Faith & Fear In Philadelphia

Last summer, I had the good fortune to get to know some historians at the University of Sheffield. No doubt intrigued that we were writing songs on 19th Century American characters and events, they asked me, over a beer or two, if we would be interested in doing a project with the History Department. I said yes, and we started planning what that would entail. At the end of January, Andrew Heath, lecturer in American history and our partner for the project, submitted a bid to a public engagement fund called the Arts Enterprise based within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at the University. A couple of weeks later, we were told our bid had been successful and our project would be funded in full.

So what exactly is our project?

Before we went into the studio to record our first album, I already had in mind a loose idea for our second record. The Mule & The Elephant was a collection of songs written over a few years; some written three years before, some a couple of weeks old. Though I think they sit together well on the album, the songs travel through time and space and this creates a particular effect. The album moves geographically from the Erie Canal to Oregon; crossing the Mississippi with the Mormons and holed up with Thomas Jefferson on his death bed in Monticello. Crossing the continent back and forth, as an exploration of the nation's ambitions, suitably frames the story. The grand themes required that 'big picture' and this is seen in the stories that we explore too. As our liner notes illuminate, moving "from Presidents to railroad tramps" emphasises the rapid change occurring in the nation as industrialisation changed forever the lives of working people and the political divisions became more pronounced. Eventually, after the mania of a religious revival and the persecution of a growing sect and the drownings and poverty and political vanity, we can hopefully stand back and say it makes some kind of sense.

It was from this frenetic state that I was looking to find a home to settle in for a while. I wanted one place for  my next collection of songs. I wanted them to be concentrated, not just in the absorption of a locale but within a close period of time too; for them to be have a cohesion that was reflective of an intense period of songwriting. I spoke to Andrew about this and he eventually convinced me Philadelphia had the requisite components for the subject of an interesting album.

He's right, too. Like other growing urban spaces in the US, Philadelphia's experience of industrialisation created a number of unsettling anxieties in its populace. Whilst revivalism had stretched to the city, most notably manifested in the preaching of ministers like Albert Barnes, the dominant strain of Protestantism became preoccupied with anti-Catholicism, which culminated in one of the city's most violent riots in 1844. This was seized on by the newly formed Native American Party, who stoked the fires of anti-immigrant sentiment. Ironically, this dissipated after the influx of Irish immigration from 1848 onwards. For African Americans, the city of brotherly love was a popular destination point for runaway slaves and free blacks. Although a black upper class developed with its own institutions of education and benevolence, quality of life deteriorated dramatically for the vast majority during the years after 1838, when free blacks lost their right to vote. An increased population did nothing for the cause of African Americans as they lost their jobs to immigrant Germans and Irish, and hostility towards them caused one visiting English Quaker to comment that "Philadelphia appears to be the metropolis of this odious prejudice and that there is probably no city in the known world where dislike, amounting to hatred towards the coloured population prevails more than in the city of brotherly love!" Such was their desperate plight, black leader Robert Purvis became so downhearted as to observe that "press, church, magistrates, clergymen and devils are against us... I am convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation." Violence followed blacks in every public arena, such as when the Negro Young Men's Vigilant Association paraded to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. Beatings, lootings and the destruction of homes were commonplace for the African American in Philadelphia during the 1840s.

These strains of violence and religion are concurrent themes in antebellum Philadelphia and are what drew me to the city. Our project then, will be an exploration of this changing metropolis and how it emerged from this period of turmoil. A collection of songs will come out of this research and will form our second album, though the recorded output is just one element of this project. We're also working with film-makers Optical Jukebox, who will chart the process of the project and bring to life some of the themes in a short film. We'll be holding a series of events throughout the next year and a half, working with Sensoria, discussing history as a subject of music and engaging in debates on urbanism and the common issues that cities face, not least our own city of Sheffield.

For my own part, the project begins now, as I delve in Philadelphia's past and attempt to bring about a narrative that can be interesting, exciting and provocative. One of the (semi) completed songs that we have been playing in rehearsal has the tentative title, 'Paris of America'. This, in one way, is close to the end of the story. The city's patricians theorised on how to civilise the poor of their violence and depravity. Build parks, fountains, boulevards and the regenerative power of this new environment will transform, it was suggested. This bourgeois fear of the violent underclass, of even a potential uprising against the elite, was real and tangible. Like many of our contemporary public debates, it is another question gone unanswered and one that has been with us throughout history: what are we to do with the poor? It isn't hard to to think back to a year and half ago, when London was burning, and to remember both the inane and the insightful answers to this question. History continues to remind us of our collective amnesia.


Credit must go to Andrew Heath, whose research is informing the project and much of the detail about Philadelphia in the post above, as well as Elizabeth M. Geffen's chapter 'Industrial Development and Social Crisis 1841-1854' in Philadelphia: A 300 Year History, from where I found the quotes.

Thomas P. Cope

I've been dipping into the diary of Thomas P. Cope, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia in the first half of the 19th Century. His observations are fascinating and like many letters of the time, can be beautifully poetic. He speaks a lot of his business, the weather, his ailments but also of contemporary events. This evening I read this entry from September 22nd, 1800 and although I'm unlikely to write a song out of it, I felt the need to share it.
"A conspiracy of the negroes has been detected at Richmond. Several of the unhappy wretches have been executed & others are expected to suffer the same fate. So long as seven thousand fellow beings are held in chains in these United States, their cruel & hardened oppressors may look for plots, conspiracies & insurrections. Nature revolts at the idea of bondage in any shape, but when that bondage is attended with other circumstances of barbarity such as tearing a fond husband from the arms of an affectionate wife & forcing the smiling babe from the breast of a tender hearted mother, of severing whole families & cutting asunder all the dearest ties of humanity, of dragging those innocent & hapless victims into a far and distant country, never, never to return, but to endure every species of heart rending torture under the galling yoke of a never ending slavery, except by the welcome interposition of death; surely those forgers of fetters, these tyrants of their species, are not to expect from men, formed, like themselves, for the sweet enjoyments of liberty, a tame and unresisting submission to all their deeds of merciless injustice. I would not be a dealer in flesh for all the riches of Indastan; nor a master of slaves for the fairest portion of my country. When I contemplate the nature of man, his restless spirit & daring efforts to regain that state of freedom of which he is wantonly deprived by his fellow man, I think I can see, in the sullen temper & discontented acts of the negroes in the southern states, a gathering storm, which may one day burst forth & overwhelm the oppressor & the oppressed in one general indistinguishable ruin."

Corlears Hook

With the build-up to our album launch in January and our tour in February, I must admit that I have been a little distracted from my main objective - to write songs. However, I was recently compelled to write something on a story I came across in a book on artisan organisation in New York City during the early republic. The story was brief - only a few lines - and was about a boy who had run away from his sick parent. As with a number of other songs I've written, this unfinished tale got me wondering what became of him.

All we know, from the account by Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely, is that the boy had absconded from his parent, who was an invalid at the New York Alms House. Ely, who in 1812 was chaplain of the Alms House, was doing his rounds through the city. Asking after the missing boy, he was told to visit a cobbler living in one of the city's many cellar dwellings. Here, Ely found the boy, alongside a mournful cobbler and his family. He had kept the boy for a week but could no longer do so, "because he was too small to sit on the bench of the profession." Ely took the boy back with him. The cobbler, in justification said, "he cannot earn anything yet." The unnamed tradesman was left with a stark choice: a sentimental gesture towards one of the city's many destitute children, or feed his family. This incident was set against a backdrop of huge upheaval for the city's trades, particularly the 'small masters', who in the wake of the "commercialization of trade" from New York's expanding economy (soon to be the country's leading port city), were left clinging to a dying tradition.

(Incidentally, Ely features in one of my earlier songs, Julia Died of Cholera, when he comes up against congressman Richard Johnson, who fought for Sunday mail deliveries to remain in place, despite numerous petitions from Christian preachers like Ely who saw it as a violation of the Sabbath. Wonderfully, Johnson said, "Stop [the mail] one day in seven, and you retard one seventh of the advancement of our country.")

Corlears Hook, named Crown Point, during the British occupation of the city during the Revolution

But what of the boy? Born into poverty, his options were limited. It is possible that he would have returned again to the Alms House, but more likely, given the boy's independent spirit, he could just as easily ended up looking for work in the rough and lively area of Corlear's Hook (beyond what is now the Lower East Side), perhaps Walnut Street, with "its grogshops, ballrooms, and bawdy houses, enticing young mechanics, sailors and drifters." Perhaps he became the young boy employed by a baker to sell cakes and pies in the street, who was caught spending the profits to "have connection" with a young streetwalker. Whilst ministries attempted to stem the tide of depravity as they saw it, the residents enjoyed numerous forms of recreation: cockfighting, bull-baiting, alongside shows from travelling musicians, daredevils and acrobats. Celebrations such as these - including heavy drinking and gambling - provided ample relief from a hard day's work. Our young man initially returns then to the cobbler who housed him briefly, only to find him no longer there, having moved his family to the western New York, to tramp, to find more work.

What happens next I'm not entirely sure. In what could become an epic, Flashman-style tale of travel and adventure, I'm both excited and wary of this potentially picaresque tale. I see our adventurer travelling throughout  New York, helping build the Erie Canal, listening to Charles Finney preach, meeting Sojourner Truth, Martin Van Buren, Joseph Smith, shaping events unwittingly.  

For now, he remains in Corlears Hook, and so does the song.

Quotes are taken from Chants Democratic by Sean Wilentz.

The Golden Book

It's been over a month now since we recorded our album and we're due to get the final mix in the next few days. In the meantime, we've been busying ourselves trying to sort out tour dates, looking at artwork options, doing a river baptism photoshoot (pictured) and generally plotting here and there about what we want to do with the album. Although fun, it quickly reminds me of what I need to soon get back to and it seems a long time since I actually wrote a song. I wrote a short song called The Golden Book just before we went into the studio, which was a song about revenge and redemption from the perspective of a prisoner of war who is confused by where to direct his anger. The protagonist reverses his role by becoming the torturer to an innocent victim. It's a brutal tale, and my hope was to explore that idea of someone trying to find relief in revenge.

Where that fits into future projects, I'm not yet sure, as I'm now moving onto writing our next album. My idea is to write a very focused canon of songs which all take place in one town in Western New York in the 1820s and 1830s. I've touched on the Burnt Over District a little before in previous songs and that period is certainly the most interesting to me in American history. Whether I write self-contained stories or try and produce a clearer narrative throughout the songs is something I'll discover in the writing process - or more likely, the research process.

I'm also very lucky to have recently befriended some fantastic people in the History department at the University of Sheffield, who we're hoping to collaborate with at some point. I've received some great reading recommendations and I've just started on What Hath God Wrought: The transformation of America 1815-1848  by Daniel Walker Howe. It's a tremendous read and brings to life the huge change going on at that time. The project is a great challenge and I can't wait to get stuck into it. It'll require a greater effort on my part, though I also have to remember we're intending to release an album in the new year!

Recording

We're into day four of the recording and I've got a few minutes to blog. I thought I might have been able to blog every day but it's just been too tight a schedule. Over the last three days, we've recorded 14 songs, just one shy of the 15 we brought in and thankfully, it's the song we'd rehearsed least. Today and tomorrow are all about tidying up vocal takes, adding backing vocals and any other additional bits and pieces we want to add - pedal steel, extra guitar parts etc. We've also invited a pianist and a sax/clarinet player down tomorrow but we'll have to see if it'll work out.

Our two newest songs, Through the Trees and Peggy Eaton have, written a couple of weeks ago, have turned out particularly well and have well and truly earned their place on the album. The more acoustic songs (Sally Hemmings and Imitation of Life) have been a wee bit trickier, and I was concerned that we'd swamp them but they've also found their place.


Recording at Club 60, with Paul Blakeman, has been the best studio experience I've had and hopefully the results will reflect this. We've been able to do most of the songs live with myself up in the control room doing vocals and guitar with the rest of the band down in the club (for those who haven't been, the club is essentially a cavern, which makes it a great environment to work in). Overdubs have been fairly minimal today although we were slowed up by the first three (Peggy Eaton, Men of Rank and South), with required a bit more work, but we've got through the last three pretty sharpish.

I've just gone through a bit of a slump of tiredness, which has made it hard to do vocal takes, but I'm coming out of it now and we're about to move onto Cawing Cuckoo. One of my few major key songs, it should lift us all a little. That's all for now, but I'll try and check in again tomorrow...

15 songs

Last night, we added two more new songs to those we'll be taking in to record for the album, making it a total of fifteen. This was our target and it was looking uncertain that we'd make it, but yesterday I managed to find some time before rehearsal to finish off one and write another. I happily discovered a desk beneath various pieces of equipment in the unused control room in our studio and hastily constructed a writing space (see picture). With a copy of Limits of Liberty and my two trusty notebooks, I happily got to work. The first, Through The Trees, was all but finished, needing a few edits to the lyrics. This is a song I had the bare bones of a few weeks ago and I mentioned it in a previous post. The song takes the perspective of the last great Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, as he makes the journey to his fateful duel with Vice President, Aaron Burr. I wanted to bring the tragedy and stillness of the event. A character I wasn't expecting to see in this song was the doctor, David Hosack, but his account was so vivid that his voice became a central part of the narrative. As Hamilton lay dying on the boat back across the Hudson River, Hosack tends to Hamilton. There was always ambiguity surrounding Hamilton's intentions with his shot but in my account, the final line settles it: "I did not intend to fire at Aaron Burr." As we played it last night, the discordant riff set the dark tone and we all seemed to settle upon a slightly stumbling, lazy feel. We agreed that given time it may have become more refined but we'll be glad to record it in its ramshackle state.

The second song regards a character I've wanted to write about for some time. I attempted a song about the Petticoat Affair, or more specifically, the wonderful Peggy Easton, over a year ago, but I missed the sentiment I was after with the lyrics and the melody. Easton, or O'Neale as she was, had married the Tennessee Senator, John Henry Eaton, shortly after her first husband, John Timberlake, had died at sea (there were rumours that he had committed suicide after hearing of Eaton's affair with Peggy, though pulmonary disease is the more likely cause of death). The new romance was frowned upon by Washington society, and as Eaton became President Jackson's Secretary of War, Floride Calhoun, wife of the Vice-President, managed to turn Jackson's cabinet against the couple. Jackson - whose own late wife had been attacked for years for marrying Old Hickory before attaining a divorce from her first husband - took none too kindly to the gossip mongering and stuck by Eaton. Before long, his cabinet had been purged and incredibly, the affair altered the direction of many of the Washington's leading politicians. Through his own maneuvering, it almost certainly put Martin Van Buren in the White House and ensured John C. Calhoun would never secure that office.

Peggy herself, daughter of a Washington hotelier where many politicians stayed, was an astonishingly vivacious woman, who never held her tongue and despised the society ladies who turned against her. In her own words, "I was a lively girl and had many things about me to increase my vanity and help spoil me. While I was still in pantalettes and rolling hoops with other girls, I had the attention of men, young and old, enough to turn a girl's head." Peggy would end up dying penniless and poor. At the age of 59, three years after John Eaton's death, she married her 19-year old Italian music teacher, who duly swanned off to Europe with all her money and her grand-daughter, who he later married. No doubt a woman with few regrets.

Whilst not quite entirely written (my trusty compadres arrived at rehearsal before I'd written all the lyrics), it sounds like one of the most complete songs we have. Everyone seemingly had their parts written by the third run through. It's full of energy and a hell of a lot of fun to play. It's now only a week before we go into the studio and I'm mightily relieved we reached our target. It gives me a little time to revisit other lyrics and do a bit of polishing.

Also, just to let you know, I'll be blogging every day we're in the studio, so make sure you check in next week.

(The above quote of Peggy Easton is taken from John Meacham's excellent biography of Jackson's presidency. Although very well written, be warned, it focuses heavily on the petticoat affair, due to new source material. More extensive Jackson accounts of his presidency are undoubtedly out there. However, it did introduce me to Daniel Webster's tremendous defence of the Union (Webster's Second Reply to Hayne) to Congress during the Nullification Crisis. It gave me shivers reading it. My good lady had it written out and framed for me.)

The album

After an immensely fun Tramlines weekend, I've finally found a spare half hour to sit down and let you know what we're up to. It's just over two weeks until we head into the studio to record our debut album. I wrote down all the songs we've got ready (see left) and it numbers thirteen so far. Some of them are a firm part of our set now (Mary Lamson, South, Men Of Rank); other newbies have recently been added (we debuted Cawing Cuckoo on Sunday at the Folk Forest, whilst Charles Grandison Finney just missed out); others still go back a couple of years but never seemed to fit either of our two EPs (Imitation of Life, Martha My Lover, Old Rebel Sue). Chappaquiddick was one we tried on Your Obedient Servant but when we started recording it, we realised we'd taken the completely wrong approach. We'd gone in very heavy on what is a very simple song.

 Then there are a couple that still require some work. One of these is Marry Me (Ellen Hart) and lyrically, I'm still adding to it. It's another song about Edwin Stanton, a character I find myself returning to. The verses are sketches of his romance with Ellen Hutchinson, who became his second wife. At this point, Stanton was known as Lincoln's cantankerous Secretary of War and as he courted Hutchinson, many of her friends were warning her off the old curmudgeon. He's scarred irreparably from the loss of his wife, child and brother, they said. He'll bring you nothing but misery. Stanton was persistent however, and eventually she fell for him. The song sees Stanton fighting the ghosts of his past, whilst pleading with Ellen that the past is gone and holds no weight over him. A hardened man by now, he doesn't find this argument difficult and despite the night terrors and the daily pressures of the war, here is a man in love, terrifyingly so.

It's possibly the one I'm looking forward to recording most, as he's my favourite character. It's fascinating that someone can go through such a dramatic and tremendous change of temperament as a result of personal suffering. As I sing about in Mary Lamson, Stanton had turned from a carefree, loving husband and father to a driven, angry and ambitious man, as he struggled to provide for his brother's family. His career became his life and this reaction to his mourning created many enemies along the way.

So, I'm still attempting to bring together all these verses, some of which are just snatches of some of these sentiments. Tonight we've got a rehearsal and this is what I want to work on. I want it to go from that persistent voice of proposal (the simple hook line is 'marry me, Ellen Hart') to those voices he attempts to control.

I've got lots more to say, both about the album and our Tramlines weekend, but as ever, I've got to be elsewhere. I'll keep you updated.