Posted in Friends, New Orleans, One song / one album, Other Music +, Public Housing on April 14, 2006 | Comments Off
1. Pal Karen Schoemer talks about her new book on the radio show On Point. She’s joined by Nellie McKai (who reviewed her book for the NYT), Patti Page, and Fabian. The book is called Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music. Here’s an excerpt on the NYT site, which I guess [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, One song / one album, Q&As on April 10, 2006 | Comments Off
Of all the contacts I’ve made since posting the first version of my “St. James Infirmary” essay online in 2003, none has been more consistently amazing than Robert W. Harwood, who knew a tremendous amount about the song and its history, and even wrote a self-published book on the subject, called A Rake’s Progress. This [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, One song / one album on March 4, 2006 | Comments Off
I’ve been a bit negligent about posting lately, not because I’m out of things to say, but because we’re still away from home and I can’t finish any of the various half-written items I have planned without consulting materials back at headquarters.
But in the meantime, I did want to mention a recent email exchange. Lots [...]
[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.
