Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Many folk and blues songs derive from other songs, since so often they were originally transmitted by oral tradition and not sheet music or recordings. Performers would hear a song, and change it for artistic purposes, or because they misremembered what they heard, creating a big version of the game “Telephone.” So, when a song’s origins are unclear, how do you determine what is the “original” version, and what are “covers?” That’s the issue that we get when discussing “St. James Infirmary,” a song whose origin is shrouded in mystery. There’s even a book about its roots, a blog, and a number of essays, but there doesn’t appear to be any universally accepted conclusion.

Some believe that the song derives from a tune called “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Unfortunate Rake,” about a man dying of a venereal disease. Although that theory appears to be losing favor, and that song may actually be more closely related to “Streets of Laredo,” a cowboy song. Another song, “Those Gambler’s Blues,” (or just “Gambler’s Blues”), may be the source material, because, like the more modern versions of “St. James Infirmary,” it initially focuses not on the narrator, but on his sweetheart, who is dead in the hospital. (And some posit other source material.) The first sheet music for “Gambler’s Blues” was published in 1925 by Carl Moore and Phil Baxter, and the poet Carl Sandburg published a book, The American Songbag, in 1927 with two different versions of “Gambler’s Blues.” The same year, Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra released the first recording of the song. Continue reading »