Last week I posted on my music blog about the common (British) origin of several classic American songs including "St. James Infirmary," "Streets of Laredo" and "Dying Crapshooter's Blues,"  which in various forms have been batted around blues, country, jazz, folk and rockabilly circles for decades.

I included versions of those tunes in my latest podcast Honky Tonk New Year.

I'll re-post the blog entry here for those who like looking into the history of old songs. The stories I link to below are well worth reading.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2012

Earlier I was re-reading Sarah Vowell's 1999 essay on her continuing awe at the American classic song "St. James Infirmary."

Cab Calloway sang the song in a Betty Boop spoof of Snow White

This song gave me the shivers then and it gives me the shivers now. Not just because it’s a morgue scene, not just because of the cold body lying there on a table instead of a
bed, but because of the chill of the man’s words. Hearing it as a young girl, hearing it before I ever fell in love myself, it frightened me because of the way it shoots down
the idea of love as a true possibility. If you need love in part to know you’ll be missed when you’re gone, what does it mean if your sweetheart stands over your icy corpse and — instead of wishing to rejoin you on some astral plane – fantasizes about impressing his buddies with a big dumb coin?

Vowell mentions several versions of the song: Louis Armstrong's, Cab Calloway's, Bobby "Blue" Bland's, even the '90s group Snakefarm's trip-hop version.

Re-reading the Vowell piece reminded me of a piece by Rob Walker in Gambit Weekly, which traced the song back even further. It's a direct descendant of a British folk tune called "The Unfortunate Rake" -- which is about a young man who apparently was dying from venereal disease. Other offspring of "The Unfortunate Rake" include the cowboy ballad "The Streets of Laredo" and Blind Willie McTell's "The Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues."


Writes Walker:

Sometimes, as in "Bad Girl's Lament," the ballad is about the woman, but basically follows the same pattern (an early mention of St. James' Hospital, a closing request for "Six pretty maidens with a bunch of red roses, six pretty maidens to sing me a song ..."). You won't find many of these exact same words in the most typically played version of "St. James Infirmary" today, but this at least is a back story that makes some of the latter's sentiments perfectly logical: The singer makes a jealousy-tinged boast and turns quickly to thoughts of his own death because his "baby" just died of VD. Dig?

A common thread is the wild fantasy of the narrator's grandiose funeral for himself.

Here's a few versions of the song. Like Vowell, I still get the shivers from some of these.









Two of my country heroes singing "Streets of Laredo."


This is one of my favorites: Ian McShane as Al Swearengen  singing "The Unfortunate Rake" in Deadwood.

I never picked up on the protagonist in "St. James Infirmary" singing about The Clap , tho' it was'nt uncommon , then. I saw Charlie Louvin , twice , the first time , I almost had to beg him to do "Knoxville Girl" , and NO ONE had my back. Lame - o's . HE DID IT , THO' (HE ALMOST did "On Top of Old Smokey " , instead.). The second time ,he explained that "Knoxville Girl" was based on a centuries - old Murder Ballad from England.

I love that book. You just made me take it off my shelf and look at it again for the first time in a couple of years.

I love seeing how old songs like this mutate and evolve. Another one like that is "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"/"In the Pines"/"Black Girl"/"The Longest Train I ever Saw." There was a good article about this in the NY Times about 20 years ago (after Nirvana recorded the definitive version).http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/13/arts/pop-music-a-simple-song-that-lives-beyond-time.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

I've got a version (on CD, not the original 78) of "The Longest Train" by the Tanneva Ramblers recorded in Bristol, Tenn. in 1927. It's very similar in melody to "In the Pines." But

I've also got a song called "The Longest Train I Ever Saw" recorded in a Georgia prison camp in the '30s by an a Capella quartet. The melody is radically different but lots of the lyrical elements are there, including the part about finding the decapitated head in the driving wheel.

Anyone who likes this post might want to check out the book The Rose and The Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad.  It's comprised on essays about the origins of specific American folk ballads and though some of the essays are "fiction inspired by", most of the actual research-driven essays are fantastic.