Brett Singer did a mother’s day piece on the parenting blog Strollerderby about my series of posts on the Victorian mother song genre.

Most groovy.

MP3

As part of my blog series on mother songs, this post is my recording of the 1893 tear jerker “A Widow’s Plea For Her Son.”

The guitar was a 2007 National Estralita Deluxe. The microphone was a Sure SM 81 pre-amplified with an ART Tube MP3. I recorded on a Macbook using iMovie HD, the 2006 version, and the built-in video camera.

An important tip for this kind of setup is that the audio will have a high-pitched whine unless you use an external mic.

I did about fifteen takes, counting false starts. This is a quarter or less of my normal count.

The setting was next to the window in my workroom right around noon, when the sunlight floods in and creates strong contrasts.

The microphone is positioned just above the camera frame. This is to emphasize the singing.

I did the audio processing in Garageband. First I doubled the original mono source by importing the movie twice into the same Garageband file. In one of those tracks I applied the “guitars/big wheels” filter to give the guitar presence. In the other track I applied the “vocals/male basic” filter to enhance the resonance of my voice. I mixed them back together with no panning to minimize a seasick side-effect caused by the “big wheels” filter otherwise.

The copyright on the composition is in the public domain, so my version is absolutely legal.

My recording here is permissively licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license version 3.0 unported, which means more or less that you can copy and reuse as long as you use the same license and link back to here. If you need another license, like a non-commercial license, just email lucas at gonze dot com to get permission.

And then it took a while to get the words right, because that old recording is so murky, so I figured I would write them down. And given that I was writing down the words I ought to do the guitar chords. And then I wanted to know how the guitar does the bass line and that naturally led to figuring out the fiddle part. One thing led to another and then I had the thing transcribed. This post is to share the transcription in case anybody wants to use the song for their own music.

There are three versions and a master from which you can generate your own. One version is a condensed summary for singing guitar strummers. One is a lead sheet for instrumentalists. One is a note for note transcription for serious fiddlers and guitarists. And the master is a Sibelius file with a lot of detail in it, for people who want to modify the sheet music.

The condensed summary for singing guitar strummers is what most people will want. It has the words, guitar chords, and melody. The melody is written in both music notation and guitar tablature. The guitar chords are named, or you can use the voicings I provide.

It looks like this:

It is in the key of A, which I picked because it works for my own voice. Your mileage will vary.

• PDF for people who want a print out.
• PNG page 1 and PNG page 2 for people who have a problem with PDF.
• MIDI for remixers and other music makers who need digital sources.
• Sibelius for people who want to modify the sheet music.

The lead sheet for instrumentalists is for jamming or quick learning. It’s a one-pager with the melody and chords. The notation is big and easy to read, in a similar style to the Real Book.

It looks like this:

It is available in two keys, A and E.

• PDF in A
• Sibelius in A
• PDF in E
• Sibelius in E

The note for note transcription is for players who want to learn about exactly what Charlie Poole’s band were doing. My motivation was to be able to play in the style of his guitar player. This transcription only covers the intro and first verse, since there isn’t a lot of variation after that.

It looks like this:

It is available in two keys, A and E. The key that Poole’s band used was E.

• PDF in A
• Sibelius in A
• MIDI in A
• PDF in E
• Sibelius in E

The master Sibelius file is for people who want to modify the sheet music, for example to transpose to a different key or to use different chord voicings, and who find my original master the best place to start. All the other Sibelius files were generated from this one, so it has the most detail:

• Sibelius

If you only want to transpose or do interactive playback of the sheet music, you don’t have Sibelius, and you can install the Scorch plugin, go to this web page:

Scorch version of the summary sheet for singing guitar strummers, in A

This is the third post in my series on “A Widow’s Plea for Her Son.”

The original composition here is in the public domain. My own work on this song is all under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.

Parlorsongs.org has a page full of mother songs from 1910-20. There’s this syrupy number entitled “M-O-T-H-E-R”:

Do you remember what M-O-T-H-E and R stand for?

M is for the million things she gave me.
O means only that she’s growing old.
T is for the tears were shed to save me.
H is for her heart of purest gold.
E is for her eyes, with love light shining.
R means right, and right she’ll always be.

In case you were wondering who your best friend after all is, it’s your mother:

And on the off chance that you’re the kind of heartless bastard who isn’t loving their mother properly, ‘There’s A Mother Old And Gray Who Needs Me Now’:

They were not afraid to go for the gusto back in the good old days.

I came across “Widow’s Plea For Her Son” in the form of a May 7, 1929 recording by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers under the name “The Mother’s Plea For Her Son,” which was on a fine compilation CD called Cotton Mills and Fiddles:

This album represents a sampler of old-time string bands found in the rich pocket of folk music in the area comprising Spray, North Carolina; Danville, Virginia; and Fieldale, Virginia. All the recordings were made between 1926 and 1931

The archaic style of the song hit me hard, and I picked up more Charlie Poole in a box set entitled You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music. This box set is a stellar curation job which I highly recommend. In some ways I modeled this blog on it.

Poole had a talent for tightening up arrangements to give a song more punch. This song needed it. Here’s how the lyrics go in his version:

Strolling to a courthouse not many miles from here,
A boy stood in a prison dark and his mother she stood near.
The lad was quite a youngster, although he’d gone astray,
and from his master’s changebox he had stolen some coin away.

The boy addressed his honor as the tears rolled down his cheeks.
He said “Kind sir would’you please allow my mother here to speak?”
His honor then consented, while the boy hung down his head,
and turning to the jury men, these words his mother said.

“Remember I’m a widow and the prisoner is my son.
And gentlemen remember it is the first crime he has done.
Don’t send my boy to prison for that would drive me mad.
Remember I’m a widow and I’m pleading for my lad.”

The widow’s eyes were flashing fire her cheeks turned deadly pale:
“The reason why I’m here today is to save my boy from jail.
Although I know he’s guilty, and though his crime is bad,
remember I’m his mother and I’m pleading for my son.

If you compare that to Lewis Hall’s original lyrics, you’ll find that Poole kept the first three verses and the chorus mostly intact, though he did make some minor edits for the better. But he condensed the last four verses, which overflowed with bullshit, into the one strong verse closing out his own version.

The Internet Archive has a bunch of very old recordings in the mother genre.

(mp3) Your mother wants you home, lad by Robert Price is a straight up sentimental song about a widow on a stormy winter’s night etc. There’s no date on the page, but from my ears it’s an acoustic recording, which would put it before 1910. I hear the musical style as being turn of the century, around 1900.

(mp3) Snyder, does your mother know you’re out? is an 1899 number. It’s the earliest recording of yodeling that I’ve come across — Jimmy Rogers didn’t happen until nearly thirty years later. This is a comedy song, and I have to admit that I find it a little funny. I’m starting to grok their sense of humor.

As long as the mother song genre went on for, though, eventually something had to break into its dream state: (mp3) Blind Willie Johnson-Mother’s Children Have A Hard Time is a harrowing blues from late 1927 with a staggering level of pathos. A commenter on the archive.org page for this song claims that Johnson was blinded as a child by his stepmother in a fit of anger after she was discovered in bed with another man by Johnson’s father, who then beat her.

Holy shit. Now that’s a mother story which breaks your heart:

Willie Johnson’s mother died when he was a child. His father remarried. His stepmother cheated on his father. His father caught her in flagrante and beat her up. His stepmother then took it out on little Willie, her stepson, by BLINDING him.

Which takes mother songs to a whole new place.

(This post is part of my series on “A Widow’s Plea for Her Son.”)