Newry Highwayman

“Newry Highwayman,” from Building St. Petersburg.

In Newry town, I was bread and born,
In Stephen’s Green now I die in scorn.
I served my time to the saddling trade,
But I turned out to be a roving blade.

At seventeen I took a wife,
I loved her dearer than I loved my life;
And for to keep in fine array,
I went robbing on the King’s highway.

I never robbed any poor man yet,
Nor any tradesman did I beset;
I robbed both lords and the ladies bright,
And brought their jewels to my heart’s delight.

I robbed Lord Golding I do declare,
And Lady Mansel, in Grosvenor Square;
I shut the shutters and bid them good night.
And home I went then to my heart’s delight.

To Covent Garden I made my way,
With my dear wife for to see the play;
Lord Fielding’s gang they did me pursue,
And I was taken by the cursed crew.

My father cried, “my darling son.”
My wife she wept and sighed. “I am undone.”
My mother tore her white locks and cried;
Saying, “In the cradle he should have died.

And when I’m dead and in my grave
A flashy funeral pray let me have;
With six bold highwaymen to carry me.
Give them good broadswords and sweet liberty.

Six pretty maidens to bear my pall,
Give them white garlands and ribbons all.
And when I’m dead they will speak the truth,
He was a wild and a wicked youth.

I think the real trick in making good music is in cover tunes.  Since the 1960′s and the advent of singer-songwriters–that is to say, in the period that formed basically all of my assumptions about what it means to be a musician–the focus has been all on writing “original songs,” however unoriginal the actual songs may be.  I began realizing in my early 20′s when I got really into Billie Holiday, which was a bit late for me given how long I’d been into jazz at that time, that here was a craft that had basically been forgotten by people my age and, I’d add, my background.  Of course Billie was, in her way, tops, though I probably go back to Ella Fitzgerald more often than Billie.  Billie put the craft of interpretation, often radical interpretation, at the center of her work.  This is by no means an original observation but it’s critical.  What does it mean to be a singer?  It means you sing songs, and what people my age and likely younger have all but forgotten how to do is to interpret, rather than imitate, others’ music.

Coupled with what was a growing understanding of the importance of interpretation of song, not just of writing them, was a growing appreciations I developed for traditional tunes, distinct from tunes written by someone with a known identity.  Covering someone else’s tune can be a good thing, for sure, and I enjoy and feel I can do it well–witness the Floyd Westerman tune, “Quiet Desperation,” I do on Adieu, False Heart–but doing so creates in the mind of the listener, or rather the listener who knows the original version, a relationship between the cover and original.  The artistic experience of the listener, the experience that counts, in art, is that of a relationship.  That’s definitely cool, and not just in a po-mo way.

With a traditional tune, however, one creates a different set of relationships.  A listener might know any number of different versions of the tune.  No one particular version is original, and so each new version relates to the others more or less as equivalent.  Authenticity is not a consideration, or really shouldn’t be–any sense that one recording of a traditional tune is more authentic than any other is a fantasy in the mind of the listener.  The earliest version of “Newry Highwayman” comes from an 1830 broadside, which is to say, in written form rather than recorded.  The first Earl of Mansfield lived in the 18th century, so we would be smart to assume that the tune had existed likely for decades before its first, written appearance.

No sense, then, worrying about authenticity with traditional tunes.  All that counts is quality and applicability to one’s present.  The latter is the real trick, I suppose.  Obviously, we can discard all museum-piece arrangements, all attempts to recreate things “as they were.”  The quickest way to irrelevance is to try to repeat the past.  Hence, the bankruptcy of Conservatism, unless one approaches Burke as a theoretician of change rather than stasis–which I wouldn’t necessarily do, myself.  A better bet is someone like Richard Thompson, possibly an obvious choice but nonetheless the musician more than any other I know of who consistently performs traditional music in a relevant way, even more so than the clearly more famous Bob Dylan.

I recently have been listening, over and over, to a recording he’s released of “Willy O’ Winsbury”, the Child Ballad, off RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson. Thompson plays it absolutely straight, performing the song on guitar, singing without any tricks.  This is the secret.  There is no need to make a traditional tune anything other than precisely what it feels like to a performer

“Newry Highwayman,” of all the traditional tunes I’ve recorded, is probably the least “traditional” sounding of the recordings.  This is primarily because of the electric guitar, recorded with fairly heavy vibrato.  I’d used this trick before, on “I’ve Maintained My Advantage,” above all.  I learned it, I swear–I’m not just trying to sound legit–from Bo Diddley, and particularly like how much it reminds me of some of My Bloody Valentine’s stuff.  The song itself I heard on a live recording posted to Bob Dylan’s website.  I’ve since become much more widely versed in sources for traditional song, though by no means as studied as a real afficionado.  At the time, though, I basically got traditional tunes from Dylan, the Pogues, and the Dubliners.  Dylan’s version is good, though not great.  That said, it really stuck in my head, so I cut a version of it.  I’m pretty convinced it’s one of the better things on the album.

Building St. Petersburg

“Building St. Petersburg” (1999) from Building St. Petersburg.

My master sent me here
From Novgorod for half the year
I took with me some pelts and beer
When the harvest was done
All I see is wood and snow
The icebound boats shift to and fro
I work and watch the sky’s deep glow
While the monks say a prayer
The Devil’s come to walk these banks
His eyes are blind to birth and rank
My face becomes a flawless blank
When I see him pass by
How many men from Germany
Have traveled on the Baltic Sea
To vent their anger upon me
In a strange kind of language?

I awoke last Sunday night
Across the sky were flashing lights
My hut came into sight
And I walked for an hour
I saw the face of old Ivan
Who drank his kvass from dusk ’til dawn
The Devil took his soul beyond
And I heard his voice calling
I recalled the lovely time
We stole a keg of Master’s wine
We went to fight after we’d dined
With the neighboring village
I further saw my Master’s face
When he first told me of this place
I can recall the awful taste
That then came from my bile

A mental picture of my wife
Brought me more of my former life
I felt my fingers touch my knife
As I thought of the Swedes
I saw the fires in the trees
I felt the earth beneath my knees
The Swedes were riding on the breeze
And they took her away
I see the pictures on these plans
How on this swamp that statue stands
The engineer barks his commands
And I hear them translated
I count the days of this long year
They say the thaw is coming near
I run my fingers through my beard
And I look toward the forest

At some point, I’ll start blogging about tunes that aren’t actually things I’m most proud of.  At some level, my second tier stuff probably could make for better commentary, as I can dwell on the flaws as well as the virtues.  I’ve only ever put one tune on a record that I’ve released that I truly think in hindsight is a bust, but I’ve always been willing to put out something that, if not perfect, has a spirit of its own and is, therefore, special in its own way.  As long as something has it’s own spirit, it’s worthwhile.

“Building St. Petersburg,” however, is not one of those pieces that’s merely interesting, or that is flawed but worthwhile nonetheless.  I wrote it during my first year teaching, and it was the second piece I properly recorded digitally to ProTools with a good mic.  Flush with cash, I thought, for the first time, I bought a $250 AKG condenser mic, still the one I use for hi-fi recording at home, and I cut this track.

It’s interesting to me, in hindsight, the tunes I’d written for both The Duck Hunter and Building St. Petersburg.  I was fresh out of grad school, studying Russian History, Soviet period, and a lot of the choices I made for settings in my tunes’ situations reflects that.  I think they end up seeming, unless you knew me at the time and knew what I was reading, like something of an exercise in exoticism, which certainly carries an appeal of some sort to a lot of folks but which strikes me as problematic.  I’m at some level guilty, because I actually have never yet made it to either Russia or anywhere else in Eastern Europe (“The Czech Philologist,” on The Duck Hunter, is more fantasy, even beyond the absurd details, than I would probably like).

My stuff at this point was very bookish, probably because I basically had in my life at the time my job and my books, which overlapped quite a bit, to boot.  This isn’t a bad thing, because what actually counts in writing tunes or, really, doing anything, is that what you write needs to be an honest reflection of where you are or where you have been, defined broadly.  Bird said, famously, that if you haven’t lived it, it won’t come out of your horn, give or take a couple words but keeping the sentiment.

I took my MA in 1995, but grad school didn’t really end for me until 2005, when I got married and left Riverside, with my wife of course, and went to Senegal for a year.  I had the good fortune to get together most fridays with some of the gang from the History Dept. at UCR for beer, and though the group dwindled over time as people moved on–my cohort in Russian History moving to LA with our advisor, who took a gig at UCLA, good for him and everyone.  I think my education on those fridays was as critical to me as any classes I’ve taken, because what you had were a lot of great people, all leaning irreverent, loosening up and talking about things of interest.  So Russia was very much on my mind even though, like I wrote above, I’d never been.

The particular idea for the tune came from a memory of a course I’d taken in my last quarter at UCR when I’d actually started the doctorate I did two quarters of before deciding to take a break and see what the world had to offer me.  It was an Imperial Russia “materials” course, meaning a book a week in a seminar discussion.  I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the prof.  He had, in the class, some themes.  Periodically, he would say things like, “and where does this extraordinary violence come from…” and get quiet for a moment, shake his head slightly and then move on.  Not the most academic point to make, but honest and therefore interesting and human to me.  He would also periodically refer to runaway peasants.  Neither of these themes–or periodic interludes I suppose you might say–showed up in his official research interests, or did so semi-tangentially.  Every so often, though, he would get this far away look and say things like, “yes, and sometimes peasants would just disappear into the forest…”

This of course showed up in the last line of the tune.  The rest of it was really something of a nostalgic catalogue, for me, of interesting memories from my grad seminars, readings, and beer drinking conversations.  There’s the obligatory Pushkin reference, noting “The Bronze Horseman.”  I don’t make as many literary references in my tunes now as I used to.  Really, it’s more important to make sure that the song offers its story and its own truth–whatever that actually means–on its own terms.  I was reading a fair amount of theory at the time, though not too much “post-modern”–curse the lips that first spoke the term itself–stuff, mostly good, honest, Marxist stuff, on up through the Frankfurt School to Habermas.  That said, as someone who went through a Joyce phase in his early 20′s and has never regretted it (I just don’t tend to reread books when there are so many as yet unread), all the hip talk about intertextuality must have sunk in at some level, because in my mid-20′s I did a lot of referencing of other texts in my tunes.  Maybe I just wanted to seem smart, but in my defense I only ever referenced things I’d actually read.  I had then always taken Bird’s admonition very seriously, and still do.

This is one of my older tunes that I still play.  On that note, those of you in the Bay Area can hear it when I do a house concert on Oct. 10, at my pad.  My wife will cook her famous tostadas, to boot, so you have no excuse but to get in touch for directions and come on over.  I will indeed play this tune.

On a related note: I’m feeling quite good about decisions I’ve made regarding my musical output in the past months, and I think after years of hemming and hawing I’ve settled on a method that suits my life.  Light on promo–really, you’re reading the promo–and taking that extra time and spending it on music.  I’d gone this way before, during our year in Senegal, when I couldn’t really do promotion if I wanted to, and in hindsight I’d hit the right note then, for me, as I seem to be doing for myself now.  Dig the tunes, and, locals, do pop in on Oct. 10.