That's right, Robert W. Harwood, who as I mentioned earlier has a book called I Went Down To St. James Infirmary about to come out any second now, has started a blog at:

iwentdowntostjamesinfirmary.blogspot.com/

Posts so far include an old advertisement for the release of Armstrong's "SJI," as well as a thumbnail on Irving Mills (who claimed writing credit for "SJI" under the pseudonym Joe Primrose). Definitely worth checking out and keeping an eye on!

On the WFMU blog, the always awesome Doug Schulkind writes:

Another lesser-known fact about [Louis] Armstrong is that he toted reel-to-reel recording decks with him everywhere. With them he committed to tape concerts, conversations, his own playing and talking, audio flotsam from the Satchmo Universe.

Even more impressive, Armstrong adorned the audio tape boxes with alluring and vivid Romare Bearden–esque collages layering photos, news clippings, concert programs, handwritten captions and other graphic elements. Armed with scotch tape and scissors, Armstrong spent countless hours entertaining himself, squirreled away in the den of his home in Corona, Queens, making visual music.

Check out a few samples of Armstrong's (visual) art here.

And there are some audio clips from the above-mentioned home taping here. I've just begun to listen to the clips, but so far they're all short. Interesting though. If I find anything particularly worth hearing, I'll report back.

I bring it up because I was interested that the film included Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell," which as readers of my original SJI essay know, is an interesting song document in the history of SJI. The visuals it played against were largely evocative of late-Civil Rights era violence. Make of that what you will.

Also, one of the Dylan versions, the one played by Cate Blanchett, in a soliloquy, dropped the line "mystery is a traditional fact," a Dylan-ism I mused about here.

If you see, or have seen, the film, let me know what you make of it. I'll admit straight out that it didn't totally connect with me, but that I think that may have had more to do with my state of mind at the time than the film itself.

The well-trod "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans" is, like "St. James Infirmary" and "Lil' Liza Jane, " a New Orleans standard overdue for retirement.

Due for retirement?

"St. James Infirmary"??

You're fucking fired.

So I was quite intrigued to get a note from a reader not long ago, a student in White Plains, New York, named Dan Pasternack. He said he was a fan of "SJI" himself, dating back to a time he'd heard it performed at Preservation Hall on a visit to New Orleans. "I was stunned," he continued, "to find the song appear in Albert Camus' 1947 book The Plague, playing in a crowded bar and then on a character's record player."

Turned out he was reading that book for a class assignment, and I got him to send me the paper he wrote, in which he actually deals a bit with the "SJI" cameo.

The Plague, as those of you who are more literary-minded than I am no doubt already know, is a novel about a small city in a French colony in North Africa that must cut itself off from the outside world due to, yes, a plague. Not surprisingly, there's a claustrophobic and introspective feel to the narrative, as the citizens of this town, Oran, deal with their isolation and with the fact that their fellow citizens are dying and they could be next. How does "SJI" fit in? That's explained after the jump.

Mr. Pasternack notes that the first appearance of "St. James Infirmary" is in the background in a bar, where one of the book's principal characters, a doctor named Rieux, is trying to convince another character, a journalist called Rambert (who was only visiting the town on assignment when he got stranded there) not to escape by illicit means. Their talk is "half drowned by the stridence of St. James Infirmary coming from the loud-speaker just above their heads."

Later they go to Rambert's apartment:

“So you haven’t understood yet?" Rambert shrugged his shoulders almost scornfully.
"Understood what?"
"The plague."
"Ah!" Rieux exclaimed.
"No, you haven’t understood that it means exactly that – the same thing over and over again."
He went to the corner of the room and started a small phonograph.
"What’s that record?" Tarrou asked. "I’ve heard it before."
"It’s St. James Infirmary."
While the phonograph was playing, two shots rang out in the distance.
"A dog or a get-away," Tarrou remarked.
When, a moment later, the record ended, an ambulance bell could be heard clanging past under the window and receding into silence.
"Rather a boring record," Rambert remarked. "And this must be the tenth time I’ve put it on today."
"Are you really so fond of it?"
"No, but it’s the only one I have." And after a moment he added: "That’s what I said ‘it’ was – the same thing over and over again."

I picked up a copy of The Plague after hearing from Mr. Pasternack, and for various reasons I'm still not done reading it, but I have made it to a point past this scene. Interestingly, there's a bit in the very next section that describes the funerals in the plague-stricken town: "The most striking feature of our funerals," the narrator relates, "was their speed." The practical and clinically efficient procedures described are, of course, the polar opposite of the elaborate ceremony of the jazz funeral, where "SJI" is often played to this day.

Mr. Pasternack writes about the larger resonance of the tune to this novel:

This mournful song about sickness and death fits perfectly into the setting of The Plague, with its long section about funerals and burials of the hundreds of casualties a day. The imagery of the corpse lying on the table is especially haunting. While the jazz arrangement that Camus’ characters heard may have been familiar to them, the song was clearly chosen for its particular air of melancholy and lyrical similarity to Oran’s affliction....

The lyrical ambiguity is one of the chief attractions of the song – what could explain the sudden shift the singer takes from mourning over his lover’s body, to his boastful declaration, and finally his proud plans for his own death? In the song, it is enigmatic, put in the context of The Plague, the meaning is very clear. The singer is preparing for his own possible death from the same pestilence.

Nice!

And as you may recall if you've read my old "SJI" essay from Letters from New Orleans, the lyrics, at least, of "SJI" can be traced back to an old folk ballad in which the singer/narrator has good reason to muse on his own funeral arrangements, as his lover has just died of another communicable disease, V.D.

But let me give Mr. Pasterneck the last word on all of this, as he convincingly ties together Camus' use of this particular song in the constricting world depicted in The Plague, where boredom and fatalism harden the characters into a view of life so brutal they hardly care when shots ring out in the distance: It's all just the same thing, over and over.

The meaning of the first scene, which at first seems only a piece of meaningless description where the three characters struggle to talk over the “stridence” of the song, now makes sense. As he does in countless other images, Camus shows the citizens besieged by the presence of death, both in the present and future, as they go about their daily lives. Although they try to avoid these reminders and talk over the noise, the anguished voice in the background still moans: “Let her go, let her go…”

[Big thanks to Dan Pasternack for getting in touch, and bigger thanks for allowing to quote from his paper here. ]

"St. James Infirmary," about an untimely death, originated as a British folk ballad and eventually became a New Orleans bar song. Yarrow describes the uncanny feeling she got performing the tune in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina. "It's about going to the morgue to see your lover," she says. "It was bone-chilling."

I forget how I got wind that the tune appears in the 2001 anime film Metropolis; it may be that I became aware of the sound track first, and then backed into it from there.

In any case, the film is a bit of a big deal in anime circles:

Based on the Metropolis manga created by the late Osamu Tezuka. The movie had an all star production team including renown anime director Rintaro, Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo as script writer, and animation by Madhouse Studios with conceptual support from Tezuka Production.

I'll leave it to you to decode all that as you wish. After some deliberation, I've decided it's best not to try to summarize the plot here, because, as far as I could tell, there's no particular reason for the specific use of "SJI" in this scene. It's a nice version, though, credited to Toshiyuki Honda, who from what I can gather is a composer and arranger, but almost certainly not the vocalist. Here's the clip.

Sorry this entry is a little threadbare on actual information. If someone out there has something to share on any of the above: Speak up!

"St. James Infirmary," Toshiyuki Honda

“Snow White,” the 1933 Betty Boop short with a rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing ‘St James Infirmary Blues.’ So beautiful.

Good choice. One more time for those of you who haven't seen it: Here's a link.

Jack White's phrasing seems a little eccentric, and he tweaks some lyrics here and there. It's a good solid version, but probably wouldn't stand out if it weren't for the fact that White tosses in a verse I'm pretty sure he made up. (Or at least, I don't know where he got it from; correct me if you do.) Right after the verse about the deceased lover being unlikely to find a man like the singer, even if she searched the wide world over, he sings this:

Take apart your bones and put 'em back together.
Tell your mama that you're somebody new.
Feel the breeze blowing, look out here it comes!
Now I can say whatever I feel like to you.

I never really gave this a great deal of thought, but for some reason listening to it again, I suddenly thought of the old Betty Boop cartoon that includes Cab Calloway singing "SJI." I've written about that before -- here -- but suffice it to say it's super-surreal and hard to explain.

Nothing in it specifically echoes or illustrates, say, taking apart your bones and putting them back together. But the curious clown character in the short film, who sings the song (via Calloway, or I guess Calloway sings it via the clown) spends a certain amount of time in a ghostly, semi-skeletal state. White's phrasing -- upon watching the Boop cartoon again -- is pretty clearly taken from, or a tribute to, Calloway. And certainly those lyrics have the same strange, loopy, vaguely macabre feel of the old cartoon.

Also this: The clown's name is Koko, and listening one more time to the White Stripes version, I picked up on something I'd somehow never noticed or forgot about or didn't hear before: In the sort of musical lead-in, White says, "Oh, Koko!"

How about that?

The Boop cartoon, about seven minutes long ("SJI" is toward the end), is here, and also pretty easy to find on YouTube.

"St. James Infirmary Blues," The White Stripes

Obviously, I would really, really like to know more. So if you know any Chicago theater freaks, let me know.

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.

2. NPR piece on the gospel tent at Jazz Fest.

3. "The primary message is: free shrimp." An NPR piece about the troubles of the Louisiana shrimp business, and its lobbying strategies -- which recently involved bringing a thousand pounds of shrimp to Washington. I sure do love Gulf shrimp.

4. The troubles of Basin Street Street Records.

5. Pretty interesting hour-long radio show about the origins and impact of Pentecostalism.

6. Kind words about Letters from New Orleans from Minor Wisdom. Much appreciated!

Actual number of links in this installment of 6 Links: 9.

Lomax conducted his interviews with Morton in 1938, and much of the discussion centers on New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century, when Morton (born in 1890) was a young man. It’s hard to know how much of what Morton says is shaded by the tricks of memory, and straight-up, self-serving revisionism. But there’s not much reason to doubt his offhand remark: “In those days, myself, I thought I would die unless I had a hat with the emblem in it named Stetson. And I didn’t rest until I got myself a Stetson hat and a pair of Edwin Clapp shoes.”

Aside from being an interesting early artifact of intense brand loyalty, this bit makes me recall a passage of “St. James Infirmary”:

When I die, I want you to dress me in straight-laced shoes
Box-back coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
So the boys will know that I died standin' pat.

This patch of the song and its mention of various sartorial details was suggested to me as a particular thing to focus on by reader Charles Neveu. The lyric as noted above is the way Louis Armstrong sang it at the end of 1928. Two of the lyric variations on “Those Gambler’s Blues” in Carl Sandburg’s book American Songbag have similar passages -– but while both mention the “box-back coat” and “twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,” neither specifies a Stetson hat. Stetson hats, by the way, date back to 1865, and are still around today.

Two things you’d think I’d be more on top of are the writings of Louis Armstrong, and scholarship concerning the song “Stagolee.” I certainly should be more conversant in both, but hey, this site is just a hobby, what can I say? Anyway, it seems Louis Armstrong actually mentions Stetsons in his book Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans (which I’ve never read, although I should have done so by now). And the song “Stagolee” certainly mentions the Stetson. (Specifically, a milk-white Stetson, at least in some versions -- which explains something that came up in an earlier post.) In fact, per Cecil Brown’s definitive book Stagolee Shot Billy, “Stagolee” was about a dispute over a Stetson: “Stack Lee” Shelton shot Billy Lyons for taking and refusing to give back his Stetson hat, and plucked it from the dying man’s hands. This 1895 incident gave rise to the song that not only topped the charts by way of (one-time New Orleanian, pictured at left) Lloyd Price in the late 1950s, but lives on more than 100 years later. Now that’s product placement.

In any case, when Fess Williams recorded "Gambler’s Blues," he had his character request burial in "in a box-back coat and a high-roller hat,” plus the twenty-dollar gold piece. Mattie Hite’s character requested “A box-back coat and hat” in her 1930 version. When Irving Mills (“Joe Primrose”) himself sang it, in 1930, his version left out funeral-request specifics altogether; the same was true when Charlie Teagarden sang it that year as part of Irving Mills and his Hotsy Totsy Gang. Same for Jimmie Rogers.

Another reader -- Scott Graves of Dark Ryders (check 'em out) -- pointed out the “Stagolee” connection, and directed me to this interesting essay by Jim Hause, which asserts:

The dispute over the Stetson may be the real key to understanding how [Lloyd Price’s version of] "Stagger Lee" was interpreted by African-Americans. This hat was very popular among black men during the first half of the twentieth century. Louis Armstrong notes this in his book Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, in which he explains that many blacks coveted Stetsons and often purchased them on installment plans. The reason these hats were so popular is that they held a special meaning. In his doctoral dissertation, "Stagolee: From Shack Bully to Culture Hero," Professor Cecil Brown, the world's foremost authority on the legend of Stagger Lee, points out that Stagger Lee's hat "represents his manhood." Brown relates that men wore Stetsons as symbols of "newly won black male masculinity" at the time of the occurrence of the murder upon which the legend is largely based.

The murder took place in 1895, which means that many of the men who wore the the Stetsons were former slaves or sons of slaves. Therefore, in representing the manhood of African-Americans, the Stetson was ultimately a symbol of freedom. The black man's manhood is tied to his freedom and his struggle for freedom.

Mr. Neveu's thought was that by isolating certain sartorial details of the song, I might isolate something crucial about its origin. But I think with a song like this, it’s not quite so easy. Yes, Armstrong dropped a Stetson reference that -– per Jelly Roll Morton, at least -– has some relevance in linking Armstrong’s rendition to black New Orleanians. On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that the Stetson had relevance in St. Louis as well –- and even more clear that the lyrics of “St. James Infirmary” (and “Gambler’s Blues”) have been repeatedly finessed by the many people who have sung them. It’s less likely that the details of any particular rendition can reveal the one, true authorship of the song, than that they will reveal, yet again, the absence of one, true author.

Having said that, both Mr. Neveu and Mr. Graves have proven once again how rich and deep this song is, and how much we have to learn from it. For that I thank them.

As for what exactly a “box-back coat” is … well, you tell me.

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.

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 touched on this very briefly in the most recent version of the "St. James Infirmary" essay. There was, it is said, a St. James Methodist Church across the street from a New Orleans bar where Jelly Roll Morton used to hang out -- but that's not it, of course, as the lyric pre-dates Storyville by many years. Sarah Vowell once wrote that her "researches found a St. James Infirmary in Dublin as far back as 1667," but the hospital she seems to refer to wasn't actually known as St. James until the early 1970s. What I say in the essay is that Kenneth S. Goldstein, in the notes accompanying the 1960 Folkways record, "The Unfortunate Rake: A Study in the Evolution of a Ballad," asserts that St. James Hospital was in London, and treated lepers.

Since I just have one sentence on this in the essay, here's a more detailed summation of what Goldstein wrote almost half a century ago. It is from Goldstein's notes that I learned that oldest "Rake" texts date back to 19th century England and Ireland, and it's unclear how long the song had been around by then (maybe since 1790, possibly longer). He also writes that it is "a bitter historical irony that the 'St. James Hospital' which provides the setting for this series of ballads is known today in London as St. James Palace... The original St. James Hospital was a religious foundation for the redemption of 'fourteen sisters, maidens, that were leperous, living chastley and honestly in divine services." Henry VIII "acquired" these grounds in the early 1530s -- and if you're curious, there's more about the Palace history on "The Official Website of the British Monarchy."

Goldstein continues: "A contemporary says that the palace 'looked more like a prison than a royal mansion.' ... Palace life was a frequent subject for popular comment ... The Mall in St. James Park continued to be the most fashionable promenade in London as late as the middle of the 18th century."

Now, however, comes interesting correspondence from Paul Goddard of Bristol, England, that challenges Goldstein's assertion. Mr. Goddard suggests that, given the time frame outlined above, a more likely site for the St. James is actually St. James' workhouse, built on Poland Street in London in 1728. (I don't know a tremendous amount about workhouses, but as I understand it they came about as a result of the bluntly named "Poor Law." Mr. Goddard points me to this link, with excerpts from a 1732 publication called "An Account of Several Workhouses." Referring to a workhouse "for the able-bodied poor," erected by the parish of St. James, it reads in part:

There are 8 Wards, viz. 4 for Women, 2 for Men, 1 for Boys, and 1 for Girls .... There is one Ward for Lying-in-Women, into which many are brought out of the Streets to be deliver'd. Another Ward for an Infirmary, where, though it is generally full of Sick People, the Women that are well, are very officious to give all the Attendance they are able, under the direction of a diligent Matron ....

I would say that I think it's plausible that a folk singer might have been referencing this place, or the (mis)remembered hospital on the grounds where St. James Palace was built. It's not, after all, as if folk songs ever went through a fact-checking process: Even in real time, they could be a mishmash of past, present, and myth. And of course when you add a few hundred years of distance, reflected only through fragmentary evidence, it gets even harder to pretend one can say with confidence where the real St. James Infirmary was.

That said, Mr. Goddard's contribution here is pretty compelling. And, more important to me, it's wonderful. I like to imagine St. James Infirmary was all the places alluded to above, and many more, and none of them. If you see what I mean.

Mr. Goddard has led a Bristol band called Dr. Jazz that has performed "St. James Infirmary" many times (once on BBC2, even) over the past twenty years or so. The Dr. Jazz web site is being updated, and when that's done, a link will be provided.

“I first heard it during University studies into the history of animation. Max Fleischer, who was one of the early pioneers of animation and created the first sound cartoons (despite Disney's claim with Steamboat Willy) used the Cab Calloway version of the song in his 1933 cartoon ‘Betty Boop: Snow White.’ Fleischer’s character Koko sings it. Koko was groundbreaking in that he was rotoscope-animated (meaning footage of a live-action actor is projected behind an animation board and the actor’s movements are traced with a character; this gives a great natural movement). The cartoon is massively surreal.”

He’s right about that massively surreal bit, for sure. See for yourself…

Also, more Fleischer cartoons here.

Thanks again, Mr. Saltmarsh.

“I worked with a jazz pianist who couldn't sing a note, she 'talked' her way through songs, but she was impressive, going by Mother Light at the time (around 1969/70). She had a lot of a/k/a's, including Tug Boat Annie, when she worked at the River Queen in Portland. Which brings me to her version of 'St. James Infirmary': she said it was a song about a group of poor people who were deliberately infected with venereal disease as part of a scientific/medical experiment. She didn't say where the Infirmary was, for some reason I heard, or dreamed, or something, that St. James Infirmary was in Western Canada, possibly Vancouver B.C.”

This intriguing information inspired a few questions, which Ms. Harmon graciously answers, below.

Q: You say you “worked with” Mother Light -- worked with her in what sense, if you don’t mind my asking?

A: I was an exotic dancer -- September Rose -- for the better part of 25 years. I had a pretty face and a ninth-grade education, and the welfare dime wasn't for me. It took two decades to earn a bachelor's degree in liberal arts and then an MFA in creative writing.

I worked with Mother Light in the sense that she tutored me: the green-as-grass strutter who could dance to anything, but who had never heard of four/four time, six/eight time, nothing. She often stopped by the bar where I worked and we'd chat while she sucked down a couple of drinks after her gig was over. She'd played all over the West Coast. She didn't back strippers anymore, but she told me about the old days, the tough times, when she had to forget her classical/jazz roots and get up on the stand with musicians who couldn't read music. She'd bang out "Satin Doll" on an out-of-tune piano and be grateful for a paycheck. That is, if the club owner was sober enough to pay up at the end of the week!

She'd always enjoyed the dancers. By telling me her story, she dignified my experience. I learned there were many generations of performers like me -- poor folk who worked the fairs, the carnivals, the road houses, supper clubs, burlesque theaters, nightclubs and more, all over America.

Q: Was "St. James Infirmary" a good pick for a burlesque performance?
A: It was usually used for what was then called "floor work," or a "floor routine". (Now it is referred to as a "floor show", which used to mean the entire revue, musicians, chorus girls, singers, the works.) Anyway, as a dirge with a sensual and sorrowful tone, this piece was a natural for the way floor routines were done when exotic dancers posed on fur rugs and couches and used other props during their floor work. This floor work was the /last/ number, the finale, done in a languid, graceful way. There was never any hopping up and down to grab a buck because dancers didn't work for tips at that time. Pole dancing was a future event.

Mother Light and I mused that "St. James Infirmary" was also about death: "...and I saw my baby there... stretched out on a long white table, so pale, so cold, and so fair..." We thought that death, the long sleep, and the long white limbs of a stripper who was doing her finale (and most strippers were white at that time; women of color were referred to as "novelty acts") -- a dancer so passively displayed probably had a huge appeal to men who were habitués of these skin palaces. They came to see females who were the antithesis of modern woman: no voice, presumably no education, naked and physically vulnerable. Although not necessarily available--which is another theory altogether.

Q: What else might you be willing to say about yourself, and your book?

I left Portland, Oregon and came to the East Coast via a long, lonely Midwest tour, almost exactly 21 years ago. Arrived with that ninth grade education and a trunk full of costumes that smelled like cheap cologne and cigarette smoke. I'm an artist, and I've also been a costume designer, a hair dresser. I figure I could write for True Romance magazine and never run out of stories! I loved the people who have become characters in my books. I want to preserve their histories.

The Moral Career of a Stripper is one of four unfinished works. It’s about coming of age in the midst of the women's movement. I loved the stage and the night life, it was difficult to reconcile my image of myself with the one that the feminists put out: strippers were anachronisms, traitors to the cause of women's rights. These days I refer to myself as a recovering feminist, although I value and defend most of the dogma. Lots of conflict and confession there!

The other books-in-progress are Dirty Little Girl (as a fifteen-year-old hooker); Lock Jockey, which is told from the perspective of a kid who was a consumer of social services, then as an adult who delivered those services (I was in reformatories for six years, almost all of my adolescence; after I left the dance business I went to work in the human service industry); and From An Ex-Con in Corporate America, which details the experience of me surfacing and joining the hordes of office workers and the nine-to-fivers. It was a pretty startling transition. Trying to tone down the red hair and ankle bracelets (which I still loved), watch the swears and the hearty laughter. All these would be considered creative non-fiction, rather than autobiography.

Q: Thanks for all the answers -- and good luck with the book(s)!
A: Thanks for all the questions. . . I love the subject, and the history.