Tlingit Indian pissing match

I had Robert Goetz across the table from me, playing hate songs from his hate song cycle, handing me back my guitar after every song of hate. My turn!

I did what I do. I score poems. I put other people's words to music. I sang the words of other people as my own songs.

I first played a setting to a 49er song. These are Indian songs sung after a pow-wow, after the public has gone away. This is the sound of traditional, working musicians stretching out, goofing off, singing and playing only for themselves - much like "Lambango," the song enjoyed by jalis in West Africa, when they are singing for themselves, not for the king.

I played a song that was first sung in a native tongue, but I found it as words on a page, in translation. So I returned it to song. It was begging for it, because it's basically a blues:

"They all sound like howling wolves from here

everybody just beginning to get drunk

& I have to go away."

Actually, I just discovered, it's not a 49er song at all, despite my having introduced it as such at campfires and guitar circles for years.

I just went back to the text, Shaking the Pumpkin, to round up a little more detail than I gave to Goetz (and K. Curtis Lyle and John Eiler, who were listening in during The New Monastic Workshop). And the only connection this "Song on the Way to Jail" has to a 49er song is proximity in an anthology!

The anthology's source for the song is a collection of Tlingit texts collected by John R. Swanton at Sitka and Wrangell, Alaska, in 1904 and published as Bulletin 39 of The Bureau of American Ethnology in 1909. Yes, and unbelievably, those were our great-grandparents' federal tax dollars at work, paying for the collection, transcription, and publication of native wisdom from Alaska!

Also to my surprise, Swanton's collection of Tlingit texts is available in its entirety online, thanks to the good souls at The Internet Sacred Text Archive. This so-called "Song on the Way to Jail" appears in a section with the far-from-swinging title, Words of Songs Taken in Connection with Gramophone Records (that's "lyric sheet," to you and me). It is numbered as song (57).

In understanding the song, it's good to know, from Swanton's section headnote, that most of these songs were composed "in song contests between men who were at enmity with each other." At enmity with each other? These are Tlingit Indian pissing matches! Tlingit poetry slams! Tlingit emcee battles!

Here is what Swanton has to tell us about our song:

"Composed by Kakayê'k, a Kâ'gwAntân, about his brother's wife. His name probably refers to the wolf making a noise that can be heard a long distance off. The woman is represented as if speaking, and anticipating being sent away by the whites for drunkenness."

This guy is giving his brother the business for having a drunken wife. Roger that. However, Swanton's transcription of the fraternal diss song is unrecognizable to this dude here who thought he had been singing it for years:

"It is just as if I were beginning to get drunk. This is what you are like, Grass-people's children. Have pity on me before I am sent away from here, Kâ'gwAntân's children."

Whatever that is, it's not a blues, it has no howling wolves, and I very much doubt it would have yielded a song I could have sang to Robert Goetz in the spaces between his hate song cycle.

I know from the anthology where I first found this stuff that Swanton's literal transcriptions had been reworked by the poet and publisher James Koller; now I see how much of a hand he had in it. And I see now it was Koller's title, "Song on the Way to Jail" - which he invented, based on the aside that the drunken sister-in-law was "being sent away by the whites for drunkenness" - that suckered me in as a songwriter.

I have never set this to music - somebody else, have at it! - but I see now that the drunken sister-in-law gets in on the emcee battle. Swanton's song numbered (58), he notes, was "composed by the woman referred to above, in reply."

Step up to the mic, sister:

"What you are saying about me is very hard, Kâ'gwAntân's children. I am very sad. You (i. e., the man accusing her) have given me one drink of whisky after another. So you ought to have pity on me, Kâ'gwAntân's children."

Here is Koller's pared-down version - the one I recommend to insomniac songwriters who find this post one dark night and jump right on their guitar (or Cassio):

"I don't know why you tell me I'm drunk

it's you been giving me all that whiskey."

The internet and opportunities being endless, and every night being long, I see some other amateur ethnopoetics scholar (who seems to work for a hair salon) also has tangled with the Swanton texts/Koller workings conundrum elsewhere on blogspot.