1927: “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” by Frank Cloutier and Victoria Café Orchestra

There is one reason that “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” is known today and was not buried in the great scrapheap of Prohibition-era dancehall novelty records: It was included at the center of Harry Smith’s celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music. In the collection, Smith sequenced 84 songs over three double-record sets, each one loosely grouped by theme (“Moonshiner’s” is song number 41, at the end of the secular half of the “Social Music” volume). Although the album was commissioned and distributed by Folkways Records (which was later picked up by the Smithsonian), Smith didn’t include any field recordings, instead opting for his vast collection of blues, folk, and country 78 RPM records, all of which were commercially released in the late ’20s and early ’30s. He then released the Anthology with an accompanying set of cryptic liner notes that refused to give the race, sex, or genre of any of the performers. In other words, he created a complete democracy.

Kids like Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia began digging into the collection soon after its release in 1952, and within a decade, it was arguably the founding document of the early ’60s folk music revival. The Anthology made such a great impression upon the ’60s folk generation, it got to a point where virtually every song had been researched, studied, contemplated, and covered.

Every song, it seemed, except for Frank Cloutier and Café Victoria Orchestra’s “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I.”

The song “is one of only two medlies [sic] on the Anthology,” points out Kurt Gegenhuber in his blog The Celestial Monochord. “Not a tune but a collection of tunes, it is an anthology in the Anthology, a collage incorporated into a larger collage. Our understanding of ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ therefore benefits from some of the same thinking we apply to the Anthology itself – if, possibly, on a different scale.”

Kurt Gegenhuber is to Frank Cloutier what Robert “Mack” McCormick is to Robert Johnson or Nick Tosches is to Emmett Miller – the person who put countless amounts of time, research, and money into the pursuit of a 20^th Century musical phantom.

So why did no one bother to take up Cloutier until Gegenhuber fell into his pursuit less than a decade ago? Because even in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction world of the Harry Smith Anthology, “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” is a complete anomaly. It is “folk” in only the loosest sense of the term – this is no bastardized Elizabethan ballad or hand-me-down slave spiritual, it is a medley of old parlor ballads played by a dancehall jazz band in a polka tempo; it is also, as Gegenhuber tellingly points out, the only song on the collection that isn’t by a rural southern performer – Cloutier and his orchestra were the house band at the Victoria Café in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And as Gegenhuber experienced when doing his initial research, the record is maddeningly difficult to classify – too ethnic for the jazz discographies, too jazzy for the folk discographies, and not popular enough to make the pop music discographies. Its sole claim to fame is its inclusion as the black sheep of Harry Smith’s Anthology, an outsider of an outsider culture.

Indeed, hearing “Moonshiner’s” in the context of the Harry Smith Anthology is something of a shock. The music that makes up the other 83 songs of the collection are decidedly rural in sound and vision, blues singers from the south and country balladeers from the hills. Even urban-based jug bands like the Memphis Jug Band and the Cincinnati Jug Band played rural-style songs with rural-style instruments, old songster tunes and blues played on mandolins, harmonicas, and of course, the ever-present jug – even if they were technically urban-based, this was music that celebrated a rural way of life with a rural sound. Not so for Frank Cloutier and Victoria Café Orchestra. Cloutier’s band was a working northern jazz-pop combo with a full sound to match; instead of acoustic guitars and bottleneck slides we get piano, clarinet, drums, and – a true rarity for the Anthology – a tuba.

But none of this even begins to scratch the surface of the sheer weirdness of this record, a whole that is far beyond the sum of its parts. The record begins with Cloutier calling out “Hey, hey, Mr. Larson–” followed by about five seconds of unintelligible speaking that has been lost to the ages (here’s my best shot: “Fistfight equally unfined auto-inspect in the playpen” – I think the FBI had an easier time making out the lyrics to “Louie Louie”). Cloutier’s piano sets the tempo at a brisk one-step polka as the band plays the first melody, whooping it up with laughter, shouts, and random non-sequiturs – at themselves, at each other, at their song, at the audience, at the Eighteenth Amendment – an infectious, near-constant sound that becomes its own parallel section of the song, a sort of madman’s “director’s commentary” track, if you will.

The first melody is played by a clarinet – an exuberant reading of a simple melody brimming with pride like the Spirit of ’76 band leading a Fourth of July parade. It turns out the song is really “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” but this detail, like the exact origin of any other melody appearing in this song, is just a footnote. Like the best music on the Anthology, “Moonshiner’s” taps into a collective unconscious of American music, like a song you hear for the first time on the radio that you nonetheless swear you’ve heard somewhere before. This is the source of the song’s mystery – as well as its strange power.

When the clarinet’s melody ends, the men then call out in a halting unified chant:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music rises with false anticipation, as a banjo snakes its way around a fluttering melody right out of the first page of How to Play the Banjo, but is as tuneful and catchy as anything that could be played more sophisticatedly. With the banjo line in front, the sound seems to shift into that of a fairground medicine show – silly and over-the-top, but strong and steady enough to entice people off of the midway to step right up and buy that bottle of snake oil. And then:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music rises again in anticipation as it regroups, but remains suspended on itself; someone (Cloutier, I believe) shouts out something out like “Two more couples,” as his bandmates react with laughing glee. A harmonica works its way out of the sound like a locomotive, its melody pushing in and out with a sense of zip that belies its simplicity, not too far unlike Uncle Dave Macon’s “Won’t get drunk no more” refrain of “Way Down the Old Plank Road” that begins the final side of the Anthology. And again:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music briefly rises and parts in false anticipation, suspending for a moment over some more inane dialogue that sounds to me like – “What’re you gonna do with that cow, Herbert?” “Milk somebody, Frankie!” “That’s right!” – before their responding howls in response are cut off by a horn playing bravely and full of cautious victory, like it was leading a march of pilgrims in flight, before somehow neatly resolving into a melody that sounds like the cloying children’s song “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.” (For the record, it’s not; Cloutier and his band are playing the old spiritual “On the Cross,” a lovely tune of faith and devotion that has been sung by everyone from Fiddlin’ John Carson to Hank Williams on down.)

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

Coupled with the constant laughter, the way the record keeps counting off into suspended anticipation before playing the next melody itself feels like a joke the musicians are having among themselves on you. They will always have the upper hand because they are always in the know; you can never be in on a joke in which people are laughing at you. This time they lock onto the most catchy melody of all-time, which has infiltrated the country as “Turkey in the Straw” and the sea as “The Sailor’s Hornpipe,” and was played by Mickey Mouse in his first cartoon appearance, Steamboat Willie. Somewhere in the middle of the melody the drummer smashes his cymbal like a baseball being hit out of the park, and for a fleeting moment, the song takes you there too.

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

With all of this counting, one can’t but wonder if Frank Cloutier and Café Victoria Orchestra aren’t the spiritual grandfathers of the Ramones – playing about a minute’s worth of music, counting off, and doing it again. But for the first and only time on the record, they get right down to business with no odd suspension before the melody kicks in. This time it’s the rousing finale; in terms of its sweeping sound and spirit, the only thing that can touch it on the Anthology is the song that closes the sacred half of the “Social Music” set, a rousing march called “I’m in the Battlefield for My Lord.” Although they are two entirely polar songs – one a mockery of Prohibition, the other a testament to sacred faith (the one played by Cloutier and his band is actually the old parlor ballad “You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Big Red Rose”) – strictly as a sound, they are one in the same; if the spiritual described what being on the battlefield for your lord looks like, this section of “Moonshiner’s” describes what this notion feels like. Cloutier and his orchestra become enormous, an army marching victoriously across a field still smoking from the weapons of battle. If you could follow the sound, it seems, you wouldn’t go across the field, but rather up into the heavens – the well-earned reward of a good life’s work, a consecration of the land worthy of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The record closes with a final chant of “One! Two! Three! Four!” with Cloutier then interrupting the festivities with a command of “Be seated–” the two words that signaled the beginning of a minstrel show, before the record quickly fades away into dead silence.

Taken as a whole, it is as good a summary of the heights and depths America in two minutes and forty seconds as I’ve ever heard. No matter how many times I hear it, there are always new things to be heard and puzzle over, new melodies to catch, new associations to be made: The way the band morphs from a Spirit of ’76 band into one that plays parlor ballads, rural tunes, sea shanties, spirituals, and children’s songs (often at the same time!), invokes the medicine show and the insane asylum in equal measure, takes in a ballgame and rides a locomotive, and finally forms God’s great army marching towards a better world, only to make way for a minstrel show; the way its periodic count-offs into the false anticipation of suspended music feel like bridges to nowhere that completely sever the pieces of the melody even as it unites them; the disjointed dialogue and mad laughter throughout that seems to imply the good-natured front of American humor is just that, a front; and finally, the way that its placement on the Anthology is like finding a Spike Jones record in the middle of a stack of old Carter Family 78s.

So why did Harry Smith put the song in there? Was it a commentary on the act of anthologizing? Was it a reminder of how parlor ballads can dissipate into the backwoods and come back as folk songs? Was it an example of how American music is so mixed up that sometimes the most American of performances can be paradoxically built upon German “oom-pah” music? Damned if I know. But maybe, just maybe, he put the song in there for the same reason that I just wrote a few hundred words about it and still feel like I could write several thousand more without even beginning to feel that I had completed my task at hand: America is a seeker’s country, and you have to get lost in its mysteries before it will reveal its truths.

Either that or he put it there as one big joke – which is to say, he let the record speak for itself.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1906: “Nobody” by Bert Williams

Bert Williams was perhaps the most famous American performer who you’ve never heard of. He was the Jackie Robinson of American entertainment, appearing in the first African American Broadway show, was the first African American member of the legendary Ziegfeld's Follies, and was the best-selling African American recording singer for the first two decades of the 20th Century. He played for presidents and kings, literally – Woodrow Wilson and King Edward VII, respectively – and was famously hailed by W.C. Fields as “The funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew.” Duke Ellington immortalized him in music as part of his groundbreaking Carnegie Hall concert in 1943, while Booker T. Washington hailed Williams as having “done more for our race then I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts; I've been oblidged to fight my way.”

Williams' biggest hit was a half-spoken comedy song called “Nobody” that epitomized his popular persona as a down-on-his luck loner. It was a hallmark work in the canon of American deadpan, with each word slowly considered for maximum melancholy effect:

When life seems full of clouds and rain...And I am filled with naught but pain...Who's there to sooth my thumping, bumping brain?

Nobody.

“In picking a song I always consider the words,” Williams once wrote. “The tune will take care of itself. I should feel sorry for a song that depended on its tune if I had to sing it!” He claimed that he didn't take proper care of his voice and that, as a result, “now I have to talk all my numbers.” But Williams' is underselling his voice. While the verses of “Nobody” were indeed spoken, they unknowingly point the way to the future in the deadpan vocals of Lou Reed, Johnny Ramone, and Beck, making Williams a sort of grandfather to postmodern American singing.

Williams’ singing in the refrains, however, was something else altogether. “IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII—ain't never done nothin' to nobody,” he sings, riding out the word “I” to mimic the sliding trombone that plays just before it. Though unremarkable to modern ears, this put Williams’ at the innovative forefront of popular singing, helping to lay the first ground-stones for instrument-influenced “scat” singing that would explode some twenty years later. Regardless of whatever innovations the song contained, audiences ate it up simply as a clever and catchy song – much to Williams’ eventual dismay. “Before I got through with ‘Nobody’ I could have wished that both the author of the words and the assembler of the tune had been strangled or drowned or talked to death...” Williams once wrote. “Month after month I tried to drop it and sing something new, but I could get nothing to replace it, and the audiences seemed to want nothing else. Every comedian at some time in his life learns to curse the particular stunt of his that was most popular. ‘Nobody’ was a particularly hard song to replace.” Not that he didn't try. There were rewrites like “Somebody” and “Everybody,” but people saw right through these for the rip-offs that they were. Everybody wanted “Nobody.”

As a light-skinned native who was born in the Bahamas, Williams always wore blackface makeup on stage, even when he was the only member of an entirely African American cast to do so. To a modern audience this may seem racist if not redundant, but regardless of Williams’ reasoning for doing so, it spoke of the hall of mirrors that is American entertainment: a black man imitating a white man imitating a black man. However, Williams never lost sight of who he was under the makeup. When asked if he would rather be a white man, he always answered a firm no. “There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am,” he explained. “In truth, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient – in America.”

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1914: "I Love You Just Like Lincoln Loved the Old Red, White and Blue" by the Peerless Quartet

The failure of African Americans to be granted full civil rights in the years following the Civil War caused the epic conflict to become a fairytale the nation told itself as opposed to the second revolution that it could have (and should have) been. African Americans were pushed out of the picture; the Civil War, Americans assured each other, was a conflict of “brother against brother.” It was an oversimplification, to be sure, but it was also the easier version of the story to tell, and the American popular culture ate it up.

In 1913, a photograph of an ancient veteran in a blue uniform shaking hands with an ancient veteran in a gray uniform became the iconic image of the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg; in 1915, D.W. Griffith’s epic (and epically flawed) film Birth of a Nation retold the Civil War from the perspectives of two close families torn apart by the war, in which each family would lose a son; and in the year in between came the Peerless Quartet’s recording of “I Love You Just Like Lincoln Loved the Old Red, White and Blue.”

Maudlin to the point of nauseating, patriotic to the point of laughable, the song tells of a lad meeting a lassie at Gettysburg, where each are leaving flowers for their fathers as part of Decoration Day. As songbirds mate in the trees, the lad declares his love for the lass – he loves her just like Lincoln loved the old red, white, and blue. In the second verse, it is revealed, of course, that his father fought for the Yankees and hers for the Confederates, but this doesn’t matter. “My father wore a suit of blue and your dad a suit of gray,” the lad sings, “That’s why we both bring roses here on Decoration Day!” His words ring with confidence, if a touch of caution, as though he is figuring them out as he says them: There is more bringing them together than separating them – in fact, it’s their very differences that bring them together in the first place.

What the song’s words do lyrically, its music does sonically. The Peerless Quartet have all of the cloying whitebread polish of a barbershop quartet, giving the song a soulless top layer of varnish one might expect from a quaint parlor ballad. Woven throughout the song are snippets of various patriotic and marching songs, stitched together by the rat-a-tat of military-style drums. For a song that is as sappy as Valentine’s Day, it sounds like the Fourth of July. The song not only reconciles North and South, but love and patriotism.

But where is Lincoln during all of this? Where he often is in popular culture: Removed and stoic, like a god watching over things rather than one who participates in the events (or perhaps sets them into motion). His tragic death occurred at just the right time to seal him off at the moment of triumph, which instantly turned a very human leader into a larger-than-life martyr/prophet. When the lad exclaims that he loves the lass like Lincoln loves the old red, white, and blue, he’s saying that his love is the ultimate love – a love from a very real and human source that transcends itself to become almost holy and immortal.

It is interesting to note that he equates his love to the love that Lincoln felt for his country – as opposed to, say, for Mary Todd Lincoln – perhaps all the more so because even after repeated listens this doesn’t jump out to the listener. For all of our rhetoric about separation of church and state, Americans take it for granted that love for their country is a divine love. And this, as exemplified by Lincoln’s spirit, creates the Union that Lincoln fought – and ultimately died – for: A land in which a war of “brother against brother” can directly result in a ballad of “lover meets lover.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1963: “Surfin’ USA” by the Beach Boys

If everybody had an ocean. With these five words, the Beach Boys became the epic dreamers of American music. Nothing was too big to put out there, no dream too outlandish, no space too big.

The five words are clumsily thrown in at the beginning of a rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (a move so obvious they gave Berry a songwriting credit), this could have been another fluke rock and roll hit in a presumably fleeting new genre they called “surf rock.” Instead, they signaled the beginning of the Beach Boys’ great American adventure, which played out in the ensuing decades as they chased after a sound as big and deep as the country they loved so much.

“Surfin’ USA” was the breakthrough. For the first time, the lead singers in the Beach Boys overdubbed their own voices to fatten up the sound. This made their already sophisticated vocals that much more so – earlier hits like “Surfin’ Safari” and “409” sounded sparse in comparison. For the rest of their classic period, the Beach Boys continued to use this technique to achieve their signature big and bold golden sound.

As is often pointed out, none of the main Beach Boys ever surfed – songwriter/bassist Brian Wilson, his lead singer/cousin Mike Love, and his guitarist/brother Carl Wilson – the only one who ever did at this point was Dennis Wilson, Brian and Carl’s little brother/drummer, who initially had the most peripheral role in the band. But no matter. Surfing was merely just the muse that Brian Wilson used to express his American dreams; when Brian started writing songs about girls and cars soon after, the Beach Boys felt that they were expanding their horizons.

“Surfin’ USA” is little more than a catchy idea put to a catchier tune, with just enough surfing terminology thrown in to lend the song, however inaccurately, an air of authenticity. It’s the refrains where the whole thing snaps together: building off of the idea of everybody in the United States having their own ocean, the Beach Boys call out all of the hot beaches from coast to coast with joyful earnestness. In doing so, they remake the map of America from a land of closed-off wildernesses to a coast of open beachfronts.

Over the years, dark realities would cloud the Beach Boys’ seemingly sunny world – both within the band and throughout the nation they lived in – but for the two-and-a-half minutes that “Surfin’ USA” lasted, you’d never know it was coming. Released in June, the song played all through the summer on radios all over the beaches the song named, and all was well and good and safe with the world. And then, less than six months later, on November 22, 1963, the ’60s took root, and “Surfin’ USA” suddenly became the quaint musings of a distant landscape.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1958: “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry’s position in rock and roll is akin to that of Duke Ellington’s in jazz: The finest composer from within the music itself, whose standards provided the rich soil out of which the genre would eventually grow and flourish. And no song was earthier than the one that began, “Way down in Louisiana, down in New Orleans…”

Almost thirty years after its release, Chuck Berry mused on the song’s origin in his autobiography. “The gateway from freedom, I was led to understand, was somewhere ‘close to New Orleans’ where most Africans were sorted through and sold,” he wrote,

I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I’d been told my great grandfather lived ‘way back up in the woods among the evergreens’ in a log cabin. I revived the era with a story about a “colored boy name[d] Johnny B. Goode.” My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say “colored boy” and changed it to “country boy.”

“Johnny B. Goode” is more than just Chuck Berry’s finest song, but the finest and most famous song in all of rock and roll. Instantly recognizable from its opening bars, “Johnny B. Goode” is rock and roll’s version of the American Dream; as a piece of mythmaking, it’s on par with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The title character could be black or white, Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley: born poor into a log cabin, the kid picks up a guitar and makes good, dreaming his way to superstardom. Along the way, he goes from rags to riches, from country to city, and from social oppression to freedom.

As Berry points out, he placed Johnny in the “gateway from freedom,” the place where his own ancestors first brought in the New World to be bought and sold. (Berry also could have pointed out that New Orleans had Congo Square, where the African slave dances are often cited as the origin of jazz – and, one could add, all of the hot music that followed.) The freedom that had taken Berry’s ancestors several centuries and a Civil War to secure, Johnny can get by picking up a guitar and playing. And tellingly, Berry doesn’t have Johnny learn his talent from books, records, or an old master – instead, he plays guitar by the railroad track, strumming to the rhythm that the drivers made. It is here where Johnny first learns to “Go!,” that the only way out of his life and into his dreams is by constantly moving ahead like the train rattling right by him – taking its rhythm for his music, its forward drive for his determination.

And “Go!” Johnny did. Countless answer records track Johnny’s progression through rock and roll, only the first of which was Berry’s own “Bye Bye Johnny,” which frames the original from the perspective of Johnny’s mother. First she continues the story by sending Johnny on a bus to make movies in Hollywood, then flashes back to how she bought his first guitar from gathering crops, and then flashes forward to when Johnny writes her that he had fallen in love. The song ends, appropriately, with Johnny building his wife a mansion by the railroad tracks.

But that was just the beginning. The figure of a restlessly motivated boy-child named Johnny crops up again and again in the best straight-ahead rock and roll music: it’s in John Lennon’s pep-talks to his fellow Beatles at the turn of the 1960s, where he’d say, “Where are we going, fellas?” to which they’d respond, “To the top, Johnny!”; it’s in Bob Dylan’s first Top 40 hit in 1965, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which began, “Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine”; it’s in the Kinks’ “Johnny Thunder” from their 1968 concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, in which Johnny is the town’s misunderstood local rebel (complete with a motorcycle); it’s in the Slickers’ early reggae anthem “Johnny Too Bad,” featured in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, which finds Johnny as a Jamaican gangster, walking down the street with a ratchet and a pistol in his waist; it’s in Bruce Springsteen’s “Incident on 57^th Street” from 1973, in which Johnny is a Spanish gang member, torn between the woman he loves and the street life he craves; it’s in Patti Smith’s epic title track from 1975’s Horses, where Johnny beats his head against the school locker until horses come running out in every direction; it’s in the sudden emergence of a foul-mouthed punk named Johnny Rotten who explodes with the Sex Pistols a year later and bring things full-circle by trying to cover “Johnny B. Goode,” only he can’t remember the words, and can only come up with: “Ayanlouisianayaya NEW ORLEANS!”

This last Johnny doesn’t so much perform the song as he does destroy it; if one cannot imagine a better version than the one sung by Chuck Berry, one cannot imagine a worse version than the one sung by Johnny Rotten. Yet, in his own way, Rotten is using the song to reach for the same fleeting sense of freedom that Berry chased when he wrote it, another poor boy cashing in on his dream of the ultimate escape into stardom.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1984: “Like a Virgin” by Madonna

Madonna is in that rare category of modern American singers – along with perhaps only Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson – whose massive success has caused the idea of the artist to trump the artist as an actual entity. Elvis, Michael, and Madonna are not just singers or performers but American icons, ranking along such national treasures as Abraham Lincoln, Coca-Cola, and Mickey Mouse. To speak of them is to speak beyond them, in a way that separates them even from contemporaries as celebrated and prolific as Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and Bob Dylan. Artists like Madonna and Elvis are simply bigger – the ready-made pop culture ambassadors for an international, all-American global brand.

In this regard, talking about Madonna is sort of like an American post-modern equivalent of writing about Shakespeare – the idea will always trump the person. But this was not always so. As a child, I remember constantly mixing Madonna up with another new popular singer of that time, Cyndi Lauper (much to my older sister’s chagrin). Today such a mix-up is laughable, but at the time, they seemed interchangeable to this young boy: A loud, blonde, wildly-dressed girl singer with catchy songs. The piece I was missing, of course, was because of my young age: Sex.

This was clear from the moment she broke big nationally with “Like a Virgin” – a shrewdly calculated perfect storm of a great song, a great album cover, a great video, and a great performance at the then-nascent MTV Music Video Awards. In hindsight, it’s the latter that gets the most attention because it told the story the quickest and (for its day) the most shockingly: A beautiful young girl in a white wedding dress sexily rolling around the stage while cooing about feeling like a virgin touched for the very first time.

Thus, the challenge Madonna presents is to listen to her with fresh ears. Her name has become so synonymous with pop music, many Americans probably think of her before the sacred figure she was named after – who also happened to be an icon in the true sense of the word. And long before Madonna the singer entered the pop lexicon, Madonna the icon provided the basis for the Freudian concept of the Madonna-whore complex. Capitalizing on the twin American obsessions with sacred purity and sexual deviancy, Madonna essentially became a living, breathing, singing Madonna-whore complex – a young Catholic girl with a pure voice and crosses around her neck, who dressed in lingerie, danced sexy, and wore a belt around her waist that said “Boy Toy.”

“Like a Virgin” was thus the perfect song to be Madonna’s cultural breakthrough – her first truly iconic song and her first American number one hit. Although it was technically the title track to her second album, everything about it seemed different and exciting, “shiny and new.” The song’s opening lines are so simple and perfect that they almost glide right by the listener without notice: “I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through.” In its own way, these words capture the entire story of America in eleven words or less.

They hark back to Captain Smith and the early settlers setting up the first permanent colony in the New World – Virginia, named after the recently-deceased Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. Like their northern Puritan brethren who would arrive a few years later, the harshness of the land was something of a shock to these men – the endless tangle of trees, the unruly savages, the extreme elements – such that the next three hundred years or so of American’s history was largely based around the taming and shrinking of its wilderness. Manifest destiny shaped our national perspective on the inside, while the open range-combating cowboy gave us a distinct national identity on the outside. A large part of Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in the election preceding “Like a Virgin” was a direct result of such ideas – in his speeches he invoked the old Puritan adage of our country being an untarnished “city on a hill” for all the world to see, while in his posters he wore denim and a cowboy hat in an emulation of the Marlboro Man. Like Madonna in her song, the country had made it through the wilderness, but still used its pre-wilderness conquering rhetoric as its guiding philosophy.

Madonna’s opening lines captures the shift from trailblazer to a settler; her mission of conquest is no longer the land, but rather a man who lives on it. The song’s central hook is the perfect centerpiece of her story: The man makes her feel “like a virgin – touched for the very first time.” In this simple yet rich phrase lies the essence of Madonna’s appeal. The key word here is “like,” which turns the phrase from a statement of fact to one of metaphor: The singer is decidedly not a virgin being touched for the very first time, but rather like a virgin being touched for the very first time. The latter implies the singer’s cool detachment regarding sexual activity, while unleashing an endless cycle between pure and tainted: She feels like a virgin being touched for the very first time because she has been touched their before, such that in this shrewd phrase, the two become one. Knowing what it was like to be touched as a virgin makes her aware of how special it feels to be touched in this new relationship’s context.

Thus, Madonna makes herself into a Madonna-whore complex (or perhaps, a complex Madonna-whore) as her body transforms into both a country that has made it through the wilderness and one that is shiny and new. She can bring these two distinct countries together because they are already the same one.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1930: “Last Kind Word Blues” by Geeshie Wiley

What are we to make of Geeshie Wiley? She appeared, made a few country blues records just before the genre's market perished in the Great Depression, and then disappeared back into the ether from whence she came. There are no known pictures of her; all the information we know about her are sketches that walk the line between hearsay and rumor: she may have been from Natchez, Mississippi (or somewhere nearby), she was supposedly romantically linked to Papa Charlie Jackson or Casey Bill Weldon (or both of them, or neither of them), she is said to have worked in the traveling medicine show in the 1920s (unless she didn’t). We don’t even know her real name – “Geeshie” was a southern nickname for an African American woman.

Mysterious figures from the past are nothing new, but the advent of recording technology ups the ante. Unlike an old folktale or faded photograph, a record is just that – a record – a document that captures something so intimate yet at the same time entirely intangible. Playing one can be like conjuring a ghost in a room. There is something ethereal about the experience that can stay with you long after the record has ended. A few films picked up on this idea in the mid-1990s, most notably Ghost World, which featured Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman,” and Crumb, which featured Wiley’s “Last Kind Word Blues.” Through the Crumb soundtrack, Geeshie Wiley began to creep into the American collective consciousness like a memory that’s so old you can’t be sure if it ever actually happened. This is the realm where Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Word Blues” exists.

It’s a haunting song, beginning with churning guitar chords emerging through the static fuzz of a thousand rusty needles. A distant, lonesome melody is picked out on the guitar, stepping forward then doubling back on itself, answered by dark, rhythmic chords that try to stomp it out like a small forest fire. Wiley begins singing the melody while picking it out on her guitar so that the notes become phantom footsteps that walk along with her words. Her vocal gives us almost nothing to work with – it is entirely deadpan, void of any apparent emotion, anger, or fear. She doesn’t so much sing the blues as she does report them, as though she was a lost soul telling her life story from purgatory. Even when she was alive, she sang as though she was dead.

What gives the recording its power and tension then, is the effortless stream-of-conscious imagery that forms the song’s words, borrowing old blues lines and making up new ones, all sung in the same haunted, blank voice. It is like trying to follow someone’s path through the fog: the vocal doesn’t so much sit on top of the song as it does appear, disappear, and reappear throughout it, sometimes obscured by the second churning guitar, the crackle of the record’s surface noise, or Wiley’s own southern dialect. Like Wiley herself, the song seems to mysteriously exist on its own terms, holding all but revealing nothing.

All we get are snatches. For the record, the last kind word the singer hears her daddy say is that if he dies in the German War (which we now know as World War I), she should send his body back to his mother-in-law. Clearly, these words don’t sound very kind. Is this supposed to be a joke? A cruel statement of bitter irony? Or is this truly the closest thing to kind words the singer has recently experienced? She then either recounts his further instructions about if he dies, or reflects on her own: “If I get killed, ’f I get killed, please don’t bury my soul,” she intones. “Just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole.”

It has been suggested that the blues are the first musical form built primarily on irony, and while that may be an overstatement, it does speak to the idea that much of the best blues explores the place between what one asks for and what one receives; “I asked for water,” goes the classic Tommy Johnson line, “and she gave me gasoline.” What makes “Last Kind Word Blues” so intriguing is a seeming lack of irony – the way Geeshie Wiley sings it challenges us to take every word entirely literally. Thus, her daddy’s words just may have been the last kind thing she heard, and when she sings about the buzzards eating a corpse whole, she sounds even more serious.

From there, the singer becomes a wanderer, making her way through a lost world of near-gothic simplicity. In one verse, she walks across the rich man’s field, in another she goes to the train depot and looks at the sign, in yet another she recalls her mother’s words to her just before she died – the content of which is oddly (or perhaps appropriately) rendered unintelligible by the poor sound quality of the recording itself.

And then, in the most beautiful and bizarre image of them all, she looks across the Mississippi River and sees her face on the other side. “What you do, to me baby,” she sings in the final verse, “It never gets out of me.”

The same could be said about Geeshie Wiley.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

1926: “White House Blues” by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers

After baseball, sex, and racism, America’s favorite national pastime is presidential assassination. Virtually no other event crystallizes the American experience so succinctly, so completely, freezing in time the assassinated and the assassin, so that in one instant the powerless becomes the powerful, the great chief executive falls to the lowly anarchist, and the two become one. Anyone can grow up to be president, Americans love to tell themselves – but to grow up to shoot the president, well, that’s something that very few people can do. It is the one role in America that is more powerful than the president himself.

Four times in our nation’s history has this occurred, and four times the nation fell into a suspended mourning period. The fallen president becomes an instant martyr while the nation obsessively devours any new headline or news bulletin and turns any artifact connected to the deceased into virtual holy relics. For a country that was founded on the rejection of monarchy, every effort is made to keep the slain president not just to make sure the president is remembered, but immortalized. By the time that a miserable anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York on September 5, 1901, the new medium of film was being used to shoot not just the president’s funeral progression, but a reenactment of Czolgosz’s execution, which many people took to be real (and many still do to this day). And to fill in where the cutting-edge technology of film couldn’t go, the oldest form of collective remembrance was used: the folksong.

Somewhere in the country, sometime after September 5, 1901, someone came up with the words and the tune to “White House Blues” – or more likely, based it on an even older set of words and a tune. Whoever it was did his or her job well; if Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers are any indication, they were still singing it a quarter of a century later. Poole was an archetypal country musician who loved drinking hard and playing the banjo, his life driven by a seemingly insatiable wanderlust for places to drink and play. He was nine when McKinley was shot, but if the news registered any trauma for him, Poole had long left it behind by the time he recorded the song with North Carolina Ramblers Posey Wilson Rorer on fiddle and Norman Woodlieff on guitar. Instead of grief, sorrow, or pity, Poole’s vocal captures something else entirely: a deadpan humor that’s drier than the dead president’s bones.

“Roosevelt in the White House, drinkin’ from a silver cup,” he announces in one verse, “McKinley’s in the graveyard, he’ll never wake up.” It’s a chiding, perfect line, at once both sacrilegious and hilarious. The whole thing is a joke to him – that poor bastard McKinley, aren’t we glad we’re not him! Or as Will Rogers (who also knew a thing or two about making fun of the president) loved to say a few years later, everything’s funny as long as it happens to somebody else. “White House Blues” proves that Rogers’ words are true, even when applied to presidential assassination.

But it would be an oversimplification to say that the inherent humor of “White House Blues” is all it has going for it, whereas its humor is merely the tip of the iceberg, the element that draws you in before unveiling its mysteries. It is a blues-labeled song that’s not actually in blues form announcing the death of a president who’s been dead for 25 years. Over the monotonous folk instrumentation, Poole spits out his words flatly, sometimes rushing them and sometimes repeating them, and in at least one point you can hear him flub the beginning of a verse entirely, quickly pull out, and begin singing the verse again. Maybe the session was running low on time; maybe Poole was drunk; maybe Poole simply didn’t care. We’ll certainly never know.

But it’s the words that keep the song going, providing a stream-of-consciousness panoramic American landscape on the brink of a new century. In one verse, the singer dryly jokes about the president’s death while in another he fearfully ponders his own; at one point, he watches the doctor grimly fold his specs over the dying president’s body, while in another he calls out the assassin on his evil deed, before oddly noting commercial brand of the gun used (it's an Iver Johnson); running throughout the song seems to be a narrative about a race between a horse and a train. Could this be about the riderless horse at the president’s funeral and the train that carries his corpse back to Ohio? Or perhaps the nineteenth century racing the twentieth century to find out which one is mightier?

If Charlie Poole knows, he isn’t telling, but if you buy him a drink, maybe he’ll make something up.

[This is the first post of what I plan to be a series - and hopefully one day a book - charting 100 years of American recorded music, spanning from 1891 to 1991, with one song chosen to represent each year. The goal is not necessarily pick the greatest or most influential song of each year (although that does sometimes happens), but rather to pick a recording that could be considered the most distinctly American. To my ears, anyway. I have a full (play)list of the songs that I'm always tinkering with, and maybe one day down the road I'll post that, if and when it is ever "finished." In the meantime, I plan to regularly post small essays like this one about the different songs in no particular order. Hope you dig.]