I was introduced to the work of Bob Coltman many years ago, by a Jean Redpath recording of "Before They Close the Minstrel Show" (the only Bob Coltman song in the Rise Up Singing songbook. I didn't hear any others of Bob's songs until I bought a couple of Bob's CDs from Dick Greenhaus at CAMSCO Records. I love every song on those two CDs, and I just recently bought a copy of Bob's Son of Child. What I like most about Bob Coltman's songs, is that they sound a hundred years old the moment they're written, they're always interesting and full or quirky insights, and they're fun to sing. So, what's not to like. Bob has posted here at Mudcat quite frequently, and his posts are always interesting. I hope I get to meet him in person some day.

Bob sent me lots of his lyrics and asked me to post them (because he's too modest to post them himelf), and I said I'd be proud to. As Dick Greenhaus says above, there are three Bob Coltman CDs, Son of Child, Lonesome Robin and Before They Close the Minstrel Show.

Here are the songs on Before They Close the Minstrel Show (1975): Meet Her When the Sun Goes Down (Trad., Carson) Banjo Sam (Trad., Watts) Fattening Frogs (Trad.) The Mile to the Mountain (Coltman) Skilly Skaw (Coltman) Sweet Petunia (Trad., Lincoln) Jack's Red Cheetah (Coltman) The Curtains of Night (Hays) Bronco Buster (Coltman) Cool Drink of Water (Johnson) Chase 'Em Home (Coltman) I'm Almost Home (Trad.) Before They Close the Minstrel Show (Coltman)



In addition to his own songs, Bob has introduced us to lots of songs from traditional and near-traditional sources. I hope he doesn't mind if I include them here.


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Bob's opening notes for this album:
One Place It's Southern music that's been my teacher, with its bite, its taste of woodsmoke and sorrow, its long distances inside your mind. But I'm no Southerner, and though I live in the North, no Northerner either. I come from a place that hangs between, like an Aeolian harp, where the winds of both blow through. The songs I write are the ones that ask to be written because nobody has. And the traditional songs I sing? Let me tell you about just one place, one man. Everything comes down to that: one person in one time and place.
About twenty-five miles south of Lynchburg in south central Virginia is Altavista, and about two miles past that stood the house of R. Abner Keesee. Years before the day I met him, Ben Moomaw, a correspondent of the Virginia Folklore Society and one of the finest singers I ever knew, had struck upon Mr. Keesee. He wanted me to know him too, if he was still alive.
Abner Keesee is still alive and 79 years old on this day in September 1954, the road dust rising in the baking heat. A squat, wheezing man, he emerges onto his concrete porch and slumps into the creaky swing to entertain his company. His son, youngest of his ten children, and son's young wife and child all think it's pretty funny that somebody would want to come see old Dad.
Nearly all deaf, is Mr. Keesee, can hardly hear at all. He says everything like it was the Ten Commandments. That old saying about hearing yourself talk ... when your ears go back on you, and you used to be the champion singer at the White Top Festival, it takes on a little more meaning.
'Some people,' he roars, 'think they know a lot of songs. But it ain't everybody that knows nine.'
Nine.
He sang two of them to my Dad and me, in a voice that boomed and swooped and dove with the tyranny of deafness. How I wish you could hear that voice. It seemed to come from another world. Hard listening: gritty, full of adventure. But never lost, just finding new paths in the darkness of sleeping ears. The song about the Fisherman's Daughter, 'whose friends was dead and gone,' the words collapsing at the ends of lines, strange, unforgettable—and then the eerie vision of broken dying love that is Far Fanil Town:
He rode till he come to the middle of the town
Likewise to the middle of the street
Who did he meet but his own wedded wife
All wropt up in a winding sheet
He had a penknife drew in his hand
He ripped the seams all around
Her cheeks they looked of a pale crimson red
And her lips they looked smiling at him
We never did find out what the other seven songs were, for Mr. Keesee was gasping after two, and we were afraid for his very life. Once, he said, he'd won the White Top singing prize two years running, and would have made it three in a row if an English judge hadn't decided three in a row was one too many, and given him 2nd instead. But he won 1st prize in dancing that year, and that was better by five dollars: $15 instead of $10.
He'd breath enough to tell about the manganese mine he knew about on property owned by coal interests. Wouldn't let on where. Nor give particulars of the gold mine that was plowed up on his nephew's property, though he could if he cared to. The songs? He'd learned them as a child. His children didn't care anything about them. 'People have come here several times to get me to sing, and not give me nothing for it.' There are a couple of plain glass bottles lying empty in the yard's scant grass. Dad, who's wiser in these things than I, spots the hint and gives him enough for a full one. It's accepted, matter-of-factly. Folded inside the bib of his overalls in hopes the boy's wife won't find and confiscate it.
It took me a long time, me who knew hundreds of songs by heart and many more by reputation, to decipher the other message: that songs are living things. Too vital to drag around in the mud, to play in the background while doing something else, to stack on shelves or count up in columns, to breeze through and forget. Keesee knew less than one song for each child he had fathered. Two songs almost too much for one hot September afternoon. Nine the measure of a whole life. Each syllable to be handled with care, like dynamite, or fine crystal.
Mr. R. Abner Keesee never made it into a recording studio in his life. He had more important kinds of music to make: fierce, lonely, stubborn, infected in the blood. He is on this record, with all the other people who taught me to die and be born in every song I sing.