Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Musical context, Q&As, Versions on September 4, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Something like a year and a half ago, I received an email from composer (and blogger) Daniel Felsenfeld, who suggested that I look into the work of Ezra Sims. Specifically, Felsenfeld told me, Sims had written some pieces partly based on Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary” – “mostly because of the microtones involved.”
At the time, [...]
Posted in Antecedents and Variations, Versions on June 7, 2007 | Comments Off
And finally, just to bring to a conclusion my unintended mini-series on versions brought to my attention by my communication with Jason Baldinger, a couple more quick notes.
First, one of the versions he said he’d played, and that I didn’t know, was by Tony Rice. (Rice’s work “spans the range of acoustic music, from [...]
Posted in Antecedents and Variations, Non-musical context on June 4, 2007 | No Comments »
I have no real memory of the movie Bang The Drum Slowly, though I’m fairly I certain I saw it years ago — years before, for instance, I was paying any attention to “St. James Infirmary,” or its musical cousins such as “The Streets of Laredo” (or “The Cowboy’s Lament”). The question has popped into [...]
Posted in Antecedents and Variations, Musical context on May 28, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Back in December, when things were a bit hectic at No Notes HQ, I had a bit of correspondence with Jason Baldinger, a DJ at WRCT in Pittsburgh. He’d just done a show that involved spining about 30 versions of “SJI” and its antecedents, and some of the material wasn’t familiar to me.
The bit that [...]
Posted in Antecedents and Variations on November 14, 2006 | Comments Off
A site called “Get Underground” has an overview piece called “The Strange Career of an Unfortunate Rake.” While the broad outline is not wildly different from what’s in the essay that this site spun out of, there are a couple of interesting tidbits.
First: Who was it that came up with the earliest trace [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Musical context, New Orleans, Q&As, Versions on May 22, 2006 | Comments Off
In case you’re wondering, yes, I still sometimes randomly hunt the Web for information about or references to “St. James Infirmary.” In just such a mode a few weeks ago, I found a reference to the song in the Amazon.com review of the sound track to the film In The Mood For Love, which said [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Versions on May 12, 2006 | Comments Off
Since one of my recurring themes here is the vibrancy that can come about through repeated and almost infinitely varied interpretation and re-interpretation, I was quite pleased about a recent email from Frank Mannix down in New Orleans. Mr. Mannix had come upon some of my earlier noodling about “St. James Infirmary,” and wanted to [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Intellectual property, Musical context, Versions on April 13, 2006 | Comments Off
Here is the final installment in a four-post series drawn from an interview with A Rake’s Progress author Robert W. Harwood. (Here are Parts One, Two, and Three.)
The way we first connected, as I recall, is that you helped me out with an open question I’d had in early versions of the “St. James Infirmary” [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Musical context, Versions on April 12, 2006 | Comments Off
Here is the third installment in a four-post series drawn from an interview with A Rake’s Progress author Robert W. Harwood. (Part One can be read here; Part Two is here.)
Q: One of the most interesting passages in your book, to me, concerns Jimmie Rodgers. His “Gambler’s Blues” version is one of my favorites, but [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Musical context, Non-musical context on April 11, 2006 | Comments Off
Here is the second installment in a four-post series drawn from an interview with A Rake’s Progress author Robert W. Harwood. (Part one can be read here.)
Q: The first section of the book contains a wealth of contextual material about the early recording industry, and how black jazz and blues performers fit into that (or [...]
[Or: The Point of this Site]
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a third version.
And now, this site: A place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) have sent me. This may lead to a fourth and significantly expanded version of the essay, some day. Also on this site: Plenty of tangents.
Never heard "St. James Infirmary"? Start here.
The most recent version of my "St. James Infirmary" essay is now a few years old. But it's still a fairly decent overview of what I know about the song, and why I'm interested in it. You can read it either in the book Letters from New Orleans (see below), or in the archives of The Gambit, the New Orleans weekly that published the piece as a book excerpt when LfNO came out.
This site is a partial spinoff of the book Letters from New Orleans, published by the unstoppable Garrett County Press. My interest in "St. James Infirmary" is the subject of one essay in the book. All author proceeds from the book still go to post-Katrina relief efforts, so I think it's okay for me to say: You ought to buy it.
