IWW

On the Goodnight Trail, On the Loving Trail

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

In 1970’s age of the Singer-Songwriter, Poet and folksinger U. Utah Phillips had an anachronistic career. In performance he might sing for only a portion of his time on stage, mixing in story-telling, verse, jokes, and his brand of political advocacy that reflected his even-then old-fashioned connections to Catholic Worker activism and the Industrial Workers of the World.* He would sing his own songs sometimes – and while he apparently didn’t write an awful lot of songs, a couple of them I know are extraordinary. Today’s musical piece, performed for American Labor Day, is one of those.

Here a video of my performance of U. Utah Phillips’ song

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On the dusty surface of it, “On the Goodnight Loving Trail”  is a cowboy song, one of the real ones that recognize that cowboy is a job title after all, not a romantic name for a gunfighter or wandering charismatic cinematic horseman. That type of cowboy song existed of course – Phillips didn’t have to invent it – but his take on the genre is sui generis. Consider the historical appropriation in the song title and the chorus’ refrain from a historical cattle drive route going from Texas to Wyoming. That trail was named for two cattle-driving ramrods: Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. A mere accident of family names, but Phillip’s choice to use them imbues the song from the start with elegiac affection.

Calling the aged cowboy whose cattle drive job fell to being the camp cook “The old woman” is also taken from fact. Is this gendered part of the song’s refrain an inevitable accident, or a choice by Phillips? That the song reinforces the old cook’s abrogation of manhood in a verse’s line about “wearing an apron instead of a name” says that the author wanted to underline that – it’s a choice. If this song isn’t Brokeback Mountain  or the sibling of Paul Westerberg’s and the Replacements’ “Androgynous,”  I’ll take the leap and say it’s maybe a second-cousin. Is it possible that Westerberg knew Phillips’ song? That’s impossible to say – the underground aquifer of the folk process is dark and damp.

UUP Wobbly

U. Utah Phillips: an IWW member in the days of James Taylor and Carole King

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I chose to present “On the Goodnight Trail”  today because it’s Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. This song about work ends with the ground-truth that the lot of many of us is to use up most of our life in our labors. Years ago, thinking of two specifically American holidays, I wrote this short statement caught commuting itself towards a poem:

The temple of summer is guarded by two pillars:
Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war,
and Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peace.

I’ll flatter myself and say U. Utah Phillips would have liked that one if he had heard it. I did my best to sing his song. Seven years ago I did a musical performance which included these three lines about The Temple of Summer,  and if you haven’t had enough Parlando Project music after the video above, here’s an audio player below to play that performance as we ride up to the gates of autumn this weekend.

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*corrected thanks to rmichaelroman

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I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, with connections

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m not one to closely follow religious matters, though many poets over the ages have — the history and the weight of all that combined belief and its inconsistent practice is considerable. I did have an interval as a youthful churchman of the Protestant kind, attracted by the community bonds and social activism of the Martin Luther King era,*  but it was recent reading of those fresh drafts of history that we call the news that brought the selection of a new Catholic Pope to my attention. For a moment my country was caught up in ancient offices as a break from the depravity of our domestic head of state.

So, first the death of the serving Pope, then the mourning, then the secret conclave in its smoke-emitting room, then the new Pope and the follow-up consideration of his background and concerns — extended this time by his North American origins. My BlueSky feed of wits supplied me with humorous predictions based on Bob/now Leo’s Chicago origins, but the pedant in me snorted most heartily when I read this news service summary of Leo’s biography explaining that he was a member of the Augustinian Order, monks with a call to service and piety. The wire-service, no doubt constrained by the spread-so-thin-the-bread-tears nature of modern journalism, informed its readers that the Augustinians were founded in the 13th century by Saint Augustine.

I have no idea what the titrated level of history buffery is within my treasured readership, but they were off by near a millennium — St. Augustine being a 4th century North African early church father! The medieval founders of this order of monks were looking back to late Western Roman empire times for a guiding light.

The Parlando results of my guffaws? I thought of a song that abides with me that I found on one of the first three record albums I bought as 1967 turned into 1968: “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  from Bob Dylan’s slightly undervalued LP John Wesley Harding.**   Dylan was on the face of it no more accurate than our news-service scribe. His apparition of St. Augustine is a troubled man, as many spiritual people are, and he briefly charges us with his preaching in the song, but Dylan’s Augustine is also specifically a martyr who was put to death, presumably by the authorities. Unlike many saints, Augustine of Hippo was not a martyr. While Augustine’s town was under siege by Vandals (the original ones, doing business as that tribal name not as members of DOGE)***  he died an old man from natural causes.

Dylan’s song is brief, brevity being an unusual virtue Dylan exercised in all but one song on John Wesley Harding.   And yet he was bringing history into the three verses, no choruses, no bridge song structure of his song. Within his seeming historical inaccuracy was his choice of a borrowed tune. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  uses the melody and the structure of a 1930s song setting by Earl Robinson of a 1920s poem by Alfred Hayes**** about a man put out to death in 1915: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”   I believe Dylan clearly meant to link the two men, in the way that dreams can combine things we never see in waking hours.

This song, and Dylan’s performance of it, has always touched me — and so having the coincidence of Augustinians being in the news, and the hopes that the new Pope may preach to our current overly-gifted Kings and Queens, I went to record myself singing this song of a remarkable comparing. Since it’s a copyrighted work, I present that performance today as a YouTube video. The few-hundred views one of my videos might gather would not make even a widows mite, but it’s my understanding that any revenue gathered from those annoying YouTube ads can be claimed by the rights holders. For my video I mingle artists representations of Augustine and Hill. If you can’t tell, the photos are Joe Hill and a news photo of a memorial march for him in 1915. Our 4th century Augustine was camera-shy, and has to be represented by artists’ paintings.

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*My youth included a couple years working at a hospital still being actively managed by an order of nuns in those days.

**In search of more footnotable connections: was it coincidence that the then considered inscrutable cover of the LP has two Bengali Baals, singers in the tradition of the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore. Surely the Bob Dylan of 1967 didn’t know he’d eventually be the second. Another connection: Joe Hill was a songwriter who sang for union organizing meetings and “He who sings, prays twice” is a saying attributed to Saint Augustine.

***Augustine’s writings include thoughts on The City of God that may survive the fall of empires. Shortly after Augustine’s death, the Vandals sacked his city. Stories have it that these Vandals were impressed by Augustine’s learning, and spared the library he had established there. The current ones aren’t up to that level of civilization.

****Hayes had a long writing career. Wikipedia tells me he was an uncredited screenwriter for the famous Italian film The Bicycle Thief.   It also claims he wrote a script for The Twilight Zone, but IMDB doesn’t confirm that.