One of my all time favorite songs has always been "Frankie and Johnny". There are a zillion different renditions of it and honestly I'm pretty okay with most of them. I also very much enjoyed the movie and I don't care if Michele Pfieffer was too pretty for the role. I like Pacino and I like Nathan Lane and I like Michele!!

Okay, I'm done now.

Anyway, I love the song but have never know beans about where it came from. One of the really cool things about reading The Rose and the Briar is the amazing amount of research these writers have done on the songs. I did not know that there was a Frankie who had a boyfriend named Albert who was much younger than her and Frankie was a prostitute. Apparently there was a fight over some woman named Nellie Bly (can you believe that name?) and a cakewalk of all things. I don't know, there are tons of different reports and everyone reported something different. And the ballad has changed so much over the years (where did Johnny come from is what I want to know) that it's hard to know where the truth is. One very cool thing I found out is that a guy actually wrote a dissertation on the ballad, tracking all the different versions and figuring out what the common elements are and then comparing them to the news reports.

Wouldn't you love to be a music historian? There was a girl in graduate school with me who was becoming a science historian and I was so jazzed by that idea. All the fun parts of science without having to pass Physics class. I am just a regular boring historian - the American history kind of historian. I honestly never thought there were so many options, that you could research a ballad for heaven's sake - that there could be a whole book about the history behind well known ballads.

I'm such a geek.

After "Frankie and Johnny" there is an essay on "Delia's Gone". Johnny Cash won me over with this song ages ago but who knew it was about a couple of teenagers? I'm right there with author Sean Wilentz - knowing that this is a murder song about a couple of teenagers is a bit mindblowing. It's hard to get behind the idea of love gone wrong when you realize it's fourteen-year-old love. And why has the story of Delia and Cooney Houston so captured the American imagination? Why this song and these children? And do any of the singers know the history when they adjust the lyrics? Did Johnny know it was teenagers he was singing about when he added a sub machine gun? Or does the history not matter so much when you get down to it. Is there the song and the history, but the two are separate. Love the song no matter what - the history is just the jumping off point, the point of creation. And everything else is what the singers (and song writers) did with it after that.

I should have been a music historian.

I listened to Springsteen singing "John Henry" at full blast today and I love it almost as much as "Born in the USA". I keep wondering where America is lately and I think the best place I've found it - the only sure place I've found it - is in our music and our words. Don't talk to me about politicians please (left, right, center, who cares). Give me Bruce and John Henry and Delia and Frankie. And maybe I'll just become a music historian on my own.