JD-202
Booklet
Bob
Coltman;Before They Close The Minstrel Show
copyright © 2007-2010
Collegium Sound, Inc
all linked music ℗
1975 Collegium Sound, Inc.
Contents:
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One
Place
It's
Southern music that's been my teacher, with its bite, its taste of
woodsmoke and sorrow, its long distances inside your mind. But I'm no
Southerner, and though I live in the North, no Northerner either. I
come from a place that hangs between, like an Aeolian harp, where the
winds of both blow through. The songs I write are the ones that ask to
be written because nobody has. And the traditional songs I sing? Let me
tell you about just one place, one man. Everything comes down to that:
one person in one time and place.
About
twenty-five miles
south of Lynchburg in south central Virginia is Altavista, and about
two miles past that stood the house of R. Abner Keesee. Years before
the day I met him, Ben Moomaw, a correspondent of the Virginia Folklore
Society and one of the finest singers I ever knew, had struck upon Mr.
Keesee. He wanted me to know him too, if he was still alive.
Abner
Keesee is still alive and 79 years old on this day in September 1954,
the road dust rising in the baking heat. A squat, wheezing man, he
emerges onto his concrete porch and slumps into the creaky swing to
entertain his company. His son, youngest of his ten children, and son's
young wife and child all think it's pretty funny that somebody would
want to come see old Dad.
Nearly all deaf, is Mr.
Keesee, can
hardly hear at all. He says everything like it was the Ten
Commandments. That old saying about hearing yourself talk ... when your
ears go back on you, and you used to be the champion singer at the
White Top Festival, it takes on a little more meaning.
"Some
people," he roars, "think they know a lot of songs. But it ain't
everybody that knows nine."
Nine.
He
sang two of them to my Dad and me, in a voice that boomed and swooped
and dove with the tyranny of deafness. How I wish you could hear that
voice. It seemed to come from another world. Hard listening: gritty,
full of adventure. But never lost, just finding new paths in the
darkness of sleeping ears. The song about the Fisherman's Daughter,
'whose friends was dead and gone,' the words collapsing at the ends of
lines, strange, unforgettable—and then the eerie vision of broken dying
love that is Far Fanil Town:
He rode till he come to
the
middle of the town
Likewise to the middle of the street
Who
did he meet but his own wedded wife
All wropt up in a
winding sheet
He had a penknife drew in his hand
He
ripped the seams all around
Her cheeks they looked of a pale
crimson red
And her lips they looked smiling at him
We
never did find out what the other seven songs were, for Mr. Keesee was
gasping after two, and we were afraid for his very life. Once, he said,
he'd won the White Top singing prize two years running, and would have
made it three in a row if an English judge hadn't decided three in a
row was one too many, and given him 2nd instead. But he won 1st prize
in dancing that year, and that was better by five dollars: $15 instead
of $10.
He'd breath enough to tell about the
manganese mine he
knew about on property owned by coal interests. Wouldn't let on where.
Nor give particulars of the gold mine that was plowed up on his
nephew's property, though he could if he cared to. The songs? He'd
learned them as a child. His children didn't care anything about them.
'People
have come here several times to get me to sing, and not give me nothing
for it.' There are a couple of plain glass bottles lying empty in the
yard's scant grass. Dad, who's wiser in these things than I, spots the
hint and gives him enough for a full one. It's accepted,
matter-of-factly. Folded inside the bib of his overalls in hopes the
boy's wife won't find and confiscate it.
It took
me a long
time, me who knew hundreds of songs by heart and many more by
reputation, to decipher the other message: that songs are living
things. Too vital to drag around in the mud, to play in the background
while doing something else, to stack on shelves or count up in columns,
to breeze through and forget. Keesee knew less than one song for each
child he had fathered. Two songs almost too much for one hot September
afternoon. Nine the measure of a whole life. Each syllable to be
handled with care, like dynamite, or fine crystal.
Mr.
R.
Abner Keesee never made it into a recording studio in his life. He had
more important kinds of music to make: fierce, lonely, stubborn,
infected in the blood. He is on this record, with all the other people
who taught me to die and be born in every song I sing.
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I
learned this breakdown from a Fiddlin'John Carson record. I've doctored
it up some: added a third instrumental part where the song seemed to
want it, and swiped some old verses to add to John's one. Carson's only
now becoming appreciated, with his salty old rasp of a voice and his
wild whiskey fiddling. In his own way he was a messenger to the 1920s
from the flatland Georgia traditions of the last century, a toucher of
vanished worlds with his endless old jokey songs and odd fiddle rhythms
and voices, bits and fragments of old ballads and stories. He can be
hard listening the first time, but I’ll tell you what: he goes in one
ear and won't come out the other.
Cheeks as red as the
blooming
rose,
Eyes of the beautiful brown,
Her hair hangs
down like a waterfall,
Meet her when the sun goes down.
Oh boy, she's a daisy
(3)
Meet her when the sun goes down.
Had a little banjo,
Its
strings were made of twine,
And the only song that it would
play,
I wish that gal was mine.
I asked
her if she loved me,
She said she loved me some,
Throwed
both arms around me
Like a grapevine round a gum.
When
I go to fishin'
I fish with a hook and line,
When
I go to marry
I'll marry Caroline.
Wish
I was in Tennessee
Sittin' in my own armchair,
Jug
of whiskey in my hand,
Sporting to my dear.
Eyes
like a morning star,
Cheeks like a rose,
How I
love that darling girl
Godamighty knows
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Banjo Sam
Wilmer
Watts was born at Mount Tabor in Columbus County, North Carolina
shortly before the turn of the century, and was a textile worker in
Belmont, near the center of the Gastonia labor troubles. He played
fiddle, guitar and banjo inventively, finally turning to gospel music;
his daughters are still singing as the Watts Gospel Quartet. He died at
St. Paul, N.C. in 1943, having produced some of the most unusual,
galloping, rusty-sounding, powerful flatlands music ever recorded,
including this. It is an elaboration of Hook and Line, one
of the dozen
or so basic pieces considered to be starters for kids learning to play
oldtime banjo in the South. It also borrows from Old Dan Tucker and
the
Jaw Bone song family, with Samson's favorite weapon changed to mine.
My name is Banjo Sam.
Hello,
Banjo Sam.
Banjo ring, banjo sing,
Banjo
tell me everything.
Banjo walk, banjo talk,
Banjo
eat with a knife and fork.
Gimme the hook, gimme
the line,
Gimme the girl they call Caroline.
Throwed
my hook in the middle of the pond,
And the catfish got my
hook and gone.
Yon comes Ezell, dressed for town,
Ridin'
a billygoat, leadin' a hound,
And the hound bark, billygoat
jump,
And throwed ol' Ezell up straddle of a stump.
Throwed
my hook to catch me a shad
But all I caught was my old Dad.
Throwed
my hook in the middle of the hole
And,the catfish got my
hook and pole.
My wife died in Tennessee,
Sent
my banjo back to me,
Hung my banjo on the fence,
And
I ain't seen nothin' of my banjo since.
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Fattening
Frogs
In
the 1950s an oldtime jook band turned up in Alabama: the Mobile
Strugglers, who got a tremendous sound out of two fiddlers, a guitar
player, a bass player and a washtub man who doubled on banjo-mandolin.
I learned Fattening Frogs from some takes made of the band at the time.
The song's much older; some say it's one of the earliest blues, and it
was recorded earlier by Virginia Liston and others. But nobody did it
with the Strugglers' flair, and that's where I hear it coming from. I
added the wig verse from a song by Cannon's Jug Stompers; it belongs
here.
Cooked
my own breakfast this morning, pretty mama,
Cook my dinner
on time,
You took my last dollar
Like you took my
last dime,
I'm
getting tired
Fattening frogs for snakes.
It
takes me so many years
To leam my mistakes.
When
I first knowed you, pretty mama,
You didn't have them fine
clothes,
You owed your house rent,
You's almost
sleeping outdoors.
Take that wig I bought you,
Let
your head go bald,
When I first knowed you, pretty mama,
You
didn't have no hair at all.
When I first knowed
you, pretty mama,
You would drag me in your door,
Now
I'm getting old
You don't want me no doggone more.
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The
Mile To The
Mountains
©
1969 Bob Coltman
I
suppose this song came from times of finding out that what ought to
blow like breezes has a habit of getting stuck fast. We all talk about
love, and say we like it, and yet we let it become a way of getting
other things, and ruin it and break it and leave it gathering cobwebs.
Many people would rather admire the view from a distance. And yet the
mountains are there.
The mile to the mountains
I must
go
Because my fortune I don't know,
Fair girl,
fair girl, just come and see,
I'll take you along with me,
The
mile to the mountains it must be.
Oh no sir, no
sir, I can't go,
Go and ask my sister though,
Traveling
don't agree with me,
I'll stay by the banks of the sea.
The
mile to the mountains never ca» be.
What will you
have to persuade your mind?
A golden vessel and silver wine?
A hair-comb made of the sunbeam strong
And a gale
to carry you along?
The mile to the mountains can never be
wrong.
Oh sir, oh sir, and don't you know
That
mile is the last I ever could go,
Many's the girl was bold
and free
That walked that mile with thee
Never
came back to the banks of the sea.
A mountain mile
is a damned hard road,
And many's the girl the way you've
showed,
You may talk of beauty fine and rare,
But
you know I'll never go there.
The mile to the mountains I
can't bear.
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Skilly Skaw
© 1975 Bob Coltman
We
kids would walk a mile over cornfields and pastures and dirt roads to
get to the little one-room school they made us go to, and none of us
liked it. We would stop along the way and dream of getting lost,
kicking the ice out of the puddles and throwing stones at trees, even
sometimes at each other; I think we must have wanted to disable
ourselves so we could be romantic invalids and not have to go to
school. And especially when it was spring there were a thousand
invitations to be out and gone. Well, and I have always been partial to
girls too. So here is a girl-and-hookey love song.
My mama advised me to go
to
school,
But I did not go.
I walked with my paper
bag of lunch
In the woods where the flowers grow,
I
played I was hunting of game
And a pirate on the sea,
Till
I met with a pretty little girl
Who smiled all over me.
Ring ting skilly skilly
skaw,
Skilly
skilly skaw skaw skee roo.
Oh love, I have been
a-hunting here,
But I found me no game.
I could
not bear to go to school,
So I walked on away.
But
I don't mind if I do learn
Out here in the wind and the sun,
I'd rather go to school to you,
For you are the
darlingest one.
So we set down on a bit of a rock
Low
down by the stream,
And we never set so far apart
That
a knife could pass between,
We told each other secrets
And
stories of renown
Till long, long after the school bell rung
And the sun was a-going down.
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Sweet Petunia
Charlie
Lincoln came to Atlanta around 1920 from his birthplace, Lithonia,
Georgia with his kid brother Robert Hicks to see what good times were.
Both of them played 12-string guitars and liked the rowdy life blues
singing led to. They washed windshields and served ribs at a drive-in
stand, and Bob got the nickname "Barbecue Bob" and went on to be a lot
better known than Charlie. But bad luck broke them both; Bob was dead
by 1931, and Charlie survived only to be put in the pen for murder,
dying there in the early 1960s. He'd only recorded a few songs in his
dark bitter-hued voice; this was one of them.
I got a gal, she's got a
Rolls-Royce,
She didn't get it by usin' her voice,
I'm wild about my ‘Tunia,
(2)
Only
thing I crave,
Oh, sweet Petunia,
Gonna carry me
to my grave.
Every
time my gal walks down the street,
All the boys holler,
'Tunia's so sweet.
I got a gal, she lives up on
the hill,
You can't get to 'Tunia without an automobile.
I
woke up this mornin', 'bout a half past four,
Was a long
tall gal rappin' on my door,
She was singin' sweet
Petunia. .
.
Come
on, little 'Tunia, you can pass the test,
A long tall gal
can shake it the best.
I'm tellin' all you men, I
have been well blest,
If I can have 'Tunia, you can have the
rest.
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top of page
©1975
BobColtman
The
old abandoned roadhouse for which I named this song still stands
somewhere on the rattiest old back lot in the world facing the Boston
and Maine tracks in Bridgeport or someplace like that in southern
Connecticut—it's hard to be sure just where from the window of a train
when you've just waked up. It's all boarded up, paint flaking, and a
big black sign over the broken door that says JACK'S RED CHEETAH for
all the world to see. A joint like that, even if it wasn't really wild,
still must have tried extra hard. So I put it together with my memories
of juke joints and dives and pine-shanty hot spots and the thoughts of
a kid who can't wait to sample the wild women and loud music.
Down below the amusement
park
Where
the hoboes play cards,
All broke down shanty town
Meets
the railroad yards,
See them guitar players go in
Where
they drinkin' and carryin' on,
Down to Jack's Red Cheetah
Till
the cold grey light of dawn.
Now when I get a little
better
grown
I'm gonna sing and play
On a great big bad
guitar,
I'm gonna go down to Jack's,
I'm gonna
have my way,
Get on my long coat, get my bottle and go,
Gonna
learn to skoodle-do-do,
And them wild women gonna find it
out
What a brand-new man can do.
Now I went down there
last Saturday night
And oooh, my Lord,
That joint
was rockin' like a washin' machine
And a-rollin' like a
Henry T. Ford,
I heard 'em singin' and laughin' and cryin'
the blues
As I peeked in through the crack,
You
wouldn't believe the things I seen,
But I know I'm goin'
back.
Now I may look like a little kid
But
I been growin' some,
I got enough sense to look after myself
And I can tell when the time has come,
I been in
short pants long enough,
I been workin' up to goin',
I
can tell the time, I can tie my own shoes,
And my mama can't
keep me home.
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The
Curtains Of
Night
As
I'll Remember You, Love,
In My Prayers, this was written in 1869 by
Will Hays, who was the author of all sorts of songs including We Parted
By The Riverside, Nora
O'Neale, Nobody's
Darling, and Little
Old Log
Cabin In The Lane, and who deserves to be better
remembered than he is.
The song was only a few years old when it spread westward to become a
cowboy favorite, very durable during the 1870s and 1880s and just right
for night herding, with its dreamy lilt. Surely it must be one of the
most magnificent love songs ever, with all the heavens for a canopy and
this angelic tune, the prettiest of the four or five I've heard
attached to it. In the 1920s, remembered from the singing of
turn-of-the-century mothers and aunts, it had a modest vogue among
country singers, including the Tenneva Ramblers and Walter Smith. This
version comes from a recording by the Blue Ridge Mountain Singers.
When the curtains of night
are
pinned back by the stars
And the beautiful moon sweeps the
sky,
And the dewdrops of heaven are kissing the rose,
It
is then that my memory flies
As if on the wings of a
beautiful dove
In haste with the message it bears,
To
bring you a kiss of affection and say
I'll remember you,
love, in my prayers.
Then go where you will, on
land
or on sea,
I'll share all your sorrows and cares,
And
at night when I kneel by my bedside to pray
I'll remember
you, love, in my prayers.
I have loved you too
fondly to ever forget
The love you have spoken for me,
The
kiss of affection still warm on my lips
When you told me how
true you would be.
I know not if fortune be fickle or fair,
If
time or your memory wears,
But I know that I love you
wherever you go
And remember you, love, in my prayers.
When
the heavenly angels are guarding the good
As God has
ordained them to do
In answer to prayers I have offered
above
I know that one's watching o'er you.
And
may its bright spirit be with you tonight
And guide you up
heaven's bright stairs,
And be with the one who has loved
you so true,
And remember you, love, in my prayers.
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top of page
Bronco Buster
©
1975 BobColtman
Jackson
Hole, Wyoming, summer 1959, was my first trip west. I went there with
Bill Briggs and we lived in the park, sustaining ourselves with Teton
Tea and music till dawn. We sang under bridges and anywhere they didn't
throw us out of, worked in the then-new Pink Garter Theater playing
melodrama, almost fell off any number of horses, and finally vanished
in the direction of Mexico and some other things I may write about
someday. While there I saw the fringes of rodeo life, with its phony
glamor and hard knocks. The working cowboy's life is lousy enough so
that staying on crazy broncs looks glittery by comparison. But there's
only room for a few hands on the brass ring. The riders I saw had a
look around the corners of their eyes that said: what a hustle.
You bronco buster, you
gotta know
how to fly,
'Cause when you leave that leather you'll be
tastin' the sky,
Got to roll and be ready on your way back
down,
'Cause there's nothing underneath you but the cold,
hard ground.
You may rise up easy but you'll come
down hard,
If you ain't built to take it, stay out back in
the yard,
For these broncos'll know it, they will drag off
your skin,
Dig a grave to contain you and then trample you
in.
Got a fast little pickup, but I can't afford
gas,
Got a hot dog budget and an appetite for class,
This
racket I'm in ain't no get-rich scheme,
I can't wear weather
and I can't eat dreams.
Take a look, Angelina,
from your hotel high,
You ain't very pretty, but then
neither am I,
Your heart may be fickle, but it's soft enough
to lay
A bronc-rider's head on till the coming of day.
Cost
me fifty good dollars just to enter this show,
If I don't
win nothing I'll be fifty in the hole,
And I ain't won
nothing since July in Bell,
And this brute they fixed for me
looks meaner'n hell.
But this old gate's a-risin',
so here we go,
Folks, here's the boy wonder, are you likin'
the show?
Fightin' pure bolt lightnin' and a-losin' the war,
But I got to stay on him just three seconds more.
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Chase 'em
Home
©
1975 BobColtman
Two or three times every spring
the neighbors' cows would get wanderlust, and they wouldn't care about
fences
any more. The fence was electrified, but it was only a light jolt—we
kids often grabbed it just for a thrill—and the cows just
knocked it down. And then they'd spread out through our woods and cross
the stream in the early wet weather and come trooping along
and sink up to their knees in our lawn and make a comfortable
breakfast off the new grass. We'd have to call out the farmers and all
of us get together and circle and coax and shove and drive
those cows back through the woods and across the stream and through the
break somehow. When I came to write the song it got changed
to pigs and they somehow became our pigs, though really we
never kept any.
Gonna be trouble as sure's
you're
born (2)
Hogs got out in the garden,
Eatin'
on the neighbors' corn.
Get you a rake,
Get
you a rake and chase 'em,
Good Lord, little boy,
can't you run?
Gotta chase 'em home.
They
don't make fence like they used to do (2)
All tore
down and dragged around,
Busted a post off too.
Here
comes the neighbor man runnin' up the hill (2)
Wisht
he would see reason,
But I don't expect he will.
Never
shoulda got out of bed (2)
Wisht I'd a-took the
covers,
And yanked 'em up over my head.
Hogs,
you gonna be bacon and ham (2)
This time I'm fed
up,
You bet your hocks I am.
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I'm Almost
Home
Staying
overnight in Beckley, West Virginia on the way home from Tennessee in
the fall of 1973, Amba Lee and I weren't looking for a song.
But Beckley, which has been a center for oldtime music for 50 years,
gave us one. I'd turned on the motel TV, because it was
Sunday morning, and things you shouldn't miss happen on Sunday
morning TV in West Virginia. A teenaged trio was singing a song I just
caught the chorus of. Later I wrote the mission that
sponsored the program; Rev. and Mrs. Evan Dewey Russ kindly wrote back
enclosing the words I'd missed. It was extra trouble for
busy people, but they were most gracious and pleased to do it; it's
through
their goodness that I can let you hear the loveliest new gospel song I
know. I added the third verse because the song seemed just
too short and over too quickly.
I'm almost home,
I'm almost home,
I've got a mansion waiting and
I'm almost home. (2)
They took the Apostle Peter,
and stoned him o'er and o'er,
But he would not
deny the Lord as he had done before,
They hung him
by his feet to die, they thought he was alone,
He
turned his face toward heaven and said, I'm almost home.
They
took the prophet John out on the isle to die,
But
he had good connections with that Man up in the sky,
God
showed him the new Jerusalem, they thought he was alone,
He
said. It's not so hard to die when I can see my home.
Oh
Lord, keep me reminded, I'm trusting in that vow,
I've
got a mansion waiting, I can almost see it now,
Although
they may revile me, I know I'm not alone,
I'm
nearly done my journey and I'm almost home.
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© 1971 BobColtman
In
the four years since I wrote it, this song has put me through the most
changes of any. I never expected it to do well; it's a risky
song so that if you don't listen carefully it calls up a fringey set of
reflexes having to do with the old blackface shows. But when
you know your music and where it's been, you know what a debt we all
owe
to the old traveling shows which, even before the radio and phonograph,
carried songs and ways of playing from place to place,
setting up by kerosene light in schoolhouses and off of wagon gates in
town squares. We move our music around differently today,
which is both a gain and a loss, like any other change. There is
something
to mark in the passing of the old minstrel men, and no stereotypes are
adequate to deal with their reality. And when did you last
hear anybody play anything pretty out in front of your house?
I
had the pleasure of sitting in with Ed Trickett when he made his
beautiful, really definitive, version. Since then Ed and I
have tried it another way, with guitar and piano, which you ought to
hear sometime. But for this album I wanted to hear the
lonesomeness come out front, and Jay's fiddle said it exactly right.
The
poster's peeling underneath
Last summer's morning
glory vine,
An old white hat and a stump of cigar
And
an empty bottle of wine,
Lay me down, Carolina,
lay me down,
Don't want to wake up in the morning
no more,
Sing me one slow sad song for this one
last old time
Before they close the minstrel show.
Banjo's got a broken string,
Don't
'spect I'll get to fix it now.
Won't
be no more chance to sing,
I'm rusty anyhow.
Daddy
Bones is dead, I guess,
You probably don't know or
care.
And Frank and Arch has gone away
Somewhere,
I don't know where.
The money and the crowd run
out
Before we left the last town.
This
old show done played its run
And rung the curtain
down.
I don't know where we go from here,
Come
to that, I just don't care.
Maybe we'll go to a
better place
And the minstrel show'll be there.
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A
Last Word In
Edgewise
Special thanks to very special people.
Theirs is music that makes my feet unsteady and my heart pound, music
like it ought to be made. When we sat down together it was like first
love and horseback, ice cream and peaks where the rain runs
off in both directions. You know, the good music doesn't hang out on
the radio. It lives off at the end of a dirt track somewhere
dark, in places that have been lived in hard, where the faces still
know
how to light. That's where the hello music is, the smile music, the
music that won't leave you in the lurch when you most need
it.
Minstrel Records let all this happen, and Jay,
Lyn, Abby, Ed, Lorraine and Estelle saw to it that it did.
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