THROWBACK THURSDAY: Gonna Murder My Baby

Pat Hare, born Auburn Hare in Cherry Valley, Arkansas, played guitar with some of the great classic bluesmen -- James Cotton, Little Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, the late great Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner and Muddy Waters. (He played on Muddy's Live at Newport, 1960 album.)

And his playing was unforgettable.

Nick Tosches, in his book Where Dead Voices Gather, described Hare's style as "black-magic electric-guitar conjurings through overamplified distortion [that] foreshadowed those of Hendrix ..." Cub Koda, in the Allmusic Guide, called Hare's playing as "highly distorted guitar played with a ton of aggression and just barely suppressed violence ..."

Though he never got famous, Hare undoubtedly would be a darling of the blues scholars and rabid early rock 'n' roll zealots because of his musicianship.

Unfortunately, he's better known for something that had nothing to do with his guitar playing.

On Dec. 15, 1963, after a day of drinking, Hare at the time was living in Minneapolis with a married woman named Aggie Winje, who, Hare told a friend, was thinking of moving back with her husband. After spending sometime fighting with Aggie, Hare told a neighbor "That woman is going to make me kill her." Another neighbor called police after hearing shots fired. Two officers responded. And one of them was shot to death by Hare. Aggie had been shot also.

The other officer pumped some lead into Hare, but he survived. Aggie  hung on for nearly a month, but died Jan. 22, 1964.

According to music journalist James "The Hound" Marshall in his detailed account on an excellent site called The Houndblog: "When questioned, Hare remembered only that he was drunk and claimed to have no recollection of shooting anyone."

But to add the ultimate twist to this squalid little tale, nearly a decade before, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Hare recorded a jolly little ditty called "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby."

Yes, he did.

Behold:



The Houndblog says:

 In May of '54, Sam Phillips decided to record Pat Hare under his own name. James Cotton was scheduled to play harmonica on the session but the two got into a fist fight that day, and Cotton disappeared. Instead, Hare is backed up by Israel Franklin on bass and Billy Love on piano on the two tunes.  The first is a monstrous reading of Dr. Clayton's "Cheatin' & Lyin' Blues," re-titled on the tape box "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby," it was and still is, one of the most foreboding and ominous recordings in the entire blues canon ... Phillips chose not to release Hare's disc which would not be heard until it slipped out on a bootleg on the Redita label in 1976, and later appeared on Charley Records' Sun Blues Box in the eighties. 

Hare was convicted of murdering his baby and the cop who came to help. He died of lung cancer in prison in 1980.

He's still a resident of Rock 'n' Roll Hell, where he's currently in a band with these guys ...



R.I.P. Ella Mae Evans

 

R.I.P. Nancy Spungen

This post goes out to my old friend, Mark, who knew more about Pat Hare than I dd.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: It's Duckadelic!

For this Wacky Wednesday, here's a tribute to my favorite waterfowl, the Duck.

According to Wikipedia (which is always right about everything):

Duck is the common name for a large number of species in the Anatidae family of birds, which also includes swans and geese. The ducks are divided among several subfamilies in the Anatidae family; they do not represent a monophyletic group (the group of all descendants of a single common ancestral species) but a form taxon, since swans and geese are not considered ducks. Ducks are mostly aquatic birds, mostly smaller than the swans and geese, and may be found in both fresh water and sea water.

Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots.

So, sorry all you loons, divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots. This ain't for you. These songs are for the ducks.

Let's start with the ultimate cartoon duck piano showdown from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?



This next one by the beautiful Carolina Cotton, makes me wish I was a damn duck!



Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater walks the duck



Nobody has really done musical justice to the duck as much as this disco classic from Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots



OK, the next one is stretching it. It's not really about a duck. It's not really really about oysters either. It's an old traditional American square dance mutated before your very ears by the late great Malcom McLaren. It's from his masterpiece album Duck Rock. And if I were a duck, I'd love this song.



Finally, just for weirdness' sake, here's a strange little band called Purple Duck I found while messing around on the Free Music Archive  (The original video I had here disappeared, but here's another one)

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, March 1, 2015 
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M. 
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time 
Host: Steve Terrell
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Come All Ye Wild Young People ...

Stolen from the Murder Ballad Monday blog

When it comes to folk songs, I like 'em bloody.

You can keep your sensitive troubadours singing sweet pastoral melodies and hey nonny nonny. I like my folk songs full of senseless murder, greed, lust, betrayal and insanity.

One of my favorite Steeleye Span songs is "Edwin," which comes from their album Now We Are Six.

Not only is it a delightfully gruesome tale of young lovers vs. truly evil parents (Spoiler Alert: The truly evil parents win!) It also has a great guitar lick that I shamelessly appropriated for my own song, "Child of the Falling Star."

Basically, it's the story of young Edwin, a sailor who went off to earn some gold, returning seven years later to his true love, Emma, whose family apparently runs some inn, basically a Bed-and-Breakfast of Doom. Edwin gets a room there, but that night as he sleeps, Emma's "cruel parents" sneak in his room, chop off his head, take his gold and dump his body in the sea to send him floating back to the Lowlands Low.

Here's the song.




Besides the music and the basic story of the song, Steeleye's "Edwin" has some lines that are simply unforgettable, starting with the very first one, "Come all ye wild young people and listen to my song ..."

Then there's "Young Edwin he sat drinking till time to go to bed/ He little thought a sword that night would part his body and head ..."

And then the not-so happy ending: "And Emma broken-hearted was to Bedlam forced to go / Her shrieks were for young Edwin that plowed the lowlands low. "

But Steeleye, it turns out left out a few verses, including a key one, in which Emma tells Edwin to go stay at dad's inn for the night -- and not to tell him his true identity. She planned on meeting him there in the morning What could possibly go wrong?

A version of "Edwin" appears as "Edwin in the Lowlands Low" in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L.Lloyd in 1959.

"This was an extremely widespread song in England, Scotland, Ireland and even more so in North America, where dozens of versions have been collected," the songs notes say. "... The song was also printed by everybody who was anybody in the broadside trade, but, on present evidence, only from the 1820s onwards. The plot would seem a natural for the melodrama stage or the cheap nineteenth century `shocker' novel ..."

That must be why I like it so much.

I hadn't listened to "Edwin" in a few years. But a few nights ago, listening to an iTunes mix of old Lomax field-recordings, the song "Diver Boy" by a lady named Ollie Gilbert from Timbo, Arkansas popped up.

Appearing on the collection Southern Journey Vol. 1: Voices from the American South, this was recorded in 1959. Young Emma is in this one, though the unfortunate "diver boy" is named Henry. Emma's brother, however, is named "Edward." It's the brother who helps his murderous dad here, while in Steeleye's songs it's Emma's parents.

Here's Ollie's version:



Natalie Merchant recorded a very similar version of "Diver Boy" on her 2003 album of (mostly) old folk songs The House Carpenter's Daughter.



So in the Steeleye Span song, Emma ends up shrieking in the insane asylum, while in the version done by Ollie Gilbert and Natalie Merchant, Emma  merely scolds her dad and brother. ("Oh father, you're a robber ...")

Neither tells what happens to the creepy dad and whoever helped him murder Emma's beau.

But the Mainly Norfolk website documents a 1979 recording by a singer named Peter Bellamy, in which an angry "Young Emily" threatens the old man, “Oh father, cruel father, you will die a public show .." This line is found in other versions of the song. But Bellamy includes this final verse, which I've yet to see elsewhere:

Now Young Emily's cruel father could not day or night find rest,
For the dreadful deed that he had done he therefore did confess.
He was tried and he was sentenced and he died a public show
For the murder of Young Edmund so dear who ploughed the lowlands low.

Justice at last!

Listen to Bellany's stark acoustic verssion version here:



Read more about "Edwin," "Diver Boy" or whatever you want to call it at  the excellent Murder Ballad Monday blog (on the website for the venerated Sing Out!, one of the greatest folk music publications) and at Mainly Norfolk, a "comprehensive overview of recorded traditional and contemporary English folk music". 

And what the heck. Here's a bonus throwback to an ancient time.


For more deep dives into songs, check out The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook

WACKY WEDNESDAY: I Lost My Harmonica, Albert!

Here's a WACKY WEDNESDAY salute to some spokes-spoofs of a generation: Some of my favorite Bob Dylan parodies of all time.

Was Simon & Garfunkel the first? Have some "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)"



And now a word from our sponsor ...



Here's one from this century, the amazing Dewey Cox with "Royal Jelly" (John C. Reilly from the movie Walk Hard)



And who can forget the night Bob rolled a 300 game? Emily Kaitz sure can't forget. This one stars the late Jimmy La Fave as the Bobster



It's time for my boot heels to be ramblin' ...