A Little Waltz, & A Little More

Sorry to be late today—we had a great time playing music last night, but I’m moving a bit slow this morning. & we did indeed have a good time; as you can see in the final poster pictured to the right, the special mystry guest was none other than Eberle, holding forth on a veritable barrage of instruments: flute, kazoo, melodica, slide whistle & train whistle. If we continue to do these shows at any kind of regular intervals, I’d lobby for her adding in a bit of washboard & maybe some banjo uke; we’ll see how things develop as far as that goes. In the meantime, I plunked away on the resonator guitar & the old Windsor 5-string banjo, & added my “golden voice” to the mix. The entire set was 24 songs, in just under 2 hours, ranging from old Appalachian tunes like “The Cuckoo” to Delta blues like “Come On in My Kitchen” (yes, done on the banjo) to old country tunes like Roy Acuff’s “Freight Train Blues” It all went well in our first show together in nearly a year; I thought the particular highlights were Eberle’s flute songs (“St James Infirmary,” “The Cuckoo,” both with me on guitar, & “My Creole Belle,” with me on banjo), as well as Bessie Smith’s “Mean Old Bedbug Blues” with yours truly on guitar & Eberle on kazoo. The crowd was small but enthusiastic, & local sound folks Skip & Toni Burnette did a fine job for us.

Sorry to folks who requested pix; we didn’t get it together for that. Next time!

Our music clip today doesn’t have much to do with our current musical incarnation—no blues, no ragtime, etc. It’s a little song I composed quite extemporaneously on the baritone uke about a year ago. It was a case of thinking of a chord progression, picking up uke, putting on headphones, turning on the recording device. This, such as it is, is what came out. Hope you enjoy it.

“Crossing”

It’s time for the Weekly Poem again, & this time around we have a really haunting piece by Langston Hughes. This particular poem first came to my attention in an odd way: the great bluesman Taj Mahal does a version of it, complete with National guitar, on his album An Evening of Acoustic Music. I was hoping to find it on YouTube, but no luck; however, the whole album is worth checking out.

Langston Hughes’ poetry is direct & unmediated; it often has the feeling of a song lyric, except it’s a lyric with its own music built in—which is one basic definition of lyric poetry; & although Mr Hughes is well-known, I think his reputation among general readers is built on just a handful of poems such as “I, Too, Sing America” & “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” I’ve been reading more widely thru his work of late (his Selected Poems published by Vintage), & I can tell you it’s rewarding. Hughes was not only an important voice, but a very gifted poet.

Have a happy July 4th all, whether you’re celebrating it as a holiday or as a Saturday! & hope you enjoy the poem.


Crossing

It was that lonely day, folks,
When I walked all by myself.
My friends was all around me
But it was as if they’d left.
I went up on a mountain
In a high cold wind
And the coat that I was wearing
Was mosquito-netting thin.
I went down in the valley
And I crossed an icy stream
And the water I was crossing
Was no water in a dream
And the shoes I was wearing
No protection for that stream.
Then I stood out on a prairie
And as far as I could see
Wasn’t nobody on that prairie
Looked like me.
It was that lonely day, folks,
I walked all by myself:
My friends was right there with me
But was just as if they’d left.

Langston Hughes

The Wayback Machine #3 – Council, Idaho July 4th 1998

As regular readers here may recall, 1998 was the first year I lived in Indian Valley, ID; as such, how could I miss the big local event of the year, July 4th? Council, ID is a very small town (tho the largest in Adams County, & the county seat), with a bit more than 800 inhabitants (actually in the late ‘90s there were about 100 more residents than there are now), & is mostly a sleepy town. But July 4th is a grand celebration, with four particularly big events: a parade, the porcupine races, the logging skills contest & the fireworks. There was also a town softball tournament for a few years that was quite fun, but that’s now defunct. The Fourth of July festivities also run in conjunction with a month-long quilt show.

The logging skills context may seem pretty exotic to folks outside the U.S. west, but such competitions are fairly common in this part of the world. The unique event is the porcupine race. It involves timed heats: two men & a porcupine “race” down a course, in as straight a line as possible (there are plastic barriers to keep the porcupine “on task” & also quills out of the spectators, tho I believe a few too-ardent fans need to have the EMTs remove quills every year. One man is equipped with a garbage can & lid (the porcupine is in the can pre-race, & the other man has a broom. These implements are used to steer the porcupine down the course, but can’t be used for “propulsion.” Although this may seem hard for some to believe from my description, PETA monitored this one year & decided it was relatively benign. There’s betting on the races, too—folks bid on individual porcupines, & the person who “owns” the winner gets all the money in the pot. It’s usually a few hundred dollars. After the race, the porcupines are released into the woods.

I heard rumor that there’s a video on YouTube of the Council Porcupine Race, but I couldn’t find it this morning with any search that seemed obvious. If anyone (especially anyone local) knows the url, please let me know & I’d be happy to add a video to the post. Barring that, hope you enjoy these photos taken in 1998!

Top pic: A pick-up full of bluegrass musicians in the Council Valley Museum pick-up truck. The museum is an interesting place with lots of artifacts from the town's frontier beginnings in the late 18th & early 20th century

I love this photo of the "old-time cowboy" on an ATV with a horse's head. In fact, the ATV has supplanted the horse for many ranching operations.

Pride of our hometown: Indian Valley Fire & Rescue; check out the dalmatian!

US Bank tellers qua horses, distributing candy

Rodeo Queens, of course! The Adams County Rodeo is held in late July; it's possible Robert Frost's Banjo may report on the event this year.

Norm the porcupine, one of the race participants. There used to be a pizza establishment in Council called Norm's (it was in business in '98), & this porcupine no doubt was its representative. All the porcupines are displayed in the pre-race parade.

Two llamas from the local Llama Joy Ranch; man, we never got ours to look that groomed!

Tractor on parade!

Last, but very far from least: porcupine racing!

UPDATE: Thanks to good friend & faithful Robert Frost's Banjo reader Jan B., here's the Porcupine Race video.

"Come, Muse, And Sing The Dreaded Washing-Day"

Among male writers, artists, and musicians, the domestic arts classified as “women’s work” occupied a lowly position in the hierarchy of subject matter for their great works. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are plenty of paintings with women bathing, dressing, or brushing their hair. Walking down the long hall of painting fame you might also find a “Woman at a Window,” or a “Woman at an Embroidery Frame,” but if you are longing to see something along the lines of “Woman Butchering Rooster” or “Woman Collecting Lye for Soap” you could walk a long ways in vain. Similarly, highbrow composers would not take something like “The Lament of the Scullery Maid” as a serious theme—if you heard this title, you would probably assume it was part of a bawdy song.

Dairymaids in the world of art could frolic in charming dishabille through a meadow but their trek through the mud to the barn in winter, the chilblains on their hands, the fatigue they felt, all these were made invisible. Women writers had an awareness of the exclusion of the heart of their working lives from the sanctioned realm of art. Anna Barbauld, in her 1825 poem Washing Day creates the separate and distinct existence of a “domestic Muse”:

The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
Language of gods. Come then, domestic Muse,
In slipshod measure loosely prattling on
Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,
Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire
By little whimpering boy, with rueful face;
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day.

There was indeed reason to dread washing day. If a family was not able to hire out the washing, the woman of the house did a weekly wash—a huge undertaking. Popular rhymes chided women who did not do the washing early in the week. Even the list of necessary equipment is daunting:

Two wash-forms are needed; one for the two tubs in which to put the suds, and the other for blueing and starching-tubs. Four tubs, of different sizes, are necessary; also, a large wooden dipper, (as metal is apt to rust;) two or three pails; a grooved wash-board; a clothes-line, (sea-grass, or horse-hair is best;) a wash-stick to move clothes, when boiling, and a wooden fork to take them out. Soap-dishes, made to hook on the tubs, save soap and time. Provide, also, a clothes-bag, in which to boil clothes; an indigo-bag, of double flannel; a starch-strainer, of coarse linen; a bottle of ox-gall for calicoes; a supply of starch, neither sour nor musty; several dozens of clothes-pins, which are cleft sticks, used to fasten clothes on the line; a bottle of dissolved gum Arabic; two clothes-baskets; and a brass or copper kettle, for boiling clothes, as iron is apt to rust.
Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1843

The technology of industrialization often proved a mixed blessing for women. The advent of cheap cottons meant that fewer women wove their own cloth, but washable cotton was part of what turned laundering into the Herculean task that it became. Women and children dominated the low-paid work of hired-out laundering as they would come to dominate the low-paid labor force of the textile factories. Previously, hand-woven linens were brushed rather than washed. Not to idealize a pre-industrial state—because pounding clothes on rocks also has its disadvantages—but the direction that technological advances took did tend to isolate women. Rather than doing spinning, weaving, and laundry in groups together, women were isolated in the nuclear family home units that better served the captains of industry and their profit-margins.

Since prehistoric times, spinning and weaving has been associated with women in western civilization. The fate of the word “spinster” mirrors in some ways the disempowerment of women as industrialization took hold—and also, in the wake of that disempowerment, the courageous steps that women ultimately took to assert their full rights as human beings.

In the fourteenth century, the word spinster simply referred to a woman whose occupation was spinning; by the seventeenth century, it could mean either a spinner or a woman whose legal status was unmarried. Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the word acquire overtones of “old maid” and the implied criticisms of uselessness, prudishness and foolishness. In the nineteenth century, spinsters showing traces of beard were likely to be fictional laughingstocks; in ancient times, however, these same figures were more powerful than the gods themselves. The Fates in ancient Greek mythology were embodied by three spinsters with beards who exerted power in a sphere apart from the official gods of Olympus. Clotho spun the thread of life from her distaff to her spindle, Lachesis measured the thread with her rod, and Atropos cut the thread, determining the manner and time of a person’s death. Athenian women swore by the Fates, making them offerings as they would to a goddess.

Domestic work, such as sewing and cooking, was not originally conceived as nineteenth century male painters framed it for their audiences—as decorative and trivial. In fact, these activities in ancient myth were linked with power over life and death. A Nordic trinity of spinster goddesses is also connected to human destiny, and the Valkyries are described as weavers as well. These warrior women sang songs of destruction at looms strung with human entrails—with shuttles made of arrows, and weights of severed heads.

This image of the Valkyries at their looms may seem a far cry from the dainty female posture depicted in Woman at an Embroidery Frame. Women writers of the nineteenth century, however, sometimes echoed the subversive history of textile arts. It is during quilting bees, for example, that women engage in discussion apart from any authorized channels of information. The long and involved process of girl friends sewing the trousseau of a bride-to-be was no doubt a time of much discussion on love and sex. Sewing and weaving turn up in some unexpected places—including hymn-writing. Hymn-writing has been considered a particularly womanly form of writing, and women from as long ago as the twelfth century Hildegard von Bingen have taken active part in this tradition. American women hymn-writers of the nineteenth century often used hymns to put their own slant on theology.

Mary Artemisia Lathbury (1841-1913) was known as one of the founders of the Chautauqua Movement, which began near Lake Chautauqua in New York where thousands of people gathered at Methodist campgrounds to listen to lectures, music, and sermons. Lathbury links an understanding of God with nature and the domestic hearth as well as with the written or spoken words of preachers. She expresses this idea in the Hymn of Life:

In age-abiding rocks that bear
An elder Scripture written there;
In the red hearth-glow, and the flame
Of countless suns, we read Thy name.

During Lathbury’s time, weaving was still the province of women and in one of her works, Song of Hope, she links God directly with the woman at the loom:

Song of Hope

Children of yesterday;
Heirs of to-morrow.
What are you weaving?
Labor and sorrow?
Look to your loom again.
Faster and faster
Fly the great shuttles
Prepared by the Master.
Life's in the loom!
Room for it—
Room!

Children of yesterday,
Heirs of to-morrow,
Lighten the labor,
And sweeten the sorrow.
Now—while the shuttles fly
Faster and faster,
Up, and be at it,
At work with the Master.
He stands at your loom;
Room for Him—
Room!

Children of yesterday.
Heirs of to-morrow,
Look at your fabric
Of labor and sorrow.
Seamy and dark
With despair and disaster,
Turn it, and—lo,
The Design of the Master!
The Lord's at the loom;
Room for Him—
Room!

Americana in the Park

Just a heads-up to local readers—or any other readers who are dying to spend July 4th in Council, Idaho (admittedly, I suspect the latter would be an extremely small set of folks!): yours truly will be performing in Council City Park from 7:00-9:00 p.m. as a prelude to the fireworks display. I’m not promising any pyrotechnics myself—just not that sort of musician—but there should be some fun times with old blues & country songs, & a few old-time novelty songs thrown in for good measure. A couple of things worth mentioning: I’ve started to incorporate my old Windsor 5-string banjo into the act to punctuate things here & there, so there will be blues banjo for your listening pleasure—haven’t you always wanted to hear “Come On In My Kitchen” on a 5-string? Even more noteworthy (if slightly less certain)—there’s a good chance a very special mystery guest musician will be joining me for about the final hour of the show.

The 4th of July is without question Council, Idaho’s extravaganza for the year: a parade, the world-famous porcupine races, softball, music (the High School chorus also will be singing in the afternoon), the evening fireworks display put on by the Council Volunteer Fire Department, & more. Since I won’t be able to run around town covering all the events for the blog (not efficient use of energy the day of a show), on Friday the Wayback Machine will take us to Council’s July 4th 1998 so you can get a sense of this small town celebration.

Hope to see you there!

Western Legends #7 - Guinea Hen & Coyote

Summers in Indian Valley get hot; right now (12:30 p.m. on Monday) it’s 95 degree Fahrenheit on our porch, & some days in July & August that would feel pretty mild. Right now, it just feels hot. Throw in plenty of dust & smoke & practically no rain & you have a landscape that gets increasingly surreal as the summer progresses.

Or at least it seems that way. Because at a certain point, I think, you just enter another form of consciousness in the Dog Days of summer (which officially begin this Friday). Things seem slow & dreamy, & reality often has a summer haze about it.

This was even more true when we lived in our old farmhouse, in which the only cooling system was a decrepit swamp cooler—probably some of you haven’t experienced the joys of swamp cooler cooling, so that probably should be a separate post. But here’s a typical scene on a summer’s evening: the house is holding heat like some unworldy presence; Eberle & I are sitting in bed, on top of the covers, in our nightclothes, just having finished watching an old Perry Mason episode on TV. It’s really too hot to do anything, including sleep.

Then we hear a big whomp against the side of the house—now this scene takes place in the early years of the millenium, back when Eberle & I were raising guinea hens; & there were guinea hens sitting on various nest scattered across the property, because no matter how fast we took their eggs away (guinea hen eggs are quite good—just a bit smaller than chicken eggs) there were invariably more, with both hens & roosters sitting on &/or guarding nests—in essence, “sitting ducks” for any predator that might happen by.

So still in our nightclothes, we traipsed out to the front lawn to see what had happened; we knew there was a nest sequestered there, but didn’t know it’s exact location. We were about halfway across the lawn when Eberle yelled, “Hey” or words to that effect & took off sprinting in her nightclothes in the direction of the draw. Just ahead of her was a coyote (pronounced as a two-syllable word locally) carrying off a live guinea hen.

As luck or prudence would have it, we had a flashlight—it was after 10:00 p.m. as I recall, which puts it a little ways into the summer, since there’s a good deal of light in the sky now at 10:00 o’clock. Actually, I had the flashlight, & I took off after Eberle—for her sake really, since the guinea hen was clearly a lost cause. Of course, even back then my lungs kept me from running for any distance, so I used a little common sense & kept to a brisk walk, always keeping Eberle & her prey in my flashlight: thru the vegetable garden, thru the pasture, up the ridge & into the wide open pasture on top, then diagonally across the pasture heading straight for the big hill that leads to US Highway 95. Eberle was still in pursuit; the coyote had actually stopped a couple of times, apparently trying to “shake her,” but she was determined.

The hill didn’t prove much of an obstacle for the coyote (& guinea hen), or for Eberle, either. On the other hand, it slowed me down considerably.

The rest of the story—after crossing the highway, the coyote turned toward Eberle, apparently thinking that a bit of an aggressive posture might get this pesky human off his trail & let him enjoy his hard-won supper. Eberle, however, walked straight toward the coyote, who it seems had had enough of this, dropped the no-doubt shaken but otherwise intact guinea hen & took off up the slope of Mesa Hill.

I rejoined Eberle & the guinea hen on the far side of Highway 95, & we began the long walk home—in nightclothes & in the lights of the semis barrelling down the south slope of the mesa. The guinea hen went home on her own—I don’t recall if it ran or flew or both—& was bustling around on the front lawn when we got back.

What was the whomp you ask? Our best guess is that the coyote flushed the guinea hen off her nest & she took flight. However, while guinea hens are better at flying than chickens, it certainly isn’t their strong suit, & we believe she didn’t get enough elevation, hit the side of the house, & fell down stunned where she was—as the coyote believed, not figuring on Eberle’s relentlessness—easy pickings.

A summer occurrence. As the great poet César Vallejo said, Es una historia!

The pix are self-explanatory, except for the top pic, which shows two of our guinea hens atop the old swamp cooler!

Moon June Spoon #6

We’re bidding June a fond adieu today—it certainly has been a topsy-turvy month, at least around these parts, & perhaps ruled very much by “th’inconstant moon.”

So what better way to take our leave of June than with one last installment of Moon June Spoon—& we’ve got some really fine songs today—western swing, jazz, oldtime country & western & more.

Thanks to everyone for the very positive response to Moon June Spoon; I’ll be sure to concoct another song series before too long—maybe in August. For now, hope you enjoy these selections!

Shine On Harvest Moon: I love this sort of old song—this & “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” & “In the Moonlight” are the very songs that laid the Moon June Spoon foundation (as it were—an odd metapher, yes). It’s also worth noting that all three of these songs—& lots more— appear on the Fabulous Heftones album of the same name. In this case, Brian Hefferan handles the vocal—including the stage-setting verse which I believe a lot of folks haven’t heard. It’s a fun & rambunctious outing, as is the Leon Redbone version (& Mr Redbone includes the verse, too). For those who are interested in the Fabulous Heftones (& you really should be), you can hear their tunes—including this one—on their site here. You can also see them performing “Shine On Harvest Moon” in the video clip below. Although there’s a lot of background noise, it’s notable for at least two reasons: first, the Fabulous Heftones seem an embodiment of “playing” music—it’s fun! Second: check out the bass banjo (known as a Heftone). Now that’s a cool instrument! The Fabulous Heftones: Moon June Spoon (Heftone Records); Leon Redbone: Double Time (Warner Bros)

Silvery Moon & Golden Sands: This pleasant “earthly paradise” number by Johnny Hodges features some tasty exchanges between saxman Hodges & trumpeter Cootie Williams during an extended intro (which is kicked off by the Duke himself on the ivories). The vocal is handled by Mary McHugh. This would be a lovely tune for a moonlit June evening. Duke Ellington: The Duke’s Men: Small Groups, vol. 1 (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces)

Sugar Moon: Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys need no introduction, at least not to fans of old time country music. Mr Wills & colleagues’ version of western swing is just flat-out great; & Wills & the Playboys were in good form when they recorded this song, with the usual fine Tommy Duncan vocal & some excellent guitar work by Lester Barnard, Jr. But the writer of “Sugar Moon,” Cindy Walker, isn’t as well known as she should be. Ms Walker is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame (inducted in 1997), but given the amazing number of hits she turned out for some of Country’s biggest stars, she should be thought of as one of the premier 20th century popular songwriters. Consider just a handful of her highlights: “Blue Canadian Rockies”; “Cherokee Maiden”; “Dusty Skies”; “Miss Molly”; “Two Glasses, Joe”; “Warm Red Wine”; “You Don’t Know Me”; “Dream Baby”—& the list goes on. Wills & the Texas Playboy’s alone recorded 50 of Walker’s songs. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys: Take Me Back to Tulsa (Proper)

That Old Devil Moon: This may be a bit of heresy to some of my classic film friends out there, but I never could quite get Judy Garland’s popularity as an actress. As Dorothy, yes. In most of her other roles—even some really famous ones—not so much. However, Ms Garland sure could sing. She had amazing range, of course, but much more than that—she could really live inside a song. A lot of folks have covered “That Old Devil Moon” but, like many of her other famous numbers, this is a song Garland made her own. I have this on an old cassette but this song is pretty readily available—one choice would be Judy Garland: Very Best of Judy Garland: The Capitol Recordings 1955-1965 (EMI Imports). For the record, mine is: Judy “Live” (Golden Circle)—looks like a bootleg to me….

What a Little Moonlight Can Do: This is one of the songs I always think about when I think of Billie Holiday—the impeccable phrasing, the understated approach, the ability to take a melody outside itself or beyond itself—taking it to a new place while it always remains completely itself. Holiday has fantastic back-up on this recording: Charlie Shaver, trumpet; Oscar Peterson, piano; Herb Ellis, guitar; Ray Brown, bass; Ed Shaughnessy, drums. Billie Holiday: Jazz Masters 12 (Verve)

When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again: I really love this old country tune, & it’s one I perform myself, sometimes with guitar & other times with 5-string banjo. Needless to say, there are lots of versions out there—Elvis’ rockabilly version, tho not one of my favorites, is very well known, & Merle Haggard also has done a nice version of the tune. To my mind, it’s pretty hard to beat the original version of this song by Wiley Walker & Gene Sullivan, but the version by Cindy Walker in the vidclip below is really good—proving that Ms. Walker was a terrific singer in addition to being a great songwriter. Sadly, this recording doesn’t seem to be available commercially at this time. Walker’s recording of “When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again” was a top 10 hit in 1944. Wiley Walker & Gene Sullivan: Columbia Country Classics, vol. 1 The Golden Age (Columbia)

Winter Moon: What a song to end on—this tune has an incredibly haunting melody, & although it’s not one of his best known pieces, I think it’s one of Hoagy Carmichael’s very finest compositions. It is a sad song—the emotion is almost desolate—but the rich harmonies & deceptively simple melody will transport you. The recording by Carmichael himself is superb, with a great back-up band called the Pacific Jazzmen (including Art Pepper on alto sax & Johnny Mandel as arranger & conductor); Hoagy’s voice was just stronger in the 50s than earlier in his career—more assured & more comfortable. I recommend this recording very highly. Hoagy Carmichael: Hoagy Sings Carmichael (Pacific Jazz)