Season 3 of Let It Roll: From the Beginning… opens with host Nate Wilcox talking to Robert W. Harwood about “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary” - a book about one song and about how confidently the history of a song can be wrong.
Almost everything widely believed about “St. James Infirmary” turns out to be untrue. It is not a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” the British broadside that gives us “Streets of Laredo” and “The Dying Cowboy.”
That connection was made by A.L. Lloyd - a figure Nate describes as something like the Carl Sandburg and the Pete Seeger of British folk music rolled together - in a single transitional sentence in a five-page article, with no evidence offered for it at all.
Lloyd barely cared about the song; it appears twice in his writings, once for a single sentence. But he was influential enough that the assumption held for decades. Harwood’s image for it is a pig rolling over a piglet in a tight stall.
Blind Willie McTell did not write “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” as a tribute to it either. He told Ed Rhodes a long and convincing story about having written it for a friend, and most people still believe him, but the song had been recorded twenty years earlier by Martha Copeland and copyrighted by Porter Grainger.
Grainger is one of the recoveries of the book: a songwriter for Bessie Smith who played in her orchestra, arranged for revues, and vanished so completely that nobody had established even his birth year before Harwood went looking - not because it was hard to find, but because no one had been interested enough to look. His death date is still unknown.
From there the trail runs through Carl Moore and Phil Baxter and the two Texas towns that each claim the song, then to Don Redman - university-trained, the arranger who made Fletcher Henderson’s band what it was - who is the vector that carries the song to Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives.
And then to Irving Mills, who copyrighted it under the name Joe Primrose, a southern nom de plume who never wrote another song in his life and appears nowhere else in the copyright registers. When the copyright came up for renewal in the 1960s and the controversy had died down, Mills quietly put his own name on it. He had also written a modified version years earlier - opening with “Why Am I Always Moaning?” - purely to secure a second copyright on the same song.
Nate and Harwood close on where all this lands now: the blurred lines verdict, attempts to copyright timbre, and hip-hop records with thirty names on the credits. As Nate points out, if everyone with a claim to “St. James Infirmary” had lawyered up in the 1920s, that is roughly the number you would have had.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
Louis Armstrong, “St. James Infirmary Blues” (1928)
Jimmie Rodgers, “Those Gambler’s Blues”
Bobby “Blue” Bland, “St. James Infirmary”
The White Stripes, “St. James Infirmary Blues”
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter.
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Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
