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

Saint James Infirmary blog has a post comparing YouTube to traditional folk practices.:

It seems that a friend’s teenage son, who plays guitar and harmonica, has discovered and been impressed by another harmonica player. The latter lives in France, and reaches whatever audience she has by way of YouTube. In general, she performs by turning on a webcam, putting on a recording by a well-known artist, and playing along, adding her harmonica part to an existing song. Her name is Christelle Berthon, and her YouTube channel has (as I type this) 1,336 subscribers.

But the video below is a bit of a departure from the scenario just described: It’s a duet between Berthon and Vamos Babe, another YouTubing musician, a guitar player whose YouTube channel has (at the moment) 943 subscribers — and a section called “YT Collabs.” These are her YouTube collaborations with other musicians.

So what’s folk, anyway?

To a large extent the article is about the question of what, exactly, folk music is. Writer Burkhard Bilger paraphrases Rosenbaum’s criteria. For one thing, “the songs had to be traditional, the music learned from relatives or local musicians.” On the question of the folk performer, Bilger notes that Rosenbaum never recorded the major figures of the folk revival that was going on even as he began his field-recording career: “Folk music, to him, was the art of the anonymous.”

Elsewhere in the article, John Lomax is quoted saying, in 1937, that the sort of field recording he did (along with his son Alan) would soon be rendered either impossible or pointless by the march of progress: “The influence of good roads and the radio combined will soon put an end to both the creation and to the artless singing of American folk songs.”

About anonymity, to a large extent it’s just bad record-keeping. There’s no such thing as anonymity in folk-song composition. That’s a fiction of the Lomax generation.

The important thing is iterative development within a lineage. For example, “Saint James Infirmary” is an iteration within the same lineage as “Streets of Lauredo.” “Frog in the Well” and “Froggie Went A-Courting” are relatives. This iterative process is what allows one generation of musicians after another to make their work from the best possible sources.

You see the same process with sampling in the mashup world. A good riff appears all over the place, making every work that uses it better and empowering musicians to do the best possible overall work.

To trad folk people like Alan and John Lomax, the idea of folk was tied into the idea of authenticity, and authenticity had to do with oldness, rural roots, low-technology. For myself, I am comfortable in my own authenticity. I am authentic, and so are you. Other people see you as authentic. Future historians will see you as old and low tech.

The key turns out to be iterative development, and iterative development turns on the public domain. It’s copyright that prevents musicians from iterating on one another’s work.

So what’s the right salutation for Public Domain Day? “Merry”? “Happy”? It strikes me that we might congratulate each other:

“Congratulations to you on your Public Domain Day, my dear friend Estragon.”

“Thank you, Vladimir. The same to you.”

Every year on January 1st a new pool of public domain works is created:

It is January 1st, which means that this morning at midnight a batch more “life-plus” copyrights expired in those countries — most of them — where copyright expires at the end of the Nth year following the death of the author.

Yes, folks, it’s Public Domain Day! And it’s international! There are little Public Domain Day virtual commemorations going on in places like Poland and Switzerland. Spread the word!

On this joyous occasion I would like to wish you a creative new year of work based on the public domain.