R & B

  • Influenza Blues — From Flu to Rock

    Lame DogR & B, Vintage

    For a long time, the Dog has been too preoccupied to indulge his musicological pretensions.  But I want to do something to commemorate the fact that, like much of the world’s population, I am under orders to shelter in place.  In this time of crisis, I find myself reflecting on the great flu pandemic of 1918-19.  I find doing so oddly comforting.  In dim historical retrospect, it appears as a discrete event that came and went, with nothing comparable to follow for over a century.


    But the pandemic was horrifying.  It may have killed fifty million people, over triple the toll of the First World War.  Indeed, it was so traumatic that for decades it was largely blotted out from our cultural memory.  


    The British journalist Richard Collier once wrote that the “Spanish Lady,” as the pandemic was called, “inspired no songs, no legends, no works of art.”  This, of course, is an overstatement.  Among the exceptions were three different songs published from December 1918 to June 1919 entitled “Infuenza Blues,”  — a ragtime composition; a Broadway show tune; and a lament for a lost sweetheart.  Google the phrase, however, and you will be linked to a fourth song,  It informs us that the flu was a punishment from God:

    This fascinating, if rather offensive piece, has a curious history. It is not clear if it was written about the great flu pandemic at all.    

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  • The Case for Ugly — From Roaring Lion to Rory Block

    Lame DogCalypso, R & B

    What’s the number one compliment paid to women in popular music?  I suspect that it boils down to “you look beautiful.”  The appeal of a pleasing physical appearance is so visceral that its value is ordinarily taken for granted.  Only on rare occasions will a song champion the opposite.  Can you think of any examples?

    Among the most familiar is “If You Want to Be Happy” — a 1963 hit for James McCleese  a/k/a “Jimmy Soul.”  It famously asserts:
    If you want to be happy for the rest of your life
    Never make a pretty woman your wife.
    So from my personal point of view
    Get an ugly girl to marry you.
     A pretty woman makes her husband look small
    And very often causes his downfall.
    As soon as he marries her, then she starts
    To do the things that will break his heart. 

    The song is credited to Joseph Royster, Carmella Guida, and Frank Guida.  But in fact, it’s a revised version of a 1934 release by  a singer/songwriter known as Roaring Lion.  Here is the original.

     
    The true author is a figure of sufficient interest to merit a detour.  Roaring Lion was Rafael de Leon  (not to be confused with the Spanish lyricist of that name — give or take an accent mark — who was also born in February, 1908).  An illegitimate child from the hill country of northern Trinidad, he spent time in orphanages before being adopted by an Indian Muslim family.  After winning various calypso competitions, he was invited to record in New York, where he had the honor of performing for President Roosevelt.  He had a prolific career in the ’30’s and ’40’s, a highlight of which was writing the calypso standard “Marianne” (who is “down by the seaside … sifting sand”).  In 1951, he went to England where, contrary to his own advice, he married a Norwegian woman who was not at all ugly.  Sadly, as an interracial couple, they were repeatedly subject to racist attacks.  In the 1960’s, de Leon returned, along with his family, to Trinidad, where he was honored for his cultural contributions.  In later years, he wrote a controversial book maintaining that calypso derived, not from African roots, but from the music of medieval French troubadours.  Over sixty years after his  “Ugly Woman,” song, he released his final album.  He died at the age of 91 in 1999.
     
    If de Leon made the case for choosing an aesthetically challenged woman, what about a similarly situated man?   For that, let’s turn to one of the Dog’s personal favorites, blues queen Rory Block.  Her main point in this 1984 recording seems to be that handsome men are narcissistic assholes.

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  • The Troups — “Motoring West” in America’s Heyday

    Lame DogR & B

    In 1946, a young couple left Pennsylvania for Hollywood, where the husband hoped to make his mark as a songwriter.   At one point during the journey, the wife suggested that he write something about Route 40.  He rebuffed her on the ground that they would be spending far more time on a different highway — Route 66.  After a pause, she replied, “Get your kicks on Route 66!”  And with that, what is arguably the greatest road song of all time was born.

     Here’s a performance by the author himself:

     

    Bobby Troup came from a family that ran music stores in Harrisburg and Lancaster.  Cynthia Troup (nee Hare) was a strong-willed girl from the Philadelphia Main Line who delighted in telling the boys at parties, “I’m only wearing (more…)