During Natalie Merchant’s recent visit to the Library of Congress, she performed an exciting concert honoring archival treasures in the Library, which I included in this previous blog post. She also led a family sing-along, which you’ll find below in this post! Around these two events, the singer, songwriter, activist, and folklife advocate spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and spreading the word about the treasures we steward here at the the Library and the Folklife Center.
Natalie Merchant has remained one of America’s most literate and literary pop stars since her days with the band 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s and 1990s. Her solo career has confirmed her reputation as a thoughtful and powerful singer and songwriter, as well as a great interpreter and fierce advocate of traditional folk music. In recognition of this, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer appointed her to the American Folklife Center’s Board of Trustees in 2022. In this important leadership and advisory role, she spends time imagining new ways to help the Center further its mission–including this sing-along.
The sing-along was part of the Library’s monthly Family Day activities. Alongside a few of Natalie’s settings of children’s poetry and a few old popular songs, it featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to the unparalleled archival collections of the American Folklife Center. In the run-up to her visit, Natalie enlisted my help to find some of the deeper connections between these songs and the archive. Natalie used that research in her spoken introductions for each song, as well as an engrossing slideshow of images and sound clips from the archive. As with the concert video, I’ve put some of the fuller stories behind the songs into this blog. You’ll find those stories below the video, along with the complete archival audio tracks wherever possible.
As with the concert, I recommend you watch the whole sing-along video first. Natalie has fun interacting with the kids in the audience, and you can’t help but enjoy both the songs and the talk about them. You’ll also enjoy the playing of her band, put together just for this occasion: Kevin Wimmer (fiddle & singing), Richie Stearns (banjo & singing), Jackson Fitzgerald (acoustic guitar), Alex Lacquement (upright bass), Matty Gordon (percussion, harmonica, dancing), and Gideon Levine (guitar). Watch the video immediately below!
Collection Connections
Natalie Merchant is a very enthusiastic researcher who looked deeply into the history of many of these songs before she joined our Board of Trustees. I helped her with some of the others. Here you’ll find background research and links to archival collectionsconnected to the songs and the traditions Natalie drew upon in the sing-along.
Before getting into the individual songs, here is Natalie Merchant’s online home. That’s where you can keep up with news of her latest release, Keep Your Courage, and of upcoming appearances and other projects.
Now–on to the songs!
Liza Jane
I wrote about the field recording of “Liza Jane,” which Natalie played in her slideshow, in Part 1 of this post.
The Devil’s Nine Questions
I also discussed “The Devil’s Nine Questions” in Part 1, at this link.
If No One Ever Marries Me
This lyrics of this song, as Natalie says in her introduction, come from a poem by Laurence Alma-Tadema, whose father was the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. (Her father’s given name was Lourens, hers Laurense. They were Dutch, and when they moved to England their names were anglicized and became even more similar!) Although Laurence came from a family of visual artists, she herself became a writer and a political and social activist, writing novels, stories, poems, plays, songs, and children’s books. She also wrote political books about Poland and translated works from Polish and other languages. She is best remembered today for “If No One Ever Marries Me,” which has been set to music several times.
A famous story about a previous setting of this song involves Helen “Bobby” Besler, an American socialite and singer who went to France during World War I to perform in YMCA shows–the precursor to the USO shows of World War II. One night, after she sang her entire repertoire, she debuted “If No One Ever Marries Me” as one of her encores. As a result, she received many marriage proposals from soldiers that night. She continued to perform the song during her tour, and recieved multiple proposals per show, leading her to be called “the most proposed-to girl in France.” According to this account, the entire audience at one show cried out “Barkis is willin’,” which is how Dickens’s character Barkis proposes to his sweetheart in David Copperfield. After Besler’s tour was over, the same paper says, “no censor would allow an estimate to pass of the number of proposals Miss Besler has received.”
The tale grew in the few years following her 1918 tour, and on October 11, 1922, after someone DID marry Besler, The New York Evening World embellished the story:
There were more than 2,000,000 U. S. soldiers France, but the next day Miss Besler got 4,000,001 proposals of marriage- – the other 2,000,000 coming from the French and British who had heard reports of the doleful plaint, and the odd one coming across No-Man’s-Land from the first German to whom the news had percolated.
Natalie has not authorized me to say how many proposals she has received since composing her version! However, her official YouTube channel posted this video of her rehearsing the song. You can also hear the album version, from Natalie’s album Leave Your Sleep.
Wheel of Fortune
Natalie learned the traditional Scottish song “Wheel of Fortune” from a Jean Redpath recording. Jean was for many years one of the most popular Scottish folksingers in America. Whether the American Folklife Center archive has a version of her singing “Wheel of Fortune” is unclear; we have seven collections containing tapes of Jean Redpath in concert, but some of them don’t have song lists for each tape. One day I’ll listen to them all and report back!
The image of the Wheel of Fortune is quite ancient, as the wheel on which the goddess Fortuna spun our fate. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spinning wheels were adapted for gambling games, and some came to be known as “Wheel of Fortune.” A vertical or upright version, in which segments of the wheel were numbered and the number you landed on determined your prize, became popular at both Scottish and American fairgrounds in the 19th century. The counting of numbers in the song’s chorus comes from the image of this fairground version of the “Wheel of Fortune” clicking through numbers before it stops.
Though the phrase “Wheel of Fortune” is usually used as a symbol of pure luck, in fact the fairground wheels were easily rigged so the operators could secretly decide who won or lost. On the other hand, in this audio interview, which was the basis of this transcription, the great Bessie Jones of Georgia explained to Alan Lomax and Antoinette Marchand how to counteract the rigging of the fairground Wheel of Fortune using the natural lodestone present in a “toady-frog.” Your results may vary!
Old Shoes & Leggins
Natalie learned this from a 1928 commercial recording by Uncle Eck Dunford which was included in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. You can hear that recording at this link.
Alex “Eck” Dunford was from Ballard’s Branch, Virginia. His wife was the sister of Ernest Stoneman’s wife Hattie, who was also a great fiddler. Because of this connection, Eck joined The Stoneman Family, one of the best known Southern string bands of the time. Since Ernest Stoneman’s performing name was “Pop” Stoneman, and Alex was generally called “Alec” or “Eck” for short, he became “Uncle Eck” Dunford. When the Stonemans moved north, Dunford joined the Ward family and their Bog Trotters Band.
We have a wealth of recordings and photos of the Bog Trotters. In October 1937, John A. Lomax visited Galax and recorded the band and other musicians over a period of two days and nights at the home of Thomas Rutherford. At his father’s recommendation, Alan Lomax traveled to Galax in January 1939, bringing with him a with a 20-year-old unpaid assistant named Pete Seeger. On the basis of the recordings they made of the Bog Trotters, we consider Pete the archive’s first intern! Finally, in 1940 Alan recorded the Bog Trotters with a CBS crew for his “American School of the Air” program. The CBS crew included a photograper, and we have their photos, including the ones above and below, along with the three sets of recordings.
In the 1937 sessions, Dunford sang an unaccompanied version of “Old Shoes and Leggins.” On the recording, after he sings it, you’ll hear a voice interviewing him briefly about the song. On first listening I was confused, since the voice clearly isn’t John A. Lomax. Listening to other sides from the session, I heard Dunford repeatedly call the interviewer “Doctor,” revealing that it must be the Bog Trotters’ founder and bandleader, Dr. W.P. “Doc” Davis, a Galax physician, seen above playing the autoharp. Dunford told Davis he first heard “Old Shoes and Leggins” from a cousin from Smith County, Virginia, in about the year 1885.
The song “Old Shoes and Leggins” is a version of an old British folksong, now given Roud number 362. We have some other great versions in the archive. My favorite is sung in broad Scots by Scottish singer Jeannie Robertson in 1958. When Alan Lomax collected it he called it “With his Grey Beard Newly Shaven,” after the refrain, but Jeannie called it by its first line, “A Dotter’d Auld Carle,” and you can hear her saying the end of the title before she sings it, in the player below or at this link.
We also have a Kentucky version sung five years earlier by Jean Ritchie, which Natalie included in the slideshow. Jean’s humorous version seemingly references her own life (“he asked me to go to New York”) and also ends with mild swearing! Interestingly, she was singing it at a song swap in Alan Lomax’s flat in London, with none other than Jeannie Robertson. Find it in the player below or at this link.
Come Take a Trip In My Airship
Natalie learned and recorded this 1904 popular song in 1996 for a special project benefiting children with AIDS. In preparing for her Library of Congress concert, she was delighted to find an early recording of the song recorded ca. 1905 sung by J. W. Myers in the Library of Congress National Jukebox, which you can hear in the player below:
Natalie was also delighted to discover enough airship-related images to put together a whole slideshow of them for her concert performance, so be sure to watch the video! She did want to research the songwriters, Honey Boy Evans and Ren Shields, who were well known as performers on the Vaudeville circuit, and who wrote a lot of songs, both as a team and separately, so here’s what we found out about them:
Lyricist Ren Shields was a Chicago native born in 1868, who started out in blackface minstrelsy and went on to theater and Vaudeville. In 1899 he was a cast member in the touring company of The Air Ship, a “musical farce comedy” about airborne shenanigans. He played a character called “Hoboken Spider.” (There was a small-time boxer with that nickname active at the time.) This experience likely inspired Shields’s lyrics to “Come Take a Trip in My Air Ship.”
George “Honey Boy” Evans was born in Wales in 1870 and came to America during his youth. He was singing in Vaudeville quartets by about 1890, and publishing songs soon thereafter. In 1894, he published one of his signature songs, “I’ll Be True to My Honey Boy,” which gave him his Vaudeville and minstrel stage name. About the turn of the century, he began writing songs with Ren Shields, the most famous of which was “In the Good Old Summer Time.” In about 1908, Honey Boy had great success as the first Vaudeville performer of W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues,” and the first known artist to perform it outside of Memphis. He was at that time in New York, where he joined the Cohan and Harris Minstrels, owned by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris. In the 1908-1909 Cohan and Harris Minstrels touring show, the troupe performed his song “I’ll Be True to My Honey Boy,” and the chorus was called “100 Honey Boys.” A few years later, Evans bought the troupe from Cohan and Harris and changed the name to the Honey Boy Minstrels.
In a sad coincidence, both Honey Boy Evans and Ren Shields died at the same very young age of 45.
Risselty Rosselty
I wrote about “Risselty Rosselty,” and provided field recordings and photographs, in Part 1 of this post.
Jennie Jenkins
Natalie learned “Jennie Jenkins” from a live recording of Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand; you can hear the live version here, and their better-quality studio recording here. The American Folklife Center has both Jean’s collection and Oscar’s, and it’s likely we have other recordings of the two of them singing this song. On the television show Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger sang it with Jean while his homemade top was spinning away; see that video at this link. When Pete tried to stump Jean with “purple,” she responded with “I’ll look like a turkle,” using a vernacular Appalachian name for a turtle or turtledove.
The earliest known version of “Jennie Jenkins” was called “Jane Jenkins,” and was printed in the Green Mountain Songster, one of the oldest American folksong collections, which was compiled by a Revolutionary War veteran in Vermont in 1823. In Folk Song USA (1947), Alan Lomax wrote:
“Jennie Jenkins is among the most sprightly of the old dialogue songs which were sung at social gatherings such as apple-peelings, quilting bees, and church socials. On these occasions much entertainment was provided as the young folks teased each other through the medium of answer-back verses, some of which, depending upon the song, had to be improvised on the spot.”
Hopalong Peter
Natalie learned “Hopalong Peter” from The New Lost City Ramblers (Mike Seeger, Tom Paley & John Cohen). You can hear their version at this link. The American Folklife Center has many treasures related to this pioneering group of the old-time music revival. Both John Cohen and Mike Seeger donated vast collections to the Center.
Relevant videos include the following:
- Folklorist Ray Allen gave a lecture on the New Lost City Ramblers
- Mike Seeger performed as part of the Seeger Family Concert
- John Cohen performed treasures from the archive with the Down Hill Strugglers and was interviewed the same day
- Country music scholar Bill Malone gave a lecture on Mike Seeger
- John Cohen gave a lecture on his life documenting old-time and bluegrass music
- A panel of experts discussed the work of Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger
Relevant blogs include:
- A Visit from John Cohen
- Remembering John Cohen (1932-2019)
- Inspiration for an Archivist: John Cohen, Tommy Jarrell, and the Blue Ridge
- There is No Eye: The John Cohen collection is ready for research
- John Cohen’s Vega Whyte Laydie Banjo
Relevant guides, finding aids, and collections include:
- Seeger Family: Resources in the American Folklife Center
- John Cohen Collection
- Mike Seeger Collection
- Mike Seeger Sound Recordings
One of the most interesting single items relating to the New Lost City Ramblers is John Cohen’s Vega Whyte Laydie Banjo, which he donated to the center soon before he passed away. Above, see Cohen playing it with the New Lost City Ramblers. Below, see Richie Stearns tuning it up in the Folklife Research Center the day before Natalie’s concert.
As for the song “Hopalong Peter,” the liner notes for the New Lost City Ramblers’ album Old Timey Songs for Children (Find a pdf here) credited their source as Fisher Hendley and His Aristocratic Pigs. Fisher Hendley, whom you can read more about here, was a clawhammer banjo player from Anson County, North Carolina, who came to be leader of a group that performed old-time music and comedy. In the 1930s Hendley’s band was sponsored by Balentine’s Packing Company of Greenville, South Carolina. This meatpacking company’s logo was a cartoon hog dressed in a top hat and tails, known as “The Aristocratic Pig,” and Hendley’s band was named “The Aristocratic Pigs” after the mascot. This made “Hopalong Peter,” which is about animals acting like people, an appropriate song for the band. They recorded it in 1938, and you can hear it here.
Fisher Hendley registered copyright on “Hopalong Peter,” which made Natalie wonder if it was indeed a traditional song. Investigating this led me to this recording by J.E. Mainer, Zeke Morris, and Homer Sherrill a year before Hendley’s, as well as a recording by the Happy Valley Boys two years after Hendley’s, which also claimed a composer credit.
Luckily, the American Folklife Center archive confirms that by the time these artists recorded it, the song was firmly traditional. It was published in several 19th century songsters, attributed to Frank Dumont, a blackface minstrel performer. As luck would have it, one of these very songsters, Kirk & Drew’s Mischievous Offspring Songster, very recently went online as part of the American Folklife Center’s Robert Winslow Gordon Songster Collection. Unfortunately, this songster contains racist language and imagery which doesn’t reflect the beliefs of Natalie Merchant, me, or the Library of Congress. But for the sake of proving the song’s age, you can see this 1876 version of “Hop Along Peter” at this link.
Calico Pie
“Calico Pie” is Natalie’s song based on a poem by Edward Lear (1812-1888). Lear is best known today for his nonsense poems, especially limericks, but he was known in his own time also as an illustrator for both children’s books and scientific treatises; a fine art painter, especially of landscapes and birds; a travel writer; and a musician and composer.
The Library of Congress has digitized copies of three of Lear’s nonsense books, all of which contain the poem “Calico Pie!” See the original text of “Calico Pie” here.
Natalie recorded “Calico Pie” on her album Leave Your Sleep, and you can hear her album version here.
Thank You!
Thanks for watching, listening, and reading! We were delighted with Natalie’s concert and sing-along, and we hope you feel the same. We published Part 1 of this blog post earlier this week. It’s at this link, and includes Natalie’s evening concert and the remaining stories behind the songs!
For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress. Visit the Library’s calendar for upcoming Live! at the Library events.