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.

The best cat, I mean, the BEST

Here kitty, here kitty

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty 

Here little kitty cat

Look at the little kitty cat

A-walkin' down the street

I bet he's got no place to go, 

or nothin' good to eat

Look at the little kitty cat

With tiny tired feet

He ought to have a place to go, 

'Cause he's so very sweet!

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty cat

I’m gonna ask my mama 

if she’ll let me take him home

Where I can hold him close to me 

so he won’t have to roam

He oughta have a lot of milk, 

and lots of fish and meat

Instead of finding what he can 

in the alley and the street

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty cat

Now look at the little kitty cat

A-sleepin' in his bed

He’s got a place to rest his feet 

and lay his weary head

I’m going to see that he will stay

as happy as can be

And now when he goes walking 

he’ll go walking next to me

Oh, kitty, 

Oh, kitty,

Oh how I love my sweet little kitty!

Oh kitty, oh kitty,

Sweet little kitty cat!

Cat lover's note. This song, beloved in my childhood, is somewhat biographical. Bentley came to us from the SPCA, designated as a "stray". These were once called "alley cats", though the term "stray" was floating around to describe missing dogs. I knew very little about Bentley's history. Nobody did. He was about a year old, brought in by someone who found him badly injured, likely mauled by a dog or coyote. We had to piece together his story after the fact: perhaps he had wandered off from somewhere, gone on a little adventure, and become lost. There was nothing remotely feral about him, though - his gentleness and sweetness was immediately apparent, even from his picture.

When I first saw him in his little SPCA cubicle by himself, he jumped down from his high place and ran up to me, looking up at me expectantly. I picked him up, he relaxed in my arms, and it was instant love. When I opened the door to the cat-carrier, he went in there like a shot.

I had my cat. He didn't have any fur on his shoulders, but I could see the healed puncture-marks where he had been so badly bitten. My daughter-in-law looked at him and said, "That's where his wings broke off."

The thing is, we had not even planned to have a cat. At all. The "cat-riarch", Murphy, had lived to be 17, and at that point we said "no more cats". I was into birds then, kept one for eleven years, and when Jasper died I got a new lovebird named Paco, a gorgeous, sweet little lavender-colored thing that I immediately became deeply attached to. The grandkids loved her immensely. When she was only about eight weeks old, I found her dead on the floor of the cage. I never found out what went wrong.

Why a cat? It was unlikely. My daughter had just gotten a new kitten, adorable. She kept saying, oh, c'mon you guys, you're pensioners, you need a cat. One day when I was feeling particularly ripped up about Paco, I said to Bill, "Jesus, we might as well just get a bloody cat."

Bill said, "We could get a cat." He said it hopefully. He said it with a sense of possibility. Perhaps we needed to revisit that "no more cats" decision of years ago.

It didn't take long. The fund of adoptable kittens was small, but Bentley was a year old and home-ready. His manners were impeccable, and my feeling is that he had a good home, but they didn't neuter him, and one day he followed the siren call. A bad thing, or a good thing? It was good for us. 

Here is his SPCA mug shot. At this point he was named Theo, so he has had at least three names in his lifetime:

He has been the best cat, I mean, the best. Gentlemanly, self-possessed, even classy, like his name. Yet just as off-kilter and unpredictable as any feline. He is the master of the soft-paw stealth attack. Though the fur grew back on his shoulders where he had been picked up and thrashed, when he leans forward I can see little gaps underneath where the skin was too damaged. I call these his "duelling scars". 

Why is Bentley on this blog so much? Hell, I'm getting views for the first time in seven years! But it's more than that. He changed my life. I never expected that, at all. 

It takes a cat like Bentley to do that.

That's All I Can Remember

GOD! It took me a long time to find this. It's a song I remember from childhood, when we owned every album Burl Ives ever made. I kind of underestimated him, I think - I thought he was just this bulky, dorky folk singer who sang kiddie songs and once in a while showed up in a movie. But this song, which I hadn't heard in - God! I hate to say, perhaps 50 years - stuck in my head. It was about a man who had been executed for a double murder and thus was singing to us, not from Heaven Above, but that other place.

YouTube just burgeons constantly, a never-ending joy and source of fascination for me, but I sure had to wait a long time for this. Ives was a unique singer with an extremely subtle and expressive tenor voice. He "undersang" rather than belted, didn't even project very much at all because he had a sort of silvery quality, like moonlight.  Even though we get to experience the horror of the electric chair directly ("they turned on the juice. . . "), he sings almost tenderly, and without a trace of anger or self-pity.

It's a damn good arrangement, and I love the smokily subtle chorus, though there are other versions such as this one (which I posted a couple of years ago) that take a slightly different approach. I don't know who Cowboy Copas is, or was, because I loathe country music more than anything. But some artists transcend genre, and this version is compelling in its own way.

Or is it the fact that I'm just bloody morbid? I've always had a fascination with death and the macabre. Death-in-life. I have seen friends of mine drop off the planet one by one, and I wonder where they go. People younger than me, I mean, and some of them even healthy, seemingly destined to live another 30 years. And then -

For many years, I was adamantly against the death penalty. We don't have it in Canada, and I am just as glad, but there are cases, particularly child murder - let's just say my views have changed, at least under particularly horrendous circumstances. People are more likely to murder their families, the people they "love" the most, than anyone else. It stretches our capacity to believe that human nature can really be that dark.

An Easter classic

Though this video is primitive, it does have a certain charm. Saran-wrap-mounted paper eggs descend like curtains, then disappear; hamburgers fly through the air, and at one point, Peter Cottontail walks right out of the screen. We've been enjoying this one ever since Caitlin was little. By the way, it has garnered a quarter of a million views.

And the wheels in my head started turning

I'm Lookin' Up From Somewhere Below
The Atmosphere Is Warm And They've Got Plenty Of Coal
Maybe Someone Above Can Hear My Story
How A Fool Lost His Soul For A Moment Of Glory


Chorus
And That's All, That's All, That's All
THAT'S ALL THAT I CAN REMEMBER


Now Bill Was My Friend, Throughout My Short-Lived Life
'Til I Caught Him Out With Mary, My Wife
Then The Wheels In My Head Started Turnin'
A Death Plan I Made Up For Both Of Those Concernin'


REPEAT CHORUS


They Took Me To Prison And They Locked Me In A Cell
They Gave Me My Last Big Meal Then Strapped Me To A
Chair
Then They Turned On The Juice, And I Felt Somethin' A
Burnin'


REPEAT CHORUS TWICE.

SPECIAL NOTE... Alternate First Verse exists... it was
only ever used in Burl Ives' rendition of the song...
Neither Lefty Frizzell nor Cowboy Copas used it in
their renditions. Frankly, I like the first verse in
the Frizzell and Copas versions better... however I
have printed the alternate first verse below:


Come Listen While I Tell You 'Bout A Man That's Gonna
Die
Be Patient With Me Won't You Please, If I Should Start
To Cry
Maybe One Of You Can Understand My Story
How A Fool Lost His Soul For A Moment Of Glory...

As usual, this came in the back door.

My dear friend David West is facing a medical crisis, will soon be having what amounts to emergency surgery to install a pacemaker, mainly because his pulse is dropping to as low as 30 beats per minute. He needed a ride from Abbotsford to Vancouver and back, had no prospects, but suddenly after a Facebook request, two people stepped forward who are happy to be of service.  I pray this is a good sign and that he'll come through it and feel better than he has in a long time. 

Pooh and Piglet can't be separated.

At any rate, in the midst of all this, David finds a skinny little stray cat hanging around his place, obviously direly cold and hungry. He took it in and began to plump him up, though Kitty is still understandably wary. In reading about all this on Facebook, suddenly a song sprang into my head, a song by Burl Ives that is lodged in my head forever:

Well, here it is! A few months ago I looked for this album and couldn't find it. When we first got our cat Murphy back in 1990, I kept singing this song, and my kids kept saying, "That's not a real song. You're making that up." I got most of the lyrics wrong, so they were almost right. But here it is! And it's about someone finding a stray cat and taking it in.

But that led to something else, and I still can't find it. On one of his more obscure, darker albums, Ives recorded a song called That's All I Can Remember. It was sombre and almost sinister, with Ives singing in a very low-key and almost resigned voice. Very spooky. It reminded me a bit of Long Black Veil, and the story is essentially the same except that in this one, like in a gangster movie from the 1930s, the guy gets "the chair". One can almosts see him screaming and convulsing and clutching the arms of the chair as the plumes of smoke rise above his head. 

I can't find the Ives version anywhere, though I know it will sneak onto YouTube some day. There are only a couple other versions, and this one is nice, but a little too cheery and Latin-sounding. There are some variations in the lyrics, with Ives introducing and setting up the story in a more dramatic fashion. Understandable, since he was such a kick-ass actor.

Ives was supposed to be folksy and recorded lots of children's songs, but in his soul he was Big Daddy, surly and menacing, with a sense of restrained power that might fly out and do terrible destruction. As in this song. It's literally sung from the pits of hell, where he will fry for all eternity. Not exactly a song you want to sing for the kiddies.

Look at the little kitty cat
A-walkin' down the street
I bet he's got no place to go
Or nothin' good to eat
Look at the little kitty cat
With tiny tired feet
He ought to have a place to go
'Cause he's so very sweet

Here kitty, here kitty,
Here little kitty, here little kitty
Here kitty, here kitty,
Here little kitty cat.

I'm gonna ask my mama
If she'll let me take him home
Where I can hold him close to me
So he won't have to roam
He oughta have a lot of milk
And lots of fish and meat
Instead of finding what he can
In the alley or the street

(Musical interlude)

Now look at the little kitty cat
A-sleepin' in his bed
He's got a place to rest his feet
and lay his weary head
I'm going to see that he will stay
As happy as can be
And now when he goes walking
He'll go walking next to me

Oh kitty oh kitty oh how I love my sweet little kitty
Oh kitty oh kitty 
Sweet little kitty cat.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Burl Ives: did he fake his own death?

Last time my husband and I were driving around Utah (having come to see Bryce Canyon, the holiest place in the world, full of glowing gilded cathedrals of God-carved stone), we were suddenly stopped dead in our tracks.
There was a sign up ahead saying, "Tourist Stop: THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN!"

I looked at Bill.

"There's never a Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's a Burl Ives song."

"No, it was based on this mountain here! Let's stop."

He got out and enthusiastically took a picture of a small, ordinary-looking mountain, the farthest thing from rock candy imagineable. We were hungry, and there was a restaurant. As we walked past a nominal gift shop with cheap t-shirts and cellophane bags of rock candy, Bill blinked in surprise, then whispered in my ear.

"There he is."'

"Who?"

"You know! Look over there."

At a table in the corner, facing a beer and a corned beef sandwich, was a heavyset older man with a grey goatee.

"Hm, well, it does look like him, but the truth is - "

"I know it's him."

"See, that's the thing. He's been dead for ten years."

"Maybe he faked his own death."

"Then he'd be 116 years old."

"Well, he looks it, doesn't he?"

He did. But he didn't look much like Burl Ives to me.

When I think of Burl Ives now, I think of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: his surly, snappy, sour performance was one of the best I've seen in a character actor.

But I also thought of other things. I was raised on Burl Ives. One of my first memories was that mild, burly tenor voice of his singing, "Here's a song about a whale, with a most amazing appetite." There was also Holly Jolly Christmas and Little Bitty Tear and a couple other mainstream hits, but they came second to his songs for children, his "Little White Duck" and "The sow took the measles and she died in the spring" (kind of an awful song for the kiddies, probably an old Appalachian thing.) There were some I did myself when I briefly had a kids' TV show in Alberta: "Old witch, old witch, she lives in a ditch, and she combs her hair with a hick'ry switch."

Having never heard it before, the kids loved it.

Anyway, my husband ordered a corned beef sandwich and a beer and kept shooting glances at this Burl Ives stand-in. It occurred to me later (hell, it just occurred to me this second) that they'd hired this local yahoo to stand in and wow the tourists.

Another thing that happened just this second: I looked up the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and found out that it was really just a song, something invented by hoboes. There were approximately seventeen Big Rock Candy Mountains scattered all over the US, each claiming to be THE Big Rock Candy Mountain, bearing big signs and restaurants serving corned beef sandwiches and beer.
Did they all have a Burl Ives lookalike? I really can't say.

Anyway, the video I've posted is haunting. It reminds me structurally of the Child Ballad, I Gave my Love a Cherry, and also evokes Christ's temptation in the wilderness. It's no doubt deeply Appalachian, thus harking back to somewhere in ancient Britain, preserved as only music preserves ancient things.

I have a hankering for another Burl Ives song which seems to be impossible to find. It was on one of his more contemporary albums (meaning, no Child Ballads), and it had songs like Mr. In-Between and Shanghai'd.

Deeply remeniscent of Long Black Veil, it was called That's All I Can Remember. I didn't recall much about it except that it was an execution song, like something out of The Green Mile. It had a couple of lines in it that stuck in my head like barbed wire: "And the wheels in my head started turnin'. . .and they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. " If this man was looking back on his own execution, it surely wasn't from Paradise.

I dug around, and dug around, and couldn't find a recorded version anywhere (though supposedly it was also recorded by Lefty Frizzell. Who the fuck is that?). But I found a fragmentary, scrambled-up lyric, which I'll try to reconstruct here. Since there is more than one version, there's some repetition of lines. I fought and fought and fought to have consistent line-spacing, and my computer just wouldn't let me do it, but since nobody reads this anyway. . .
I've never killed anyone, but I do identify with this fellow's loneliness.

That's All I Can Remember
Come listen while I tell you 'bout a man that's gonna die
Be patient with me won't you please, if I should start to cry
Maybe one of you can understand my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

I'm lookin' up from somewhere below
The atmosphere is warm and they've got plenty of coal
Maybe someone above can hear my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

Now Bill was my friend, throughout my short-lived life
'Til I caught him out with Mary, my wife
Then the wheels in my head started turnin'
A death plan I made up for both of those concernin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

They took me to prison and they locked me in a cell
They gave me my last big meal then strapped me to a chair
Then my life before my eyes came returnin'
Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

There's another verse in there, about how he killed Bill and Mary, a very lurid one, but I can't find it anywhere. I can't find the composer and lyricist of the song. In fact, I barely found it at all.

But it stuck in my head, which is how songs are transported or propelled forward. It happened even before anything was written down. Most of the people who sang and remembered them couldn't read or write anyway. People from Appalachia who sang those twangy, multi-versed songs with tunes that all had similar intervals, and even told similar stories. Unlike the kid from Deliverance, most couldn't play very well, and just strummed one chord on the banjo, bom-jigga, bom-jigga, bom.

Everything went around in a circle then, and everyone was everyone's cousin. How many broke away? Some must have. But mostly, the musicologists had to go after them, first with pen and ink, then gramophones, then more sophisticated equipment.

If you want a repository of those songs, go listen to Joan Baez' first album. I can hardly stand it now, her voice is so bleak, so wintry, so devoid of youth or joy. My brother used to sing songs about someone named Geordie, put to death for poaching "the King's royal deer". I used to think they were being cooked, like eggs. My sister sang "Go 'way from window" and other cheery ditties (one of them called Poor Old Horse: "the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). But then, my sister was bitter and emotionally deformed, even in her twenties. She was weird, holding the guitar between her legs like a cello, and having a new boy friend every six months.

How did I get on to all this? Burl Ives didn't really have a very good voice, but then, neither did Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan. Charisma, they had, and an understanding of the underpinnings, the deep traditions of music. They were building on something. There wasn't an internet then, but songs were a repository, not necessarily of history, but of things that happened all the time. Not factual, but nevertheless true.

POSTSCRIPT. I just listened to this song again, and I take it back, what I said about Ives' voice. It vibrates like Waterford crystal, sounds like nothing else, and defies all analysis.

And the song! Listen to it one more time. It's clearly Appalachian, probably a Child Ballad from antiquity, with that plainspun tune and spooky medieval intervals. But what grabs me is that he plays just two chords. Two. There used to be a joke that if you could stand up and play three chords, you were a folk singer, but this trumps even that standard for minimalism. Pick-twang, pick-twang, pick-twang: not even full chords, but maybe three strings. And he tells this incredible story, this question and answer. Why nine questions? The Trinity/three wishes, times three, making it three times more powerful? Nine-ty-nine-and-nine-teeeeee. Three nines. But flip those three nines over, and you have. . .
The devil's number.

POST-POST-SCRIPT. I guess I can't count. There are only eight questions. So what is the ninth: whether he's "God's or mine"?