Just Something My Uncle Told Me (1981)

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It doesn't get much better than than this. This is a collection of "field recordings" by the noted discographer and rare record seller Lou Curtis.  Let me enlighten you on some of the mysteries surrounding it. I obtained this knowledge through talking to Lou Curtiss, one of the producers of the album:

- all of the performers here used pseudonyms with the exception of the amazing cowboy poet/singer Glenn Ohrlin and Jim Garland.

- "Buford Pippin" on this LP is none other than the wonderful singer/coal miner Nimrod Workman. You may know him from Alan Lomax's Southern Journey documentaries and his releases on Rounder and June Appal.

- "George Bernard" is bluesman Thomas Shaw. He originally was from Texas and actually beat Mance Lipscomb in a guitar competition in the 1930's. He moved to San Diego and started his own Holiness church out of his home there.

- "Julius Sorel" is Van Holy Oak, the great cowboy singer from Arizona. Rounder put out a collection of his tunes, and he is also featured on the rare LP compilation- In an Arizona Town. Van passed away soon after these recordings were made.

- I don't know who the other performers are "Smokey Rodgers" and "Wash Nelson". If you know their real names, or anything else interesting about this LP , I would love it if you enlightened me.

"Blaggardy songs" Jim Garland called these celebrations of errant character. His term is an Appalachian derivative of "blackguard" and the population of these songs largely embraces personalities of impossibly mean disposition. Much found on this album is described from a first- person vantage; it seems that the joy of their performance lies in the temporary adoption of a mask of outrageous countenance. Therefore although outre sexual behavior is the order of the day here, this lp is fashioned less as a collection of the bawdy than of the iconoclastic. However, although some are only sweetly naughty, concerned parents and radio broadcasters will probably prefer to avoid its flagitious core, for nothing here has been censored.

It has long been realized that ribald materials form a substantial underpinning for more recognized balladry, but, until recently, these materials were not available for study except in the field. In particular, reliable phonograph recordings of traditional sources are quite scarce. About twenty years ago, Mack McCormick issued a similarly intentioned Unexpurgated Songs of Men (sic) and good material, more often black than white, can be found on an occasional "party" record. The present album is an attempt to document a range of authentic materials, all performed by traditional singers. Admittedly "traditional" is a nebulous term to employ in this context, for urban folksong enthusiasts will typically have learned their lewd songs, if no others, through certifiable "folk processes". But no collegiate performances are heard here; the songs are all drawn from the country, even if they thrive in urban climes as well. This collection is only a small start for there is much more to sample. In particular, I regret that no performances of the large corpus of bawdy songs known to Southern women could be arranged for this lp, for some of the chill of male domination could have been removed thereby. However we could not induce any informant to relax her moral scruples sufficiently for a recording.

The Songs:

The British derived Last May Morn presents the reprehensible behavior of its protagonist in a rather favorable light, but nonetheless was not considered "dirty" by its elderly singer, who acknowledged acquaintance with songs in a rawer vein which he would not sing for us. Many Appalachian singers, however, find songs like this, Mathy Groves or The Trooper and the Maid obscene, despite their venerable heritage. Songs like One Morning in May or the tamer versions of The Little Ball of Yarn sometimes pass muster only because their double-entendre is unrecognized. The present text is quite close to an English one supplied in Reeve's The Idiom of the People. Further ranging variants can be bound in several American collections, e.g. Good Morning, My Pretty Little Miss in Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. The song seems well known in northeastern Kentucky; Clay Walters supplied a similar version to the Library of Congress.

Jim Garland's version of Crawling and Creeping is likewise fairly close to its British prototype, e.g. Harry Cox's Nancy and Johnny on EFDSS lp 1004 or Ernest Austin's Knife in the Window on Topic 12T243. The latter text is combined, as frequently happens, with the ancient Hares on the Mountain, parent of the ubiquitous Roll Your Leg Over. In the Appalachians, there has been a tendency to detach the song from the original story; another version (from North Carolina) I have heard appends to a text like Jim's:

Weil, I jumped right out and shit in the floor
Said, "It's been good pussy but it won't no more" (sic)
In about nine months she fell to weeping
'Long came a bastard crawling and a-creeping
I went to the doctor with a hack and a cough
Said "I can save your dick but your balls'll rot off."

A good example of a similar devolution is The Little Ball of Yarn, for which Glenn Ohrlin provides a particularly full text. Originally a rather gentle piece, Topic Records has included several renditions among its offerings of traditional English folksong. Mike Yates also reports that the song is related to The Yellow, Yellow Yorlin' found in Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia. According to hearsay, coarser texts are also encountered in Britain. An almost completely chastened text was published in 1870's as a love song and it is uncertain whether the Southern Melody Boys would have fully recognized the erotic elements in their somewhat incoherent Bluebird recording. Glenn's version allows no interpretative leeway however; this is the way the song is most often encountered (Jim Garland had a version of intermediate obstreperousness). The appended verses of grotesque punishment for the seduction are quite bizarre, but represent typical, burlesqued "atonements" in this genre.

One-eyed Riley is likewise of British origin, although its unmitigated rowdiness make its antecedents hard to trace. Ed Cray's The Erotic Muse contains a discussion of a typical urban version. Jim's mountain text, learned from his brother "Bad" John, is an especially good one. (Incidentally I view the unrealistic sexual violence portrayed here as antisocial farce rather than misogynist fantasy, but listeners will want to frame their own opinions on this point.)

Probably of equal age to these are many of the jingles which accompany fiddle and banjo tunes. The Ryestraw (a.k.a. The Unfortunate Pup or Joke on the Puppy) melody is likely Scots in origin and some form of Jim's quatrain is known to most fiddle players -- cf.. Clayton McMichen's kidding introduction to his instrumental performance on Rounder 1005. I would be surprised if the ditty is not locatable in Scotland as well. R.P. Christeson's The Old Time Fiddler's Repetory says the tune is intended as an imitation of a constipated dog; I wonder if this reading is not a later addition -- rather like Walt Disney's classical "interpretations" in Fantasia.

Many of the fiddle and banjo ditties live a double life of sorts. I once obtained the following couplet from a Kentucky fiddler:

I've got a grandpa, bless his old soul
All he wants is a fiddle and bow.

Further inquiry revealed that the "real words" ran ". . .All he wants is a peter in the hole". Such Hydes lurk behind many respectable Doctor Jeckles -- for example, on the Power Family's commercial recording of Old Granny Hare, "dog turd" has been replaced by "butterdish" and "asshole" by "keyhole". Such emendations induce a peculiar surrealism in the song (which ultimately traces to the Scottish Fairy Dance). These alterations are probably of modern vintage, since scatological references in themselves do not seem to have been taboo in the mountains until recently. For example, Jim learned his Mother Goose so:

There was an old woman lived under the hill
She shit in her stocking and sent it to the mill.
The miller swore and proved by his wife
He never took toll from a turd in his life.

In published texts, this is invariably bowdlerized to "mouse", which destroys its sense.

As Jim rightly stresses, many selections on this lp should rightly be regarded as children's songs, for whom they serve as haphazard vehicles of sexual education. (Nonetheless, I doubt Rounder will include this record in its 8000 series!) In fact, our semi-reluctant informants are frequently embarrassed by the childish nature of some of this material. Many of the snippets of lyric scattered throughout this collection were learned in grade school from other children. Some of these fragments occasionally flower into more developed form. For example, Harmonica Frank Floyd's Shampoo on Barrelhouse 05 is a development of Jim's God Damn Her Old Soul, She's Dead. The bizarre Old Granny Cripplecunt reappears as part of an Indiana fiddle tune, Good Old Cabbage:

Pussy on a haystack; peter on a pole
Drop cock, dodge cock, wink asshole. . .

Limericks are a common form of recreation among the educated, but the recovery of a fossil of the 1850's like A Conversation between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan from a Kentucky coal miner is quite unexpected. Jim learned this from one Matt Donaldson and says that he arranged for Donaldson to record this and others for folklorist Mary Barnicle, whom Jim escorted through the mountains in the mid-thirties. The disc is presumably now buried in the Library of Congress' sizable, but largely uncatalogued, collection of folksong erotica.

Longish poems are often called "toasts" by blacks, whereas Jim Garland used this label for his shorter recitations. The Eagle is more episodic than most and may represent a medley of briefer fragments. Indeed Jim knew the couplet beginning "Up to it, down to it" independently. George's concluding apology which provides the title for this lp represents a fairly common, ritualized ending for a toast and is not intended as genuine avuncular slander. The tag serves rather as a charm to ward off the evil effects produced by the poem's performance. Roger Abrahams and Bruce Jackson both have books surveying like material. The latter has an accompanying lp on Rounder 1014. Good material may be found on commercial records; those by Rudy Ray Moore are particularly recommended.

The art of lengthy memorized narrations has been finely developed among the cowboys. Julius' Hermit of Shark Tooth Shoal is not obscene, but features a paragon of "blaggardy" behavior as protagonist. Julius remembers seeing this printed once "with an apology to R.W. Service"; it shows how close such poetry is to the "folk" level. (He also knows an excellent unfettered parody of Dangerous Dan McGrew itself.) The Open Book was written by cowboy composer Curley Fletcher, and its mention of Sunset and Gower Boulevards in Hollywood date it to the time Fletcher worked as an extra for the movies. Glenn says that many variants have sprung up on the rodeo circuit and the present sample is only about a third of the total.

As Glenn explains, Curley Fletcher "wrote his own parodies before somebody else could get to them". His Strawberry Roan in its original form has become one of the best loved ranch ballads and his original Wild Buckaroo can be heard on Arhoolie lp 5007. The Castration of the Strawberry Roan enjoys much underground popularity and a "party" record of it once appeared by an ensemble sounding suspiciously like the Sons of the Pioneers. Glenn knows yet another "blue" version of the song, which could not be fit in here.

The Uncle Bud song, in its various guises, is certainly quite old, although Texan singers, such as George Bernard, invariably now associate it with Bud Russell, the notorious Texan prison transportation officer before the war. The present text is full and atypical; other versions can be heard on Flyright's Library of Congress series and Roosevelt Charles1 Vanguard record (remarkably dry-cleaned). Riley Puckett sings a related piece on Rounder 1005.

The Great Wheel is an extremely widespread piece, which Glenn sometimes also sings. Presumably it originates in the late nineteenth century. Harry Babad's Roll Me Over has a related Little Piece of Wang song which seems to be the text Gus Meade collected in Ohio. Although Ed Cray dismisses this as a recent "clever effort", our cantefable from the Southern Mountains suggests that its symbolism is older.

Barnacle Bill the Sailor, in its present form, is hard to date. Frank Shay's More Friends and Drunken Companions presents a partial text of Rollicking Bill the Sailor resembling the Abel Brown in sailor collections, of which he writes "This bit must be meat and drink to those initiates who know the correct words,...but it is well to remember that the Pilgrims landed on the rock." Frank Luther popularized a "juvenilized" Barnacle Bill on commercial records during the Depression. The present text may represent a parody of his which unwittingly restores the song to original potency. Likewise the Tattooed Lady motif has assumed protean vestments, ranging from the common Tra-la-boom-de-ay setting to Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg's Lydia the Tattooed Lady, sung to great effect by Groucho Marx, Smokey Rogers learned his version while working in Vaudeville. Only merely "naughty", its ribaldry pales in present company, although it is a nice performance nonetheless.

I have relatively little to report about the pieces of more nondescript vintage, such as the well known Winnipeg Whore or the less common In Mexico. Good sources are the Babad and Cray books already cited, as well as Harold Hart's The Bawdy Bedside Reader. Most versions of The Ring Dang Do, incidentally, include the explanatory:

Oh, the ring dang do, now what is that?
It's soft and furry like a pussy cat
So round and warm and split in two ?
She said it was her ring dang do.

The Singers:

Although one may hear a good deal of "blaggardy" material in the field, it is difficult to bring it to disc and we are deeply grateful to the artists for recording the material found here, much of which is at odds with their present moral tenets.

The late Jim Garland was originally from Bell County, Kentucky where he was blacklisted for union activities. He spent the 'thirties in New York City where he engaged in folksong activity with his sisters Sarah Gunning and Molly Jackson. During the war he moved to Washougal, Washington. Jim had a great fund of unusual folklore, and composed the popular I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister and Death of Harry Simms from personal experience. He wrote a fascinating autobiography which will be published by the University of Kentucky Press.

Buford Pippin was an elderly retired miner from Delight, Kentucky and a good singer of old ballads. Wash Nelson was in his nineties and from the Ashland area. Both have passed away since these recordings were made.

Julius Sorel is a rancher in his fifties from Leupp, Arizona and a great storehouse of laconic cowboy wit. Glenn Ohrlin,, originally from Minnesota, now runs his cattle in Mountain View, Arkansas. Author of The Hellhound Train and several lp records, Glenn is a frequent performer at folkfestivals. Smokey Rodgers has enjoyed a long career in country music, having worked as a vocalist for Spade Cooley, Tex Williams and many bands of his own. He now lives on a ranch in Victorville, California.

George Bernard from Washington, Texas is in his late sixties and now a Holiness preacher. Hearing Sam Chatmon (cf. Rounder 2018) perform some of his rowdy pieces at the San Diego Folk Festival induced George to come into Lou Curtiss' record store and announce "OK, I'm going to put all this stuff down for you so you'll have it and then I'm never going to mess with it no more". And he hasn't.

Side 1

1.          The Ring Dang Do -- Glenn Ohrlin

2.          I Fucked an Old Girl in the Graveyard / Here's to Old Meg -- Julius Sorel

3.          One-eyed Riley -- Jim Garland

4.          The Eagle -- George Bernard

5.          The Wild Buekaroo -- Glenn Ohrlin

6.          The Piece of Wang -- Buford Pippin

7.          The Tattooed Lady -- Smokey Rogers

8.          Barnacle Bill the Sailor -- Glenn Ohrlin

9.          Last May Morn -- Wash Nelson

10.        The Little Ball of Yarn -- Glenn Ohrlin

Side II

1.          Crawling and Creeping -- Jim Garland

2.          The Open Book-Glenn Ohrlin

3.          The Winnipeg Whore -- Julius Sorel

4.          Granny Hare / Little Girl from Arkansas / Ryestraw / She Went Around the Huckleberry Bush / Blackeyed Susie -- Jim Garland

5.          The Castration of the Strawberry Roan-Glenn Ohrlin

6.          The Hermit of Shark Tooth Shoal -- Julius Sorel

7.          Blue Balls from Bellman / Fucking Does the Women Good -- Buford Pippin

8.          Uncle Bud-George Bernard

9.          Lost the Race by Jesus / My Organ Grinder / Here's to the Whore / In Mexico -- Julius Sorel

10.        Old Granny Cripplecunt / God Damn Her Old Soul / I Sent a Rabbit for a Bucket of Beer / A Conversation between President Buchanan and Queen Victoria -- Jim Garland

11.        The Great Wheel -- Glenn Ohrlin

Produced and recorded by Mark Wilson and Lou Curtiss
Cover design by Gene Waldman
Annotated by Mark Wilson

Rounder Records
186 Willow Ave.
Sornerville, Mass 02144


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