Remember Me...

Last Sunday morning I was listening to the gospel show on New Orleans public radio station WWOZ, I'll come back to New Orleans but the song I heard that morning which stuck in my head was Mississippi John Hurt's performance of the old spiritual "Do Lord Remember Me." In a year like 2020 there has been there is time to think deeply about this old tune. 

"Do Lord Remember Me" seems to have it's roots in the 1860s as a spiritual sung by slaves of African American descent who picked cotton in the American south. They probably sang it in the fields as a rhythmic accompaniment to repetitive labor. They probably sang it in church on Sunday morning as a prayer to ease their burdens. Mississippi John Hurt was born in 1893. That was 30 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves and "Do Lord Remember Me" had been in circulation about the same amount of time. Cotton was still an industry and hard working people usually have a custom of church attendance on Sundays. Hurt surely heard this song as a child in one place or another.  

"Do Lord Remember Me" has been recorded many times. I don't think the Beatles ever recorded it but Johnny Cash  sure did. With parents born and raised along the Mississippi River only a few miles from where Cash was born and in rural East Texas I am only one generation removed from knowing what cotton picking is all about. I was lucky enough to have my family lifted by FDR'S New Deal programs and the industrial boom of World War II and the years that followed. My parents probably heard this song. As I say hard working people go to church and there were changes, trials and new things to become accustomed to and prayerful songs helped.    

As I toyed around with this song on my resonator guitar I thought about it's history. It's not the oldest song I have ever played. I've been in brass ensembles and concert bands covering Baroque and Renaissance pieces but those have a set way to be interpreted. "Do Lord" can be made your own. I like songs like that. 

Working on slide guitar licks for the song and still thinking I wondered what song was making the rounds thirty years before I was born? It was easy to find this information. The 10th most popular song of 1927, thirty years before I was born was "Charmain" by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians . When I was a teen and my interest in music was growing my mom took me to see Lombardo and his group when they played the local community concert series. I don't recall what they played but I bet I heard "Charmain." It may not have carried the spiritual weight of "Do Lord" but certainly a good tune that has surfaced in movies and remained evergreen in popular interest. 

Now to bring things back to New Orleans. Once during a trip there I was going one place to another on foot and took a short cut through one of the old cemeteries. All burials are above ground due to the water table in a below sea level city so I was passing bleached white crypts, leaning monuments and mausoleums with some falling into haunted disrepair. With the music of the Crescent City on my mind a name on a crypt leapt out at me. I spotted a tomb with the name "Doctor of Jazzology." No other information, no dates, nothing. I've searched the internet. Nothing there either. "Doctor of Jazzology." Do remember him.