Posted in "St. James Infirmary", MySpace/YouTube/Etc. on July 20, 2007 | No Comments »
Not being much of a Transformers fan, I didn’t know that there’s a character in that line of toys/entertainment property named Jazz. But there is. And he stars is this, a mashup kind of thing in which Transformers snippets are used to illustrate, yes, “St. James Infirmary.” It has some pretty good moments.
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Irving Mills/Joe Primrose, MySpace/YouTube/Etc., Versions on July 13, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Of all the YouTube “SJI” ephemera, this one cracked me up the most. I was of course interested to see the title: “St. James Infirmary By Duke Ellington and his Orchestra 1930.” Wow! There’s footage of that!
I clicked immediately.
What the clip turned out to be was a video of a record playing. That’s it. A [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Lyric deconstruction, MySpace/YouTube/Etc., Non-musical context, Versions on July 12, 2007 | No Comments »
The other day I mentioned The White Stripes including “St. James Infirmary” in a live set. The famous Detroit duo also of course have recorded the song, on their first album. I’ve never written about that version here, but now’s as good a time as any. The occasion is the appearance on YouTube of what [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", MySpace/YouTube/Etc., New Orleans, Non-musical context, Versions on July 9, 2007 | No Comments »
Speaking of Wynton Marsalis & “St. James Infirmary,” a relevant bit of Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke popped up on YouTube recently. If you haven’t seen Lee’s epic documentary about Katrina and its aftermath, I highly recommend it. If you have seen it, you know that the “SJI” tune pops up early in [...]
Posted in MySpace/YouTube/Etc. on June 18, 2007 | Comments Off
I’ve posted a YouTube video or two in the past, but a recent friendly note from friend of this site Joe B. Stewart made me realize a) that I ought to take a more comprehensive look at “SJI” versions on the famous vide-sharing site, and b) I ought to make it a habit to keep [...]
[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.
