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I’m not sure when I first heard the song “St. James Infirmary,” but the first version of the song that really resonated with me was when I first saw Doc Watson perform it in concert. Over the years the song’s been recorded by dozens of artists, ranging from Louis Armstrong back in the ’20s to the White Stripes and Rufus Wainwright more recently.

I just came across an article about the new book “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary,” which has the catchy subtitle “Investigations in the shadowy world of early jazz-blues in the company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a host of others, and where did this dang song come from anyway?”

Turns out the author, Robert Harwood, earlier wrote a book about the song called “A Rake’s Progress,” but discovered that much of his earlier information was wrong and decided to rewrite the book.  Harwood has his own website where you can pick up the book, while his blog contains some really interesting posts regarding artists who covered the song or variants of the song.

And if that’s not enough for you, New Orleans writer Rob Walker, whose book “Letter From New Orleans” addressed the song, has a website that addresses the song as well. Fortunately, these two researchers seem to be on good terms, as Walker recently featured on his blog a two-part interview (here and here) with Harwood.

I’m still digesting all the posts on both blogs, but for the mean time here’s a couple versions.

Cab Calloway and Betty Boop

Bobby “Blue” Bland

And here’s Murfreesboro, Tennessee’s Jake Leg Stompers, featuring my good friend and erstwhile blues photographer Bill Steber on the musical saw. I was there that night, so it was pretty funny to find this turn up on youtube. Soon we won’t have any need for memory…

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I haven’t seen anything other than the clip below for the documentary Fauborg Tremé, but I knew that the New Orleans writer Lolis Eric Elie (author of the BBQ book Smokestack Lightning) was working on it and he’s a pretty amazing talent. One of the executive producers is his good friend Wynton Marsalis.

The Tremé district, located on the other side of North Rampart from the French Quarter (between St. Louis and Esplanade all the way up to Broad), is probably the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, the likely birthplace of jazz, and today is the center of the still vibrant brass band scene. From the synopsis:

Long ago during slavery, Faubourg Tremé was home to the largest community of free black people in the Deep South and a hotbed of political ferment. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor co-habitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much of what defines New Orleans culture up to the present day. Founded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city, the neighborhood developed during French rule and many families like the Trevignes kept speaking French as their first language until the late 1960′s.

The film brims with unknown historical nuggets: Who knew that in the early 1800′s, while most African Americans were toiling on plantations, free black people in Tremé were publishing poetry and conducting symphonies? Who knew that long before Rosa Parks, Tremé leaders organized sit-ins and protests that successfully desegregated the city’s streetcars and schools? Who knew that jazz, the area’s greatest gift to America, was born from the embers of this first American Civil Rights movement.

Here’s a clip (from another source) of the Tremé Brass Band playing at a protest of the proposed closure of the St. Augustine Catholic Church in the Tremé district after Katrina. After two weeks of occupying the church, protesters succeeded in having the church reopened. Founded in 1841, the church is one of the oldest African American parishes in the nation, and its members have included jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet.