On Whose Way: Thoughts on Jumpin' Judy

1

On Whose Way: thoughts on ‘Jumpin’ Judy’

Robbie Dawson

My previous post about Erik Darling’s performance of ‘St. John’s River’ was concerned with locating the particular heft and anti-heft that caused the song-as-fragment to glow so enchantedly. ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ comes number two in my playlist of Erik Darling turns, and in several ways it is the perfect companion to ‘St. John’s River’. The case for companionship weighs both lyrically and musically, with the former being characterized by the same minor tableau and direct address applied in the other song, and latterly by the same suitably high-lonesome-cum-revival mono-melodic arrangement. A stranger link is found in another version of ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ at a few degrees remove from the present one. A verse not present in Darling’s performance makes mentions of “St. John’s River,” and I have used this connection to extend some thoughts about movement and axis as a technical device in folk song.

I – Preliminaries

Companionships and provenances

Before starting proper, some preliminary information and speculation is necessary. In the early 1930s, Alan and his father John Lomax recorded Allen Prothro singing ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ in Chattanooga, TN. It’s unclear quite when the recording made its way into commercial circulation, whether before or after Darling’s performance, and any further speculation would be pointless, not fairly crediting the info-stripped mp3 era with the silence it imposes. In other words, wordy speculation would simply mask – smoke – the inexcusable absence of easily available discographical data present in this case. Simply, the song and a Prothro-sent performance of it was likely first publically accessible in print form through Lomax’s 1934 collection, American Ballads and Folk Song. It should be noted here that while the recording (likely by Lomax) and the text (collected by Lomax) can’t differ too much in provenance, the text sung is different from the text printed, for whatever reason. The first part of this post will consider the Prothro and the Darling as they are sung, and a latter part will talk of the Prothro as it is printed- only within which are the verses about ‘St. John’s River’. It has served my purposes throughout to cast Prothro as the archetypal chain ganger. This is in fact likely to be false, but I felt that an analysis of Darling’s song would be better served by a human rather abstract spur, however engineered.

The case for transmission

The tune and delivery in Prothro’s version of ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ is very similar to Erik Darling’s version, with the addition of a simulated hammer-pounding ‘Ha!’ keeping time between phrases, reserving a link with the song’s place in the chain gang. The printed version directs us to sing ‘rather slow—with pathos’, and this is not a bad description of Prothro’s delivery.

There are three possible sources for Erik Darling’s version: 1) Lomax’s published text 2) Lomax’s contemporaneous recording, and 3) some other less direct transmission. Evidence of the former would be encouraging, since the ability to breathe fresh life into even an accurate transcription is a skill very rarely acknowledged in the folk world since it transgresses some

2

more holy tenets of the practice. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to recognise an aptitude possessed by the revival generation that serves even in its negative symbolism (the written word versus the living source) to vivify the old ways. But the case for Erik’s book-learning is weakened in this instance in an otherwise useful transcription by a fluffed top line, which can be seen here in an online facsimile of American Ballads and Folk Songs (see notes, below). The drop from the first ‘judy’ to ‘jumpin’ ought to be of a minor third, not a major third, and the drop of a fifth from A to D in the following bar should be of a fourth, A to E. Erik’s performance adheres more to the recording, not the transcription, so disregarding a musician’s intuitive license we can presume the printed song was not Erik’s only prompt, if it all. The verses sung in both versions are juxtaposed below.

Jumpin’ Judy – Erik Darling

Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy All over this land All over this land

Well you kick and stomp and beat me That’s all I know

If you treat me right I’ll stay all day

If you treat me wrong I’ll be on my way

Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy All over this land

Jumpin’ Judy – Allen Prothro

Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy All over this world All over this world

Gonna take this old hammer Give it back to Jumpin’ Judy Go tell her I’m gone

Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy I wonder where the captain’s gone

Don’t you want a dollar? But you got to go home

Jumpin’ Judy, Jumpin’ Judy What’s the matter now?

Well you kick me and you beat me That’s all I know

Yonder come my captain Who has been gone too long

Tell him how you treat me So you better get gone

He got a 44, He got a 44 In his right hand

It has been noted already that the two Prothro sources do not match, but it is also significant that the recording fades out before the performance concludes. This is a reflection of the limitied capacity of the sound recording and storage medium that Lomax would have been

3

using in the field (about three minutes) and explains why the book text is longer. The extra verses will be dealt with in the final section, below.

II – The Tune

The song as Erik sings it

Erik sings without accompaniment in a broad-stepping and precise style, complete with an admirable yelp up to the A above middle C. The tune is idiosyncratic and shapely, but in Prothro’s care is never far from having a blues or Pentecostal feel. While being close in content, Darling somehow infers much less of a blues tonality, and with its freer rhthym aligns the song more with a lament than a blues complaint.

The tune, presented here, has four distinct phrases, combining in broad strokes in quite clear ways. Relaying between tonal centres of D, A, F#m and Bm, better sense can be made of the melody with a simple motivic analysis (see fig. 1, below). Phrase 1 starts high on D, descending a fourth to A. Phrase 2 starts at the F# below and ascends a fifth to C#. Phrase 3 repeats the descending shape of phrase 1 but expands in range, falling from a high A down a seventh to B.

4

The final phrase, repeated once with a minor variation, has a cadential feel, ascending then descending to rest on B. This final phrase suggests a harmonic resolution from F#m to Bm.

III –Reading the Songs

Prothro’s armed captain

Being a chain gang song, ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ would originally have been sung by convicts to mitigate labour, partly by keeping time and partly by commenting and commentating on their surroundings, their overseers in particular (whom we naturally picture on horseback in hard sun). Judy is a recurring character in chain gang songs (as is Rosie, who often brings good luck), and the word 'jumpin'' is thought to refer to Judy's defiance towards her guards and to describe the manner in which someone works "when driven by an angry guard" (American Ballads and Folk Songs p.82).

This guard – deferentially ‘captain’ – is an enduring preoccupation in the Prothro version, and he figures heavily in the song’s central fantasy of escaping, and the fear of being caught doing so. This fixation is host to our sense of paranoia and, us being free men and women, wrongfoots are conception of what to think about when thinking about escape. We may think of plans, chances, mark hints, lapses, and weigh probability, but the chain ganger’s first thoughts are, “I wonder where the captain’s gone…[he’s] been gone too long.” This errant note of concern - of need - is an offbeat and effective testament to deeper captivity, and a highpoint of Prothro’s song.

In following the singer, our eye settles on the captain’s weapon. From the expansive first verse, “all over this world,” the song (as we hear it) narrows to a very local, fixated subject: his .44. If we take the song to be a meditation on escape, then it is unsurprisingly concerned with the obstacles to this, and a consideration of the captain’s coiled threat (his gun) is necessarily one primarily of vigilance. But the gun’s not holstered; we have the captain returning with weapon in hand- further cause for collective vigilance.

Since we can imagine the verses called by a leader and taken up by the chain gang, it’s plausible to imagine the verse being sung as a form of status update on the space around the men, a commentary on something wider that does not need to be voiced. The gang knows where the captain has been and knows what a protracted absence might imply, and so know that a pistol holstered and a pistol brandished are two different things. If it is not too offensive, I am put in mind of a group of birds, serried on a wire.

Darling’s treatment

Darling presents a very different text, with two of his four matching Prothro’s, and two that are harder to pin down:



5

Narrative and cast in the Prothro are more implied than evident, and our attempts to attribute voices to either the singer or Judy is frustrated, perhaps by the song’s construction from stock verses as per the will and whim of a lead caller. The crucible of Darling’s revival praxis would understandably have been less comfortable in permitting such refractions, and his version uses ambiguity and implication in wholly other ways.

It’s been shown that Prothro’s version effects (brings about) a shift in scale between the first and final verses. Darling’s is by contrast almost palindromic, with the song hinging either side of the near ultimatum excerpted just above, with a cursory broadening of scope either side of this. Like a graphic ‘V’, this structure mimes the opening and closing of a book, and in its fleeting commencement, consummation, and conclusion is teasing in its idealization of the song fragment – the reconstructed excerpt - as a form unto itself.

This is a sort of curate’s delight, a connoisseur’s teehee- a sonic distressed look couture. The fine lapidary form in which Darling sets the song is not so much or so simply a revision or reworking of his source, but is dialectical in its retrieval of one song-as-phenomenon (and with it its hallmarks of fragment and agency that I have been discussing here), and the subsequent transplantation and transcription of its perceived qualities (fragment and agency) into a form that gives them precedence and autonomy as artistic techniques alongside the song itself. I am speaking here of a) a fetishisation and expert redeployment of the qualities inherent and essential to the original and b) the act of extracting (song as ore is a nice idea) such qualities so that they are no longer constituent, processual, structural consequences born of the very sociological origin of the Prothro version but artistic qualities displayed in such a manner as to be present as the result of careful artistic assembly, not of bonded chemical processes (to extend the mining metaphor).

This is certainly an abstract thread, but I am following it in an attempt to get at the heart of a) Darling’s construction of an art song and b) what kind of dastardly relationship modern artistic process requires of its source material. Of the latter, I have suggested that it takes the form of a very subtle recuperation of extra-song qualities perceived in source material by the folk revival artist (who we can assume possesses a strong hunch, or taste, for these same extraneous features). It’s not all about the song as it is sung, but the wider constellation of any given song in any given performance. I have not gone all that far into examining exactly what of these extra-song properties is appealing to the artist, but I would argue that my discussion of the fragment – reified or not – is one such idée fixe.

The question remains, how does the artist actually execute this process of extraction, and in so doing better refine and control the song-as-art? I would argue that it is in large part achieved by the careful verse structure of the song (see: palindromic, above). According with this recto-verso ‘V’ form, the song marshals other techniques the investigation of which can be useful in two distinct ways. Firstly, to better understand the lyric in and of itself, and secondly to further explore the song’s complex relationship to its sources and its equally complex satisfaction of singer and audience desires and fascinations (largely to do with potent notions of authenticity). It is the former thread that I now propose to take up again. A discussion of the latter will follow.

6

A dance for two people

From the source’s richer bequeathal, Darling’s version features a cast of just two, leaving the Captain out entirely and ‘‘Jumpin’ Judy’’ abstracted, baffling in her opacity. Darling’s version uses this clarity to gently equivocate in its duty to delegate the balance of power, a vacillation constituent to the best folk love songs, ‘St. John’s River’ included.

Well you kick and stomp and beat me That’s all I know

This relationship is abusive and possessive, with mind and body fought over on parallel fronts. Darling’s apparent revision of the Prothro source in the first line here (from ‘kick…beat’ to ‘kick…stomp…beat’) is a bloodsport combo in the best sense, coached by the literary law of threes. The grace of the following line is an object lesson in lyric writing. A lesser song might appeal to quality (I hate that you kick and stomp and beat me) but in appealing to quantity - abuse begetting paucity (that’s all I know) - the song is enriched in line with another favoured dichotomy – showing above telling.

But further, the abused are driven to locate a plane on which to establish a system of exchange of whatever kind with the abuser. This is a stage in the path towards triumph. It may not be on the more obvious level of the destitute, the broken (expressed in terms of quality), but to gain strength from abuse is, in the first instance, to have learned how to gain- by what chemical process to bind the mal-exertion and mal-attention of evil in a balanced system of exchange rather than in acts of dissipation and squander on the part of the abuser, and forlorn receipt on the part of the abused. It is this task that defines strength in adversity, and the second line shows us this.

That’s all I know

To gain from one party, some kind of exchange relationship needs to be established or be reconfigured for one’s benefit. This is why strength is required- to gain one has to define or recognise the parts to be relinquished, and then to bring them into the kind of proximity befitting transaction. Proximity to one’s abuser is understandably dangerous, and this is partly why it demands strength. This lyric expresses as much, and is the reason it’s treatment of abuse is so compelling.

Master and servant relationships are paradoxical things by construction. Discrepancy of rank is mismatched by an intimacy in other respects. Indeed status discrepancy itself has been recognised as a mechanism for coping with exceptional physical or intellectual proximity among people. Think of the barber profession, typically of low status- the concession implied by surrendering one’s bodily profusions is counterbalanced by debarring the barber from one’s wider society. I have been talking of the yielded and the yield in this system as being separate items, but the verse shows us that this is not necessarily the case. Rather, in this case knowledge or experience is shown to be the very thing uniting in strange proximity the abuser and abused. Just as the barber client is debased by yielding his trimmings, the abuser debases himself by so outwardly prosecuting his desires, fears, and prejudices. This is what the abusee knows- this is all they know. The transactions placed upon the abused become the very corpus upon which

7

reasoning and retribution can take place. In this sense, it is possible to see how the above verse can be said to effectively communicate equivocation in so far as the song’s balances of power are concerned.

Returning to the third and fourth verses, the merest armour-chinks of self-determination in the second are followed by the clearest of ultimata. They speak the psychology of positive reinforcement, and their primitive cause and effect mock at the greyscale morality of the abuser.



Yet neither fine form nor clarity nor irony quite get at the charm of these central verses. There’s a modesty of scale that is a welcome substitute for the small cast melodrama to which a song of this premise might otherwise aspire. Firstly, the rubric of romantic comportment is unstated, suggesting courtship is a fixed, stable, possibly even local procedure in this world. The rigs of abuse may then be similarly given, held to be self-evident, part of the same rough-and-tumble of these people’s lives.

The second lines of each verse also speak to our interest in charm, and call to mind the bittersweet cadence of the small-town crush so deftly expressed by Leonard Cohen:

You go your way And I’ll go your way too

In our verses it is not quite a decision between staying and going, but a decision between heading off and seeing out the rest of the day. This is not the cynical matrimony of the blues (‘crying won’t make me stay’), but a play-date visiting song marred by a lover’s quarrel. We can fair imagine elder relations hovering on the home ground periphery.

Imagining this song cast as a romance of this kind accords not only with the keepsakely form of the song, but also with Darling’s substitution of ‘land’ for Prothro’s ‘world’. This is a country sketch, and land is demarked - pegged out - by the span between two lovers. The outdoorsy skin-close linen den enisling - cloistering - love in its shade. The world doesn’t come into it.

Of course, I have chosen to read this song as it may have occurred to a listener of Erik Darling’s record, on the hearing of which there is little indication for the uninformed listener that this is a chain gang song in origin, as I have taken it to be elsewhere (and thus facing freedom above love). I have not had the pleasure of consulting the Darling LP sleeve or notes, which may provide some pointers for the keen. A reading of the Darling version in the knowledge (presumably in which he sings it) that this is not principally a romance song provides some equally interesting avenues to consider.

8

Darling in the chain gang

One that stands out, speaking still of verses three and four, is the wit inherent in a captive’s hollow barter:



For the chain gang working on the roadside (as they are often depicted), the ‘way’ (the road) was something uncommonly conflicted- a symbol of liberty defiled, and these verses give voice to this concern. Irony cuts through the song and serves the genre’s given strength: to comment and commentate on the work of the chain gang and the particular changing conditions of captivity. It is this triumphant reading that is most lost in Darling’s interpretation, and, equally, most likely to be lost on his audience.

IV – Performance and Transmission

Revival praxis

Having gone some way towards a reading of the song as a text, there’s now space to tilt at the other slightly more speculative approach: that of further exploring “the song’s complex relationship to its sources and its equally complex satisfaction of singer and audience desires and fascinations (largely to do with potent notions of authenticity).” First of all, it may be interesting to compare the ways these songs might have been constructed and wherein each lies the heart of the song as it is known and owned for each singer. Namely, in the parts or in the whole?

Darling sings a tight, coherent version that is nonetheless filled with the suggested and the implied. Prothro’s is more detailed but works less hard to assemble this data into a narrative work. Both works draw on a stock or fragmentary base, but arguably terminate in very different places, with ambiguity muddying and clarifying our understanding of the song in different ways.

As has been stated, Prothro’s casts a long shadow of authority, but is less faithful in his stage direction. Darling takes a more lyric approach by using his fragments to sketch an outline of modern emotional rhetoric.

Both appear fragmentary, but their respective fragments cohere in different ways, in different directions, and at different moments in their construction. This results in two very different songs whose parts relate differently to their respective wholes. My interest in exploring this is because I think it reveals some of the deeper conditions of both songs and the people and places that made them: chain ganger and folksinger. A comparison of these relations is attempted in fig. 3, showing Prothro’s STOCK sending forth into multiple renderings of the same song. In this performance context (the chain gang), song is not reified or isolated as it is

9

on the stage, so the idea of a definitive, through-composed piece is less applicable, hence the diagram indicating multiple iterations of the same song.

By contrast, Darling’s version is more strongly impelled by an attempt to marshal and curate its parts and to turn the inference and implication of its fragments – its stock – into something understated and lucid enough as to infer a wider milieu, a living habitat for the song. The conditions of the chain gang that bred an earlier recorded version of the song were not impelled by these same artistic and song-centrifying techniques, and do not share the luminous, vivifying quality radiated by Darling’s performance.

The diagram below in fig. 3 attempts to place Darling’s song in a larger system and to define its relation to tradition. It is guided by an understanding of the nature of Darling’s work as a city-bound professional folk revivalist. Here the trace of historic performances (and in these arrows figure the Lomaxes) is marked in the new Darling-era matrix as FRAGMENTS. I take this term to mean the musical material that traverses and itself connects two historically separate eras. I regard these fragments as such primarily because they demand their own course of reclamation and appropriation, not just to cross time but also to cross social groups defined in parts racially and socio-economically. In other words, Darling was a white middle-class city-dweller, our chain gang singers were not. This gulf, added to the rupture of all other likely processes of transmission, explains the presence of fragments as an integral part of this schema.

Fig. 2 also addresses what I think are some differentiating factors in both performances, with a special attempt to explain their difference in sound by exploring with whom custody and agency lands. It hinges on the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic creation, in other words on the concept of a division between shared and owned parts and processes of a song. I contend that it is those parts and processes that are owned by and intrinsic to the performer wherein which one is able to exercise one’s control as an artist. Being a modern professional folksinger, Darling controls the song as a whole and shares (and cannot claim to possess in isolation) verses and fragments that would have been grist to the folk revival mill. This corresponds with our conventional understanding of what the artist controls and is responsible for (the song itself) and is one reason why Darling’s performance is so pleasing. There are, as the left side of the diagram shows, other places to locate one’s control in musical performance that can plausibly replace the song itself (in stock, for example).

As our (perhaps unreasonable) embodiment of the chain ganger, Prothro’s creative control doubtless labored over the learning and devising of applicable verses, both stock and novel (let’s not be prematurely seduced by the idea of the volk mind), and his part in the whole would have centred there - on his stock - not on marshaling the more ineffable touches upon which Darling sets his stall. The difference being, such that Prothro engaged in creative work upon this song (which all performers do), it would have been to continuously decant and replenish the stock of verses and notions both narrowly and broadly associated with the song, which was shared and performed by the gang. This being the case, we have no need to picture Prothro or any other at the head of the chain gang fretting over the form and finish of the song, and over the shimmer and ring of the piece as it ends, or the hush and gosh of an imagined audience. These conditions, which we take for granted based on our experience of song and our conditioned response to it, are largely inappropriate for group work song, especially

11

penitential work song which, as we discussed above in relation to the (notionally horseback) captain, has one eye on the extra-musical exigencies of incarceration.

After all, the chain gang is not primarily a musical environment, and we should remember that when discussing its music. To make an obvious if still partisan point, this is why the common sight of a ‘musical director’ at the helm of potemkin, reformed, or token music-producing groups based on ones similar to this (the chain gang) is such an uncomfortable sight. Reforming group relations with a disregard for deeper structures (see figs. 1 & 2) will result in this kind of redundancy, which I would argue is the very thing that discomforts – even discomfits - us. (It is also why the same musical director is a harmonious sight in contexts to which it is native- the stage, bandstand, or concert hall.)

This attempt to localize individual artistic agency is served by fig. 2, showing how Prothro (left), in serving the song, submits his stock in the course of performance. He makes his choice based less on narrative or inferential delicacies beyond his control, but on more circumstantial factors. The point is, it is not necessarily because narrative or poetic inference is less important to the musicians or that they are somehow incapable or insensible, but that a) other factors instead are positioned within the realm of agency for the individual participants (stock and invented verses) and b) extra-musical (not song-centric) factors are foregrounded for the collective.

To summarise, we control the things we own. We control the things that are intrinsic to us. Prothro uses intrinsic stock phrases to comprise a song, which is sung collectively. Darling uses extrinsic fragments to comprise a song, which is sung individually. As a professional folksinger, Darling shares the fragments and owns the song. As a member of the chain gang, Prothro contributes the phrases, and shares the song. Prothro’s control is contributory, and Darling’s is summatory. One may appear stronger than the other, but levels of involvement and participation are equal. Nevertheless, it is hierarchicial: stock below, song above.

More relativising

To return to my talk of shimmer and ring (a song being able to have a certain finish) and hush and gosh (a song being able to lay claim to the spaces before and after its performance, often shown by the presence and behaviour of the audience), it is again not all that hard to imagine a performance context less governed by these attributes than the ones we are trained to acknowledge and reinforce (the stage, the record, the television). Secondly, the absence of any meaningful anticipation or reception of a chain gang song outside of the singers themselves (unless the captain is a fan, or Lomax & Lomax are in attendance) is sufficient to explain why we are less able to safely think on it in the same way as we are invited to appraise a bona fide musical performance by a professional singer before an audience. That is not to say the rest is silence; indeed there is plenty to think about.

This might all seem a little nebulous, but I am guided in these speculations by a primary interest in the concrete properties of a particular performance, some of which I have mentioned already, and in interrogating such properties find it worthwhile to look back at the deeper structures and encompassing conditions I have been discussing. In essence, fig. 2

12

attempts to visualize the structures relevant to the performers, and posits a simple link between the two, shown with an arrow.

Attacking and defending

I should add here that an insensibility towards the varieties of musical motive and context (which I aspire to countermand here) is exactly the cause of the kinds of obfuscatory drivel that serve to muddy even the preliminaries of musical understanding and leave us to describe certain musics as ‘raw’, or worse, ‘authentically raw’. These words are used to get at something that, in their very use, is shown to still be out of sight- the mere glimpses of which I have attempted to define as shimmer, finish, or the lack thereof.

Seeking to isolate one or the other performance type, or treating (if only provisionally) chain gang performers as fully blind to the idea of the reification of song (native to the revival) is a convenient but risky tactic, even potentially insulting. It is dangerous not to credit every individual with the kinds of bifurcated, multifaceted drive to perform that I have here been reserving for professionals (or worse, non-convicts). But the ability to identify and readily dissolve such dichotomies, while rightly impelled by an aversion to entrenchment and prejudice, is too often lazily deployed as a mark of modern intellectual sensitivity. There is a place for this of course, but space (immunity?) should also be provided for convenient abstractions to remain whole whilst they are of use. This is my defense for treating the chain gang as an inviolate abstraction, uncomplicated by imperatives that I instead reserve for the professional performer, here representing (or represented by) Darling. Of course (he writes dissolvingly), people are complicated beings. I do not intend to discredit, and am in fact excited by, the very plausible notion of a member of a chain gang training an expansive and reflective eye on the sounds he is hearing and making and changing. But likewise I do not place a value judgement on his not doing so. Touché.

For all these reasons – and this is a plea for relativism as much as anything else – it takes only a little reflection to unseat strength of narrative and clarity of expression (Darling’s churches of choice) from their positions as the measure of value and importance in contexts otherwise united by the broad concept of song. That being said, this argument may be little more than confessional, since I have spent much of my time here reading the texts (looking at strength of narrative and clarity of expression and so on) in relative isolation, the attractions of which I have been trying to qualify and contextualize in this latest part.

I have been most interested in pursuing these attractions through Darling’s version, the very finish of which invites the kind of meditation that an essay like this is justified in labouring over without suffering a complete crisis of purpose. I may still be dancing about architecture, to quote Elvis Costello, but you can’t fault the view.

V – Tracing Axes

The river surfaces

This remaining part dwells in the umbra of the text-only verses touted at the outset (contained below), and takes advantage of this hinterland in adopting a new line of interest largely

13

tangential to the foregoing discussion. Remember, this special space is accompanied not simply by a shift in principal medium from sound to text, but by an incidental soundtrack all of its own: that of the needle of John Lomax’s sound recorder turning in the lead-out groove having exceeded the aluminium or celluloid disc’s storage capacity. Is this slipping off the record, in both senses, sufficient to give us a sense of license in our treatment? No, but in the encroachment of sound silence there may open up a space for deeper collusion between incumbent texts: that which testifies (the original manuscript) and that which reads (the present one).

Below is a comparison of verses mentioning ‘St. John’s River’. On the left are the relevant verses of ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ printed in American Ballads and Folk Songs, and on the right is the relevant verse from ‘St. John’s River’, transcribed from Erik Darling’s performance of the song. This is our material for the following part.

Jumpin’ Judy

If she asks you was I running You can tell I’s flying,

Tell her I crossed the St. John’s River With my head hung down

St. John’s River

Baby, did you her me? Your sweety’s going to ride the Cherokee On the St. John’s River

Riding and crossing

The beginning point of this comparison concerns the two ways each protagonist assails the waterway, with one riding downriver, the other crossing over it. This forms a + or x in our minds, with the perpendicular lines of approach providing an impetus for investigating other stages for perpendicularity in and extending from the song, especially to do with diverging social experiences and their expression in transportation in life and in song.

Although it may be unnecessary to establish a racial division between songs by taking ‘St. John’s River’ to have its origins in specifically white American folk tradition, the treatment of public transport and home furnishings (see notes, below) means that the song automatically inhabits more mainstream social footings than African-American songs of the era tend to do. If that is the case, then the two songs together - ‘St. John’s River’ and ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ - present us with an interesting schematic (a procedural diagram) for routes of escape in and from society; one man goes down river, another kind crosses it. (I should qualify this by saying that the Twain-sent image of the rafting Southern bum would somewhat weaken this construction, since our schematic equates riverways with societal subscription.)

The social status of groups (if not ethnicities) also maps itself onto the other great vein of American topology- the railroad, with the phrase 'the wrong side of the tracks' speaking of the very real way in which the tracks themselves often became a desire line of urban segregation.The analogy of river and railroad is not entirely sensible though, since the two sites of crossing or following - and the opposing axes that these two acts (crossing and following)

14

together construct - connote different things in either site. To begin, let us consider our x axis - 'following', in relation to river and to rail.

Flowing and following

'Riding the blinds' (travelling on the outside of the train carriage) and the railroad bum are key images in American folk tradition and are particularly resonant in African-American song, being demonstrative of the poor status endured by blacks in America. The river as an equivalent highway, however - rich in symbolism and experience - is substantially more diaphanous. Huckleberry Finn and Old Man River aside, this would require further exploration. Riverbank calamities are many, and sea ones just the same, but songs taking place on and about the riverways are more elusive. The river surfaces in Cajun song, but as the swamp or bayou or some other wetland, amphibious in nature, and as such deliciously corrupting our chosen dichotomies!

To the y axis - crossing. Initially, river crossings bring to mind the collection of Scottish ballads that relate the crossing of the Clyde in various tragic circumstances. Here, crossing is crossing over, from one state or status to another. In ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ the crossing is a flight from captivity to emancipation, whereas in the Clyde ballads it is a staging point in a larger tragedic orbit. The very fact that the protagonists in these tragic ballads dwell in the river rather too long - crossing and recrossing as a foundation of the narrative - is an indication of how malevolent this site can be, especially if its symbolic status is pushed too far.

Elsewhere, The gospel song Cross the Rivers of Jordan recasts the story of the Israelites as a yearning for salvation and emancipation and judgement, and this reminds us that the river crossing is also a Christian theme.

Crossing is, of course, at the heart of this. River songs that take place on the banks are altogether more ambivalent; from murder ballads (Banks of the Ohio, Oxford Girl), love ballads (The Bold Fisherman) and bawdy sex ballads (The Bush of Australia), crossings remain unconsummated.

Having begun by considering the significance of the river in two American folk songs, we have located two opposing approaches - literal approaches in this case - to the river, and have suggested that they could, figuratively and schematically, be drawn as opposing axes. I suggested that these axes could be treated, opposingly and individually, as representative of routes of escape, the one mainstream, the other not (following and crossing respectively). If this idea is at all valid, then it might suggest two qualitatively different modes of escape; with or against the mainstream, using these modes in counterpoint to what is being escaped- are we escaping with the masses, following the river, or from the masses, across the river? By way of explanation, it might be worth going back to the original song examples:

In ‘St. John’s River’, a free man uses the river as a public highway to escape a woman. In ‘Jumpin’ Judy’, a wanted man uses the river as a boundary or perimeter to escape a larger foe; a putative enemy, malevolent authority, or hostile society, depending on the song.

15

The idea of axes is made significant by overlaying the two songs, and imagining how their respective conditions of escape are effected (brought about) and heightened by the presence of the river in song. Using the idea of axes also implies a nexus, and this is where comparisons can be helpfully made between the two songs. I choose to stage this nexus visually, on a wide part of the St. John’s River, with a paddle steamer going in one direction and, say, a coracle in the other.

Notes

My thanks Anthony Vaver’s pleasing Early American Crime website for information on ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ and the Lomaxes. www.earlyamericancrime.com/songs/jumpin-judy

John Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) is available online here: www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/american-ballads-and-folk-songs/american-ballads-folk-songs.html. ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ can be found at this address: www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/american-ballads-and-folk-songs/american-ballads-&-folk-songs%20-%200183.htm

The recording of Allen Prothro singing ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ is available on Document Records DOCD-5576 Field Recordings Vol 2 North & South Carloina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas 1926 – 1943. The recording of Erik Darling singing ‘Jumpin’ Judy’ was released in 1961 on the LP True Religion. Both recordings are likely to be available as downloadable mp3s.

My Happy For Me: thoughts on St. John’s River considers the treatment of transport and furnishings in this song.

On Whose Way: Thoughts on Jumpin' Judy

Documents

Transcript of On Whose Way: Thoughts on Jumpin' Judy