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Upcoming show, April 19, 2008

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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.

innumerable ones

Set list for April 11, 2008

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ADELPHI MILL
Spring Shindig of the Department of Entomology, University of Maryland-College Park

Playing jug, banjo uke, and now mandolin with the Paint Branch Blue Boys (I’ve got about half the band now calling it that, with the other half sticking stubbornly to Paint Branch Bluegrass Boys).

SET #1

  • If I Lose
  • Jerusalem Ridge
  • I Saw the Light
  • Ocean of Diamonds
  • Everybody’s Truckin’
  • The Fillmore & Buchanan March
  • You Are My Sunshine
  • Long Journey Home
  • I’ll Never Love Anybody But You
  • Ashokan Farewell
  • Will It Go ‘Round
  • Blue Ridge Cabin Home

SET # 2

  • Sweet Georgia Brown
  • Jackknife / Down Yonder
  • Banks of the Ohio
  • Paint Branch Ramble
  • CC Rider
  • Good Morning Irene
  • Tell It To Me
  • What’s the Matter with the Mill*
  • Soldier’s Joy
  • Haste to the Wedding Quadrille / The Musical Priest / Whiskey Before Breakfast
  • Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die
  • Sitting On Top of the World

ENCORE

  • Last Call Waltz

* Well, as it turns out, nothing is the matter with the Mill at all. The Adelphi Mill at which the Paint Branchia played is Prince George’s Co.’s only surviving historic mill, built ca. 1796 by the Scholfield brothers, and is a perfectly lovely place to play. We were set up right at the foot of the mill workings themselves (shown above) and played two sets remarkable for their lively goodfooting, the collective sickness of most of the band members, and my inability to remember most of the arrangements. Due to being somewhat in the bag by the end of the second set, I’m not entirely clear on whether we actually cut the Louvins’ “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die” from the list, or just talked about it.

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Granny, Does Your Dog Bite?

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Here’s a recording of the Paint Branch Blue Boys practicing “Soldier’s Joy” on March 3, 2008:

download here

The line-up is James Key, bass; Peter Jensen, violin; Michael Sevener, banjo; Ryan Jerving, banjo ukulele and most singing; Mike Paul and Bob Smith, guitar. We never played it all the way through at the practice we recorded, so this is pieced together with parts from three different passes (and the brain of one “Abbie Normal”) into what sounds like a pretty solid performance, with some especially nice improvised bodhran/guitar playing by Mike Paul in the banjo-uke and fiddle breakdown.

The lyrics are PG-13 and are pulled, more-or-less at random, from the following collection:

General Washington and Rochambeau
Drinking with the Hessians by the fireside glow
They’re spending up their money, they’re racking up their pay
They’re never going to win the war this-a-way

So Jimmy get your fiddle out and rosin up your bow
Johnny tune your banjer up we’re gonna have a show
Pass the jug around to Kirk and McCoy*
We’re gonna have a tune called Soldier’s Joy

I’m my mother’s angel child
I’m my mother’s random child
I’m my mother’s only child
I won’t get married for a while

Rock the cradle, Lucy
Rock the cradle, high
Rock the cradle, Lucy
Don’t Let the baby die

I’m gonna get a drink, don’t you want to go?
I’m gonna get a drink, don’t you want to go?
I’m gonna get a drink, don’t you want to go?
Oh! that soldier’s joy

15 cents for the morphine
15 cents for the beer
15 cents for the morphine
Gonna take me away from here

Rooster chews tobacco
And the hen dips snuff
Baby chicks they don’t do nothing
But they sure can strut their stuff

Grasshopper sitting on a sweet potato vine
Grasshopper sitting on a sweet potato vine
Grasshopper sitting on a sweet potato vine
Along come a rooster and he says he’s mine

Chicken in a bread pan scratching that dough
“Granny does your dog bite?” “No child no”
Daddy cut his balls off a long time ago
All for the soldier’s joy

To a butcher’s block or a cobbler’s last
With dedication bend ye,
But oy! From a soldier’s awful life
Good Providence defend thee!

etc.

*  I always thought the Holy Modal Rounders (from whom I take this verse) were singing “Kirk and McCoy,” which I thought was a pretty funny contemporary reference. However, since the Rounders sessions at which this was recorded were from 1964-65, and since Star Trek wasn’t on the air until 1966…well, now I’m thinking they were just singing “Coffer and McCoy” which is from the 1957 Jimmy Driftwood version of the song. But in the best Stampfelian surrealist tradition of purposefully singing lyrics as you mishear them, I’m going to continue imagine morphine being administered medically on the Starship Enterprise while Bones plays jug (and maybe Kirk plays bones).

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The Fillmore & Buchanan March

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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.

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“Bang, Bang”

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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…

  1. 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.
  2. Rip my own back-up copy of the CD to carry with me on my MP3 player when I’m commuting.
  3. Let one of my friends borrow the original CD I purchased.
  4. Record a cover version of “I Got You Babe” with my band.
  5. Sample the oboe riff from “I Got You Babe” and record an original rap over a loop of the sample.
  6. 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.
  7. Post a video of my friend and I wearing matching adidas tracksuits and lip syncing to “I Got You Babe” in his dorm room.
  8. Learn to play “The Beat Goes On” on ukulele and sing it at an open mic.
  9. 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.
  10. Whistle the chorus to “Baby Don’t Go” while I walk down the street
  11. Play a recording of “Baby Don’t Go” at a party
  12. Play a recording of “Baby Don’t Go” loud enough in my car for other people in traffic to hear.
  13. Make my MP3 of “Bang Bang” available on my computer to peer-to-peer file-sharing programs
  14. Perform “Bang Bang” in class in order to help illustrate a point about copyright laws.

the kind of music your great-great-great-grandparents warned your great-great-grandparents about