I’m doing a solo show at 10:30 at Hyperion Tavern in Silverlake this Thursday the 12th. This will be amazing and well worth the trouble to stand around and drink beer.

Then on Thursday the 19th of February I’ll play in Culver City at Cinema Bar, the favorite LA dive of both Lucinda Williams and every east sider on the west side. Cinema Bar rules. Also, Tito’s Taco is right around the corner and Tito’s is a very fine taco indeed.

Musically speaking the solo shows have been moving away from the 19th century parlor sound and towards something more raucous and 20th century. But as always the set is full of weird-ass nuggets. Like, I’ll do a supercool instrumental I just learned called “Posey Ran Away,” which is a slave fiddle tune that was transcribed in 1780 by a Scottish tourist in America. The sound has a perky celtic influence, like any fiddle tune, but there’s a hypnotic circularity about the way the parts link up that gives it a north African edge. It’s like a cross between a Ghanaian kalimba song and an Irish jig. It’s basically nothing but a melody, so I’m going to put it in a batch with other songs that don’t have either words or chords. It’ll be a mini set with no words or chords. Because words and chords are overrated.

But then there will be other songs that have words and chords and are about sex!

I’ll also be backing up Madame Pamita at Taix every Wednesday this month, so February 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The set starts at ten. Goofy good fun right on Sunset in Echo Park.

Gig nights are 90% about drinking beer and talking to friends, and I’m usually up for dinner nearby before the show, so c’mon by and hang out. Yes, I know you are a very old person whose prime directive is to protect the television, and you have reached a stage in life where both social life and cheapish drinks have lost their special sexy magic. But just in case you’re going out and you want to meet up for food or make other arrangements then send email to my first name at my last name dot com.

Jelly Roll Morton’s piano roll of “Dead Man Blues”, quoting “Flee As A Bird” in the intro: MP3.

Played by an Israeli New Orleans band called “The New Orleans Function”:

In this version they let the song roll through the bridge before picking it up with the tune “Didn’t He Ramble.”

Here’s a real-world 2006 funeral procession in New Orleans:

Little known fact: the party funeral was a direct import from Africa that was widely practiced by slaves and eventually evolved into the jazz funeral.

Here’s a really helluva nice example of a real world jazz funeral from 2007. Anybody who gets such a good sendoff is a lucky person.

The song “Flee As A Bird” has also entered classical repertoire. This dude has a killer voice, and if the orchestra is more pompous than strictly necessary how is that a bad thing? “Flee As A Bird” starts at about 2:30 if you want to skip the intro:

I came across a great looking 1820 how-to diagram for a portion of a dance called the “Star” Quadrille figure. It’s a poster-size color image with a high-res scan — 2438×3470 pixels — so this browser window can’t do it justice. But if you give it your whole desktop that should work nicely.

LINK TO JPEG

I discovered it via an entry at the dance history blog Capering & Kickery:

In his manual on quadrilles, early 19th-century (“Regency”) London dancing master Thomas Wilson wrote hopefully that his diagrams,

… together with the printed Directions appended, will enable any person, by marking the Figures on a floor, to perform them correctly without the aid of a Master.
    Thomas Wilson, The quadrille and cotillion panorama, 2nd ed., London, 1822

Quadrilles, the ancestors of the modern square dance, were popular in England from the 1810s onward, displacing the longways country dance from its former preeminence in the ballroom.  Wilson’s diagrams and directions are in fact quite helpful in deciphering many of the figures needed for the Regency-era quadrille, but he does have occasional failures, as in the figure “L’Etoile” or “The Star”.

19th century music was slow in the same sense as slow food or slow brands.

For a digital music producer to give a section a more open and airy quality is quick and easy — just twist the reverb knob. For a live performer on an acoustic instrument it’s time consuming and difficult — change your hand position, embouchure, or breathing, and then practice until it’s second nature. But there is a tangible reward for the extra labor.

I could play live music for slow food events like farmer’s markets, though it would be an uphill battle to get the booking and make the music come alive outdoors. I wonder what other real-world events would be good venues?

From the broque.de netlabel release nils hoffmann – kurz und klein e.p., I present to you the techno remix of the early jazz classic “Saint James Infirmary”:

sweet man like me.

It was the overwrought pathos of Mother’s Plea For Her Son that pulled me in and made me sing along. I couldn’t not.

And then it took a while to get the words right, because that old recording is so murky, so I figured I would write them down. And given that I was writing down the words I ought to do the guitar chords. And then I wanted to know how the guitar does the bass line and that naturally led to figuring out the fiddle part. One thing led to another and then I had the thing transcribed. This post is to share the transcription in case anybody wants to use the song for their own music.

There are three versions and a master from which you can generate your own. One version is a condensed summary for singing guitar strummers. One is a lead sheet for instrumentalists. One is a note for note transcription for serious fiddlers and guitarists. And the master is a Sibelius file with a lot of detail in it, for people who want to modify the sheet music.

The condensed summary for singing guitar strummers is what most people will want. It has the words, guitar chords, and melody. The melody is written in both music notation and guitar tablature. The guitar chords are named, or you can use the voicings I provide.

It looks like this:

It is in the key of A, which I picked because it works for my own voice. Your mileage will vary.

• PDF for people who want a print out.
• PNG page 1 and PNG page 2 for people who have a problem with PDF.
• MIDI for remixers and other music makers who need digital sources.
• Sibelius for people who want to modify the sheet music.

The lead sheet for instrumentalists is for jamming or quick learning. It’s a one-pager with the melody and chords. The notation is big and easy to read, in a similar style to the Real Book.

It looks like this:

It is available in two keys, A and E.

• PDF in A
• Sibelius in A
• PDF in E
• Sibelius in E

The note for note transcription is for players who want to learn about exactly what Charlie Poole’s band were doing. My motivation was to be able to play in the style of his guitar player. This transcription only covers the intro and first verse, since there isn’t a lot of variation after that.

It looks like this:

It is available in two keys, A and E. The key that Poole’s band used was E.

• PDF in A
• Sibelius in A
• MIDI in A
• PDF in E
• Sibelius in E

The master Sibelius file is for people who want to modify the sheet music, for example to transpose to a different key or to use different chord voicings, and who find my original master the best place to start. All the other Sibelius files were generated from this one, so it has the most detail:

• Sibelius

If you only want to transpose or do interactive playback of the sheet music, you don’t have Sibelius, and you can install the Scorch plugin, go to this web page:

Scorch version of the summary sheet for singing guitar strummers, in A

This is the third post in my series on “A Widow’s Plea for Her Son.”

The original composition here is in the public domain. My own work on this song is all under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.

New in the sidebar of this site: dippermouth, which is a blog about Louis Armstrong. Yes, that’s correct, there exists a whole blog about nothing but Louis Armstrong. Yes, uh-huh, that’s right, I think this makes complete sense. Well, that’s right. Thank you Mrs. Whitmore, that won’t be necessary. Well, good-bye now.

¡ YES WE PUEDE ! is a net-compilation ~= 1-shot-website of songs like Taps – America the Beautiful and My Country ‘Tis of Thee conceived and performed in a sloprock style.

Says the blog:

To celebrate the inauguration, we asked some of our favorite Los Angeles bands to record cover versions of public domain patriotic songs. The entire album is licensed under Creative Commons and available for free download from the project’s website: yeswepuede.com

Produced and conceived by the microlabel.

Lewis Hall’s 1893 tearjerker “A Widow’s Plea For Her Son” was old but not all that out of style when Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers recorded it 36 years later along with two other songs in the same genre — “Write A Letter To My Mother” and “Mother’s Last Farewell Kiss.”

Parlorsongs.org has a page full of mother songs from 1910-20. There’s this syrupy number entitled “M-O-T-H-E-R”:

Do you remember what M-O-T-H-E and R stand for?

M is for the million things she gave me.
O means only that she’s growing old.
T is for the tears were shed to save me.
H is for her heart of purest gold.
E is for her eyes, with love light shining.
R means right, and right she’ll always be.

In case you were wondering who your best friend after all is, it’s your mother:

And on the off chance that you’re the kind of heartless bastard who isn’t loving their mother properly, ‘There’s A Mother Old And Gray Who Needs Me Now’:

They were not afraid to go for the gusto back in the good old days.

I came across “Widow’s Plea For Her Son” in the form of a May 7, 1929 recording by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers under the name “The Mother’s Plea For Her Son,” which was on a fine compilation CD called Cotton Mills and Fiddles:

This album represents a sampler of old-time string bands found in the rich pocket of folk music in the area comprising Spray, North Carolina; Danville, Virginia; and Fieldale, Virginia. All the recordings were made between 1926 and 1931

The archaic style of the song hit me hard, and I picked up more Charlie Poole in a box set entitled You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music. This box set is a stellar curation job which I highly recommend. In some ways I modeled this blog on it.

Poole had a talent for tightening up arrangements to give a song more punch. This song needed it. Here’s how the lyrics go in his version:

Strolling to a courthouse not many miles from here,
A boy stood in a prison dark and his mother she stood near.
The lad was quite a youngster, although he’d gone astray,
and from his master’s changebox he had stolen some coin away.

The boy addressed his honor as the tears rolled down his cheeks.
He said “Kind sir would’you please allow my mother here to speak?”
His honor then consented, while the boy hung down his head,
and turning to the jury men, these words his mother said.

“Remember I’m a widow and the prisoner is my son.
And gentlemen remember it is the first crime he has done.
Don’t send my boy to prison for that would drive me mad.
Remember I’m a widow and I’m pleading for my lad.”

The widow’s eyes were flashing fire her cheeks turned deadly pale:
“The reason why I’m here today is to save my boy from jail.
Although I know he’s guilty, and though his crime is bad,
remember I’m his mother and I’m pleading for my son.

If you compare that to Lewis Hall’s original lyrics, you’ll find that Poole kept the first three verses and the chorus mostly intact, though he did make some minor edits for the better. But he condensed the last four verses, which overflowed with bullshit, into the one strong verse closing out his own version.

The Internet Archive has a bunch of very old recordings in the mother genre.

(mp3) Your mother wants you home, lad by Robert Price is a straight up sentimental song about a widow on a stormy winter’s night etc. There’s no date on the page, but from my ears it’s an acoustic recording, which would put it before 1910. I hear the musical style as being turn of the century, around 1900.

(mp3) Snyder, does your mother know you’re out? is an 1899 number. It’s the earliest recording of yodeling that I’ve come across — Jimmy Rogers didn’t happen until nearly thirty years later. This is a comedy song, and I have to admit that I find it a little funny. I’m starting to grok their sense of humor.

As long as the mother song genre went on for, though, eventually something had to break into its dream state: (mp3) Blind Willie Johnson-Mother’s Children Have A Hard Time is a harrowing blues from late 1927 with a staggering level of pathos. A commenter on the archive.org page for this song claims that Johnson was blinded as a child by his stepmother in a fit of anger after she was discovered in bed with another man by Johnson’s father, who then beat her.

Holy shit. Now that’s a mother story which breaks your heart:

Willie Johnson’s mother died when he was a child. His father remarried. His stepmother cheated on his father. His father caught her in flagrante and beat her up. His stepmother then took it out on little Willie, her stepson, by BLINDING him.

Which takes mother songs to a whole new place.

(This post is part of my series on “A Widow’s Plea for Her Son.”)

In 19th century america there were a lot of grotesquely sentimental songs about motherhood, like for example Mother would comfort me or Just think of your mother. This was back before American women got the vote; the idea seemed to be something about empowerment of women short of actually empowering women.

A “Widow’s Plea For Her Son” is an 1893 tear jerker by a guy named Lewis Hall. It’s a weepy story about how your mom is awesome even when you’re a creep.

Specifically, it’s a moment of courtroom drama. There’s a young man in court about to get sentenced for embezzlement when his mother gives an impassioned speech to the jury about how she’s his mother and also she’s a widow. The song is the speech.

Don’t send my boy to prison
For that would drive me mad.
Remember I’m a widow
And I’m pleading for my lad

This was a trailblazing early use of the wookie defense.

Here is the cover page for the sheet music:

Here is a lyric sheet published in 1893 to encourage people to buy the sheet music:

There needs to be an MP3 too, but that’s not so easy, because there are no recordings of this until the late 1920s, and by then musical styles had changed a lot.

But there is an MP3 which is damn close to that — a recording of an answer song which is probably so close to the original that you can get a good sense of how the original went. This answer song is a 1904 parody sung by a guy named Will F. Denny, over on archive.org. The story in the parody is about a father pleading to the court to haul his rotten brat of a child away to jail for life instead of just ten years, which is funny with a 1904 sort of wickedness.

One morning in the courthouse a boy stood up for trial
His father stood beside him on his face there was a smile
The old man told the jury “That one’s not my only son.
But I have got three more like him and I’ll bring them one by one

This boy was born on Sunday and I tell you he’s a beaut.
He’ll take anything that isn’t nailed and never tells the truth.”
The boy took out a cigarette and the jury near fell dead.
When he struck his father for a match the old man loudly said:

“Remember I’m his father and his mother is my wife
Don’t let him off with ten years but send him off for life
And when he’s tired of living just keep him there for fun
There’s noone more could be dead sure than a father on his son.”

Now the boy spoke to his honor and he said “Dear Judge You See,
Just let my father here go home and bring the other three.
The other ones are crooked why they can’t lay straight in bed.
They peel the whiskers off your chin and they put hair on your head.”

The jury men all faded and the boy called out for beer.
The judge he stood upon his head and the wind blew through his ear.
And now there’s 13 funerals for the jury men are dead.
And the judge of ??? before he died he said

My boy you are a daisy, through others ? be done.
No matter who your father was you are your mother’s son.
And as the old judge neared the end before he met his death
He shook his head and softly said with his last dying breath.

My boy you are a daisy through others don’t be done
No matter who your father was you are your mother’s son.
And if ever you get married just have one boy for fun.
And if he’s a sport don’t go to court but kill the son of a gun.

That’s my own transcription. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying in the parts where I wrote ‘?’. If you want to give the line that starts “my boy you are a daisy” a shot, grab this here MP3 fragment and tell me what you’re hearing.

And while we’re dealing with MP3 fragments, here are a few to close things out. Maybe they’ll be handy for ringtones, maybe they’ll inspire some ultra retro wax cylinder remixing:

• credits and title
• intro riff
• outro riff