Some folks said he played a hand or two with Stagger Lee and Billy Delyons. Word had it that he was the very rounder that Delia fell head over heals for. I heard he had money on John Henry winning that race and that he said he may have preferred to lose that bet. It’s on the record that he stood up in court for Frankie and was a pall bearer at Albert’s funeral. They say he visited her in the asylum all the way up until the very day she died.
A quiet, unsung, witness to it all. A storyteller, to be sure. How do you think we came to know any of these stories anyhow? Mason Porter, he kept on moving, telling anyone who’d bother listening the things that he had seen.
When I met these boys, I was fresh back from Mexico. Spent a few years playing bassoon in one of the grittier traveling carnivals below the border. I was still dusty, still looking over my shoulder for something that should be 2000 miles behind me and just itching to fight someone who spoke English again.
It was a chicken-wire-around-the-stage sort of place, I think it was called The Briquette Lounge. Cowboy boots and pool tables, ladies dancing in their plaid country dresses and gents in their still dark, and clean, blue jeans. Before I could get a beer to my lips, they pulled me into a world long gone, at least I thought it was gone.
My Creole Belle and Wayfaring Stranger fit like your grandfather’s favorite old shirt and get you to buy into the world they’re laying out for you. Then they just throw a good old fashioned John Wayne bitch slap at you with something like Hotel Yorba or Take This Hammer. That there’ll get you up and kicking someone if the face if any songs ever could.
Frankie and Albert goes down like a good ol’ country waltz, it was good to see them old folks still do that two step slow dance. Old Paul sure makes us feel the Bob and the Johnny in North Country Fair and I just wanna crawl into that snare drum to listen to the slide guitar from there.
And on it goes just like that, providing tender moments and hootenanny foot stompers. It’s like spending an afternoon walking through the fall goldenrod with your sweetheart, drinking moonshine corn whiskey at the barn dance and then winning a bar fight.
Good times. Good band. Good record. So quit reading this here jacket and buy it, or I’ll stab you in the face.
Max Spiegel
Folklorist
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