Yesterday, I highlighted the father of Mississippi delta blues, Charlie Patton. In 1930, just four years before his death from a heart problem, he met and married Bertha Lee Pate. In their brief time together, she recorded a dozen songs with him. She lived into the 1970s, but after Patton’s death, she never again recorded, which is a damned shame, because she was a great blues singer.

In 1965, Sam Charters tracked her down in Chicago where she was working in a used clothing store. She was just living her life and part of that was living and loving a blues legend — and being one herself. In the interview, she told the touching story of Charlie Patton’s death:

One of the songs that she did with Patton, which she also wrote, was “Mind Reader Blues.” I love the sliding of her voice. Patton just finger picks the guitar; there is no need for any slide; she provides it all.

I have a great love of the music that is generally referred to Mississippi delta blues in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. But it is something of a distortion to call it that. There certainly was a lot of great music that came out of there. But there was very similar music that came out of Louisiana and Texas and even as far east as Georgia. And the people who played it moved around a lot to support themselves.

I had wanted to focus the women of that time and place. But there isn’t much to speak of in that regard. Everyone knows Bessie Smith, of course. But she didn’t perform that kind of music. She was more like Billie Holiday, although she’s not even of the same time period. So I’m stuck with just two women: Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley and maybe Bertha Lee Pate. And even they barely make the cut in terms of time. I’m not even going to make it to Robert Johnson.

Let’s start the week with Charlie Patton who, as far as I can tell, was the closest thing that the Mississippi delta had to a star. My main interest in delta blues is the combination of the voice and the guitar. That’s why the slide guitar was so often critical. Patton was a master of it apparently at the very birth of the technique. I haven’t noticed anyone doing it better than he does on “Spoonful Blues.” I love Leo Kottke, but I’m sure he would agree that he doesn’t do a thing that Charlie Patton didn’t do a century earlier. As you will hear, Kottke isn’t alone. Just wait until we do Sun House tomorrow.

We end our week of Shel Silverstein with his song, “The Mermaid,” off his album, I’m So Good That I Don’t Have to Brag. There is something about the man that allowed him to see the absurdity of everything. I’d never really given a lot of thought to mermaids, but it is indeed true that they are half fish and it really doesn’t matter how lovely one half of her is, the other half really is a fish. Of course, as I discussed in Fake Science and Fake Reality on Television, more recent fabulist would have us believe that mermaids were half human and half dolphin. But that doesn’t help a whole lot.

The lyrics were published in Playboy, and I suppose it is intended to be salacious. I have a hard time seeing any of Silverstein’s work as being salacious because he always seems like nothing so much as a naughty five year boy. Maybe I give him a pass on that because I feel kind of the same way. But I think it is a major mistake to read much into his work. I was thinking of “The Father of a Boy Named Sue,” and I don’t think there’s much there. You can even see it as a comment on a man so screwed up that he set the record straight about naming his son Sue only to relate that it’s all worked out great for him because he gets to rape his son.

There is a distinctly dark core to everything that Shel Silverstein wrote. But the same thing could be said of the Brothers Grimm. Not that I’m saying we should share the work he created for Playboy with our toddlers. So here is “The Mermaid,” which you can make up your own mind about.

Shel Silverstein has a devilish wit. I think that’s why he is a children’s writer at the same time that he isn’t. He has a child’s sensibility with an adult’s knowledge and experiences. I believe I share this with him, without being on the same creative plane of existence. It is this kind of stuff that parents normally complain about regarding me. It is the parents’ job, after all, to socialize children. I see it as my job to remind them that they can be both good and devilish.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is filled with devilish stuff. There is also a version with a CD, which I used to have. There is something extra that we get when Silverstein reads his own poems. They always sound so much sharper than they do in my head. Poems like “For Sale” are horrible in their way, even as they are too extreme to be taken seriously. It’s the literary equivalent of Tom and Jerry. But I’m going to highlight another poem from that collection, “Crocodile’s Toothache,” even though I actually love dentists. As the animator, Aida Alemy, says, “No crocodile or dentist were harmed during the making of this animation.”

Shel Silverstein’s most famous song is probably “A Boy Named Sue.” It was a huge hit for Johnny Cash and it works well for him. But he makes the song too serious. You get the impression that it was the right thing to do to name the boy Sue. As a result, the denouement where the singer says that he will name his own son anything but Sue doesn’t work all that well.

Silverstein’s version of “A Boy Named Sue” off Boy Named Sue and His Other Country Songs fully embraces its silliness. And at the end, he goes crazy and shows that he wouldn’t just name his son something different, but that he still hates his father because it was terrible to have named him Sue. There might have been an upside to the name but it didn’t make up for the downside.

About a decade later, Silverstein wrote a followup, The Father of a Boy Named Sue off his album, Songs and Stories. Whereas “A Boy Named Sue” is a fun song, the followup is deeply disturbing. It claims that Sue lied in his song and that actually he’s a transvestite. After the fight, they reconcile and the father moves in with the son who takes care of him better than any daughter ever could. And the song ends with more than the implication of incest. Shockingly, when Johnny Cash covered the song, he kept the lyrics in, although he sings them so forthright that it doesn’t come off as creepy as it does when Shel Silverstein delivers when in a barely audible squeal.

Let’s go back to Shel Silverstein’s songs. As far as I know, he was not a drug user. But he wrote about drugs a lot. A good example of that is “I Got Stoned and I Missed It.” It’s a song that a lot of people have covered, most notably Dr Hook and Jim Stafford. The song sounds like a pro drug song, but the whole point of it is that the singer misses out on his whole life because he’s stoned all the time.

As is pretty much always the case, the music is super simple. The band might interject some passing chord, but it is just two chords: I and V. And truthfully, these are the kinds of songs that seem to be most joyous. Despite the lyrics, the song seems almost to be an advertisement for cannabis. Certainly the person who put this video together thought so.

Elizabeth mentioned that she knew about Shel Silverstein’s poetry, “And oh, that book about a jerk of a person.” I correctly deduced that she was referring to The Giving Tree. The truth is that the tree is not real. It is rather the platonic ideal of motherhood or Mother Nature or certain conceptions of God: something that gets pleasure only through giving. The boy is all of us: searching for fulfillment from outside things and experiences — all of them doomed to disappoint.

It makes me think of the nature of friendship. A friend is not someone who helps you move to a new place; a friend is someone who you help move to a new place. It is, of course, great when friendship is reciprocated. But the nature of it is what you are willing to do and the feelings that you have. And so the giving tree has a very great friend in the boy. The boy, on the other hand, is a sad figure — alone in the world, apparently without friends.

Of course, if I wanted to, I could provide an endless number of interpretations of the book. It has much to say about aging and the need to be useful. All of the interpretations are poignant and edifying. That’s what makes it so great. “And the tree was happy.” It is what we all aspire to. We don’t need apples or branches or trunk for that.

Today we listen to a prototypical Shel Silverstein song, “Show It at the Beach.” It is off his 1978 album, Songs and Stories. It has this usual folk formulation, which may have been one of the reasons he was popular among the listening audience; he isn’t too demanding in that way. And the focus is always his wonderful words.

“Show It at the Beach” is really modern in what it talks about. He’s making fun of the odd fact that you can’t be naked on the beach, but somehow it is fine to wave guns around in front of others. One especially interesting lines is, “You can show it in the most sophisticated magazine.” Silverstein was a longtime writer for Playboy. I wonder what he would think now that you can no longer even show it there!

It’s also funny at the beginning of this clip. In introducing him, Ray Sawyer says, “I’d be surprised if he hasn’t written at least one or two of your favorite songs.” And Silverstein interrupts, “I’d be surprised!”

Will mentioned that I might want to look into the history of the song “Beans Taste Fine.” He thinks it goes way back, but as far as I can tell, it is just a Shel Silverstein original, off his 1962 album, Inside Folk Songs. But since I didn’t have a theme for this week’s Morning Music posts, I figured that was an excellent idea. I could easily do a month of Shel Silverstein.

He first came to my attention as the guy who wrote one of the greatest musical satires ever: “The Cover of Rolling Stone.” And so I want to start there, even though I knew other of his songs (without knowing they were his) before that. And I’ll probably go back to some of his earlier work. I also probably won’t stick to his songs. His poetry and prose are equally good.

So we start with “The Cover of Rolling Stone” performed by Dr Hook & the Medicine Show off their album Sloppy Seconds. They did a lot of Shel Silverstein songs. Their first album had the hit “Sylvia’s Mother” and the following album had “Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie.” They are an interesting group, because it still isn’t clear whether they were a rock band or a parody of a rock band.

Certainly their association with Shel Silverstein makes that case stronger. I think he was on record as not being that fond of the art form. But if you assume that a rock band is actually meant as comedy, it is not hard to convince yourself that they are hilarious. Think of The Beatles, going from the bubblegum of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the utter pretentiousness of “Eleanor Rigby” just two years later.

Anyway, here is the song. I’m presenting the album cut, because I really like the production. Live versions of it are distinctly lacking.

People may find it strange, but I’m a big Frank Sinatra fan. There is no reason for it especially. He is mostly just a ripoff of Billie Holiday. But in his defense, he was very open about that. And there is nothing about his persona that I especially care for. In fact, it is usually when he is pushing against that image that I most like him. For example, check out his wonderful version of Send in the Clowns.

But since this is Christmas week, I figured we would listen to the holiday song that Frank Sinatra is most associated with, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The lyrics are really upbeat. The implication is that things are not great now, but they are looking up. The music, however, is not upbeat. That’s probably a function of it being originally a Judy Garland song. Coming from her, it seems like a pleasant lie that everyone is too polite to contradict.

It reminds of the Woody Allen short story “A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets,” where he writes of one of them, “The ballet opens at a carnival. There are refreshments and rides. Many people in gaily colored costumes dance and laugh, to the accompaniment of flutes and woodwinds, while the trombones play in a minor key to suggest that soon the refreshments will run out and everybody will be dead.”

Frank Sinatra’s version is different. It implies — like so much of his work — that he has seen too much to be upbeat or to think that things will really get better. He’s seen things in his life that have made him wise but sad. So he’s telling us all to make the best of a bad situation. And it’s not bad advice. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less tolerant of people who want to wallow in their own unhappiness. I know, I know: I hear the trombones too.

I’ve saved the best song for Christmas itself! Another classic by Don Novello.

Back in 2006, Father Guido Sarducci released a Christmas album, One Hundred Bulbs on the Christmas Tree Party. He said at the time that he hated Christmas songs. And this had inspired him to write “the worst Christmas song ever” even though he realized that “the bar has been set high.” The song, “One Hundred Bulbs (on the Christmas Tree),” is based on what he calls the worst song ever written, “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Despite what you might think, it really is just the countdown of bulbs falling from the Christmas tree. But Novello has a commentary on top of it where he complains about various Christmas songs. He starts with “The Little Drummer Boy.” He has a theory that it wasn’t an angel who went to the kid, but the Devil. And the Devil did it just to get the kid to write the song to torture us all these years. It’s a good theory, and I would add to it that the Wikipedia article claiming that it only dates back to the 1950s is all part of the Devil’s evil plan.

Don Novello goes after a number of other songs. In discussing “Holly Jolly Christmas,” he says it is by “the man of the name Burl Ives — I’ll mention him by name!” After that, he engages in a surprisingly charming murder fantasy. Despite all the comedy — much of it hillarious — by the end of it, you do want to strangle the choir. But you should listen to all of the almost 15 minutes of the song. It will be a sign of you stamina and good health.

Who is Burl Ives? When he says that we should have a Holly Jolly Christmas, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to sing his songs not against his enemies but against those who need them most? Why does he sing his hardest battle against the woman he loves?

You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling song that plays each Christmas in the lives of the amazing men and women at this blog. You will discover why a musical genius becomes a worthless playboy… why a great folk singer is working for his own destruction… why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph… why a beautiful woman who produces children’s Christmas specials falls in love with the man she has sworn to replace with Paul Soles.