The Paint Branch Blue Boys recently completed a demo recording of three tracks, produced through the Herculean efforts of James Key in his home office, from which the following recording of “Everybody’s Truckin'” is drawn.
The lyrics we’ve devised for this Western Swing standard stay just this side of clean. Peter Jensen came up with my favorite pair, which is “Everybody’s nippin’ and tuckin’ / Everybody’s liposuckin’.”
The line-up for this recording is as follows: Mike Paul, vocals and blue-blown comb; Peter Jensen, violin and vocals; James Key, bass and guitar; Ryan Jerving, banjo ukulele, jug, and vocals; Michael Sevener, banjo. Though all three demo songs were recorded in multi-track style, with each musician recording their part separately, this is the only song on which we actually did overdubs that we couldn’t reproduce if we were playing the song live. In particular, listen for the solo section in the middle in which James brilliantly brought things down to just comb (Mike), banjo ukulele (me), and jug (me again). This is our Sgt. Pepper’s moment.
HOMEGROWN COFFEEHOUSE, ACCOKEEK, MARYLAND
April 19, 2008 — 6:30-10:00
I’ll be playing about 10 minutes of material — yet to be selected — at the 8th Annual Talent Night of this venue at the National Colonial Farm on the Moyaone Reserve that the Viper has haunted for a number of years now, intermittently. I will likely go on sometime between 8:00 and 9:00.
The whole evening will feature a large slate of performers and poets. The flyer for the event remarks: “Donations appreciated — be a supporter of Local Artists and the Homegrown Coffeehouse).” For further information on the show or site, see the directions and contact information below the following listing of performers.
Dinner music provided by The Mozart Orchestra of Kay Budner’s Violin Studio
Beverly Woods (Storyteller and Poet)
Kevin Dudley (Singer-Songwriter)
Rey Robles (Guitarist)
Diane Parks (Poet)
Celtic Trio: Sarah & Laura Carts, & Keely Hollyfield (Hammered Dulcimer, Harp, and Violin)
Terri Purcell-Diehl (Poet)
The Viper (Ukulele Rhythm)
Tom Seaton (Classical Guitar)
Amy Lynn (Vocalist)
Cliff Lynn (Poet)
Rocky Jones (Poet)
Directions from the Capital Beltway: Take Beltway (495) going South: Take Exit 3A (Indian Head Highway, Route 210). Follow 210 south for approximately 9.2 miles. After you pass Farmington Road, you will take the next right onto the Bryan Point access road, (look for the National Colonial Farm sign), go left at the first stop sign, and right at the second stop sign onto Bryan Point Road. Follow approximately 4 miles to the end. National Colonial Farm, Educational Building. 3400 Bryan Point Road, Accokeek, MD. Follow signs for the Visitor’s Center; follow road to the right, parking on the left. For more information: 240-305-0876 and 301-283-3246.
In belated honor of Presidents Day, 2008, here’s a song written in tribute to two of our forgotten, and worst, presidents. It’s called “The Fillmore & Buchanan March” and it goes like this:
This piece was written for the Paint Branch Blue Boys, first under the title “The House of James March,” after the home to which bassist James Key so generously invites the lot of us to practice most Monday nights. I found myself playing the tune on the mandolin while attempting to come to terms with “Under the Double Eagle” (which likewise shifts between keys) and the mandolin more generally. It is my virgin tunesmithing effort on the mandolin.
The piece was renamed “The Fillmore & Buchanan March” in the midst of all the 2008 Presidents Day excitement, as a way of remembering the unelected signer of the Fugitive Slave Act and failed Know Nothing candidate, Millard Fillmore, and along with him, James Buchanan, the “doughface” bachelor president whose bronze and granite memorial residing near the Southeast corner of Washington, D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park is among the least-visited and least-well-loved statues in our nation’s Capital. I have contributed information on this memorial to the Wikipedia entry on Buchanan (and really should get around to uploading a photograph of it as well).
CHORDS AND MELODY
If you’d like to play along with the recording above (which you can also download here), the chord progression follows the basic march/polka/ragtime formula (e.g., “Under the Double Eagle,” “Roll Out the Barrel,” “Tiger Rag”), though it shifts between the keys of C and G. Each slash represents a 2/4 measure.
C / / /
C / G7 /
G7 / / /
G7 / C G7
C / / /
C C7 F /
F / C D7
G7 / C /
G / / /
G / D7 /
D7 / / /
A7 / D7 /
G / / /
G G7 C /
C / G A7
D7 / G /
If you’d like to play the melody, you can download a PDF of my handwritten manuscript for it. The recording was made first (recorded using the built-in microphone of my Dell laptop), as a scratch track for band reference. The written version simplifies the rhythm for adaptation for other instruments, and improves somewhat on the turnarounds you’ll hear in the recording.
In my last post, I told the harrowing tale of a little lost uke and the odyssey of its nigh miraculous return. And I mentioned that, in what might have been our final performance together, the Guild baritone ukulele and I went out with a bang.
Above, is a recording of that bang. Specifically, Sonny Bono’s 1966 composition “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). The late Bono vox populi (R – CA) wrote the song for the second of Cher’s solo albums, The Sonny Side of Cher, though the version I know is the one Nancy Sinatra recorded, also in 1966, for her album How Does that Grab You? (This is the version that later turns up in Kill Bill.)
It’s a great song. And, once a semester, I foist it upon the students taking a writing class I teach centered around issues of intellectual property and public culture. I play it as musical accompaniment to an ungraded quiz on the specific uses of copyrighted material excluded by Section 106 of U.S. Code Title 17, California’s 44th district. As I ask in my intro to the quiz:
The controversial 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, sponsored by the late U.S. Representative — and one-time songwriting half of Sonny & Cher — added 20 years to the length of copyrights. Until Bono’s compositions and recordings begin reverting to the public domain in the 2060s, which of the following can I do without the explicit permission of his estate, according to the “exclusive rights” outlined in section 106 of the U.S. Copyright Act (Title 17)?
Of course, as it turns out, not much.
NOTE ON THE RECORDING. This is not a live recording from the class in question. It was made when I was rehearsing the same song for the same quiz the previous semester on September 20, 2007. The recording was made using a Plantronics headphone mic hung from the fire extinguisher in the upstairs hallway of my house in Hyattsville, Maryland, recorded to the Roxio Easy Media Creator sound editor program. (This is really a program designed for minor editing of existing recordings for making home mixtapes — it offers single-track recording and some limited mastering effects.)
AND NOW…THE QUIZ
Take it if you dare. Again, the question is: which of the following things can I do with Bono’s music without anyone’s explicit permission? Note that the premise was to answer only with reference to section 106 of the U.S. Copyright Act (Title 17 of the U.S. Code), and without consideration of the exceptions outlined in some of the sections that immediately follow it. In other words, the question here isn’t what the law actually is. Rather, the question is what the law as written assumes as the default condition, the ideal working of copyrights for which exceptions need to be made to enable many of the everyday things we do.
So, can I…
Make copies of my Sonny & Cher: In Case You’re in Love CD to sell at yard sales or to send to friends for Valentine’s Day.
Rip my own back-up copy of the CD to carry with me on my MP3 player when I’m commuting.
Let one of my friends borrow the original CD I purchased.
Record a cover version of “I Got You Babe” with my band.
Sample the oboe riff from “I Got You Babe” and record an original rap over a loop of the sample.
Create a video montage of still photographs of my parents, using Sonny & Cher’s recording of “I Got You Babe” as the soundtrack, and post it to YouTube in time for their anniversary.
Post a video of my friend and I wearing matching adidas tracksuits and lip syncing to “I Got You Babe” in his dorm room.
Learn to play “The Beat Goes On” on ukulele and sing it at an open mic.
Learn to play “The Beat Goes On” on ukulele and teach my 4-year-old daughter to sing the “la-dee-da-dee-dee” part at home.
Whistle the chorus to “Baby Don’t Go” while I walk down the street
Play a recording of “Baby Don’t Go” at a party
Play a recording of “Baby Don’t Go” loud enough in my car for other people in traffic to hear.
Make my MP3 of “Bang Bang” available on my computer to peer-to-peer file-sharing programs
Perform “Bang Bang” in class in order to help illustrate a point about copyright laws.
Thursday, January 31 might have been the last time I would ever see or play my baritone ukulele. This 1960s Guild uke has been my primary instrument since about 1996, the one for which I had to order from Brooklyn a custom-built hardshell case, the one used at just about every Viper & His Orchestra show ever played (see picture below), and the one to be heard on both Viper recordings. And it was almost lost for good when I left it behind in the classroom for my 8:00-9:15 class. At least we would have gone out with a bang — or, more accurately, a “Bang Bang,” as I’ll take up in my next post.
The Viper and his Famous Orchestra (baritone ukulele at right)
Costumed as an allegory of life under Das Capital
Halloween 1999, The Hideout, Chicago, Illinois
When I started writing this post on Friday, February 1, the fate of that uke was still very much up in the air. It wasn’t in the classroom when I checked first thing Friday morning, it hadn’t showed up at the university police department’s lost & found, and the pleading contact message I scrawled on the classroom blackboard when I came in on Saturday had been wiped clean by Monday morning. (I take this erasure as a function of teaching at a private university — at the state school where I did my graduate work, we RESPECTED the “do not erase” sign.)
So on Monday, I started trying to track down the information on everyone else who’d taught in that same classroom after me, and emailing them my sob story. The first responses that started trickling back weren’t encouraging, though one of them indicated at least that the uke had still been in the classroom as of 12:25. It wasn’t until 9:18 on the morning of Tuesday, February 5 — after four rather depressing days — that I got a message from a faculty member in the Philosophy department named Chris Venner that he had the instrument, that I could pick it up in his office, and that “Charley Patton’s ‘Jelly Roll’ sounds pretty good on it” (the which I don’t doubt).
Reunited and it feels so good. Chris, I will always be in your debt. And in the next post, I’ll put up my recording of what otherwise might have been the last Viper performance ever on this instrument.
the kind of music your great-great-great-grandparents warned your great-great-grandparents about
The Viper & His Famous Orchestra 