Music carries cultural themes far beyond their original meanings. Sometimes the original meaning remains the focus even as that meaning fades. Sometimes the meaning disappears but the meme behind the music continues almost as a nonsense nursery rhyme. And sometimes the meaning gets transferred to a new meaning and takes on a new life.
There is a song tradition that originated in the 18th century that has evolved over the years, but slowly...and the song shows some of our deepest prejudices as well as our deepest dreams, even as it evolved over the centuries.
In 18th century England there was a song called "The Unfortunate Lad" or "The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime" or "The Unfortunate Rake." The various versions of the song focused on a man (with the woman's fate secondary!!) who discovers his lover (presumed in the song to be a prostitute) dead in a hospice from what is taken to be syphilis. And the assumption is that the man has also contracted the disease and will die of it, so the focus is on the mans discovery of his dubious lover dead and realizing his own fate. Though the more dire consequences of this dynamic get pushed aside in later versions, the basic idea of a man in love coming face to face with the dead body of his lover defines this genre.
Here is one version, already linked to a hospital that will carry the theme forward:
The Unfortunate Rake
As I was a-walking down by St. James' Hospital,
I was a-walking down by there one day,
What should I spy but one of my comrades
All wrapped up in flannel though warm was the day.
I asked him what ailed him, I asked him what failed him,
I asked him the cause of all his complaint.
"It's all on account of some handsome young woman,
'Tis she that has caused me to weep and lament.
"And had she but told me before she disordered me,
Had she but told me of it in time,
I might have got pills and salts of white mercury,
But now I'm cut down in the height of my prime.
"Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don't smell me as they bear me along.
"Don't muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin,
Saying: There goes an unfortunate lad to his home."
To our eyes not so romantic, but it is the origin of an amazing tradition in American music culminating in the song "St. James Infirmary." As the original focus changed from a man suffering from the consequences of his connection with a dead prostitute to the romance between a man and a woman (who is dead...MAYBE for the same reasons as that 18th century prostitute...) but remains his focus of love, the song for some reason latched onto one particular hospital: The St. James Infirmary. Since there have been many places with that name, and since the amazing genre of songs called "St. James Infirmary" stand out even without any context, the song has taken many lives of its own beyond the 18th century meaning.
One version that came to America, Called the Cowboy's Lament or the Streets of Laredo, largely ignored the role of a woman in the story altogether and became just the regrets of a cowboy about to die...and I remember my mother singing the lines from this version:
"Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly"
But that isn't the version that clicks with me.
That version, where the cowboy was lamenting and dying separate from a more complex story, was one theme that came from the original version But it wasn't the aspect of the complexity that interests most people. Most people don't care about the dying cowboy or whatever he is...they care about the woman involved, and that is what propagates the most...
The theme that resonates most to us is NOT the venereal disease story linked to a prostitute or even the cowboy dying from some unspecified cause that just MIGHT have to do with a woman. The theme that resonates most with most people is the direct connection, good or bad, between men and women. THAT is what we are most interested in deep down.
SO the original story of a sleazy dude discovering his lover had syphilis evolves to a deeply loving story of loss of a lover who dies for reasons beyond anyone's control.
The song "St. James Infirmary" carries the full weight of all of this. It is a song that comes from that 18th century context, but softens it. And echoes beyond.
Streets of Laredo by Johnny Cash: a more American version of the story:
Note that some aspects are identical, some are completely different, this is how culture develops.
Somewhere between the very specific "Streets of Loredo" version and the "The Unfortunate Rake" version comes the blues I like most. The "Streets of Loredo" take the story in one direction, and the "Unfortunate Rake" takes it in another direction. In between is the song, covered by so many great people, called "St. James Infirmary."
One of the purest versions of "St. James Infirmary" is the amazing piano solo segueing
into song by the late James Booker. Sure, his piano is way better than his vocals, but he is amazing through and through:
Way earlier is a very, very strange version done by the amazing Cab Calloway as part of one of the strangest Betty Boop cartoons:
And Hugh Laurie (of Wooster and House fame):