Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume One: Ballads

"King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O", the one I listen to most often (and sing all the time as well).

Henry Lee, but I find myself humming Charles Giteau quite often.

Between this and the Townes Van Zandt poll, it's a night of difficult choices...

I mean, any poll where I'm voting AGAINST the Carter Family feels wrong, but I feel like Clarence Ashley deserve my vote (even if that isn' my favorite cut of his.) And Kelly Harrell? Charlie Poole? MS John Hurt? Let's just canonize it all and be done with it.

can we do an ILXor comp of us singing these songs, with or without instrumental accompaniment?

lol, my kids and I sing these songs all the time; the Anthology's like the best kids album ever (morbidity and all)

lol, my kids and I sing these songs all the time; the Anthology's like the best kids album ever (morbidity and all)

Wow, that is cool x1000.

Clarence Ashley deserve my vote (even if that isn' my favorite cut of his.)

Coo Coo Bird's the early frontrunner for the Volume 5 poll. For Volume 1, it has to be Mississippi John Hurt. But Peg and Awl's great too.

my least favorite of the three, but still light years ahead of just about everything else ever recorded.

leaning towards "When That Great Ship Went Down", but Masked Marvel is awesomeness defined. what to do?

can we do an ILXor comp of us singing these songs, with or without instrumental accompaniment?

― ian, Tuesday, 4 November 2008 02:35 (7 minutes ago)

This is a good idea

yeah i was pretty serious about that idea.
it's not folk music if people stop singing it.

and what with the innumerable versions of many of these, you can pick & choose the verses as you like. I'm pretty sure my version of the cuckoo that i sing to myself all the time is drawn from more than one source.

I'm tempted to vote for Drunkard's Special.

I just noticed that "Pockets in a bedquilt, I've never seen before" foreshadows the Slanket

The vocal on the Coley Jones number is so ultra-mimetic it makes my liver hurt just listening to it. These polls are gonna be tough, alright. I'm going with "Kassie Jones."

(I recorded a version of "Drunkard's Special" with a Bo Diddley beat. Can that go on the comp?)

yes.
send me mp3s and i'll post them all when i get 40 minutes.

I would have a MUCh easier time voting for the song I did not like:

"Down On Penny's Farm" — The Bently Boys (1929)

And that's about it.

The next round should be a lot easier.

"the old lady and the devil"

'The Wagoner's Lad' slays me. I think it's the 'your parents don't like me because I am poor' bit.

ballads > songs > social music

I love "fatal flower garden"

ian I will send you a track for yr comp this weekend

Coo Coo Bird's the early frontrunner for the Volume 5 poll.

Ooops...meant Volume 3, not disc 5.

"John Hardy" vs. "Frankie"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

So many great songs but "Fatal Flower Garden" still shakes me up. Euler, your kids sing THIS one???

Apparently in Ulysses, James Joyce turns the gypsy into a Jew. Not sure how common that version was. But here's Gavin Friday singing it:

Ian, what's your favorite Clarence Ashley ?

Apparently in Ulysses, James Joyce turns the gypsy into a Jew. Not sure how common that version was.

I think it's the other way around; the earliest version has jews killing the children and it eventually became gypsies (apparently a more acceptable group to smear as child killers). it's a pretty old song, a child ballad.

isn't the anthology sequenced by chronological authorship? so the earliest written songs come first.

I think my fave Clarence Ashley is his version of "John Hardy."

anyone wanting to send me recordings of these tracks should do as at dr dot carl dot sagan at gmail

"fatal flower garden" evolved from child ballad 155, "Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter"
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch155.htm

here's another guy whose kids sang it
http://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-FatalFlow.html

Ah ok. Fascinating!

I voted Mississippi Bollweavil Blues, sort of against my instincts to go with the more obvious choices. At the same time, Frankie is not close one of my favorite Mississippi John Hurt songs and same for the Carter Family numbers.

from my new favorite blog

http://encyclopaediaoftinyfacts.com/2008/06/30/fatal-flower-garden/

Harry Smith was the truest American cultural scavenger of the 20th century; Smith gave birth to the 1950’s-60’s folk movement, was an important experimental filmmaker, occultist, maven of the Beat scene, synesthete, jazz champion, shaman, world-class collector of paper airplanes and Ukrainian Easter eggs, and the finest alchemist in North America; Harry Smith spent the majority of his adult life pursuing the philosopher’s stone, but despite the tireless joint-efforts of Smith, the faculty of the Naropa Institute, and the Boulder City Council, he was unable to ever locate pure carmot; while Harry Smith never successfully created gold or a homunculus, he was reputedly able to transmute dust containing rat feces into a chocolate powder similar to Ovaltine; in Weirdo Heaven, Harry Smith operates a phonograph while Tiny Tim sings in a cartoon falsetto and Moondog bangs on drums; if you like songs about famine, infanticide, infidelity, God, drought, drowning, Satan, or moles in the ground, the “Anthology of American Folk Music” is for you; “Fatal Flower Garden” is my favorite song on the collection; several years ago, I flew into BWI airport in Baltimore; my then-girlfriend picked me up in a silver Isuzu Rodeo; while driving to the Eastern Shore, we found ourselves in a minor monsoon; we pulled off the road and parked; the stereo in the automobile was broken, so I took out my Mac laptop, opened iTunes, and put on the “Party Shuffle”; the rain outside came down so heavy that we could not see ten feet in front of the Rodeo; my then-girlfriend and I moved to the back seat, got frisky, depantsed, and while we were in a state of physical communion, “Fatal Flower Garden” began to play; this song is in no way sensual or erotic; “Fatal Flower Garden” is spooky and haunted, as if dead peckerwoods performed at a Leper Colony Luau in Hades; I shut my laptop, then we put our clothes back on and began our drive through the storm; it was the beginning of an unpleasant weekend;

I'm having trouble coming up with some sort of yardstick that would let me choose one of these

"Fatal Flower Garden" — Nelstone's Hawaiians (1930)
"The Butcher's Boy" — Buell Kazee (1928)
"King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" — "Chubby" Parker (1928)
"Peg and Awl" — The Carolina Tar Heels (1929)
"My Name Is John Johanna" — Kelly Harrell (1927)
"John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man" — The Carter Family (1930)
"Frankie" — Mississippi John Hurt (1928)

real men flip coins.

nerdz roll a pentagonal prism

thought about making an eight-sided die joke but you only listed 7 options ;_;

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Nice...the best two win.

Hey! My vote for "Old Lady and the Devil" didn't go through!

Neither did my vote for "Kassie Jones."

FIX!

ian I sent you a thing

thanks Ed!

If anyone else wants to record themselves singing a song from the anthology, please e-mail me!
dr dot carl dot sagan at gmail dotcom

Oh my god do I dare record "Peg and Awl" as my friend and I sang it with verses (made on the spot) from 18-and-one to two-thousand-one? ie TWO HUNDRED YEARS, and all of the teen years (all) ended with "in the days of blank-year-and-teen, pegging shoes made me a queen"? Does anyone want to hear "pegging shoes made me a queen" 20 times in a song? And I can only play one chord per every eight bars?

WOULD THE WORLD DESERVE THIS?

it's a great idea, can't wait to hear it

that was an xpost to ian but it also goes for abbott's post too

sometimes you have to honor the past and sometimes you have to rape the corpse

Thought about starting polls for each volume, glad I checked...Having just finished the biography, I've dug out my old home-burned copies of these and plan to spend the next couple of weeks in the car with them. Got through Vol. 1 today. My vote would go to "The House Carpenter."

need to hear the 200-year "Peg and Awl"

Love this set so much. Started re-listening a few weeks ago, at low volume at work. Peg and Awl is def a fave, but don't rly know the set inside-out. Also vol 4 has gems i am less acquainted with. . .

I rly love the centuries of sound blog, and related, this set likely has overlap or will have once all the years are covered. Full of the good stuff
https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=806

love this stuff so much, this is the only one I have a 50's vinyl press of, I have later 60's reissues of 2 & 3 plus the Smithsonian CD box from '97 (iirc?) that kicked the revival off

I feel like you could make an argument for the (impeccable) sequencing of these volumes as a clear influence on the "album as statement" era ushered in by Dylan et al

influence, antecedent, idk

THE CORE. THE HEART MUSIC.