 I'm here to tell you about a book that's been struggling to be born. My adult children complained, I have two of them, and they complained that I never taught them the old songs. In fact, they didn't want to even hear them, they didn't want them. And so I decided to make them a little song book. And I have this picture up here. I didn't paint it, it's by Englishman from, he died in 1944, but this shows ladies coming home from the pub. And this is my idealized relationship with my daughters, that we would be skipping happily down the street. But they did complain, and I decided for Christmas, I would make them a little song book. That was last winter or the winter before. I thought I'd just make three copies, I'd go on that shutter fly or butterfly or whatever it is online, or you make a little book. And I thought I'd get three copies, one for each of us, Sarah, Eli, and me. And I would tell just the songs that had stories that I really love, those are ballads that tell a story. And for each one, I'd tell the ballads history, just a little history because they're always interesting. And then why not some illustrations, I thought, oh well, why not some photographs? And I thought, nah, why not photographs of whistles? And I hadn't been making whistles for a long time because my mother had gotten sick and she taught me to make whistles, and it made me sad, and I couldn't do it anymore. And some painful years passed, for I just painted really awfully bad pictures to make up for the loss of this great love of my life. Anyway, so I thought, when this idea came in, all of a sudden I wanted clay in my hands, and I started working again after a long, long wait, and it was thrilling. And so then I thought I would make story whistles, and there I am, in one of these open studios that the Craft Council puts on, and I'm whistling away, as if it had never, that 15 years had never been taken out of my happy life. And I've got pictures by Leah Greenberg, she takes wonderful pictures. And anyway, I thought, why not make story whistles for my girls for the illustration? And I want, because whistle making is my family tradition, and because story whistles are my invention. So I wanted them to be more interested in what our family did and what I do. And so I thought, this would be a way to trick them into it. And so I began really working happily. It was Mark's idea when I said, I want clay in my hands, he said, let's go out and get some. And we drove out and got a big load of clay, and I came home and got right to work. And I was happily making these baller whistles. And then I couldn't stop working, I was having so much fun. And things began to get a little complicated. A publisher probably sacked on me by my sister, Nona. She was the captain of our childhood lifeboat. And she saved us in many ways, many times. But she also has been very, very helpful in pushing her younger sisters forward. And so some of us fight and don't go forward. But she, somehow, this publisher said he wanted to publish this little book. And he said it could be any way I wanted. Well, if you've ever worked with publishers, that's unheard of. I said, any way I want, any way, and he said, any way you want. So I really flew into action with renewed energy. And I soon had dozens and dozens of finished whistles. And each one was accompanied by a really stout, hearty essay. And I was doing really well in that publisher. Then I sent him some examples of pictures and essays. And he said some things that surprised me. He had ideas of his own. He wanted essays to be shorter, and not so many of them. And not so academic. And couldn't there be painted illustrations? It's like painting a pretty Polly. And he's singing her own song, which is a little confusing. And he saw that, and he said, oh, maybe not painted illustrations. And so that was the last idea that he came up with was a real humdinger. What about Ballard Crankies, a book with scrolls that pulled out? And I thought nobody in the world could figure out how to print it. But couldn't that be in the book, Crankies? So suddenly, this book, and I really adore books. I like making them and playing with them and looking at them and just having them in my hand. And so this book was no longer for my daughters. But it now has become embarrassingly concerned with three fascinations of my entire life, which is a long time. These fascinations are all really old. They're so old that the book and this talk could be titled Three Archaic Pleasures. OK, so my interests are definitely not the interests of the world. And it was seen that there's one of the things to explain what's going on in my mind. This is St. Francis preaching to the banjos. That is an uncontrollable instrument. And I love it for that reason. But there it is. That's what's going on that seems that very odd things come out of my mind. And it would seem that all my life's work are woven out of endangered and nearly obsolete traditions. And even that possibly includes books, although I hope not. OK, so where do these fascinations come from? All are ancient crafts. All have been brought to life by the human breath, because the book is really best when it's read out loud. All are fun for me, as are painting and writing about them. And I was happily clicking along with this new idea from the publisher when I had an epiphany from my daughter. I'll tell you the short version of the epiphany by daughter. And hopefully, if you have daughters, you won't get many of these. This one happened at one in the morning, which here is sleeping time, but in California, it's not. She said, what are you doing? And I described this problematic book. And she then asked me two questions. This was Eli. She said, well, how did you feel the first time you saw a television? And I thought, I was disappointed. I was four years old. And the TV was about this big. And everything was gray. And it was a baseball game that was being filmed from an enormous distance. And I was disappointed. And she said, well, what about the first time you saw a cranky show? And I said, I was thrilled. My first cranky show was Raps. Peter and Elka Schumann and the bread and puppet troupe were spending their first winter in Vermont. And the Vermont air at that time was tinted with petroleum weed. And Peter and Elka were above that kind of thing and beyond that kind of thing. But their audience was almost always bright eyed hippies who built this. And if you see it on the outside, you think, put us through a new building. But if you go inside, it's just nonsense. There's no usable space that doesn't have some sort of drop-offs or calamities. So they were beyond all that. And bread and puppet, though, was based on ancient sensibilities. And I think that was one of the reasons that I was immediately attracted to them. Even the woodblock images they create have something about them that seems medieval. But they're not a medieval artist. They're using an old form and they've carried it forward to make it become a vessel for information now. And so as my daughter said, there's a message for me in my memories. She said, I've always been interested in certain human creations and not others. And they have to have been ripened over a vast expanse of time. So they're artifacts with lineages and they've been made eclipsed by electronics and by technology. They are redundant. So what is this? The very idea makes my brain spin in a really weird way. I tried to make a photograph to show what I was thinking so it would make sense to you maybe, but it doesn't make sense either. And so here it is. It's a kind of a nonsense alchemy. And here's an image of a crystal that's strangely important to me. They chose the image I've done over and over my whole life of a person or any creature as a passenger on a bird. Why? My mother made birds, but she didn't do this to them. They're not being asked to carry all my hopes and dreams. And so there it is. It's Google Presences in the background. You go online, you can see this whistle, living in the mysterious electronic world. And then in front of it is the little whistle having its picture taken. And here it is in my hand. And those three iterations of this whistle are by no means the end of what goes on in the human mind when you're talking about artifacts or art. And that's really interesting to me and makes no sense. And it might seem silly, but this sequence tells me that I'm asking old forms to work across time. I'm asking them to carry messages that are old and messages that are new. And I'm asking this little bird to make music that birds don't make. Maybe they do. And this little girl whistles. The excitement of riding a bird, I guess. And I want my work to be loaded with warnings and facts and painful truths about human existence and all existence. And I want it to carry social knowledge, the accumulated social knowledge that we have had throughout time. And if they're funny, so much the better. So though I was raised in a folk tradition, I admit I'm focused on the revival of these antiquated objects. And that act, I want them to speak about my interest in storytelling. And so my objects of fascination are the clay whistle, stories, ballads and songs and books and a form of panoramic theater based on painted scrolls which nowadays is called the cranky. These artifacts have always been used for information carrying vessels and all reforms of entertainment that once were precious to human existence and all are obsolete. So I love them. As I work, I really delight in pulling the circle closed. On the cranky, I'll spend hours on a computer, mining online archives and history files to find out what I can give to my creations to carry them into the future but what comes from the past. And so they become little time capsules. And now toward the end of my life, all these creative fascinations of a lifetime have entered into one flowing stream in my mind and that's sweeping me along in a really pleasant way and I wish that for all of you as you get old. It's really very, very wonderful. Okay, foremost in that stream of whistles, stream of flowing information are whistles. And the whistles came in with a caveman. Ancient bone whistles, they mostly were started off like a transverse flute, right, that you're blowing across and then some wise guy or woman thought of the idea of fixing a mouthpiece to it so you didn't have to always be adjusting to get the sound. It would stay in place no matter how you held your mouth. And so that was the first great advance and the last great advance in whistles. Except for somebody in medieval times who thought, oh, we look at tube to that with finger holes in it, we'll have a more usable instrument. So that was the last great advance, the recorder. That was a whistle that got a fingering board. Okay, so these ancient things have been with humans throughout the entire human adventure and they're amazingly varied and they're inventive. And some ancient cultures produced an effect numbers, particularly anyone from Central America on down. They produced so many of these things, great loads of them, that you might think that they had important uses. Why would they make so many of them? And they've been found by the ton in some Mayan tombs but they're also found in simpler settings. There's a Mayan in a king's tomb. There's someone else who's blowing some other kind of honker but that's a little whistle just like has been made forever by humans. And they've also been found in the loving person who placed a little bird whistle in the hands of a dead child, which he was being buried. And now when archeologists dug up this simple place, it wasn't a fancy tomb, they found this little skeleton of a small girl, maybe seven, holding a little bird in her little skeleton hand. And perhaps it was her favorite toy but crystals aren't always toys. They are discovered in archeological digs of all sorts and all over the world. Every culture has had them and they're almost always made about the same way. You find that old outhouses where they fell out of someone's pocket when they pulled down their pants to pee or moats or in ruins of castles, moats were a big source and ruins of castles and cottages and forts. And their settings suggest their uses, their spiritual practices or for music or for signaling or hunting and especially as toys which they still predominantly are today. For me as a lifelong grizzlemaker all things goes to my mother and to her father. That's my grandfather and he was born in 1882. He was an old man, my mother said when she was born already an old man. I don't think he was all that old. But he was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and he lived within the traditions of his community and he was remembered as a man who made crystals to amuse children. My mother, there she is. Looks like she has radiant antlers but she didn't. She was wonderful though. She was perhaps, she was initially inspired by her father's toys or by something called fairlings. Fairlings were tiny crystals. Now these are tiny. I put a penny in the picture and then hated how it looks like, made another picture. But a penny is that big next to these little things. They're tiny, tiny little crystals. One note, just a little hoppy squeal and they were what you won at county fairs for prizes. Nowadays you've got a huge teddy bear that won't fit in your car but then they gave out fairlings and you can still get them online. The price has gone up on them but they're still cheap because people don't know what they are or why they have them in their grandmother's attic. So she made crystal making her life work and she passed it on to me. Nona made one crystal once and said I'm never doing this again. But it was beautiful. It was a bob white or some bird with big cheeks. Okay, so for me it's been a long and delightful obsession and it's perfect for contemplating almost any topic under the sun. And here are some of the larger crystals that I made. Okay, this is called the corporate crystal. It actually signed to a corporation. It was big. My daughter's ear, I said mom, you need a forkless to pick this up. It's true, it was heavy. And way in the back and you can't see it from this angle is a tiny little woman fighting to get sand shares on a black suit with a tide. And she's really trying to fit in with the guys but they aren't letting her forward. We hope things have changed since I made this many years ago. But it's in some corporate office now ornamenting their space. That's the, some people are really not very religious and should stay off that topic. That's the last step where it has dogs there that are out here, they didn't fit in the picture. And they're just only eating bread and apples and that sounds like a good thing. And that's not just probably, he has a horrible stomach ache. And if you blow in his foot, he goes, well, so there I get some say in what's in the Bible, I guess. The next one, that's a beautiful, beautiful whistle called risking all for freedom. I was on a beach in Florida with my in-laws who liked very fancy places. And I don't like fancy places. And there were waiters coming out and serving daiquiris on the beach and stuff like that. And down the beach, five miles away, the boats were tumbling in the waves, dropping the boat people into the water to drown as they were coming from Haiti. And it was so horrifying to me this contrast between what I was doing on this beach and what was happening five miles away and what happened in Haiti that people would prefer to put their little babies in a boat than to stay there. And so I have all these people crammed in a boat and because the boat has a bird, they're going to get to wherever they want to go and hopefully give them a good life. All those pictures were by Jose Benitez of St. John's Bay, by the way. Okay, so obsolete item number two, ballads, the story songs. This is a painting by Thomas Hart Benton about people enjoying a ballad and the kind of topics that we are now involving ourselves in, that's up there, the women going like that, a bottom, what's it called, a bism-ripper. Yes, that's what books are called that look like that. Okay, I have a hair that's tickling me, bodice ribbons, yeah. Okay, all forms of music were vital parts of our childhood and that included folk music and old ballads. We lived in a region where all time music was still alive and both of my mothers and all five of my sisters all sang. We sang at church and on car trips and around the campfire and on school bus and while we were picking beans and we were doing the dishes and at school and with friends, everywhere. And by the early 60s, the folk revival was in full swing. I was just finishing high school in 1963, I guess it was and singing became even more common. Forgotten musicians were being even rediscovered and that was exciting and the folk revival was really fun and then it slid into the hippie years and music kept the peels rolling and here's my sister Charlotte, she's the next one, she's between known as age and my age and she's there holding her guitar in the ruins of Berkeley with her hippie husband and their dog, termite, long gone. But they sang these songs and he actually became a professional musician who plays at the trolley car and turned around at San Francisco and all the money he makes singing old songs at the trolley turn around he sent four children to college. So it's not nothing to be a musician, I guess and that's what the people were doing a lot of then and as a consequence of those years, music was being passed along from person to person and every party had music, you didn't go to a party and accept there was music and so as a consequence, I know thousands of songs. Now this book that I'm allegedly working on was called narrative songs and musical sculptures but then Cranky's got added and the book, which had been an exploration to art and essay of 35 British ballads. Here's, you'll recognize some of them. This is, the color's not just right in this one but it's the nut brown bride and Lord Thomas. He's asked his father, which girl should I marry? The one I love or the nut brown girl? And the father says, marry the nut brown girl, she's rich and any time in a ballad if you ask your parents for advice, all hell's gonna break loose. This should never be done. You should never ask your parents for advice. So because he marries the nut brown girl but his true love doesn't like it, she dresses up like a bride and comes to the wedding and the actual bride gets mad and kills her and then everybody gets killed by him and it's a really bad ballad and sadly, actually a beautiful ballad that ends badly. But next one, there's the old father, he's creeping around the back looking to give someone else bad advice. Next. Oh, this one was a ballad we sang in grade school. I'll give you a paper of pins so that's the way true love begins. But we sang it boys against the girls, very loudly and nobody ever mentioned that this was a medieval ballad of extreme obscenity. That's where it came from. All that had floated away and just left a children's song. Yeah, oh, here's Old Bangham. Old Bangham was a story about a knight in shining armor back whenever that was, whatever the date with that. He did that one out, he killed giants in the crumbs and trees and all kinds of wild behavior goes on for 56 verses and it came to Appalachia and ended up with four verses about a man who goes and kills a pig and it's now called Not So Rinal, but Old Bangham. And it's my favorite band show song and it's a very singable song. The words of the chorus have remained the same since it first was ever written down and that was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So there, not a next one. Yeah, though, there's Sir Lion. I'll see, there's a naked lady in a tree. He's gonna save her but he goes off and forgets about her. And there's the giant pig, the mythic boar that he kills. Is there another? Oh, there's a little boy on the road who's beset by a devil who asked him riddles when no TV riddles were really popular. And a lot of the very earliest songs are riddles and they often were extremely obscene. You have a riddling game to keep from being assaulted sexually or whatever. That's how you get out of it if you win the game, if you're clever. And they've all been stripped down by time until now they come to us. I gave my love a cherry as no stone. There's no sign in that one that that was really an obscene song of bad things were happening. This little boy is much smarter than the devil and he stands right strong in place and fights him back. And every question the devil asks, he gives him better than he was asked. Oh, and that one came to America and instead of a devil on the road, it's a fly. Yeah, no one knows why. I do, but I'm not gonna tell you. Okay. The one that was up there, well there was the farmer's first wife and she goes down to hell and hits the devil's children on the head. Who knew the devil had children? I never knew. He perpetuates, this is horrifying. And so she hits him on the head with wooden spoons and other things and bashes their brains out on the wall and he's so disgusted with her that he takes her back to her husband who doesn't want her and she skips across the field saying, this proves, look at me, I'm better than anybody, I'm better than men. I went down the hell and I've come back again. And so those ballots were very popular and if they're funny, they're less likely to have changed for some reason. Nothing to draw. This is a one of, a folklore said that you could travel across America in 1920s say and if you collected in every town the version they sang of Barbara Allen, you could tell where that town in England or Scotland or wherever that community predominantly came from by the version they sang of Barbara Allen. So that's them crossing the plains, yodeling away. This is, shows these from the Old Valids and they're followed for the book they made, the old version is followed by the new version so that there's a crystal of each. But then the crankies crowded in and the books started moving in really new and unpredictable and somewhat mad cap directions. So what is a cranky? This is our third obsolete. What is a cranky? It's a box. It's a pre-industrial viewing device. It's a box with a window on the back there. You can see the window there and you can't see it because it's got a scroll in the way. But through the window once he's portions of a panorama on a painted scroll and they get cranked past the viewing window and you can watch it and music or narrative may or may not be supplied and they were immensely popular everywhere in the 1800s. Anyway, somewhere tiny. This one would fit right in the palm of your hand and it was a little cranky about the Boer War and it's English in a little museum. But it's tiny. You turn those little knobs and a little scroll goes past and shows the horrors of the Boer War. And somewhere huge. This one goes on for miles and miles. It's in the Gloucester Hurling Museum and it literally goes like this and it's on looping, I'm sacked and I'm sacked. And that was of a failing voyage. I must have taken about the length of the Hurling voyage to watch it and who knows how they cranked it, whether they had mules or what. You would go to fairs or in theaters in the 1800s and you could see these giant moving scrolls and they'd always be a some sort of adventure. Hurling voyage, trips down the Nile, trip down to Mississippi, you'd go down to Mississippi and then you'd leave the theater. The next people would come in and they'd go up to Mississippi because nobody wanted to rewind that massive thing between shows. And so Mark Twain told funny stories about a cranky show and about a theater was doing crankies that traveled on the frontier in America and there were ridiculous stories. So they lost their piano player. He'd say, wow, we could make that mistake but they lost him. And then the next time they needed a piano player so someone said, oh, that guy plays a piano really well. So they hired him but he turned out to be a dead drunk and so he played enormously bestowy kind of thumping and embarrassingly inappropriate music. And that was the whole story is what it was like to have this sad story in mind with songs he only could know from a brothel being played on the piano. And so that was mostly forgotten now and crankies are still cherished by puppeteers. There they are. The word cranky was coined by Peter Schumann. It was before that it would have been a panoramic theater or something like that. And so it's still cherished by puppeteers and by activists and ballast-inners. Activists love it because you can go out in the street and play something quickly and break down fast. And people with an interest in the past, that's Carolyn Shapiro and this role has been tossed out onto the floor of the labor hall to show sort of how what it looks like when you unroll a whole scroll. It's really very exciting for me. Okay. So but tonight is really about this one page of this struggling book and that page is a page about Pretty Polly. And this is a song I've known for 60 years and to learn more about it, I sifted through historical documents and books and online because I wanted to know about its beginnings and how it changed over time. Here are the words of one critic talking about Pretty Polly. Quote, depending on the version things can take a cringe-worthy turn involving incest, insanity, premeditation, pejorative language, obsessive behavior, and of course, the supernatural. It's no wonder that this story continues to be one of the most popular and widely coveted of the folk music world and beyond. To put it plainly, it's a messed up story and his opinion. The time was tidied Pretty Polly up but the critic is still right. Even tidied, it's a brutal story of seduction and murder and it's current watered down modern version Pretty Polly is very much shorter but it's still a cautionary tale. Where did it come from? England. It was brought here again and again traveling with waves of immigrants. Your ancestors might have brought a version and mine certainly did. As they sang, details were admitted but the important elements all remained. Now Pretty Polly is considered to be the great American crime ballad. That 300 years ago it was a small thing at least till it was seized and reworked and printed as a British broadside called the Gospel Tragedy. Broadfives were printed song lyrics that look like that and here she's holding one on the street to sell them. They were sold on the street for next to nothing and it was a new way to learn songs and musicians sang them on street corners to earn a living and so there's a person holding a broadside scroll as she sings and people gather around and they're gonna be expected to pay her as a lovely sketch. I think it's only named Tomlinson and so usually the poetry in broadsides was printed together by hack poets taking, they take real life scandals and write them into verse and crimes were very popular for their material. Old songs would be taken and spruced up with new information, place names were put in them or popular elements from other ballads and there was ridiculous flowery language that was imposed on most old ballads during the broadside period and Pretty Polly was one of these. The public liked Pretty Polly and they sang it and nobody knows what tunes they sang for they changed both the tunes and the words to suit themselves. The fancy poetry was replaced with everyday words. No one wrote down the old tunes but the appellation Pretty Polly has a minor tune called Mountain Modal and it suits the story. In this way it flowed along changing as it went. Molly, who was the old version, became Polly and William were shortened to Willie and 36 verses dropped to less than 10 but they still contain the tale in all of its gruesomeness. The history detective for Pretty Polly was David Fowler who was a university graduate student in the 1970s and he laboriously examined old records and found strong evidence this story was told about an actual murder that happened in 1726. The British Library has one of the first printed broadsides to Pretty Polly from early 1700. It was, but scholars say it wasn't entirely new at that time that it contains many older elements. Polly inspires all sorts of art and Pretty Polly is the queen of the murdered girlfriend ballads. There's a whole genre called the murdered girlfriend ballads and but she's the queen. Polly is. In ballads all the bad men are named Willie and Pretty Polly has a narrative moving between Willie's voice and a little bit of neutral observation and then Polly's concerns. She knows that she's been tricked and she knows nothing is going to go well for her. So the lurid details of Polly's fall from virtue and unmentioned nowadays and unmentioned pregnancy were openly described in the old broadside but now been dropped. These details are probably why Pretty Polly was excluded from Francis Jane Child's 1890 massive collection of early ballads. As a Victorian gentleman child avoided dirty songs and he disliked the targary sentiments that emerged from the gutter press. So the gospel tragedy probably offended him in every way although he'd like Pretty Polly now. Pretty Polly always contains supernatural elements. Originally the murder escaped on a ship as Pretty Polly's ghost chased him. This is a comic book of Pretty Polly that's on the ship. He could use the old version because it's more dramatic I guess. And in that Polly's ghost is so powerful he dies of fright or he becomes a raving maniac and she tears into pieces. There's some versions of her ghost is so powerful that she sinks the whole ship. But all those ideas are stolen from other ballads which was a very popular thing for ballads to do. And sometimes when you're singing you realize the verse you're singing isn't about three other songs. Okay in the American versions Pretty Polly has become a really wispy remnant of the powerful super-ghost that she was in the old days. Sometimes you get an eerie ghost of Polly after her death. The version I'm going to sing during the cranky repeats an opening verse about rings on the fingers of her lily white hands and the last time that sung you're supposed to, that's her as a ghost because you know she's dead then. And usually wild birds greeting her death is the ending of Pretty Polly. And I sing it, most of the time I end it there but I went ahead and put in the last creepy verse to make them feel scared. Now so Woody Gusley, the great American songster, used this sad and lonesome tune for his great song Pastures of Plenty. It's a celebration of migrant workers and a really fabulous song. And that alone shows that great things can come from a sad story. And so it gives me hope for my odd book. Now I'll set up the cranky which will take a second. With primitive technology there's so many things that can go wrong. Okay, I sing this just the way I learned it when I was 12, so here we go. Will yonder she stand Work through the polly Will yonder she's on the fingers of her lily white hands And the rings on her fingers They shine, shine like gold Rings on her fingers They shine, shine like gold I tell you Polly's mind Will be forth to unite his soul I courted her to be Polly I courted her so sweet I courted her to be Polly I courted her so sweet Polly, she be lented And we'd be dance to me I courted her to be Polly The hollowed long night Poor pretty Polly's a hole in She jumped on behind Givin' away they did go The valley below They let her overkill And the valley so deep Let her overkill the valley And she began to Oh Willie, oh Willie I'm feared of your ways Willie, me a spray And what did they spy They rolled in I'm feared for my life Willie, never be her one You guess just about right All the way He stabbed to her heart And her life blood just flowed He stabbed to her heart Her life blood He's rollin' her over Her star Workbird And her light shine round her Whistle that you're working on Has often two sides And we saw two pictures And we didn't understand that One was on one side This whistle has on one side Pretty Polly being ready to be shoved in her grave Pretty Polly being ready to be around Pretty Polly is gonna get Poked into the grave Here's the little bird ready to grieve And around the back is the gossip The old story of her chasing down the ship That she's going to sink To revenge herself on him And so I tried to do that in most instances Because it got so cumbersome Having two whistles early and later But it's been a great pleasure This project And this mad cat part of it Has certainly been a thrill I just can't understand why you killed her Yeah I just mentioned In the old version The old broadside version She was pregnant And it's quite clear about it But by the time The puritanical strain Runs tide in America And that kind of thing Gets dropped out of a lot of ballots There's no mention of that And the editor said Why don't you make a new verse It explains that And I said well this is an ancient ballot I really don't feel like I can make a new verse And he looked a little bit like That was a great deal breaker We'll find out But he wanted me to In some way explain why He said this just turns him Into a psychotic killer And I know Yeah But he was He was But she's in the oldest Versions of it They openly describe what's going on They're very lurid And clear in what's going on So that's his child Right Was she already pregnant? No, it's his child He's the innocent girl Who he seduced And then And then he doesn't want to marry her But now there's no explanation Because there's no explanation But now there's no explanation You're just supposed to Intuit it He's just a psychotic killer Maybe you could do a new version Since there are really So many versions You can do that To where she kills her But she doesn't know How to do that I'm working on my fourth prank Of this set And the fourth one is For an old, old song A medieval song called Nottingham Town Or Nottingham Town And the first verse is In Nottingham Town Not a soul would look up Not a soul would look up Not a soul would look down To show me my way That we're not in town And so What's that mean? The whole song is a riddle Every single verse is a new riddle And nobody remembers The answers to those Because it was medieval And it hasn't been sung In Great Britain For hundreds and hundreds Of years It was lost But it came with a wave Of people who ended up In the deepest hollows Of Appalachia And it was found By Alamo Max And those people When they were looking For all ballads And they found this Intact ballad That they had heard of But had never known It still existed And those people Didn't matter Where you went In that community And even the ones Who are the greatest All sing the same version And they all sing the same tune And for not a midtown I was wanting I loved that song Because I like medieval songs That kind of modal sound Minor songs But I decided The other day I had After I talked to my daughter At one in the morning I thought Oh, this is a song For us No one looks up And no one looks down Because they're all In their cell phones And so I'm painting the scroll Of that as big As the entire ballad Which works out Perfectly About what technology Is done to social relationships Wow And I'm really having fun With that So I think from now What was a madcap scheme Is going to get Just a matter Oh, perfect I think Bob Dylan used Not a midtown For masters of war He did He did That was For which of the songs Masters of war Masters of war Masters of war Yeah Oh, yeah Yes, yeah Can you talk a little bit About the orphaned queen And others Yes Yes, that was when I finished And I just gave a workshop At the Pottsham School Of the orphaned train And it's the same as this Only shorter little A little slide show About the history of the orphaned train Which was a train That was a social experiment Trying to figure out What to do with Orphaned and abandoned Or truant children In the eastern Seaboard cities Because after the Civil War There were thousands And thousands of children Living on the street And refugees And immigrants Were coming in On a daily basis Thousands of days More It was just People pouring into the United States And they didn't know What to do about these children And there were no federal programs At all In place in those days So a kind man Devised this idea Of the orphaned train And you really Think it through very well But it was to put Children on the trains And just send them out west And give them to Any body Who wanted a kid They'd line the kids up On the train platform And you'd come along If you were a farmer Or if you were needing A boy in the field Say, I want that boy And I want that one And I'll take that little girl To scrub the dishes And you could just take them And nobody kept Very good records And may I mention you We have a person here In the audience Susan Grimoli The hood is Ross Her grandfather was on The orphan train As a two-year-old child And when he was taken Off the train in Missouri With the Missouri The people who took him Didn't have a name for him He was too little To know his own name And so they named him Bailey after the locomotives That brought him there That was the name Painted on the locomotive And so did they Gave him a good enough life? Yeah He was one of a lot And some of them were not Just happy stories And some were wonderfully Wonderfully happy And you know And so that's What the orphan train Cranky is about It's about the A boy, Bailey Only gets a little older On the song And it's sung The song that's sung Is the Utah Phillips song That's really Just a great song And Mark and I sing it together Because the guitar And I do the harmony And it's just a Really pleasing ballad And then the kids At the couch in school Got to have a cranky workshop And they made cardboard Crankies I knew it wouldn't work And it did It worked But that's one of them I have pretty Polly The wife of Usher's Well Which nobody wants to hear Because it's a story Of unmelenting grief And a mother Who's lost her children Another medieval story But out of that In that story Or a lot of odd practices Of grief That we still have remnants Of today How do you Honor the dead And all that She doesn't know her children Are dead But she wants them back And why she can't have them back And it's a very beautiful song But in a beautiful painting The scroll is lovely I think That one And then Yeah The orphan train Pretty Polly The wife of Usher's Well And not among them And I'm just going to keep Going until I can You know It's odd that we've never Discussed this deeply But when Charles and I Were in Annapolis A few years ago Did I ever mention to you That I talked to a man Who was going to the city hall And he was on his 12,000th Name The books had not been Open for 200 years These were people Who were picked up Anywhere in Great Britain Not people Not any people People who were children If any child Was found on the street They took them They absconded And they put them on boats And they brought them to this country And many of those children Ended up on the trains And he On these orphan trains And they were called In unindentured servants So the fact that Your grandfather was able At some point It appears to please His owner adequately Or had good enough luck To be able to Apparently start a family The flourished it wasn't It wasn't lost It's true that many of these Extraordinary Many of these children Had parents who wanted them But the children Had been snatched On the street You didn't get them back And the records were Pretty haphazard And There are thousands and Thousands Every port Of a community Along the eastern sequel Is there a reason? Is this happening right now? It is Well that's why I like this I like this Particularly because Of what's going on In the port Of the children being Warehouses and having pages And that's all The highest bidder To good Christian moms This seemed to me To be a parallel And that's one of the reasons I wanted to do it Are you going to do a sequel To the show With some of these other Crankies? You haven't talked to them Yes, please I'd be glad to do a sequel It's better than standing Out on the street And getting run off By the police Or breaking on the streets But yeah I love doing this It puts For me This was the first one I painted by myself And not really It was the first one For a long time And I had trouble Thinking about The sequences of it And is it You know I don't want to Look like a recovery book But as I've gone I want the story To be clear And it's It's a story That's a story That's a story That's a story It's an interesting And tricky kind of balance Of Because in art My style of art Is to go from catastrophe To catastrophe As I paint And I obliterate everything And I start over And it's all Just a great big teetering Mesh until finally I feel satisfied It looks like Oh, Mila And I'm happy with it And we can't do that With this You can't The paper won't light It keeps scrubbing And scratching And so I had to Color in the lines Well, you don't have to Align it with the words With your song And you notice One little problem I bet The people who sold this paper To me said it was 18 inches wide So I made my theater From This is just a piece Of wallboard That's put on here With Velcro Right? From Summers Not Summers Obatom But I made my theater All the way For the paper to come And because the paper's 18 inches wide I made it For the 18 inch wide paper And the paper turns out To be just a little bit Over 17 inches So it was sticking out So I had to take some Bedding That the dog had chewed up And made a little Curl But it won't stay in place So I'm going to try Something else The dog eats sheets How many feet Is the crunkie Probably about 30 feet Yeah I think that would be I started measuring And then kind of got For the doctor It was Do you have a canvas Or paper? It's paper It's called butcher paper Now they sell it With plastic on one side And that doesn't work For the paint And And it's holding pieces Ready to wrap Your sandwich in a deli Or something So I had ordered this From a place that Still does it There's stuff called Tyvek There was a scroll Of painting A slide that went by Very quickly Of a Cranky odd Pain years ago On Tyvek That house-wrapping Stuff And it was a marvelous Mesh Because the paint Cops off in unexpected Ways And at least A really, really terrible Look that I liked Tyvek now is being made With a paper-thin version That's meant for artists To paint on And it doesn't have A very long shelf life But neither do I So I might go And try that Phoebe When I saw this In your living room It was backlit Can you talk about that For a few minutes And issues are cranky For often backlit And when that's handy Is if you're going to Want to use Shatter puppets with it Because if you want to If you're going to A foxman on a stormy night You have a landscape Going this way But you want the fox Progressing to the den And home And to the farm yard And whatever he's going They make a little paper Fox on a stick And he gets run Along behind here I don't know How they must have In any arms He gets run Along behind And the light from behind Makes him a shadow A shadow fox Moving along Through a painted landscape And it's very nice But because of the way I paint It was such an ungodly mess That they put the light Behind their places For the paints A real thick blob And then that's just A big black spot It was such a mess What do you find in the Species lights around the Half side? That would be jolly That would be very jolly I would like that I saw it twice It's a mess It was quite beautiful I worked on it After that And I turned it I turned it this dark Brown afterwards too So the light doesn't come Through so well The dark brown is Another psychological Mystery I've never Understood I like things that look Like they were just dug up Have you ever worked on fabric? I would like to work on Fabric And a lot of people They quilt Sort of Essentially quilts For their frankies But I don't have A sewing machine And I don't know That gluing to fabric Would be very Satisfying for me You can get Really long pieces Of silk And canvas And they're on rolls And I could tell you How to get them I would love that Because this has its drawbacks That people can read And it starts to wear out And just take contact paper And put it along the back Well, that's the kind of job That I can see me bundling Fabulously And having it stuck With the back And crumbling wads I just don't know How you would do that They're kind of All kinds of wits Out of the four inches That would be good I'll ask how I can do that Because I would like to try something That has a little Put it Here's another rip That it Thank you