Stagger Lee Saturdays - Margaret Walker

This is Dr. Margaret Walker (wiki bio poetry selection). She was born in Alabama in 1915, went to school in New Orleans, and worked as a poet and professor right up until her death in 1998. Her take on Stag was originally published in 1942, when Walker was still a young woman, recently employed by the New Deal's Work Progress Administration and its Federal Writer's Project (alongside Richard Wright). This is a transcription of dialect, and Walker reads it as such in both recordings below. (Both source albums also include recordings of Walker's poem about "John Henry," another legendary black American story also told in dialect.)

Walker recorded her poem twice for Folkways, the record label that also released Harry Smith's epic Anthology of American Folk Music, and a lot of the recordings of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly. The first time was in 1954, twelve years after she published the poem -- at the time she was living in Jackson, Mississippi with her husband and their four children. Twenty-one years later, she returned to Folkways to record three albums, one of which included her poem about Stag.

I've included both of them here, so you can hear how the two versions are different -- the text is identical in both, but the delivery varies. The first one is faster, and Walker makes the cartoon birds flying around the cop's head funnier. The second is clearly the voice of an older woman -- this version spends a little more time (going a little slower) when we hear how Stag escaped the lynching meant for his hide, and the tale of how Stag haunts New Orleans.

Walker is pretty important as far as poets go, and this post clearly hasn't done her justice -- click on that poetry link at the top to read more, or go down to the buy link and support the work of Folkways while listening to more from her.

Margaret Walker - Bad Man Stackalee
(1954)
mirror 1 -- mirror 2
(1975)
mirror 1 -- mirror 2
Buy from Folkways Recordings

The Drifters - White Christmas

Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas" in 1940. It was first publicly performed (by Bing Crosby) in December 1941, and Crosby first recorded and released it in 1942. The '42 recording actually degraded so much from overuse that five years later Crosby recreated the original session, laying down the version we're all familiar with now. It's since been recorded by hundreds of other acts.

In 1954, the same year Crosby starred in the year's top-grossing film (titled, as you can probably guess, White Christmas), The Drifters recorded this version, with a gospel-blues tinge that kept it relegated to R & B radio for decades.

This song is so excellent I put it on last year's compilation, "Have Yourself A Bluesy Little Christmas." (I'll be posting that here soon.) While researching this post, I found out (thanks, Wikipedia!) that Bill Pinkney, the bass singer on this record (whose name, you'll note, is misspelled on the label above), was also in The Harmony Grits, whose jumpin' version of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" I also chose for last year's compilation, thereby breaking my rule of only having one song per artist.

The Drifters - White Christmas

Buy CD from Pinkney's website