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. Here are some items I collected from my reading. (I like rabbit holes.)
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.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.
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.
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 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.”This 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.Related reading
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.
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Harwood’s blog, with further exploration)
