Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Intellectual property, Musical context on April 26, 2007 | 2 Comments »
The other night I watched a short documentary about The Carter Family on PBS. It wasn’t the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, but given how little I really know about The Carter Family, it was somewhat educational. And it did have a few interesting moments. This related web site mentions one of the things [...]
Posted in Intellectual property, Musical context, New Orleans, The Rolling Jelly Series on July 18, 2006 | Comments Off
[Here is Part 3 of the Rolling Jelly Series]
In the first — and admittedly way too long — installment of the Rolling Jelly series, I recounted some of what Jelly Roll Morton had to say about authorship and intellectual property issues. There is one footnote on that from Alan Lomax’s 1949 interviews with other [...]
Posted in Intellectual property, Musical context, New Orleans, The Rolling Jelly Series on July 3, 2006 | Comments Off
Some months ago I bought Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings. This is an eight-CD set, with two books, in a box that’s supposed to look like a piano. Pretty fancy. The material itself has been released in various forms before, many times, for many years. But it was new [...]
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, Intellectual property, Musical context, Non-musical context on April 3, 2006 | Comments Off
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been much of a Roger McGuinn fan. I don’t even find much pleasure in Sweetheart of the Rodeo, even after years of trying (on the theory that so many people with good taste seemed to like it so much). Nevertheless, McGuinn does have a version of “St. James Infirmary” [...]
[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.
