What makes you sleep so sound

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

Gonna tear your still house down. 

Go 'way, go 'way darlin' Corey 

Stop hanging around my bed 

Bad liquor's ruined my body 

Pretty women’s gone to my head.

I’m going across the deep ocean 

I’m going across the deep sea 

I’m a-going across the deep ocean 

Just to bring darlin' Corey to me. 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow

Go dig me a hole in the ground 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow 

Just to lay darlin' Corey down. 

Don’t you hear them blue birds a-singing 

Don’t you hear that mournful sound 

They're a-preaching Corey’s funeral 

In some lonesome graveyard ground.

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

They’re going to tear your still house down.

Burl Ives 1941

It took me a while to figure out why this song is such a work of genius - that is, as Burl Ives sings it, with one endlessly-sustained, finger-picked chord. It's the minimalism of it, the stripped-down quality, like a pine board silver-greyed and punched full of knotholes. He uses only the barest minimum of his incredible voice, just the edge of a single vocal cord, and whispers the ending in a way that chills the blood. 

I was only familiar with that other version, the one all the folkies sang in the '60s after Harry Belafonte made it famous. I don't remember stills being torn down and "Darlin' Cor-ray" being buried in a "medd-a" in that one. Belafonte homogenized it somewhat, tamed the lyric, took the coldness, the whiskery scarecrow quality out of it. 

Ives was a strange one, walking out of a schoolhouse one day saying he had had enough of education, then walking just as confidently into a totally unique lifelong career as an actor and a folksinger. He had a sort of effortless, artless tenor that could wrap itself around any kind of song - remember Little Bitty Tear? But then there was that chiller That's all I Can Remember (which see):

It took me a few decades to catch up with this amazing jailhouse ballad again, sung in his usual downplayed, straightforward way. But ah, the way he sings, "Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. . . " Like Johnny Cash, who was never in the service and never spent a single day in jail, Ives somehow presented himself as a man who had been everywhere, done everything, and lived to sing the tale. 

Then there was the acting. His Big Daddy was downright frightening, malignant, cold-eyed, the polar opposite of his grandfatherly self, chuckling away on that wretched Christmas show he was in. I am sure I watched it, listened to Holly Jolly Christmas, Little White Duck, and that incredibly stupid song about The Whale, which my smart-ass/pain-in-the-ass family endlessly, pretentiously quoted:

I have to admit to being both drawn and somewhat repulsed by Ives, by his bulk, his scary tremorous voice, his heartiness backed by a surly rage that scares the hell out of me. He was too many things at once, but there is no beating or repeating that voice. It's one of those but-he's-not-doing-anything voices. He does not seem to be putting any effort into it at all, and chances are he wasn't. It was just a genius voice. Not a mountain voice at all, not a holler or a howl. It was actually kind of refined. Some of his oeuvre was not to my tastes - he did a lot of bland, country-ish stuff that I remember listening to a lot as a kid, the same way I listened to Andy Williams.

But then he starts whispering to us about Darlin' Cor-ray, and a chill works its way up, or tingles on my scalp so my hair seems to stand on end. This is one of those minimalist things, a few brush-strokes expressing a world. Van Gogh could dab his brush on a canvas a couple of times and paint a recognizable human figure, a person with an attitude, a mission and a soul. Minimalism has died out; cacophony is king. We have to go back to the records, because they're all we've got left.

Duelling dulcimers

For reasons unknown, I can no longer post a YouTube video in the usual way. I have to do back-flips and stuff (i. e. I can't browse, but already have to know the name of it in order to find it!). This however is worth any kerfuffle. I'm not a mountain music fan, but this stuff! Mountain dulcimer can be excruciating, like playing stretched wires (which I guess it is), but these two make it sound golden. She's a tad sedate and he's really groovin' (holding his instrument aslant as if it will soon tip right off his lap). But when they look at each other at the end. . . it's the sweetest moment.

I'm always digging around for the wacky 78 rpm recordings of my childhood, especially the Children's Record Guild collection, a sort of record-of-the-month club that mailed you a new recording for something like $2. We didn't subscribe to this, but were given a whole whack of recordings, 50 or 60 of them maybe, by someone whose kids must either have never played them, or were so careful they didn't even leave a scratch on them.

Within a couple of months, Davy Crockett sounded like, "king of the wild frontier. . .tier. . . tier. . . tier. . . tier" (etc.)  The background ambience soon resembled World War 3, but the records were well-loved and constantly played.

Some records represented the force-feeding of classical music, with Cinderella accompanied by music from Prokofiev's ballet and Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn's incidental music. This was all part of a general indoctrination I suffered through: almost everything I heard, saw, smelled or touched (or tasted?) had to be oriented towards "good" music. No other music (not even "that rock 'n roll music" I later came to love) existed in our tiny stifling universe.

Thus came various musical punishments: Victor Borge narrating some sort of swill about "Piccolo, Saxie and Company"; Rusty in Orchestraville, a morality tale about what happens to little boys who don't practice the piano; Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met (already covered in a previous post, so let's not go there again). And something about the history of the orchestra which, I remember, began with a smarmy narrator saying, "Well, well, well! Here is an orchesta!" And here I thought it was a cheese blintz.

It really was a narrowing education, not a broadening one. We should have known something about mountain music, about jazz and blues, but my father looked down on these renegade forms as if they didn't exist. I think it came from his background of dire poverty, his ignorance of any music except for the excruciatingly bad English music-hall stuff he grew up with. He was always terrified of being found out and even deliberately erased his Cockney accent on arriving in Canada.

I remember (and even found on YouTube once) a Children's Record Guild 78 rpm recording - might have been by the Weavers, in fact - of a song called Round and Round the Christmas Tree, which is the same tune as this dulcimer duet. I think of the fluidity of this kind of music, passed along by memory and never written down. The fact that Appalachian music has echoed through the generations with its integrity intact fascinates me. No Children's Record Guild required: they had memories then, and ears to hear.

Kiddie Records Weekly

http://www.kiddierecords.com/2006/archive/week_05.htm

Frail wildwood flower

Certain things, movies, books, people, lovers, are somehow relegated to the back of your mind. Or perhaps they sneak back there, or roll like nuts on a tilted surface. . . or stones, or. . .

A long time ago, it seems, I saw a movie that totally enchanted me. But for some reason, very little of it stuck with me except the bare subject matter: a musicologist tramping around the backwoods of Appalachia in the early 20th century, lugging a Gramophone to record the ancient ballads passed down since time immemorial. This much I remembered. But, shockingly, the rest was lost. No title, no characters, no plot, no year: just that mountain music, that sere and strident singing that a critic once said "would make thin glass rattle".

It would pop into my head, then sort of disappear again. I'd say to myself, I'll try to look it up on Google. Then I'd forget. Then, today, for some reason, I pounced. I had no idea where to start, so I entered search terms like "movie with Appalachian folk music on gramophone" and things like that. I knew that if the title did pop up, I would recognize it immediately.

It didn't take too long (God bless the internet!) until the title did pop up: Songcatcher, a 2000 film about a woman professor collecting folk music while living in her sister's backwoods school.

I haven't seen it yet, have happily ordered it from Amazon and hope I'll enjoy it twice. We'll see. Movies have a way of changing, over the years.

Peeping into it on YouTube, I see a lesbian relationship I had forgotten all about. I was kind of shaken by the harshness of the singing, with a sharp yodelly end to each line. These felt like authentic singers to me, so they must still be around. Yes, we have heard such strident sounds in the voices of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and June Carter Cash, but somewhat watered down. Most of these mountain songs, often called Child Ballads for some reason (let me look that up!), were composed by Henry VIII or somebody like that: I mean, somebody had to write them, didn't they? They didn't come out of the thin air. But they have that feeling of always having been there.

This started a flood in my mind: memories of the folk boom of the early '60s, when my older brothers came home from university toting guitars. They sang such weird old numbers as Cape Breton Mines, Geordie, Down by the Greenwood Side (ee-oh), In the Hills of Shiloh, Corn Whisky ("you killed all my kinfolk and sent them to hell"), and a truly awful number my sister sang called Poor Old Horse, Poor Old Mare ("the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). She stuck to really morbid, hopeless things ("Wide and deep my grave shall be/With the wild-goose grasses growing over me") and seemed to relish them, singing them in an trained operatic soprano while plucking her guitar, which she held between her knees.

My brother Arthur, the one who died so young, was the best guitarist and the best at interpreting Cohen and Dylan. Especially Dylan, who could write songs that seemed like they were written generations ago: The Hour the Ship Comes In being my favorite.

What's the point of all this? There is no point. Music falls on the air, disappears. For millennia, none of it was recorded anywhere. An echo from some holler was the closest anyone came. Now we have it all, and most of it is lousy. It all sounds like that quasi-soul stuff made up of melismatic riffs and doorknob-rattling high notes rather than melody. Sucks.

Just let me hear some-more-that gram-o-phone music. . .

Songcatcher: at last I've found you!