Friday Videos: Dock Boggs
Dock Boggs was the real deal, and the brief biography I’m does not do the liner notes on the Revenant Records compilation justice.
Dock was from Virginia, and was a bootlegger. At one point the revenuer man broke down his door,and grabbed Dock’s wife as a human shield. Dock aimed his gun, fired, and blew the guy’s head off. Soon thereafter, his wife’s family chased him from Virginia: he hid in Kentucky for years before returning. He wore a suit to his recording sessions, because he didn’t want the city people to think he was an ignorant hillbilly, and his sense of vengeance was razor sharp. Reading Mike Seeger’s recollections in the liner notes is disturbing, as the 80-something Boggs gets drunk and begins describing the plans he had to kill his wife’s family when they ran him out of the state. He was known for beating his enemies, perceived and real, into pulp, including one incident that left his forearms soaked in blood.
Dock’s voice sounds like it comes from the grave, a truly terrifying yowl of pain and despair. He stopped playing in the early 1930s, when his wife gave him a choice of the banjo or sex. He didn’t play again for 30 years until Mike Seeger re-discovered him.
Dock’s version of the old murder ballad “Pretty Polly” is actually one of the bleaker, more terrifying versions of this ancient song that came to America with the Scottish and British pioneers who settled in the isolated Appalachian Mountain hollers. There are a lot of variations of the song (collected by Francis Child in the the 19th Century), but the story is roughly the same: Willy leads innocent Polly into the woods and kills her. In the original European versions the reason is explicit: she’s pregnant. In the US the sexual motive is omitted, thanks to our more priggish society. In one of the older versions, the ghosts of Polly and her child follow Willy to sea, and sink his ship: in most of the American versions, Willy is either caught or turns himself in. Dock’s vision is very dark:
He threw some dirt over her and turned to go home/
He threw some dirt over her and turned to go home/
Leaving nothing behind but the wild birds to mourn.
The first-person, anonymous murderer walks away from the scene, without so much as a regret, and disappears. He’s still out there.
Pretty Polly
One of Dock’s best-recognized pieces is “Country Blues”, like the rest of his music, a story of despair. It’s a common thread in most old-time and bluegrass music, which is hardly surprising considering the history of the pioneers, the economic conditions in the mountains, and the times in which many of these performers grew up. It’s not for nothing the Carter Family sang about “No Depression in Heaven.”
When I had plenty of money good people/
My friends were all standing around/
Just as soon as my pocket book was empty poor boy/
Not a friend on this earth could be found
Country Blues
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March 3rd, 2007 at 2:25 pm
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