Courtesy of the Library of Congress, an eruption of antiquarian graphic design from the year 1890:

It’s a lot easier to appreciate the tawdry sentimentality of an emotional mugging by a colorful operator like Pappy O’Daniel if you don’t have to listen to the music to get to the words, and I wanted to figure them out so I could play the song, so….

I’m Taking Care of Mother (While Daddy’s Gone Away)

In a comment on one of the mother songs, Spiegs (who is a politics junkie) brought up this totally obscure info:

On the subject of songs about motherhood, an interesting piece of history is that Pappy O’Daniel, then a radio host in Texas in the 1930s, wrote songs like ‘Mother you fashioned me, Bore me and rationed me’ and ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother’s Hair’ and had his hillbilly band play them on the air.

O’Daniel went on to become Governor of Texas, defeated Lyndon Johnson for a Senate seat in the special election of 1941, and served as the model for the corrupt Governor of Mississippi in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’.

Pappy O’Daniel’s date with music destiny was as part of a band called The Light Crust Dough Boys, in which Bob Wills also played. Bob Wills went on to become a huge country star, founding the country swing style and bridging the 1920s explosion of jazz (as pop for black audiences) and hillbilly (as pop for poor rural whites). The idea of street cred was so foreign to Bob Wills and Pappy O’Daniel that their band was named after the sponsor of their radio show, Light Crust Dough.

Because Bob Wills is such a big deal, the music he made with Pappy O’Daniel is still in circulation, and though I didn’t find either of the songs that Spiegs mentioned I did find another mother song by the Boys, called “I’m Taking Care Of Mother (While Daddy’s Gone Away).” It’s the kind of Oedipal weirdness that people used to do with a straight face.

Here’s the song, plus the another Light Crust Dough Boys number that I love, their theme song for the radio show.

The Light Crust Doughboys’ Theme (mp3)

I’m Taking Care Of Mother (While Daddy’s Gone Away) (mp3)

On Friday I played with Madame Pamita at a gallery in Eagle Rock called Sea and Space Explorations. Here are a few photos.

An error message from the computer was unintentionally cool looking.

This avant theater group did funny faces and primal vocalizations.

The view over my guitar during a tarot reading.

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”.