clarkspicks.com

September 21st is the international day of peace. I was reminded of this song by my friend Bob Ortiz, who sang it at a Peace Day celebration, a day early, today. By making a small change in one line Bob, brought the image of the twin towers into the song.

Here, Peter Paul and Mary have added a verse, which Mary Travers sings, about famine, which PP&M dedicated to the work of the late Harry Chapin, who used his music to feed the hungry.

There But For Fortune was written by Phil Ochs. Ochs has sometimes been dismissed as a “journalist” writing and singing songs that sound like newspaper articles. Actually the artistry of his songs, and of his performance, was hard to match in the folk scare ere of the 1960s. This clip, filmed at the Bitter End in New York in 1967, contains only a partial performance, but you can get a taste of the kind of musical chops Phil Ochs really had.

I wrote in a previous post about the traditional song, Stagolee which tells the story of the killing of one Billy Delions by a bad man, cruel Stagolee. I was able to find, quoted online, a newspaper from St. Louis, MO in 1895 regarding the shooting of one Bill Curtis by Lee Sheldon in an argument during which Curtis grabbed Sheldon’s Stetson hat. I thought I’d take a shot at Frankie and Johnny, another song with many variants, also involving the story of a shooting and presumably dating from around the same time.

St. Louis, Missouri must have been a wild town in the 1890s, or the city was fortunate enough to have in it’s midst a songwriter of immense talent, who chronicled, in his ballads, the history of it’s wild side, at least according to Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus, authors of the book The Rose and the Briar. In their chapter on the song “Frankie and Johnny” they quote the St. Louis Republic of Oct 16, 1899:

Negro Shot By Woman

After midnight, Sunday Allen (Albert) Britt, Colored, was shot and badly wounded by Frankie Baker, also Colored. The shooting occurred at the woman’s home at 317 Targee Street, after a quarrel over another woman named Nelly Bly. Britt had been to a Cakewalk at Stolle’s Dance Halls, where he and Nelly Bly had won a prize. His condition at City Hospital is serious . . . The Police, pending investigation made no arrest.

and on Oct 19th:

Amid The Suffering

Alan Britt’s brief experience in the art of love cost him his life. He died at the City Hospital, Wednesday night from knife wounds inflicted by Frankie Baker, an ebony-hued cakewalker. Britt was also colored and he was seventeen years old. He met Frankie at the Orange Blossom’s hall and was smitten with her. Thereafter they were lovers.
In the rear of 212 Targee Street lived Britt. There his sweet heart wended her way a few nights ago and lectured Allen for his alleged duplicity. Allen’s reply was not intended to cheer the dusky damsel and a glint of steel gleamed in the darkness. An instant later the boy fell to the floor mortally wounded. Frankie is locked up in four corners.

Apparently Frankie Baker was able to successfully plead self defense and was acquitted of the charge of murder. She sued Republic Pictures after their 1936 film, “Frankie and Johnny” was released, claiming ownership of the story. She lost, the defense being able to show that there were more than 300 variants of the, by then, traditional song. Elvis Presley starred in a remake of the film in 1966.

Wilentz and Marcus attribute the writing of both the original “Stagolee” and “Frankie and Johnny” ballads to a local barroom singer and piano player named Bill Dooley. Dooley was a prolific songwriter and, in the tradition of balladeers since medieval times, would write songs about contemporary events, turning them out quickly in order to get the attention of his transient audience. Bill Dooley to them is an artist on a par with his contemporary, W. C. Handy, but without access to copyright because of his status as an itinerant street singer.

The earliest known recorded version of “Frankie and Johnny” dates to 1914 and was copyrighted by Hughie Cannon, the author of “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” under the title “He Done Me Wrong” and subtitled “Death of Bill Bailey.” Many versions of the song have been recorded, sometimes calle “Frankie and Albert or “Frankie’s Blues.” The name Johnnie was apparently substituted for Albert in 1912 by Frank and Bert Leighton, who copyrighted another version of the song, their second.

Here are a few of the many recorded versions. Let’s start with a version by Mississippi John Hurt “Frankie,” recorded in 1928

Here is blues singer Furry Lewis, recorded sometime in the 1930s singing “Frankie and Johnny.”

Everyone from Elvis Presley to Sam Cooke to Mae West has done a version of the song. Here is Lindsy Lohan, in the 2006 movie, “A Prairie Home Companion.” Lindsey doesn’t know the words, but she soldiers on.

Pioneering acoustic guitarist and delta blues folklorist, creator of the Takoma record label John Fahey was born in Washington DC in 1939. His family moved to Takoma Park, a Washington suburb when he was six years old. Fahey grew up listening to the bluegrass and country music favored by his parents and became a protege of record collector, old time music scholar and radio broadcaster, Dick Spottswood, who hosted a long running program on American University’s station, WAMU, “The Obsolete Music Hour.” On a record collecting trip to Baltimore with Spottswood, Fahey discovered a recording by blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, which was a conversion experience for Fahey.

Having bought a guitar from Sears at the age of 13 to learn to play bluegrass, Fahey was inspired to learn how to play the blues like the delta artists of the 30s. His playing was never an exact copy of that had gone before, however. He incorporated many musical influences, including Charles Ives and Bela Bartok, in the sound of his “American primitive” style of guitar. Fahey recorded and issued his own album of songs in 1959, with his own name, “John Fahey” on one side and “Blind Joe Death” on the other. He had 100 copies pressed and it took him three years to sell them.

After studying philosophy at American University Fahey moved to California and entered UCLA to go for a masters degree in philosophy, but found himself in the Folklore department writing a masters thesis on blues singer Charlie Patton. During this time Fahey tracked down bluesman, Bukka White and produced an album of White’s songs, releasing it under the Takoma label, which he had created for his own first release. Fahey also recorded his own “Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes” which surprised him by outselling the White recording and launching a music career for himself.

Fahey’s Takoma record label released recordings by guitarists Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho and Peter Lang, pianist George Winston, electric blues/rock artist Mike Bloomfield, jug band and folk guitarist Rick Ruskin, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Maria Muldaur and Canned Heat. Kottke’s first album sold over 500,000 copies, enabling Takoma to have a long and prosperous run.

By the mid 70s alcoholism, diabetes and Epstein-Barr syndrome were beginning to erode Fahey’s abilities. He spent some years living by pawning his guitars and selling rare albums that he had collected from junk shops over the years. When I met his in the late 1990s his guitar playing was a mere shadow of his earlier work. He never fully recovered and died in 2001 while undergoing heart bypass surgery. We are left with his legacy of recordings and writing.

Here is an instrumental of Fahey’s “Red Pony,” performed on Laura Weber’s “Guitar Guitar” television show in 1969.