collection is -- I think there are about 600 CDs there. If you looked along the shelves you'd notice, right away, an inordinate amount of Bob Dylan. After that, the most frequently encountered artists would be, in no particular order, Keith Jarrett, Beethoven, Van Morrison, Thomas de Hartmann, Jean Sibelius, J.S. Bach. Lots of Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell. We created a double CD to accompany A Rake's Progress (all forty copies of it), of songs and/or artists that appeared in the book. You'll find those artists on our shelves, of course: Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, Bessie Smith, Henry Thomas, Jimmie Rodgers, Emmett Miller, Hank Williams, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, King Oliver. And you'll see The Anthology of American Folk Music. The Blind Boys of Alabama. Compilations with names like Before The Blues, Southern Country Blues, The Great Women Blues Singers, Wax Cylinder Phonograph Recordings. Django Reinhardt. Tom Waits. George Gershwin. Stan Kenton. The Watersons. Charles Ives. John Adams. Didjeridoo music. David Hykes. Texas Alexander. That sort of thing.

I'm pretty sure your book was the place I first learned of George W. Johnson; more recently Johnson is addressed in a book called Lost Sounds, by Tim Brooks, about Johnson and other black musicians and singers in the early days of the recording business. Also in the intro you write: "When all is said and done, the music being pursued in A Rake's Progress originated in the British Isles. But it found its greatest acolytes in the black musicians of the American South." Obviously there's a similar interest in this partly animating my own focus on "St. James Infirmary." My question here is pretty open-ended, probably unanswerable, and possibly best ignored. But why is this connection between an old European folk song and African-American musicians so interesting or important?

What did I mean by that? This area becomes extraordinarily complicated. But, you know, blacks were not stuck singing field hollers, they weren't all sitting on porch stoops strumming blues songs with repeated first verse lines. They weren't living in isolation from the rest of the country. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, everyone was singing the same songs. Musical entertainment was immensely popular. The traveling minstrel shows of the mid and late nineteenth centuries took America -- and much of Europe -- by storm. And although the cultural assumptions of the time are extremely disturbing to us, people were generally under its spell -- just as we are under the spell of certain cultural assumptions today. There are great tales of musical heroism to be told. All-black minstrel shows, for example, emerged -- with considerable success; and from that kind of force there arose a new sort of music in mainstream America. New Orleans jazz, Dixieland. The stage shows of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith -- often set up in tents, it would not be uncommon for both blacks and whites to be scrambling for tickets and lining up together awaiting entrance (albeit sitting on opposite sides of the stage). This would be in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It can be difficult to enjoy their recordings today, but that's because they sang to a large audience without microphones. Their voices had to be large, and we generally prefer a subtlety of vocal expression that only arrived with electronic microphones and recording devices.

And yet, when black Americans did start recording -- after 1920 -- the first songs that emerged were blues songs. Not because that is the only music blacks played, but because that is what the recording companies insisted on. That's what they thought would bring in the bucks. Many of these artists would have jumped at the chance to record popular show tunes, for instance, but that wasn't permitted. The recording industry created their "Race Records" divisions (a term coined by Ralph Peers, who makes occasional appearances in A Rake’s Progress), they wanted new material, and they paid for the types of songs they were looking for. As Francis Davis points out in his excellent The History of the Blues, Memphis Minnie never recorded "For Sentimental Reasons," although she did sing it in concert. And if she been allowed to? Who knows what would have emerged.

Which might be one reason it took "Gambler's Blues" / "St. James Infirmary" so long to reach the recording studio, and why it first appeared with jazz bands rather than solo artists. It's not strictly a blues song, but I am convinced that it emerged through black America. On one side we have "Streets of Laredo," on another "St. James Infirmary." They grew up from the popular music of the time, probably shared the same roots, but the real transformation occurred in the latter song. That's a song that helped, I think, to reshape the musical landscape.

Tomorrow: Part Three, Jimmie Rodgers and “Gambler’s Blues.”

Mr. Harwood is working on a revised and expanded version of his book A Rake’s Progress, which he aims to complete in the fall, or thereabouts. To be notified when it is done and available for purchase at a very reasonable price, contact him at robertharwood@rogers.com. I recommend this.

You can listen a couple of George W. Johnson recordings at this NPR page.

The good news is that he’s at work on a second (revised and expanded) edition of the book, which you will learn about here. Bob was good enough to answer a series of questions that I sent him about his research, and the book, and I will devote this week to that email interview.

Here is Part One.

Q: Let's begin with the obvious questions. A Rake's Progress, as you note in the book’s introduction, is about "the evolution of a song." What was your entry to this, as a listener? That is, what version of the song (or songs) was the one you knew and/or got curious about first?

A: Bob Dylan and Lou Rawls! Around 1992 a friend sent me a tape of previously unreleased Dylan songs. I found out later that these came from Columbia's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. (Should any record executives out there feel concerned, rest assured that I later bought the CD.) The song "Blind Willie McTell" immediately caught my attention. I never tired of listening to it. Some years later I was playing a newly bought compilation CD of jazz vocals, and Lou Rawls came over the speakers singing "St. James Infirmary." This was the first time I'd heard “SJI.” Rawls sings his own introduction, "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" and so on. He then gets into the song proper, and at this point I shot up from my chair, exclaiming aloud "That's ‘Blind Willie McTell’!!!" For some reason that I can't explain today, I became quite excited. There was nobody else in the room. The Dylan lyrics, "I'm standing by the window of the old St. James Hotel / and I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell" came to mind, and that started it.

I have since played this Rawls song to friends, and they often don't recognize the similarity.

At what point did you decide to write A Rake's Progress? Was it a way to organize informal research, or did the decision to write something come first, and then the research got ramped up as a result?

A bit of both, actually. I plunged into trying to find out more about the song -- and about the ground from which the song grew -- out of simple curiosity. It so happened that I was able to gather quite a bit of information, and had become intrigued by the question, "How did Joe Primrose/Irving Mills gain credit for the song's authorship?" My wife, Pam, encouraged me to start writing, and gradually I began to put together an essay of sorts. This led, of course, to further research. I found, for instance, that many of our assumptions about the arising of the blues are faulty. That the advent of recorded music dramatically altered the process of musical evolution. That the path I was exploring had many crossroads. In an appendix I wrote, "The problem is that, often, the closer one gets to something the less distinct it becomes. Or, it becomes part of a larger landscape, the puzzle becomes more complex and one has to select which areas to investigate . . . I was sometimes left with the impression that, had I been able to search all the pathways that opened up during my exploration, the result would have been nothing short of a history of the world. Which is, of course, impossible."

So, the essay became something else. And Pam, who works as a graphics artist for a university book publisher, began to muse about actually creating a book. I created a cover illustration, Pam designed a cover and formatted the text. The book was kept short (about 70 pages), as we were concerned about the cost of printing. And we finally did print forty copies, most of which were given to family and friends as gifts. By this time, you and I were exchanging letters, some of our discussions found their way into A Rake's Progress, and you were the first person to whom I sent the completed book.

I am working on a revision, considerably expanded. The aim is for the fall of this year. Again we will publish it ourselves. We are considering offering it for general sale and so, because of copyright issues, won't be able to include an illustrative CD. If anyone is interested in purchasing this book when it's finished, they can send me a note at robertharwood@rogers.com. I could then inform them when it's ready. As we'll be publishing it ourselves, I should be able to keep the cost fairly low.

Tomorrow: Part Two, the early recording industry, the blues, and other important contexts.

"Blind Willie McTell," by Bob Dylan

There's definitely something to be said about the parallels between Internet culture and folk culture, but I haven't quite worked it out yet. Folk expression (and of course I think "St. James Infirmary" is a good example) tends to have a kind of collective authorship. There's an awful lot of rhetoric about the Internet and other technologies enabling something similar -- "open source" projects (from Linux to Wikipedia) that not only allow, but encourage, even depend on, the collaboration of and contributions of many people. People talk about this like it's something without precedent, but to me, "St. James Infirmary" has a very open source kind of history to it; it has, in my view, no single author. And as discussed in prior entries on Dr. John and Josh White, long after its evolution from "Unfortunate Rake" and "Gambler's Blues," the song remains a source of raw material for new creations. Anyway, the Internet has definitely added something new to the long-standing tension between group authorship and individual authorship, but (as admitted above) I haven't totally worked it out. (McGuinn shared his thoughts about that tension in this April 2004 interview with the Creative Commons folks; click through and scroll down.)

Anyway, The Wall Street Journal ran a short piece about McGuinn's box set the other day, and in the interview McGuinn explained that the project came about because:

"I thought, 'This is a great opportunity to get some of these songs up there to share with people around the world. It's a grass roots thing, and I love the Internet for that, and also more one-on-one. Sitting in front of a computer, it's more like the oral tradition, with somebody singing the song to you, than it is if you're being broadcast at by TV."

Interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about the notion of sitting in front of a computer as being a more authentic listening experience than sitting in front of a television set. But by and large I like the ideology of McGuinn's project. It's great to use new tools to make new things.

On the other hand, sometimes the obsession with novelty comes at a cost of overlooking the past. I think it's cool to use new tools to explore and rediscover old things. But you probably guessed that.

I went down to that St. James Infirmary, and I saw some plasma there,
I ups and asks the doctor man, "Now was the donor dark or fair?"
The doctor laughed a great big laugh, and he puffed it right in my face,
He said, "A molecule is a molecule, son, and the damn thing has no race."

And that was news, yes that was news,
That was very, very, very special news.
'Cause ever since that day we’ve had those free and equal blues.

Full lyrics (and an informative essay about White originally published in Living Blues Magazine) can be found here. That's the site of writer and musician Elija Wald, and it is filled with all kinds of book and music projects he's had a hand in. One of those books, actually, is the biography Josh White: Society Blues. Clearly a guy who knows what he's talking about.

All I've heard of this Josh White version is the 30-second sample available on a page for this Folkways CD. At some point I'll buy this, but there are presently some budget strictures in place on this, uh, research project of mine. Anyway, per Wald's essay, this song was evidently recorded in the mid 1940s. "A favorite song of this period was 'Free and Equal Blues,'" Wald writes, "with music by Earl Robinson and lyrics by Yip Harburg (lyricist of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow,' 'It’s Only a Paper Moon,' and 'April in Paris,' among hundreds of other songs). Originally recorded by Robinson with Dooley Wilson, the piano playing 'Sam' in Casablanca, the song became one of Josh’s big crowd-pleasers. It was perfectly suited to his style, being a take-off of another song he had been instrumental in popularizing with the folk and cabaret crowd, 'St. James Infirmary.'"

White was from Greenville, South Carolina, and as a young man moved to New York, where, according to another source that the generous Mr. Bach sent me, he "obtained a recording contract with ARC and had a great success with songs such as 'St. James Infirmary Blues' and the anti-lynching song, 'Strange Fruit'."

From the bit of the "Free and Equal Blues" take that I can hear, the melody sounds identical to "St. James Infirmary," so I don't know what the above reference to "music by Earl Robinson" means, exactly. In any event, White also recorded "St. James Infirmary" itself in 1956, and that version happens to be available on iTunes, if you're interested. Thanks again, Mr. Bach...

Josh White, "St. James Infirmary" (1956 version)

Mr. Tersmeden is a collector of 1920s jazz and dance 78s. A little while back he added to his collection a copy of Victor 19304. This features Whitey Kaufman's Original Pennsylvania Serenaders, and one side contains a song called "In A Charleston Cabin." Mr. Tersmeden wrote to me to say:

"When I first played this side I was immediately struck by the fact that the trumpet part played at the beginning of the record (with subdued accompaniment by the full band) is a note-for-note rendition of -- you guessed it -- 'St. James Infirmary.' And this on a record which was made on March 21st, 1924 -- three years before Fess Williams and four years before Armstrong!"

At first he figured that perhaps this trumpet player must have simply been quoting a folk melody as inspiration for his solo. "But soon after," he continued, "I found another contemporary version of the same song (on a CD-reissue: Americans In Britain 1920-1925), this one having been made in London in August 1924 by the Carolina Club Orchestra (led by a very young Hal Kemp). [Kemp is pictured above.] And not only does this version include the same 'quote' as a solo (this time on trombone), but it's also played by the full band! So obviously the 'St. James' passage must have been part of the melody as written. Both the Kaufman 78 rpm record and the CD reissue of Kemp's version give the composer of 'Charleston Cabin' as one Roy Reber."

I'm in no position to start collecting 78s. But luckily, thanks to the strange and never-ending miracle of the Internet, I don't have to. It turns out that the Whitey Kaufman's Original Pennsylvania Serenaders recording is simply hanging around online, as part of the amazing Red Hot Jazz Archive. And just as Mr. Tersmeden described, there's quite a similarity in the opening passage of this take to the melody associated with "St. James Infirmary." Go ahead, click through and listen for yourself.

Meanwhile, as quickly as was reasonably possible, I tracked down a copy of the Americans In Britain 1920-1925 CD, which arrived yesterday. Hopefully I won't run afoul of any copyright laws by offering up the song for a listen; about 45 seconds in, the key solo passage/break occurs:

"Charleston Cabin"

Then the song goes back to the main melody. But once again, to me, that passage (done both by the trombone player and the clarinetist) sounds an awful lot like the melody of "St. James Infirmary."

Further poking about on the Red Hot Jazz Archive indicates several other recordings of "Charleston Cabin" were made in the 1920s: by Saxi Holtsworth's Harmony Hounds, in New York, on July 6, 1924; by Ray Miller's Orchestra, in New York, on July 22, 1924; by The Varsity Eight, in New York, on July 29, 1924; and by Alex Hyde's Original New Yorker Jazz Band, in Berlin, in May 1925. The only one of these you can actually listen to is the Saxi Holtsworth's Harmony Hounds version, right here. And, once again, there's the "St. James" melody, about 30 or 40 seconds in, in the manner of the Carolina Club Orchestra's take.

All of this is fascinating -- and, frankly, a little annoying. What could explain it? Mr. Tersmeden offered the "wild theory" that this melody was from a folk song particularly connected to Charleston or South Carolina, and thus "deliberately incorporated to give a 'local flavor' (just like many songs about the South contain short snippets of 'Way down on the Swanee River')."

This is no wild theory at all, in my view. I don't know about the idea that there's a particular South Carolina or Charleston connection (I'm still holding out hope that if there has to be a geographic touchpoint in the United States, it will turn out to be New Orleans), but I'm a believer in the idea that this melody belongs more to folk tradition than any single human being that we'll ever be able to name. I figure that the song I'm so interested in must have been kicking around for a while before Carl Sandburg included it (as "Those Gambler's Blues") in his 1927 book American Songbag, and thus, of course, before Irving Mills (as Joe Primrose) was granted the writing credit (for "St. James Infirmary") in 1929. Anyway, what's news here to me is that it appears Roy Reber claimed at least the melody part of it before Mills did. Was Mills aware of "In A Charleston Cabin"? Was Reber intentionally quoting a specific folk tune? Was Reber aware of Primrose/Mills?

Clearly I'll have to return to this subject later. At the moment, I know practically nothing about Roy Reber; cursory Internet (cough) research suggests that he led a band in California in the 1920s, but for now that's about all I can say. I haven't seen the sheet music for "Charleston Cabin," but according to the web site of the University of New Hampshire, it's in the library there as part of the Alvah Sulloway Sheet Music and Theater Program Collection, and was copyrighted in 1924. Roy Reber is listed as the composer, and Edward B. Marks Music Co. as the publisher. Oddly, there's also a lyricist credit (Sidney Holden), although none of the versions I've heard so far have lyrics.

I'll also mention, quickly, that Whitey Kaufman (per Red Hot Jazz) was from Lebanon, Pennsylvania. His band recorded a number of sides in New York and New Jersey, and evidently toured around the country. Hal Kemp (per the AllMusic entry linked above) was born in 1905, in Alabama, and played clarinet and alto sax. As a 19-year old student at the University of North Carolina, he led the Carolina Club Orchestra. This outfit was booked on a cruise line, and that's how they ended up getting recorded on a London date. He later had a fair amount of success leading the Hal Kemp Orchestra, before dying in a car crash in 1940. Regarding that last detail, I suppose I should admit right now that I don't think Hal Kemp has any substantial role to play in the story of "St. James Infirmary," but I couldn't resist a quick recap of his life story here. If I'm not allowed to indulge in a little off-topic melodrama every now and again, then what's the point in writing about this stuff at all?

This just in (March 26): Our friend and fellow-"St. James" enthusiast/researcher Robert Harwood points out this link to a Duke University library site, which offers some additional clues regarding the lyrics to "Charleston Cabin." It gives the "first line" ("How I hate to waken...") and the "refrain" ("In a Charleston cabin happy I'll be..."). "So," Mr. Harwood suggests, "the lyric is probably pretty pedestrian." Agreed. But a great tip; our hat is off to Mr. Harwood again.

But reader Larry Broomberg once suggested to me another line of influence that, to date, I've not had a change to explore more fully. But I'll share it here, and perhaps someone out there will have a suggestion or two.

What he suggested is a possible connection to Eastern European Jewish musicians in the U.S. It seems he was looking for musical numbers to play at a function organized for the Jewish Cultural Council of Grand Rapids, MI, and got interested in "St. James Infirmary." He wrote to me:

"I was drawn to this particular piece by its simplistic structure and just wondered if there was a trace of Eastern European influence. The Dm, A7th, Dm, Bb, A7th Dm, Bb7, A7, Dm stream is so like many 'traditional' Jewish melodies of Eastern European origin. We know that the early Jewish immigrants found acceptance and boarding with many 'negro' families in the South. I could not help conjuring up the scenario of a couple of these immigrants with some musical talent, singing or playing these traditional numbers being overheard by a local originator of the blues who was then influenced by those minor harmonies when creating a lament for the passing of his lady!"

Later he added:

"The Klezmer tradition was, as you may well know, one of musicians going from village to village in the countries of Eastern Europe playing for weddings, bar mitzvahs or anything else that they could celebrate in between pogroms. Many of these people immigrated to the USA and found little acceptance into society anywhere outside Delancey Street, NY. Many found work as traveling salesmen in the southern states, and that's where they established a kinsmanship with the black population, who were having their own social integration problems."

Well, I was pretty fascinated by that possibility, and still am. But apart from, you know, a passing familiarity with klezmer music, I know very little about any of this -- certainly I'm not knowledgeable about Jewish musicians who emigrated and ended up as traveling salesmen in the South.

What really gave me pause is I had actually noticed before that a couple of songs on a Steven Bernstein CD called Diaspora Soul (which Amazon.com summarizes as the "result of Bernstein's desire to combine what he described as 'the Gulf Coast sound, encompassing Texas and Cuba' with traditional Hebrew music") have "St. James"-like melodies, to my ears, anyway. Particularly one called "Chusen Kalah Mazel Tov." I'd never really given much thought to this -- beyond entertaining the possibility that I've listened to "St. James Infirmary" so many times that I hear it even when it's not there.

So, I put all this on the record, and the Web, on the off chance that it will lead to suggestions about how to research it further. Is there a definitive book, for example, on this subject? Email me (walker at robwalker.net) or comment below, if you have thoughts.

"Chusen Kalah Mazel Tov," by Steven Bernstein

Before I lived in New Orleans, I basically thought of Dr. John as the guy who did the song "Right Place, Wrong Time," which was an FM staple when I was very young, and which never did much for me. I've wised up since then: I am still not wild about that particular tune, but one of the things I learned by osmosis during our New Orleans stint is the musical context that Dr. John came out of, and I now "get" him. Actually I have a pretty specific memory of the moment that made me realize that I had totally misjudged the man: I was listening to WWOZ in the kitchen one afternoon, and they played this recording of him talking about New Orleans piano styles, and illustrating his points with music as he spoke. It was a brief but totally fascinating passage -- and of course his speaking voice is mesmerizing.

More to the point, I have to say, his "Touro Infirmary" is really great, a totally passionate and gritty performance. He rewrote the lyrics completely, to make the song not about a lover, but a "running partner."

I went down to the Touro Infirmary,
Lord knows, and I found my running partner there.
He was stretched out on a coal-black table, yes he was.
Lord, the narcotic agent left him there.

He was gone, he was gone,
God don’t you miss him?
A better man than him can never be found.
All the characters on the street all around here
They all know he’s laid his burden down. . . .

Full lyrics, to the best of my ability to transcribe them, are here.

Digging back through very old correspondence on this matter, I find that a couple of people mentioned to me that the lyrics appear in Dr. John's memoir, Under a Hoodoo Moon, which everyone says is excellent. Apparently in the book he describes the song as "a pain-filled sayonara to a partner long gone." On the CD, the song is credited to "Traditional," and needless to say Dr. John is very much in the "traditional" tradition in reworking the song's story.

More recently he recorded the song again, under the title "St. James Infirmary," on a 2004 album called Dis, Dat, and D'Udda, but I'm less interested in that take. Also, I've been told of (and have seen Web references to) a bootleg version from 1996 of Dr. John performing the song live with Eric Clapton, but I have not heard this*. Finally, I should mention that the NPR interview cited above was partly tied to his recent EP, Sippiana Hericane; evidently, proceeds from that disc go to the New Orleans Musicians Clinic, the Jazz Foundation of America, and The Voice Of The Wetlands.

* Update, May 2, 2006: Now I have, see this post.

Thanks: Raymond Landry, Cal Morgan, Reagan Arthur, Rene Crowe, and Marie-Jeanne Trauth.

"Touro Infirmary" (1982)

"St. James Infirmary" (2004)

Lyrics follow.

Touro Infirmary
[By Dr. John]

I went down to the Touro Infirmary,
Lord knows, and I found my running partner there.
He was stretched out on a coal-black table, yes he was.
Lord, the narcotic agent left him there.

He was gone, he was gone,
God don’t you miss him?
A better man than him can never be found.
All the characters on the street all around here
They all know he’s laid his burden down.

He said, “When I go, when I go,
Lay a ten-dollar gold piece on my eyelids.
Lord knows I want loaded craps in shoes.
I want the finest whores off of Bourbon Street
And I want to hear Professor Longhair sing a low-down blues.”

I went down to the Touro Infirmary
And I seen my sweet running partner there.
He was stretched out, with a DOA sticker
With a .32 hole in his hair.

You know they say Chief Giarrusso had warned him:
"Son you can’t win this game."
But that never stopped him as long as he was living.
Yeah Lord, you can’t hold the boy to blame.

Yeah went down to the Touro Infirmary
Lord knows that I seen my running partner there.
He was stretched out on a coal black table, yes he was .
It made me cry to see him there.

Let him go let, him let him go, him let him go, him let him go,
Straight to heaven.
I know none of you dirty rats expect him there.
He was a better man than all the ones that expect to arrive
From that Touro Infirmary, he don’t care.

Touro Infirmary.
Yeah.

Note: These are the lyrics as I hear them. In Dr. John's book Under A Hoodoo Moon, the lyrics are apparently published with a few differences. Most significantly, in place of the line, "With a .32 hole in his hair," the book says it's "With a .323 special in his hand." Also, the book includes an "alternate lyric" for one section:

It was a cold black night last winter
Five coal black horses on Prytania Street
Five coal black ho's all dressed in leather
Waitin' by the Touro Infirmary)

Barbara Dane wrote in some time ago. She's a professional singer ("sometimes folk, sometimes hot jazz or blues ... don't care much for categories or labels") who says she's performed the song for many years in many forms. One of her favorite versions is Jack Teagarden's take, she added, and "one of the oldest versions I know is called 'One Morning in May,' and is probably Irish in origin, about a young woman dying of syphilis."

In fact, she recorded that song, as "When I Was a Young Girl," on an album with that title (and later re-released as "Anthology of American Folk Songs.") This would be part of the cycle stemming from "The Unfortunate Rake," which eventually led to "St. James Infirmary," as discussed in the "SJI" essay. "I learned it off a Library of Congress record in 1946, so no doubt it has changed a lot." Presumably refering to current peformances, she wrote: "I like to sing it a capella first, a few verses, before bringing my jazz band in full force with 'St. James Infirmary.'"

While I was not familiar with Barbara Dane, she's had an interesting career, and was once referred to as "Bessie Smith in stereo" by Leonard Feather. She also toured with Teagarden at one point. She has performances coming up in the months ahead in San Francisco and New York. And her "When I Was a Young Girl" is available on iTunes.

"When I Was a Young Girl," performed by Barbara Dane

Now, I know you're curious about the lyrics to "Spitál svatého Jakuba," and I'll get to that momentarily. But first: Info about George's gigs and CDs can be found at GeorgeGrosman.com. If you happen to be in Toronto, his expat group Music on the Corner has CD release party on March 4, at the Prague Restaurant. "Spitál svatého Jakuba" isn't on on the disc (which features swing tunes from the 1920s and 1930s), they might play it at the party. All I can say is, if I were in the area, I'd go. George plays in several groups that gig reguarly around Toronto and elsewhere, and there are music samples and CDs for sale on the site; check it out.

Okay. So, after the jump below you can read the Czech lyrics -- and the re-translation of those lyrics back into English. All this courtesy of George himself, who notes that translating the song into Czech in a way that actually rhymes and fits with the beat is what explains how the re-translated English version is different.

This was all of course of great interest to me, because of my obession with certain lyric passages in many versions of the tune. As you'll see, the English re-translation creates a song that is perhaps more conventionally romantic, but also, I think, even more tragic, in its tone. For example, this bit:

The sun lit up the eastern horizon
I'm standing at a crossroads
Little hope is left
All is left is pain

Later the singer says, "I'll be alone forever," and shuffles home in the rain. The song ends:

May God grant her calm rest
Heaven is much more peaceful
Than this miserable world
No more pain for her now

Little hope is left. I'll be alone forever. This miserable world. Pretty grim! And a pretty long way, one might say, from the fearless taunting-the-fates attitude of the singer (that I hear, at least) in the most frequently used English version. And yet, I think there's an interesting commonality. Even as the original confronts fate with bravado, it still lives in the realm of the fatalistic. The two versions share a vision of a world in which much is beyond the singer's control. Now, it might seem as though the idea that there is much beyond our control is something everyone knows and believes, but sometimes I wonder. Anyway, also remember that while the lyrics alone seem pretty stark, it's no doubt a different experience to hear them set against the melody, which serves as a non-verbal counterpoint, no matter what the language of the singer.

Lyrics in Czech & translated English follow.

Spitál svatého Jakuba

Do spitalu se pomalu plouzim
Stona tam laska ma
Tezke myslenky souzi
Rozbresku se nedocka

Na vychode slunce vzplalo
Ja stojim na rozcesti
Nadeje zbyva uz malo
Zbyvaji jen bolesti

Spital je chladny a bily
Vzduch je tu k zalknuti
Ma mila kazdou chvili
Dusi svou vypusti

Uz nikdy mi nerekne kluku
Ja te tak rada mam
Uz nikdy mi nestiskne ruku
Ted budu na veky sam

Destem se domu plouzim
Pomalu jako ve snach
Ma mila uz se nesouzi
Nesou ji na marach

Boze muj at spociva klidne
V nebi je pohody vic
Nez na tomto svete bidnem
Neboli ji uz nic

St. James Infirmary
(Translated back into English)

I’m slowly shuffling toward the hospital
my love is there, lying sick
heavy thoughts weigh down on me
she won’t live to see the dawn

The sun lit up the eastern horizon
I’m standing at a crossroads
Little hope is left
All is left is pain

The hospital is cold and white
The air is stuffy here
Any minute now
My love’s soul shall depart

Never again will she tell me: “My boy
you know I love you so”
She’ll never squeeze my hand
I’ll be alone forever

I’m shuffling home through the rain
Slowly, as if in a dream
My love is beyond pain now
She’s being carried on a bier.

May God grant her calm rest
Heaven is much more peaceful
Than this miserable world
No more pain for her now