I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there.
She was stretched out on a long white table, so sweet,
So cold, so bare.
Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be,
She can search this whole wide world over,
She ain’t never gonna find another man like me.
In the badly-in-need-of-updating essay I wrote about “SJI” a few years ago, I went on and on about how the song’s opening passages in the version that’s most commonly heard in New Orleans — above — is a major part of what captivates me: the singer beholds his dead lover, and promptly declares that “She can search this whole wide world over; she ain’t never gonna find another man like me.” Since I’m practically self-plagiarizing, I may as well just resort to quoting myself:
That passage I’m so obsessed with does not appear in the old English “Rake” songs, nor is it in either version of the lyrics provided by Sandburg, or in McTell’s version. In one of the sets of lyrics that Sandburg offers, the line is replaced with, “There’ll never be another like her; there’ll never be another for me.” This is the way the Hall Johnson Negro Choir did it in December 1931, and it’s also the reading that Bobby Bland went with decades later. It’s certainly a more traditional and less jarring sentiment. And it’s much less interesting.
The line is omitted from Fess Williams’ 1927 take, which skips straight from the image of the dead woman to the narrator discussing his own funeral…
The references there are several. Most notably, the “Rake” songs refers to the line of songs stretching back, perhaps, to Ireland in 1790. The root song, “The Unfortunate Rake,” concerns a man lamenting that his lover has given him syphilis. It’s a scenario that naturally raises the subject of betrayal, and of the singer’s own demise as a result of it. “Streets of Laredo” is the more obvious descendant of this song cycle, but “SJI” is often described, by me among others, as a kind of spinoff or offshoot. Robert W. Harwood’s I Went Down To St. James Infirmary teases out a more detailed history of the “SJI” we all know and love today. In particular, he zeroes in on the creation of the song “Gambler’s Blues,” credited to Carl Moore and Phil Baxter (and recorded by Fess Williams in 1927), that is pretty darn close to the song that Louis Armstrong recorded in 1928 , and that was later attributed to “Joe Primrose” (Irving Mills). Please see Mr. Harwood’s book for details, because I can’t do the whole story justice here, and I have something else I want to say.
What I want to say concerns that “Let her go” bit. And I guess I should warn you that this is a very, very long post. Continue Reading »