On Sunday I was in Portland with a friend and went to a memorial at the Laurelthirst. It was for a musician named Turtle. Local musicians showed up like crazy. There were at least six very fine guitar players, three on stage at a time and sometimes more. They switched in and out and switched styles. It was a beautiful tribute.
My two favorites were “They threw me out of the band” and one that bemoaned everyone playing music and drinking and that he had to sing another song about another dead band member. Funny and sad.
This is Malcolm K. Ottaway, my father, singing the Humpty Dumpty Blues in 2009.
He made them up when I was two. Here are the two stories that my mother would tell and that I finally linked.
In the early 1960s my parents married at age 21 and were both going to the University of Tennessee. They married in June and I was born the next March. In a tuberculosis sanatorium, because my mother started coughing blood at 8 months pregnant. She thought she was going to die. She didn’t die, but after I was born she did not hold me again until I was nine months old. I was suspicious of adults by then, because they kept giving me away.
My parents had music parties, where my father played guitar. My mother had a prodigious memory and would remember every verse, so she was the last one singing. My mother said, “At one party you wanted your father to play Humpty Dumpty. He wouldn’t. You were the only child there. You kept asking. Finally he made up the Humpty Dumpty Blues. You were so angry at him that you stomped your feet at him and everyone laughed.”
And the second story: “One morning after a party, your father picked up his guitar. It RATTLED. It had 17 beer bottle caps in it. We checked and not one person had seen you pick up a beer bottle cap or put it through the strings. It took your father hours to slide the bottle caps out from under the strings with a butter knife.”
Well, that will teach him to not sing a song for the two year old. At any rate, he sang the Humpty Dumpty Blues my whole life. I don’t remember the original party or sliding bottle caps through the strings. I must have done it after the party was over, right? Did I go during the party and pick up every cap I could find, or did I already have a hidden stash? Two year olds can be sneaky, apparently.
At any rate, I am very happy to have the recording now, even though the original made me stomp my feet.
The photograph is of me, in about 1963 or 64. I don’t know who took it, but it was taken at Lake Matinenda, in Ontario, Canada.
Sing! This photo if from my birthday, some years ago. My father is the seated guitar player. He is gone and so is Andy Makie, standing.
Andy brought music to everyone he could in his last decade. Here is an article: Why music? He talks about it here and another version here. My daughter was in a classroom that received a box of his strumsticks and lessons in second grade and for a while he lived in a trailer on my father’s land and built the strumsticks in my father’s barn.
My father, Malcolm Ottaway, loved both classical and folk music. He was one of the people who started Rainshadow Chorale and I got to sing with him in it for 13 years.
This party was like my parents’ parties: a music party. Bring an instrument. Our age range was under 2 to 70s and everyone made joyful noise at some point. My son led the high school Chamber Orchestra to play too.
We sang Dark as a Dungeon as a family song and at singing parties from when my sister and I were very little. We learned many of the songs before we knew what the words meant. At some age I considered this a cautionary song and was glad that my father was not mining coal. I also decided that I didn’t want to mine coal.
The song words have morphed a little, since we sang from memory. Here is our version:
Come all ye young fellows so young and so fine
And seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mines
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul
‘Til the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal
Where it’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mines
I wrote an essay in college about a song that I learned from my mother. I researched versions of Green Grow the Rushes Oh. I had always wondered about some of the verses, because it’s a counting song, from one to 12. Twelve for the twelve apostles and eleven for the eleven that went up to heaven. In an atheist household it takes a while to figure out the meaning of apostle. But other verses are mysterious to this day: nine for the nine Bright Shiners and eight for the April Rainers. In oral traditions if you forget a verse you make up a new one.
There’s many a man that I have seen in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine
The comparison ofΒ mining to addiction impressed me: “it will creep in your soul, til the stream of your blood runs as dark as the coal”. “Like a fiend with his dope” — opiate addicts were called fiends. And people were called drunkards. So this song also made me cautious about both drugs and alcohol.
We didn’t learn the third verse:
The midnight, the morning, or the middle of the day
It’s the same to the miner who labors away
Where the demons of the death often come by surprise
One fall of the slate and you are buried alive
The last verse interested me. I liked the idea of bones turning to coal over time. My parents were atheists and did not go to church, but there were lots of songs that talked about God or heaven or the devil: including sacred music. We went to big chorus rehearsals when my parents couldn’t find a sitter and we were expected to behave politely during concerts: The Messiah. And we got to go to operettas. I saw Ruddigore in Ithaca at Cornell when I was 5 and the ancestral ghosts stepping out of their portraits and singing was terrible and wonderful.
I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken and turn into coal
Then I’ll look out the door of my heavenly home
And I’ll pity the miners A-diggin’ my bones
The photo is my father’s family and he is in the back, first trumpet. This is the Bayers Family Orchestra. My great grandfather is conducting, my grandmother on violin and my grandfather on saxophone. They became a band when my grandparents moved away, because my grandmother was the only string player.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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