In which I try out ChatGPT and make a music video of the wonderful song "William Glenn"

"William Glenn" is a ballad my band Mappamundi learned from the 1978 recording by Nic Jones. Now that the internet exists, I can see that, for example, Mainly Norfolk notes it's also called Captain Glen, Sir William Gower, and The New York Trader, and that like all "Jonah Ballads" it stars a murderer on a ship. Sailors thought this brought bad luck and the only remedy was to throw the offender overboard. This theme is found in ballads of Scandinavia and Russia as well as Great Britain. Here's the video I did of our version:



Making the video version was complicated because so much happens so quickly in this song. At first I had the grand ambition to paint all the pictures myself but instead fell down the rabbit hole of ChatGPT and found myself creating William Glenn's world with the help of the ecologically devastating data centers of artificial intelligence. In for a penny, in for a pound: I also experimented with having our images lip-synced. I know it looks like people poking their heads through plywood cutouts at the amusement park but it's the best I could do at my current skill level.

Thanks to my pals of Mappamundi, Beth Holmgren, Jim Baird, and Robbie Link for joining me on this adventure. Thanks to my son-in-law Derek Miller for showing me how to use ChatGPT. Thanks to Jerry Brown at the Rubber Room for recording and mixing this song back in the day for our cd World Music Our Way.

Old fashioned coconut cookies with molasses

This recipe was eliminated from the Joy of Cooking many decades ago but it's one of my favorites. N.B., some kinds of shredded coconut sold today are drier (maybe, filled with more filler?) than we used to buy, so watch out for the consistency of the dough. Last time I made these the dough was kind of crumbly and the cookies were totally delicious but maybe I should have used less flour.

Old-fashioned coconut molasses cookies

1/2 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons of molasses (NOT blackstrap)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1-3/4 cup shredded coconut

2 cups flour (maybe less if your coconut is dry)
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt

Cream butter and sugar, beat with egg, molasses and vanilla. Add coconut. Beat in flour (maybe start with 1-3/4 cups and see how it looks) with other dry ingredients. Chill at least 3 hours.

Preheat oven. Roll 3/4" balls, flatten them ont he baking sheet, cross hatch them by pressing them down with a fork in two directions, cook 10-12 minutes.

Best lemon bars I ever made

Lemon Bars

Carefully line a pan (9x12) because these bars stick like crazy even to a non-stick pan. I lined the pan with wax paper and that was insufficient. Next time, parchment paper or aluminum foil

For a lasagna pan (9x12):

Crust
1 T lemon zest (or more)
3/8 c sugar
2 sticks of salted butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-5/8 c flour

I whizzed the sugar and zest together in a food processor, then added the butter cut in pieces and salt and flour and whizzed it until all was crumbly, then added a few tablespoons of water and whizzed until it clumped together. Press it into the pan and cook for 18 minutes or until visibly browning a bit.

Filling
6 eggs room temperature
1-1/2 tablespoons lemon zest (or more)
1 cup lemon juice (or a little more)
2 c sugar
1/2 c flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix until frothy. As soon as you take the crust out of the oven pour the filling over it. Bake for another 22 minutes or so. Refrigerate for at least a few hours. Cut with a hot knife, wiped between each cut. If you think they look ugly dust them with confectioners sugar.

For a 9x9 pan:

Crust
1 T lemon zest (or more)
3 tablespoons sugar
1-1/2 sticks salted butter
1/2 ts salt
1-3/4 c flour

Filling
4 eggs, room temperature
1 T lemon zest (or more)
3/4 c lemon juice
1-1/2 c sugar (scant)
1/3 c flour
1/2 c salt

The Cloudburst

UPDATE: It was September 2005 when I originally posted this song about the Great Flood of 1916 which wiped out Asheville and surrounding areas. I'd forgotten about it until this past week, when Hurricane Helene flooded and destroyed the same area.

 

It was a firefighter, Dave Baumgartner, who made this song. He was on the 1916 search and recovery team and was the one who found Lewis and Jennie dead in the mud. The song was remembered by and collected from a woman in Ebenezer, North Carolina in the 1930s. (The sprawl of Raleigh long since rolled over Ebenezer - it doesn't exist any more.)

 

About a quarter century ago I used to sing this with Robbie Link playing cello. Now I only have my 70 year old voice to sing it with. 

 

Read more about The great flood of 1916

 

The Cloudburst

In the month of July in the year of '16
The worst tropical storm that ever was seen
Made its way from the ocean wide
And struck with force on the mountain side

At the head of Jack Branch there was children five,
A mother, and father, and all alive.
They stood in the door and the rain came down,
They saw how swiftly it covered the ground.

The pleading words of little Perry was heard:
"Together to the pines let us go," he said,
But the words of that boy had scarcely been spoken
When the windows of heaven was thrown wide open.

The downpour came in a terrible row.
It struck the house, they were thrown to the flow.
A poor little babe in a cradle at rest
The mother picked up and held to her breast.

Down in an old house that Wilson built
There Lolas and Lilly and the children knelt
Says Wilson to Lolas and to Lilly too:
"Are your children all saved? I only see two."

"Oh, no," says they, "we fear they have drowned,
They've not been seen since the house went down."
Down in a bottom near the Sinclair pond
The bodies of Lewis and Jenny was found.

But poor little Perry has never been found
He lies somewhere below the ground
In a bed of mud and a pillar of clay,
He may not be found till the last Great Day
When the angels come, and the trumpets sound
To wake the dead that's below the ground.

Glue for papier mache

 Posting this so I don't lose the recipe!

To make papier mache paste with cornstarch and boiling water:

Boil 3 cups of water in a medium pot
In a small bowl, whisk together 1/2 cup of cornstarch and 1/2 cup of cold water until smooth
While the water is boiling, slowly pour the cornstarch mixture into the boiling water while whisking
Turn off the heat and continue whisking until the paste thickens. Let the paste cool

The boiling water helps cook the paste, making it stickier and longer lasting. You can store the paste in an airtight container and use it within a week.

Animated music video for Hallowe'en: Lucy Wan

Lucy Wan is Child ballad 51 (read about it here) and one of the grimmest we've ever done. We put it on our cd "We Did It! Songs of people behaving badly." I used my cigar box fiddle, which I bought in 2008, only once, to record this song. Ever since it's hung on my window. 

It was a puzzle, how to make a video that wasn't overtly grisly while still conveying the darkness of the song.

Animated music video: "What a Shocking World This Is for Scandal" (I Never Says Nothing to Nobody)

Sixteen years ago Bob Vasile and I recorded a Pratie Heads cd called "We Did It! Songs of people behaving badly."

We got the idea from Clarke Thacher, head of the local folk song society, who said every proper British Isles traditional band should have a collection of murder ballads. We expanded the remit to include the other seven deadly sins and this was the opening song, as true today as it was back then. I found it decades ago in a tiny folk song collection, the collector averred it was written in 1818. Now, sixteen years later, I've made an animated music video for it.

That was long before the internet. Now I can look it up and see it's usually called "I Never Says Nothing to Nobody," and that it was first published in 1826. And further, that Thomas Hudson himself performed it in "the singing taverns and supper clubs that influenced early Music Hall." And yet further, that Hudson published 13 collections between 1818 and 1832. I'm going to see if there are other delights within. Supposedly the tune was heard from Henry King in Hampshire in 1906 by the collector George Gardiner.

What a Shocking World This Is for Scandal What a shocking world this is for scandal The people get worse ev'ry day, when ev'rything serves for a handle To take folks' good names away. In backbiting vile each so labors The sad faults of others to show body I could tell such a tale if I liked But I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday. The butcher, so greasy and fat, When out, he does nothing but boast He struts as he cocks on his hat As if he supreme ruled the roast Of his wealth and his riches he'll prate Determined to seem such a fine body He's been pulled up three times for short weight But I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday. Tis a snug little house I reside in And the people who're living next door Are smothered completely such pride in As I never have met with before But outside their door they don't roam A large sum of money they owe body When folks call they can't find them at home But I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday. The publican, thriving in trade With sorrow is now looking down His sweet little pretty barmaid Has a little one just brought to town He's not to be seen much about His wife is a deuce of a shrew body The gossips are on the lookout But I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday. The new married couple, so happy, Seem quite the quintessence of love He calls her, before every chappy, "My darling," "My Duck," and "My Dove." In private there's nothing but strife Quarrelling, fighting o'erflow body In short, quite a cat and dog life But I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday. I could tell if I liked such a tale Of neighbors all round, great and small That surely, I think, without fail, Would really astonish you all. But here now my short ditty ends As I don't want to hurt high or low body I wish to stay in with my friends So I never says nothing to nobody, fallerollolliday.

Music Video: "Our Captain Cried All Hands."

I heard this song from the wonderful band The New St. George in 1994 and fell in love with it. My kids and I had a family band called Flash Company toward the end of the 1990s and we performed it a couple of times. I wanted to revive it when I started playing with Jack Herrick and Bob Vasile a few years ago, but it's tricky because the verses are very short and dense and it was hard to figure out how to space them out for some breathing room. The tune I finally settled on is a version of the English Country Dance "Mary and Dorothy." Bob sang and played bouzouki and I tracked the rest of it. 

I made this video when I was visiting my daughter and had no access to art supplies, so it was all done on computer. I just got a drawing tablet and am struggling to make it work. My granddaughter and I really laughed over the last image (they were mostly generated by Bing Image Search) because the woman so clearly is not buying what her sailor is trying to sell her.

Animated music video: Take a Bumper and Try (from the woman's point of view)

In the 1980s I sang this song with Bob Vasile to great audience approbation. Middle aged ladies would come up to me and say "That's the story of my life." Beth Holmgren and I recorded it on our cd "Courting Disaster" way back when... A couple years ago I recorded it again with Bob and Jack Herrick, and Jack mixed it in his studio, and this video is the result.

The song was originally from a man's point of view, and of course outrageously sexist. It was popular in Colonial America, and can be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time; A Collection of Ancient Songs, Ballads and Dance Tunes.. with... Notices... from Writers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries published in 1859. Some enjoyable (if you like this sort of thing) verses we didn't sing include:

They tell me, my love would in time have been cloy'd;
And that beauty's insipid when once 'ts enjoy'd;
But in wine I both time and enjoyment defy;
For the longer I drink the more thirsty I am.

Perhaps, like her sex, ever false to their word,
She had left me, to get an estate or a lord;
But my bumper (regarding nor title or pelf)
Will stand by me when I can't stand by myself.

Pelf, by the way, is a wonderful word used in other Colonial American songs. It means "money, especially when gained in a dishonest or dishonorable way."

Although audiences laugh at this song, I find it deeply melancholy as I had an alcoholic mother who drank alone. That's why I decided to start this video with bright colors and finish it in somber hues.

Music video made with images from the Codex Manesse: Touch But My Lips

Thirty some odd years ago my vocal ensemble "The Solstice Assembly" got hired to do the occasional Renaissance Fair. We became acquainted with the Society for Creative Anachronism. I'm at the bottom right with my mouth hanging open.

We didn't really have enough suitable material so I wrote some. Like most things at Renaissance Fairs, my songs were mashups. For this one I selected three quatrains from Shakespeare's romantic poem "Venus and Adonis" (not medieval, obvs), which is as I recall (I haven't googled it) about the goddess Venus falling in love with a mortal man and getting the cold shoulder from him.

Then I went to the UNC Music Library and looked for suitable melodies, but all I could find from way back when was wandering trails of noteheads, without any indication of rhythm or duration. I took one of these wandering trails and hammered it into this melody, which I think is the prettiest one I ever came up with. 

Bob Vasile and I used to play it in Pratie Head concerts, and at weddings, but for the cd Under The Drawbridge David DiGiuseppe accompanied me on the cittern. Here's the video for it which I finished just today, decades later.

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Almost all the images in the video are from the Codex Manesse, a German songbook of the early 14th century. I cut them out on the computer and mashed them up with whatever.

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As I did it I was thinking about the method demonstrated in the video Terry Gillium teaches Monty Python animation (1970). Terry cut things out of photographs and magazines and the pieces were so flimsy he had to put a piece of glass over his scene to keep them from flying away. He doesn't say how he kept them from all sticking to the glass when he went to make his miniscule adjustments. It's much easier to do in Photoshop (I'm still using an ancient version because I refuse to pay a monthly fee to have the newest iteration). Of course there are other programs that make this all much easier, but I think my technology has plateaued. 

I was thinking about this song because I'm on a campaign to throw away all the heavy boxes of old cds in my attic. It makes me sad, we loved this music so much (I still do) but not that many people got a chance to hear it.

Another music video with paper cutout animation: Away With These Self-Loving Lads

This one has some moments that really make me laugh, amusing myself as usual. It didn't take as long to put together because the song is shorter and there are fewer "scenes." It's a challenge figuring out what to do during the instrumental breaks. In this case, I took the original songbook cover from 1587, cut the images out of it and blew them up and colored them. The idea was going to be, they were going to hop out of the cover, and if I had fancy software I could have done that, but my end result is so simplified I fear the idea was lost. It was fun, anyway. The song was recorded in my living room in 1990. At that time I had a four-track machine and a two-track machine and the cuts were edited with a razor blade and tape. A tiny sliver of the first verse was just - blank space - on the cd, which astonished me. Had I really not noticed this, way back when? Or did I just forget? I thought maybe it was a manufacturing error so I went up in the attic and dragged down some boxes of these 33-year-old cds and tried some others, the silence was on all of them. I tried to paper it over by copying a smidgin of the instrumental break into the hole and then singing a half-word over the top. It was not very successful but I think it's better than the sliver of silence. I paid my granddaughter 6.5 cents per angel for her artwork! The angel in the last scene is doing a dance modeled after "Toto ballerino" which my sister-in-law sent to me.

Music video with paper cutout animation: Turpin Hero

Another in my series of recordings of songs nobody ever wanted to perform with me. I learned this one at a house concert in Durham NC featuring the wonderful Brian Peters. I've loved the song ever since, and taught it to my grand kids. I tried lip syncing in this one. I took pictures of myself making the different sounds and put the shapes on the puppets' mouths. It was only partially successful.

Music video with cutout animation: The Day We Went To Rothesay-O, a Scottish folk song

 My grandkids came to visit and while they were here I got my grandson to sing on the choruses of two songs, this was the first. A song I could never get anybody to record with me before! As usual, making the animation took almost a month, and so far, only 51 views on youtube. I keep reminding myself I do it for my own enjoyment. I chuckle over my own jokes and figuring out what I can actually manage to pull off is good brain massage. I spent more than a whole day on a tableau that appears on the screen for like a second and a half.

The best part of this video is the bugs we all drew together when I was in Manhattan with them. "There were several different kinds of bugs, some had feet as big as your clogs."

Grandma Peppler's coconut custard pie

This was one of the first recipes I got from my grandmother when I was in high school and so inexperienced that I didn't realize (and she hadn't thought to tell me) that you have to cook a cornstarch mixture in order for it to jell up. I put it all together, uncooked, and refrigerated it in hopes of a miracle that never occurred.

Lately I had to increase the amount of filling, pie pans are bigger than they used to be.

Grandma Peppler's coconut custard pie 

scant 1/2 cup sugar plus 1/4 cup for meringue
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 cups milk
1-1/2 tablespoons butter
4 eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
2-1/2 cups flaked, sweetened coconut
baked pie crust

1. Mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a non-stick saucepan till there are no lumps. Add a tablespoon of the milk and mix it in as well as possible, then add milk just a tiny bit at a time till you have a stiff lumpless gook. Then turn on the heat and add the rest of the milk gradually, stirring constantly. Cook until it thickens.

2. Add the butter and melt it. Then add 1-1/2 cups coconut, give the pot a few good stirs, and turn off the heat.

3. Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Put the yolks in a smallish bowl and whip them smooth with the vanilla.

4. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites stiff, gradually adding 1/4 cup of sugar as you go.

5. Drop a few dollops of the hot custard mixture into the egg yolks and whip them together (this is called tempering) - then add the egg yolk mixture back into the custard mixture and cook a little longer (so the egg yolks cook a bit).

6. My grandma would fold all the egg whites into the custard, but I've taken to folding only half the beaten meringue into the custard. Then I dump the custard-mixed-with-meringue into the cooled (well, supposedly, but actually I never wait and dump it into the baked pie crust when it's still hot) pie crust and spread it evenly.

7. Spread the remaining 1/2 of the meringue on top and cook in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10-14 minutes until the meringue is a bit browned. Please do not eat this pie hot. If you put it in the freezer to hasten the cooling, don't forget you put it in there.

Another cut out animation video: Ben Franklin's Advice

Lately I decided to start recording songs that, for whatever reason, I never put out there before. It's a bit mortifying not to sound the way I did a decade or two ago, but this is where I am now. Here's my rendition from last month (just finished the animation this morning):

Ken Bloom and I were hired to do a presentation at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich for their Ben Franklin exhibit in 2006. I wrote a couple of songs for the occasion. One was "Downfall of Piracy," lyrics by Ben Franklin as a 13 year old (note the "purple gore") and published on his brother's printing press. Bob Vasile and I recorded it that year - Bob regaling us with Franklin's enthusiastic history of the pirate Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. 

The other song I wrote was this one, Ben Franklin's Advice (I actually called it Ben Franklin's Aphorisms at first, but too many people didn't know what an aphorism is). I googled up a handful of his pithy comments as printed in Poor Richard's Almanac, and shook them into five verses. I always thought this song would be good for re-enactors and historic events, but we never got a chance to do many of those events so the song got forgotten.

The animation took weeks. I have tried several lighting setups and none of them have worked well so far, so it turns out all the time it took cutting out the figures with little tiny scissors and an X-acto knife was wasted - I had to finish it all in photoshop.

My first cut-out animation music video: The Frozen Girl (Pratie Heads version)

The Frozen Girl was a very popular song from its beginnings in 1840 through the early twentieth century; more than 200 versions have been collected, in thirty states and in eastern Canada, titles including The Fair Sharlot, Frozen Charlotte, Fair Charlotte, and A Corpse Going to a Ball. The heroine scoffs at the notion of dressing warmly to ride in an open sleigh, twenty miles, at night, in Maine, on New Year's Eve, to go to a dance. When her idiot boyfriend (why did he let her go out like that?) gets her to the dance, she is dead. In the newspaper story, it says the ball went on regardless. 

There was even a merchandise tie-in, see the Frozen Charlotte dolls below.

The poem on which this song is based was written by Seba Smith (or, perhaps, his wife, as I have seen in one published broadside), and it recounts in rhyme a supposedly true story which took place on New Year's eve, 1839. At the foot of this post you'll find the original story; originating in the New York Observer, it was reprinted in newspapers across America.

I first heard a version of Young Charlotte sung by Tim Eriksen on an album by Cordelia's Dad. I love Tim Eriksen's voice, and I loved the story, but the tune was so slow and dreary, so I wrote my own tune for it and reworked the lyrics for my own entertainment. I recorded it with Bob Vasile on our cd "Rag Faire: music of the British Isles and beyond."

I've been working on this animation for the last two and a half weeks. It took a lot of time to get set up and do the paintings. I found the colored pencils my aunt gave me in the 70s which I've never used until now. It did feel like playing with paper dolls, as Mike Craver says. (See his cutout animated music video which inspired me here: The Dame of Camellias.) My biggest problem (besides lack of talent) was insufficient light, I hope to fix that by the time I do the next one.

Links for studying cutout animation

• Mike Craver's cutout masterpiece The Dame of Camellias - he uses watercolors and works very large, using an old iPhone SE because the camera is so good. He has rigged his to a tripod but I'm thinking about using a boom microphone stand and a fixture that holds the phone to the stand. He is very old school! No computer manipulation. If he doesn't like a character's face, he whites it out and paints it over again.
  
• Tutorial by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python's Flying Circus. He used pictures cut out of magazines and they were so flimsy he had to put a big piece of glass on top to hold them down for every shot. Then when he picked up the glass the pieces flew around unless he had tacked them all down.
• How to Make a Paper Puppet for Stop Motion Animation by John O'Donnell - (he uses a quarter-inch hole punch to make a hole in the back piece. Puts a dab of glue on the back of the front piece and attaches it through the hole to a paper disk behind the back piece.
• FayeMaybe's Making Puppets for Animation. She is using index cards for her puppets. She pokes a hole in the back piece, bends an L shape out of wire and tapes it to the front piece, turns it so the wire stands up and pokes it through the back piece. Then she makes a spiral out of the wire and flattens it on the back of the back piece. Looks hard.
• Houston Filmmaker Explores Dimensions of Paper Animation is a good overview of the wonderful work of animator Brandon Ray. He photographs his moving characters on a piece of glass suspended over a background or a green screen. Not sure why.
• Making of Paper plane by Massimo Giangrande gives a good overview of the initial planning and the drawing process. And here is the finished product: Giangrande's Paper Plane
• Gianluca Maruotti's cutout animation music video for Tay Oskee's song Black Smoke
• Aleene's 29-2 Tack-It Over & Over Liquid Glue 4oz for holding things down temporarily
• The bigger you work, the easier the creating and manipulation are. Mike's puppets are about 8" tall.
• Outline the body parts and cut right to/through the outline. Recommended to blacken the edges of the pieces to avoid flashes of white