The folk process

Three wonderful granddaughters have each altered the venerable “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” substituting the fifth note of the scale (sol) for the second (re) in the song’s final line: “How I wonder what YOU are.”

One kiddo explained: “I like a little burst of excitement at the end.”

Yodeling

A great episode of 99% Invisible : “Tootle of a Devilish Song,” all about yodeling.

Two musicians missing from the episode who deserve mentioning: Emmett Miller, the minstrel show (blackface) performer whose “Lovesick Blues” (with yodeling) was taken up by Hank Williams, and Tommy Johnson, the Mississippi blues singer and guitarist with a signature understated yodel. As on, for instance, “Canned Heat Blues.”

[“Canned heat”: Sterno, an extremely dangerous subsitute for alcohol beverages. Johnson’s song is the source for the name of the blues-rock band Canned Heat.]

“Lightly edited,” but still wildly incoherent

Have you read the transcript of the current occupant’s September 28 interview with Time ? The transcript has been “lightly edited,” Time says, but it’s still wildly incoherent. With lots of lies. I wonder what it was like before editing. A sample:

Do you trust Sam Altman?

I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman. Smart. Dario’s smart. They’re all smart. We’re dealing with a very high level of IQ. Very very high level. That’s a good thing. I like that. I like it. Did you see the story about my uncle?

The one who taught at MIT?

I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a — I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.

What I’ve done is I’ve created, for instance, these massive plants have no — We have no electricity in our grid. These massive plants now are allowed to make their own electric —

Are you worried you can’t bring the American people along with you on that?

I might not be able to. I don’t know.

The child-like appraisal of a person (“I like Sam Altman”), the obsession with IQ, the uncle story, the bragging, the weird JFK touch (“the new frontiers”), the preposterous claim to have created “massive plants,” the struggle to say something clearly (“We have no electricity in our grid”), the surprising moment of self-doubt. What a long strange trip.

For me, the biggest tell comes in two words: “I’m fine.” No, he’s not.

Sherry Turkle on the world she’d like

From a Here and Now interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines :

I'm not looking to a world where we evolve with AI into a posthuman thing. I'm not looking to a world where we leave to go to different planets and it doesn't matter what we did to the earth. I'm not looking for a world where robots raise our children. I'm really looking to a world where human beings, our species, maximizes what we are best at, which is caring for each other, loving each other, making communities, making culture, not leaving that all behind because computers can’t do it.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Big Jim

“Big Jim is a nearly 32-foot-tall aluminum statue of a fisherman, clad in old-style yellow oilskins, holding a giant can of Maine sardines”: you can see him in this report about the Penobscot Marine Museum’s SardineFest.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Sad: the newscasters make no mention of the sardine’s new status as a fad food.]

Educational malpractice

The most recent episode of This American Life , “An Argument,” is devoted to one story: the decision two affluent, Black Brooklyn parents made to send their daughter to a low-income, mostly Black public school, and the years of education (or miseducation) that followed. A 2016 New York Times article (gift link) told the beginning of the story. A Times article (gift link) published earlier this month brings the story up to date. The TAL episode adds details.

Reading the Times articles and listening to the podcast reminded me of what I used to tell my students: whatever form educational malpractice takes, it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. I think of the daughter in this story, Najya Hannah-Jones, crushed when she fails a statewide eighth-grade algebra exam. It turned out that despite her great grades and the confidence they inspired, she knew very little algebra. What’s more, she had great deficits in her knowledge of fractions and long division.

And I think back to the last freshman composition class I taught, many of whose students had taken AP English in high school. Granted, they hadn’t received test scores that would have exempted them from a college course, but still — I thought it’d be a great class. I began to think differently when I assigned some reading — Betty S. Flowers’s “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” and an excerpt from William Zinsser’s “Writing English as a Second Language” — and some short writing.¹ So many of these students were lost. During conferences (that inflated word), I asked, Did you do much reading last year? Did you do much writing last year? No, and no. So many students disappeared from that class. The work, at least at that time, was beyond them.

Whatever form malpractice takes — and I assign far greater blame to teachers and principals and the shitstem in which they’re embedded, not to the Hannah-Joneses, who thought that they were doing the right thing and worked mightily to improve education for everyone in their daughter’s school — it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. And who, sometimes, is able to trudge their way to real improvement and set the bag down.
_____

¹ The class was not for second-language learners. I omitted Zinsser’s opening paragraphs about languages and began with “So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?” Written English is in many ways a second language for anyone.

Forty-two

Elaine and I were married forty-two years ago today. It hardly seems possible. Happy anniversary, Elaine, in all the seasons and all the years.

Q: Who knows where the time goes? Anyone?

I went down St. James rabbit holes

Robert W. Harwood’s I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Genius Music Books) explores the origins and history of a song. The book is now in a fourth (2024) edition. I have the third (2022) via interlibrary loan. It’s one rabbit hole after another. (I like rabbit holes.) Here are some items I collected from my reading:

Wax cylinders:

Unlike the discs that achieved popularity early in the twentieth century, these cylinders could not be mass-produced. However, as many as five records could be made at a time by pointing the recording horn of each machine toward the singer’s mouth.

Bessie Smith and industry practices:

If a musician did not have the education or savvy to know better, record executives would pay them twenty-five or a hundred dollars to record a song. Even if the song became a hit, the artist received no further money.

Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” for example, never saw a penny beyond her cash-per-recording deal with Columbia, despite having authored many of the songs she recorded. Frank Walker, who signed Bessie to Columbia Records, struck out the royalty clause in her contract.

I knew that many early recording artists were paid by the side, with no royalties to follow. I didn’t know that even Bessie Smith recorded under those terms. In 1979, the son of Smith’s estranged husband took the matter to court.

Syphilis and mercury:

Mercury is known as quicksilver — or, in German, Quacksalber. Doctors who over-treated their patients with mercury came to be referred to as quacks.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has quack derived from the early modern Dutch quacksalver. The etymology is uncertain, but zalver denotes a “person who cures by using ointments,” salves.

Radio:

Chicago’s first radio station began broadcasting in 1921, but in its initial season it aired only opera. The first American radio advertisement reputedly took place in 1922 — it cost the advertiser hundred dollars and lasted ten minutes: “Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Courts, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.”

That Queens apartment complex still stands.

Novelties:

“Piccolo Pete,” recorded by Ted Weems and his orchestra in 1929, was possibly the first novelty record to sell a million copies.

Here it is. Years later, Elaine’s flute teacher Julius Baker played it on a children’s television show. Elaine has a story about that.

Buell Kazee’s first banjo:

The neck of the instrument was a whittled piece of walnut, the hoop was made from split white oak, and a home-tanned cat skin hide was stretched over the hoop and fashioned with carpet tacks.

Kazee makes three appearances in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music : “The Butcher’s Boy” “The Wagoner’s Lad” (both 1928) and “East Virginia” (1929). He became a minister and returned to musical performance in the 1960s.

Irving Mills (Duke Ellington’s manager from 1926 to 1939):

At nineteen, while demonstrating songs in a store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Irving met his future wife and proposed after one-week courtship. He and Bessie remained together for the next sixty years and had seven children.

Sophie Tucker:

She was born Sophia Kalish in 1884 to Jewish parents who were fleeing Russia. As a young girl she learned to sing and perform vaudeville songs from patrons in her parents’ Connecticut restaurant. She was married at sixteen to Louis Tuck, who left a year later following the birth of her son. Changing her name to Tucker, Sophie broke into vaudeville in 1906, where she performed in blackface. She stopped using the burnt cork when, prior to a 1908 concert, her makeup case was stolen. She appeared on stage without makeup and was startled to discover that she was a bigger hit with the audience that she had been when in blackface.

Here’s her last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show .

Irving Mills again:

He managed as many as thirty-six bands concurrently.

Cab Calloway:

Before “Minnie, [the Moocher],” Cab Calloway’s signature tune had been “St. James Infirmary.” He first recorded it on December 23, 1930, about a month before signing a contract with Irving Mills. The song remained in his repertoire throughout his long career, and Calloway recorded at least three times. Millions watched him perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 23, 1964 — the date of the Beatles’ third appearance on the show.

Here’s that performance. And here, from the same show, the Beatles.

It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters:

We shall never know the original author of “St. James Infirmary.” There was none. We are unlikely to discover when it was first performed, or how it sounded at the time. Regardless of where a musician first heard the song, we can be recently certain it came to that place from elsewhere, assembled from fragments of other songs, from snippets of other people’s experiences. It was a song written by Everybody (E.V. Body), and until 1929 it was owned by nobody.

In the second decade of the 21st century “St. James Infirmary ”is once again on my nobody. The present bracket Irving bracket Mills copyright refers only to a specific arrangement of traditional song, not in the original song itself. It seems that sometime, probably fairly recently, music publishers seated ownership of the song back to E. V. Body, where it has always belonged.

Related reading
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Harwood’s blog, with further exploration)

Dream app pun

It came to me: ’Just the Pages, a third-party app to adjust settings in the Mac app Pages. But why, I wondered, would Apple permit a third-party app to tinker with Pages?

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). A possible source for this slight dream: seeing Harry Morgan and Jack “Just the facts, ma’am” Webb as bad guys in Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950).]

“Hopelessly analog”

[“Four Panels in Search of an Algorithm.” Zippy , September 28, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip insists on the analog life.

Venn reading
All OCA analog posts : analog and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[As a youth, my dad set pins in a bowling alley. You can see how the work went, or still goes, at YouTube.]