It's called "Clar de Kitchen" (minstrel show dialect for "Clear the Kitchen"), often spelled "Clare de Kitchen"). Mike Thomas is tabbing it out chord-melody style in DAD for the Prairieland Dulcimer Strings. But I like to play it in an open Ionian tuning like DAA or CGG. And I've made up some 1970s-style tab - with fret numbers above the words - for Saturday's session, since we're working with open modal tunings.
Here are a YouTube clip and a link to help you get the tune in mind. Come tuned to DAA.
Gordy Ohlinger-Clare de Kitchen
Ohlinger, of California, plays a minstrel-style banjo. His talking-blues delivery is probably more from the 1930s than the 1830s, but his act is in the spirit of the minstrel shows as they influenced vaudville, medicine shows and 20th-century artists as varied ("diverse" isn't the word we want here!) as Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff and the old Amos & Andy radio show. Ohlinger's patter leading up to the song begins at 1:25, and the song itself begins at 2:45.
Ohlinger works in a few of his own licks here (IMHO they're pretty effective, but they aren't in the sheet music on the Johns Hopkins University library website). A more traditional version - relatively speaking - is by the 2nd South Carolina String Band, a group of Civil War re-enactors It's on their CD Dulcem Melodies (30 second sample available on Amazon.com). Their arrangements are for a modern old-time string band - fiddle, banjo, guitar, etc. - but they play a lot of the old minstrel-show repertory, and I think their vocals are as close as we're going to get to the spirit of 19th-century blackface minstrels.
Below are some notes on the song I wrote for The Picayune, newsletter for interpreters at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site, but it never got in the newsletter. So you're reading it here first.
* * *
Blackface minstrel shows had their heyday a few years after the town of New Salem winked out, but their music was already being heard in the 1830s – and it was heard in the Sangamon country. Several of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite songs had their origin on the minstrel stage, and one such tune has a direct connection with New Salem - more precisely with the mill dam at New Salem.
The song was a ditty called “Clar de Kitchen” (minstrel show dialect for “Clear the Kitchen”), and a parody of the song was printed in The Sangamo Journal when the steamboat Talisman cleared the New Salem mill dam on its way to Springfield in the early spring of 1832.
Blackface minstrelsy is a popular genre of the 1800s that makes us feel uncomfortable today, since it featured broad, sometimes vicious stereotypes of African Americans. But if we ignored it, we would ignore something that was an important part of the popular culture of the early to mid-19th century.
We would also ignore some of the music that Abraham Lincoln most enjoyed.
“Lincoln was an lifelong admirer of the Negro minstrel songs so much in his day,” says John Lair, a Lincoln buff who knew something about music as founder of the Renfro Valley (Ky.) Barn Dance. “Nothing could more quickly arouse him from a fit of despondency than a rollicking nonsense song of this type. Ward Hill Lamon, his close friend and associate through the years, said Lincoln’s favorite was ‘De Blue-Tailed Fly’ [also known as ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’], which he called ‘that buzzing song.’”
In his book “Songs Lincoln Loved” (1954), Lair also mentioned “Lucy Long,” “Old Dan Tucker,” “Jim Crow,” “Jim Along Josey” and “Zip Coon.” All were very popular minstrel songs of the 1830s and 40s.
Another, mentioned in Carl Sandburg’s “American Songbag” (1927), is “Hoosen Johnny,” a ditty about a black bull that may have its roots in African American folk music of the day and was a great favorite of lawyers riding the 8th Judicial Circuit. Constance Rourke, in “American Humor” dates it to the 1840s “and probably earlier,” which would put it in our period.
Almost all of the earliest minstrel hits are thought to have originated in the oral tradition, in one variant or another, well before they were published.
One that surely was popular in oral tradition before it got on the stage was “Clar de Kitchen,” or “Clear the Kitchen” to use the modern standard English spelling. On his “Fiddler’s Companion” website, Andrew Kuntz cites a description of a fiddler on the Indiana frontier around 1810, “delving [a]way with fingers, elbow, cat-gut and horse-hair, to the joy of all around - The pieces of music mostly called for, were 'The gray cat kittened in Charley's wig,’ 'Captain Johnston', 'Buncomb' &c. the whole ending in a jigg called 'Clear the kitchen'.”
So the song was a favorite on the Midwestern frontier long before it got on the stage. Both “Jim Crow” Rice and another blackface entertainer named George Nichols claimed it. The chorus, in Rice’s version, is:
In old Kentuck in de arternoon,When the steamboat Talisman made its voyage from St. Louis to a river landing by Springfield in March 1832, crew, passangers and a crew of men with axes had to cut its passage through heavy ice on the Sangamon River. You probably remember this: Young Lincoln was one of the axemen, and he piloted the boat as it bushwacked its way back downstream in April.
We sweep de floor wid a bran new broom,
And arter dat we form a ring,
And dis de song dat we do sing:
(CHORUS)
Clare de kitchen, old folks, young folks,
Clare de kitchen, old folks, young folks,
Old Virginny never tire.
An anonymous “bard” in the April 5 issue of The Sangamo Journal commemorated the Talisman's passage with a lengthy song, specifying it was to be sung to the tune of "Clare de Kitchen." It began:
The Talisman came with a great hurra,One verse directly refers to New Salem, where the steamboat was manhandled over the mill dam. As the “bard” put it:
To go up the Sangamo;
She beat the ice, aft and fore,
And left us safe upon the shore!
So clar the steam boat, thick ice, thin ice;
Clar de steam boat, thick ice, thin ice;
Young Illinois never tire!
O! When we come to Salem dam,Rice's lyrics and a MIDI file are available on line at Benjamin Robert Tubb's "Music from 1800-1860" page in the Public Domain Music website at http://www.pdmusic.org/1800s.html. There’s more rhythm than melody to the song, but it’s a catchy little tune. And it was definitely popular in the 1830s.
Up we went against it, jam!
We tried to cross with all our might,
We couldn’t do it – we staid all night;
O! clar de steam boat &c.
But there’s more to it than that, and “Clear the Kitchen” is one of very few old minstrel show ditties I wouldn’t be embarrassed to sing in public today.
Says jazz afficionado, pianist and historian Karl Koenig on his website Basinstreet.com, “Popularized by Thomas Dartmouth ‘Daddy’ Rice, the text is close to the tradition of Negro humor. In a succession of nonsense verses we meet various animals, an old blind horse; a jay bird sitting on a hickory limb; a bull frog dressed in soldier's clothes; and a little whip-poor-will whose sad fate is to be eaten. … George Nichols was the first to sing ‘Clare’ in public and is said to have adapted it from a melody which Nichols had heard sung by Negro fireman on the Miss. River.”
A couple of verses will give us the flavor:
A Jay bird sot on a hickery limb,
He wink'd at me and I wink'd at him;
I pick'd up a stone and hit his shin.
Says he, "you better not do that agin."
And this:
A bull frog dress'd in soger's [soldier’s] close,Koenig echoes the influential African American poet and folklorist Sterling Brown, who sais in "Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs," excerpted in the University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry website. Says Brown, "... power and pomp in the guise of the bullfrog and bulldog have the tables turned on them by the sassy blue-jay and crow."
Went in de field to shoot some crows;
De crows smell powder and fly away,
De bull frog mighty mad dat day.
That didn't always happen in the minstrel shows, and I think it ought to be celebrated when it did.
No comments:
Post a Comment