Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  Soon I wanted to play an instrument. (All this predates, by a few months, anyway, the advent of the Beatles, after which everybody and their brother decided to take up an instrument.) I started strumming along quite spiritedly on a mandolin, chosen because it was a small instrument and I owned a small hand. The first song I learned to play was a classic, “This Land Is Your Land.” As first songs go, this was a pretty good one. There is wonderful power and poetry in the lyrics, and in adopting “This Land Is Your Land” as an ideal, a basic template, I had (unknowingly) set the bar rather high. I say “(unknowingly)” because I was preoccupied not only with fingering the chords but with trying to remember the words. It is a geographical song, and at least off the top is concerned with naming places. I have trouble retrieving mere lists from the memory banks. Moreover, there was a Canadian version (“from Bonavista to Vancouver Island”), and I was torn between this version and the “real” one, so often I bellowed out an odd combination of the two.2

  WOODROW WILSON Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the son of a businessman, landowner, and Democratic politician. (I mean, his father was all those things; it wasn’t my intention to suggest some Satanic trinity.) Woodrow was a bright lad, and he read constantly. That didn’t prevent him from leaving high school before graduation. It is said he picked up harmonica by hanging around a street corner beside a black man and his shoeshine box. He learned a little guitar in order to accompany his cousin, a fiddler. And that’s what Woody was, a widely read kid who could play a little music, when he joined the thousands of Okies travelling westward to California, where, it was said, there was work. This was the Dust Bowl era, and out on the coast was the mythical “pie in the sky.”3

  I don’t know at what point Guthrie became “politicized,” a word I’ve put in quotes mostly because it makes me kind of uneasy. I sometimes conflate Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck’s fictional Tom Joad. In The Grapes of Wrath, Joad is made increasingly aware of injustice and suffering; he discovers the worth of every single human being, regardless of wealth or origin, and he goes out into the world to fight for the dignity of all. I believe something like that happened to Guthrie; indeed, one of his most enduring songs is “Tom Joad.” Guthrie was also inspired to write a song about Thomas Mooney, a labour leader imprisoned for bombing the Preparedness Day march of 1916 (killing ten and injuring forty), a crime virtually no one thought he actually committed. But as the fine songwriter Steve Earle once remarked, “I don’t think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times.” I’m guessing that Guthrie was inspired by a good story as much as by his outrage. After all, he did write “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The song makes an eloquent point about the callousness of banks (“some rob with a fountain pen”), but Charles Arthur Floyd was pretty much a murdering thug.

  Guthrie’s songs soon found an audience, and he began singing “hillbilly” music on radio station KF VD. There he met newscaster Ed Robbin, a left-leaning fellow who introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including a man who would become Woody’s lifelong friend, Will Geer.4 Many of you will remember Geer as Zebu-lon (Grandpa) Walton, but it is interesting to note that Geer was also a folksinger and a political radical. “Which means I get to the root of things,” Geer was fond of saying. “That’s the Latin derivation for ‘radical.’” Geer refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was subsequently blacklisted. His solution was to start a theatre company called Theatricum Botanicum, in which he and other blacklisted players presented the works of the Bard.

  Geer, busy on the Broadway stage, invited Guthrie to New York City. It was there Woody made his first real recordings, musicologist Alan Lomax feeling that Guthrie’s songs should be documented for the Library of Congress.5 Guthrie decided to respond to the over-popularity of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” He had seen too much to endorse that kind of cheery chauvinism. He borrowed a melody from an old gospel song, “Oh My Loving Brother.” Although he wrote about the physical grandeur of America in “This Land Is Your Land,” he got a few good digs in too. Not everyone knows the final two verses to the song, in which Guthrie sees hungry people lined up outside a relief office and wonders if this land is really made for you and me.

  Song can be an effective vehicle for political statement, in particular for complaint and damnation, song being an extension of speech, and speech being what it is. Alan Lomax described a scene that occurred during the “ballad hunting” he undertook with his father across the American South.

  A few ragged sharecroppers had been gathered together by the plantation manager to sing for us. They had sung some spirituals, and finally everybody said, “Let’s have Old Blue sing.” A big Black man stood up in front of the tiny Edison cylinder recorder. He said, “I want to sing my song right into it—I don’t want to sing it in advance.” We said, “Well, we would like to hear it first because we don’t have very many unused cylinders.” He said, “No sir, you are going to have to have this right straight from the beginning.” We agreed, and so he sang:

  Work all week

  Don’t make enough

  To pay my board

  And buy my snuff.

  It’s hard, it’s hard It’s hard on we poor farmers,

  It’s hard.

  After a few more stanzas, he spoke into the recorder horn as though it was a telephone. He said, “Now, Mr. President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you and I’m talking to you so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks here in Texas.”

  On another afternoon in the early twentieth century, on a street corner in Spokane, Washington, a political agitator named Jack Walsh was busily recruiting for the Industrial Workers of the World, standing on a soapbox and preaching unionism. Down the road, the Salvation Army was recruiting on its own behalf. The Holy Soldiers disliked Walsh’s exhortations of revolution, so they elected to march the band down—tambourines pounding, trombones baying, trumpets keening—and attempt to drown him out. Walsh fought back, starting a musical aggregation of his own that included Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock pounding out cadence on a bass drum. Among the songs McClintock wrote was “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a beautiful evocation of a hobo’s Utopia. McClintock had another song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which the street-corner crowds found very rousing. Walsh penned a couple of parodies of the Sally Ann’s high-test spirituals, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” and “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” Those four songs became the foundation of the IW W’s Little Red Songbook, which sold for ten cents. The volume soon contained not only more songs but “The Preamble,” the manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World:

  The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.

  It’s hard to say how this all connects to a chubby little eleven-year-old kid playing “This Land Is Your Land” with cross-eyed, tongue-biting concentration. I knew nothing then of pie in the sky or sharecroppers or the Industrial Workers of the World. All I knew was that Woody Guthrie’s song was fun to play and sing. Without realizing it, I suspect I was also absorbing the idea that songs should mean something, that they should make a point, and that the point should be beneficial.

  I had another musical lesson coming, too. At the end of seven months of arduous performance on the mandolin on my part, my younger brother, Joel, came along, picked up the mandolin, stared at it for a few seconds, and then proceeded to play it with aplomb. Tony, meanwhile, had become something of a hotshot on the banjo. Suddenly there was a guitar in the house as well, and Tony began his adventures on the fretboard, adventures that continue to this day. All of which is to say, my brothers very quickly demonstrated themselves to be much more musically gifted than I.

  I could, how
ever, sing. When I sang, pleasant things happened. My father would pause in the doorway to his den and pull on his pipe reflectively. My mother would lay aside her book (for she read constantly), and a vague, somewhat wistful smile would visit. When we three brothers joined forces, my brothers would let me sing lead, while Joel undertook the higher harmony and Tony essayed the bass.

  The music we favoured was bluegrass, popularized in those days by groups like the New Lost City Ramblers. During those sessions with my brothers, I imprinted upon myself particular notions of music-making. For one thing, in bluegrass (the result of a backwoods tryst between English traditional folk music and the blues), instrumental virtuosity is encouraged, the musicians bellying forward in turn to improvise over the changes. Also, bluegrass features harmonies, dense and often a little dissonant, the characteristic “high lonesome” wail of Bill Monroe. And I adopted, back then, an iconography of trains and birds and churches that would show up later in my songs. Finally, bluegrass music, for all its up-tempo spirit, often embraces dark subject matter: murder, alcoholism, the untimely death of loved ones.

  ALL RIGHT: on that note, here comes the new thematic material. As Martin and I drove home from the meeting with Dr. Frazier, we weren’t sure how to proceed. There seemed to be very little to do. Very little to say. At one point Martin ventured, “Well, I guess if you ever wondered what you’d do if someone gave you that news, now you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Martin is not technically my oldest friend, but he is my dearest. He had come with me to the doctor because several people had suggested it was good to have two sets of ears. But the truth of the matter was, Marty had been every bit as gob-smacked as I, and neither of us had heard much more than dick-all of what was said. Somewhere in there Dr. Frazier had seemed to suggest that I was going to die in a few months.

  I called Dorothy at work. Dorothy and I had divorced several years prior to all this, but when I first got ill she took me back into the house on First Avenue. (The house on First Avenue is next door to the house owned by Martin and his wife, Jill, which is no coincidence. We bought the houses together, two adjacent row houses, and then we tore down the fence separating the gardens, giving us a larger shared space. This wasn’t done for any Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice type reasons, rather so that both couples would have handy babysitting. Indeed, my daughters, Carson and Flannery, think of Marty and Jill as a second set of parents, especially since their first set of parents split up.)

  Anyway, Dorothy worked part time for E & C Marine, the “C” of which was Charles Gallimore, who had sold me my houseboat, and she arrived home a little while later, seeming very calm and collected. (I found out later, from Charles, that she’d done her crying there in the shop, a nor’easter of misery, so that she could appear at home unruffled and strong.) “So, it’s lung cancer?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Again. Very little to do. Very little to say. We exchanged words of some sort, and then I announced, “Well, I think I’ll go for a little drive.”

  I headed, without thinking, toward the east, way out into Scarborough. As I drove, I said, under my breath, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck” over and over again.

  My cell phone rang. It was Shaughnessy, who often phones up to see how I am. I dare say he didn’t expect such a blunt answer: “I’ve got lung cancer.”

  “What?”

  “Non-operable.”

  “Shit shit shit shit.”

  “No, it’s fuck fuck fuck fuck.” I tried to be stoic, saying as how I had led a good life, and had lovely friends and loved ones. But then the sight of a very pretty girl reduced me to convulsive sobs. “I’m going to miss this so much,” I managed to get out, although my throat was so knotted with remorse that speech seemed hardly possible. I told Shaughn that I’d call him back later, and I drove on down to the Bluffs.

  Some brief earth-science history: over many millennia, the eastern end of the land that modern Toronto sits upon eroded, and the effluvia ribboned across the water to the west. Over time, it formed a long, bent peninsula; a storm in the nineteenth century severed and separated this landmass, which now forms the Toronto Islands. The Bluffs are fascinating, to me, on several counts. For one thing, they are beautiful, in a bleak and desolate way. They rise hundreds of feet into the air, with the kind of naked nature, lifeless and alien, that one encounters in hoodoos and mesas.

  The Bluffs are also associated in my mind with death. I don’t believe this was at the forefront of my mind as I drove there on D-Day, Diagnosis Day. But throughout my childhood I heard stories of people meeting their end on the Bluffs, either by suicide or when a part of the cliffside suddenly collapsed. A very popular art teacher at my high school lived on the Bluffs; his young daughter was standing close to the edge one day when the earth disappeared from beneath her feet, and she was gone. So maybe this was leading me down to the Bluffs, on some level: it seemed a place to go to begin battle with the Darkness. (“To begin negotiations” might be more accurate.)

  Various species of birds inhabit the Scarborough Bluffs, evolution having brought them to this particular place of endless bickering and squawking. Any scrap of food is the epicentre of a convergence of ungodly screech and ululation. Wings are beaten menacingly, necks ruffled. The only relatively quiet species is the swan. Those elegant creatures maintain their silence, for the same reason the crazed and homicidal do: to keep their victims unsuspecting and unprepared. I mention this because, having driven down the huge hill and left the car in the lot, I stumbled out to the shore and bawled like a baby. Not non-stop. But every minute or so I would emit a long wail of, oh, who knows what the emotion was at that point? The truest thing to say would be that it wasn’t a single emotion, it was quite a few of them stumbling into each other to get out, like drunkards in a doorway.

  In the midst of all this, a swan snuck up behind me and bit me on the ass.

  I was of course very indignant, but the creature had a point. Get on with it. I started back toward my car. My first resolution: no more cheap wine. I drove back to First Avenue, stopping at the LCBO on the way to buy some Borolos and Amarones.

  We held an impromptu wake.

  1 Here’s another bit of family lore I just learned from my brother Tony. Apparently, for a while, my grandfather played in a band that supplied entertainment on some sort of pleasure vessel, a huge paddleboat or something, that cruised down the Don River. That’s a lovely bit of family lore, but I’m not going to fact-check it too aggressively, if you see what I mean. If you could see and smell the Don River these days, you would share some of my misgivings. But the story goes that Joe Quarrington played in the band, and also featured on board—her act consisting of “Recitation and Elocution”— was Nora Fleischer, who was to become my grandmother. Tony says he has seen the playbill, even thinks that he possesses a copy of it, but Tony is a pathological collector, and the chances of finding any one thing in his collections is remote.

  2 There is also, I’ve since learned, an Irish version of this song (“from the hills of Kerry to the streets of Derry”), a Scottish version, a Swedish version, an Israeli version (“from the Negev Desert to the heights of Golan”), and so forth.

  3 That phrase, “pie in the sky,” was coined by Joe Hill in his song “The Preacher and the Slave.” Hill, another honorary godfather of the folkie protest song, was executed for a murder he didn’t commit.

  4 Although Guthrie wrote 174 “Woody Sez” columns for The Daily Worker, he was never an actual Communist Party member. I don’t know why I bothered to include that as a footnote; I think it’s just a knee-jerk reaction for a kid of the fifties to note whether an individual was, or had ever been, a member of the Communist Party.

  5 Lomax was the son of pioneering musicologist John Lomax, and had travelled widely with his father recording authentic folk music. At the Angola Prison Farm, the Lomaxes encountered a man who was physically intimidating and immensely popular with his fellow inmates for the songs he sang. They recorded hours of thi
s fellow, then sent the warden a request for clemency, including a recording of this fellow’s most popular song, “Good Night, Irene.” Huddie Ledbetter—Leadbelly, as he was better known—was pardoned.

  CHAPTER 2

  I HAVE ONLY a handful of vivid childhood memories, and here’s one of them: I was on a sleepover at my friend Kenny’s house. I was in the top bunk normally occupied by his brother, because his brother was out somewhere, and we were watching television late at night, because, well, I became a television addict early on in life, and Kenny was more addicted than I. We had managed to pull in an American signal—not always possible in those days of rabbit ears—and were watching The Jack Paar Show. I don’t suppose the show interested us much, for the most part, but it was American and therefore superior to anything the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation might put on the airwaves.

  Jack Paar said something about something being a sensation in Britain, and our ears perked up. The television screen filled with the image of four young men, similarly suited. All four men sported “Buster Brown” haircuts, a term I use because that is what I read subsequently, somewhere in the thousands of pages of Beatles-related material I ingested. I associated that particular hairstyle with Moe Howard, the nasty, eye-poking leader of the Three Stooges.

  That T V event heralded a trip we all went on back then, one that took us to England, and to India, and to recesses of our minds no doubt better left untouched. Not a lot of that is germane here. The important thing to note is, we all started forming groups.

  I don’t suppose I’d be a songwriter today if it hadn’t been for Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Their songs appeared in my life one by one—each wondrous, almost miraculous, each announcing itself boldly as a Lennon/McCartney composition. Lennon/McCartney, as an entity, seemed to be the most creative force ever unleashed upon the face of the earth. Of course, we eventually learned that Lennon/McCartney didn’t really exist, that it was a label of convenience. If John wrote a song, he credited it as Lennon/McCartney. Paul did likewise. I recently heard a rumour that Sir Paul is trying to change the order of the names, to alter the designation legally to McCartney/Lennon. It might seem a bit small-minded, but I say, hey, he’s the living one, he’s survived hellish marriages and kept playing music, so he should get the credit he deserves.