Barking Dog: February 22, 2024
This Week’s Theme: Money
This week, the flipside to last week’s show about hard times: songs about money, in honour of CKUW’s Fundrive.
Note: This week’s notes are less detailed due to the Fundrive.
Raymond Scott - The Sound of Money Being Wasted
Scott was a composer from New York who got his start as a pianist for the CBS Radio house band, and later established Manhattan Research Incorporated, an organisation that he described as “More than a think factory—a dream centre where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today”
Manhattan Research released a series of three albums designed to soothe babies, created audio for commercials, and developed devices like doorbells, vending machine, and ashtrays that had their own electronic music scores
This is off the 2017 album Three Willow Park (Electronic Music from Inner Space 1961-1971)
John Lee Hooker - I Need Some Money
He was a Mississippi blues musician known for adapting the Delta blues for electric guitar, though this is an acoustic recording from the 1960 album The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker
Six Boys in Trouble - Money Honey
Off the album Street and Gangland Rhythms, Beats and Improvisations from 1959
Old Man Luedecke - Easy Money
From Chester, Nova Scotia
Off his 2019 album of the same name
John Jackson - I Bring My Money
He was a piedmont blues musician from Virginia who had given up playing music in his community by the time folklorist Chuck Perdue found him in 1949
Arhoolie Records released his first recordings in the early 60s, and he toured Europe, played folk festivals, and recorded for a few other record companies during that time
From the 1992 album Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down
Junkanoo Band - Sponger Money
From their 1964 album Key West
“Spongers” are sponge fisherman, who often sang to pass the long days and nights aboard their boats
Derek Lamb - The Money Rolls In
An English pub song from his 1962 album She Was Poor but She Was Honest: Nice, Naughty and Nourishing Songs of the London Music Hall and Pubs
David Francey - Money Boys
Scottish-born Canadian folksinger who worked as a railyard worker and carpenter for 20 years before pursuing folk music at the age of 45
From his 2016 album Empty Train
Malvina Reynolds - The Money Crop
She came to folk music later in her life, when she met Pete Seeger and other folk singers when she was in her 40s
Reynolds had received a doctorate from the University of California in 1938, but went back to university in the late 1950s to study music theory
She’s known particularly for writing the song “Little Boxes,” though she wrote and recorded a large catalogue of music during her career
This is from the 2000 compilation album Ear to the Ground
Dave Van Ronk - Had More Money
A member of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City, known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”, MacDougal Street being where practically every coffeehouse in New York was located in the 1960s
From the Smithsonian Folkways collection Down in Washington Square
Jim Doherty - Save Your Money While You’re Young
From a 1961 album called Lumbering Songs from the Ontario Shanties, collected by the folklorist Edith Fowke
Doherty was from Peterborough
This was an old song at the time, and Doherty was the only person Fowke came across while recording who knew it
The Wakami Wailers - Save Your Money While You’re Young
They’re a band that formed in 1981 when four employees at Wakami Lake Provincial Park, near Chapleau, Ontario, started playing Canadian folk music together
They have continued playing since then, and have released four albums
This is off their 1985 album The Last of the White Pine Loggers
Lee Murdock - Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week
He’s a musician and storyteller whose work largely revolves around the Great Lakes
This is from his 1989 album Fertile Ground
Oscar Brand - A Dollar Ain’t a Dollar Anymore
Brand was a Winnipeg-born American folk musician and author who also hosted a weekly folk music show on WNYC Radio in New York City for 70 years, the longest running radio show with a single host in broadcasting history
This song was written by folksinger Tom Glazer in the mid 1940s, though it still really resonates today
Colter Wall - Do Re Mi
From Swift Current, SK
Off a 2021 compilation album of covers of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs
Clarence Edwards, Cornelius Edwards, Butch Cage - Stack O’ Dollars
Cage was a fife, guitar, and fiddle player originally from Mississippi, though he moved to Louisiana in the 1920s as a result of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927
Clarence and Cornelius Edwards were brothers and blues musicians from Louisiana who first began playing in bands together in the 1950s
Clarence became more widely known in the 1980s, when he performed at blues festivals throughout the country
This one was recorded at the home of Butch Cage in Zachary, Louisiana by the musicologist Harry Oster in either the late 50s or early 60s
Glasgow Song Guild - Ding Dong Dollar
From the 1962 album Ding Dong Dollar: Anti-Polaris and Scottish Republican Songs by the Anti-Polaris Singers, who started a musical movement in protest of an American nuclear submarine that sailed into the Holy Loch in the early 1960s
Polaris was the United Kingdom’s first submarine-based nuclear weapons system
Horace Sprott - One Dollar Bill, Two Dollar Bill
Sprott was a wandering musician from Alabama who was recorded in the 1950s by researcher and writer Frederic Ramsey
This is from the 1955 album Music from the South, Vol. 3: Horace Sprott, 2
Furry Lewis - I Will Turn Your Money Green
American country blues artist from Memphis, Tennessee who began his recording career in 1927
This is his own song, and he first recorded it in 1928
This version is from the 1972 album Shake ‘Em On Down
Alice Stuart - Follow Me Honey, I’ll Turn Your Money Green
She was a musician from Washington who got her start in folk music at the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1964, when she was 22
She returned to the festival twice in the following years, and formed a friendship with Mississippi John Hurt, who we heard earlier, and the two toured together throughout the US
She also toured with musicians like Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Van Morrison, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Stuart was briefly a member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as well, though she didn’t end up making any recordings with the band
This is off her 1964 debut album All the Good Times
Alan Mills - The Klondike Gold Rush
Canadian folk singer, writer, and actor from Lachine, Quebec
Made a member of the Order of Canada in 1974 for his contributions to Canadian folklore
From his 1960 album Canada’s Story in Song
Barbara Moncure, Harry Siemsen - Madam, I Have Gold and Silver
From the 1963 album Folk Songs of the Catskills
Moncure was an Ohio singer and Harry Siemsen was a musician from the Catskills who learned his songs through the oral tradition and was the official historian for the town of Kingston in New York
Fiver - Pile Your Silver
From a 2017 album of fictional field recordings collected from the files of people who were incarcerated at the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane between 1856 and 1881, called Audible Songs from Rockwood
Marilyn Monroe - One Silver Dollar
From the 1954 movie River of No Return
Mike Seeger - Got No Silver Nor Gold Blues
Seeger was a folklorist and musician who co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s
From his 1998 album Southern Banjo Sounds
Edsel Martin and Bill McElreath - Last Gold Dollar
Off the 1997 album Close to Home: Old Time Music from Mike Seeger's Collection, 1952-1967
Pharis & Jason Romero - Only Gold
From their 2011 album A Passing Glimpse
Star Thistle - Two Thin Dimes
Another project from the mind of Winnipeg artist Uncle Sinner
Off his debut album The Best of Star Thistle, released in 2021
Ferron - Shadows On a Dime
Off the 1992 live album Not a Still Life
Pete Seeger - Empty Pocket Blues
Seeger was a folk singer and activist from New York who advocated for Civil Rights, environmental causes, and other important issues through his music
This one comes from the 1993 reissue of albums Darling Corey / Goofing-Off Suite
Jack Owens - Give Me Your Money, Baby
Owens was a blues musician from Mississippi
He learned several instruments as a child but his chosen instrument was the guitar
He never really aimed to become a professional recording artist, and instead farmed and ran a juke joint for much of his life before being recorded during the folk and blues revival of the 1960s when the musicologist David Evans learned about him from other blues musicians from his region
He toured throughout the US and Europe during the last decades of his life
This was recorded by Gianni Marcucci for the Blues at Home record series
Marcucci travelled from Italy to the United States five times during the 70s and 80s to document blues music
It was recorded in Bentonia, Mississippi on May 2, 1980
Precious Bryant - Broke and Ain't Got a Dime
She was an American musician described as one of Georgia’s great blueswomen
She was first recorded by George Mitchell in 1967, and by the mid 1980s her fanbase had grown enough for her to perform internationally
This is off her 2002 album Fool Me Good
Floyd Council - Poor and Ain't Got a Dime
His name was half the inspiration for the band Pink Floyd’s name, along with another South Carolina blues artist, Pink Anderson
The North Fork Rounders - She's Got the Money Too
They’re an old-time string band that formed in Ohio in the mid 1970s
This is from their 1978 debut album Railroadin’ & Gamblin’
George Davis - Rocking Chair Money
He started playing music when he was 27 while working as a miner
He would practice on his front porch every evening, and the miners would come and stand on the railroad tracks to listen to him
In 1947, he was invited to do his first radio show, and at one time had at least three radio shows in three different towns, driving 480 km a day to record them
This is from his 1967 album When Kentucky Had No Union Men
Bob Dylan & The Band - Million Dollar Bash
This recording was made during the Basement Tapes sessions in 1967
Ella Jenkins, David Melchiorre, Frank Schneider - What’s Your Trade?
An American folk singer and actress dubbed the “First Lady of the Children’s Folk Song”
From her 1999 album Ella Jenkins and a Union of Friends Pulling Together
Jenkins wrote this little rhyme to teach children about paying people a fair price for their work
