In Lieu of a Letter of Resignation -- Top Ten Songs for Quitting your Job

Remember "mix tapes?"  Remember the all the work put into breaking up back in the late eighties/early nineties, what with having to put all your lovesongs on a Memorex cassette tape and send it over via her best friend?  Nowadays, with text messaging and email, little care is spent on departures, which is sad.  All transitions should be commemorated with song. 
So please enjoy these ten songs celebrating one door closing, another opening...  And be grateful that
you won't need a pencil to wind back the tape.  Remember: it's not you, it's me.... Okay, maybe it's you.

10. "Been on theJob Too Long" by Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles

Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles were born of the Gastonia cotton mill culture in North Carolina, reaching the peak of their limited success in the late twenties before the stock market crashed.  Watts himself a former cotton worker knew all too well the troubles of working to death and found an outlet in music to entertain himself and other workers.  This song of his is a version of the murder ballad "Duncan and Brady" and was recorded in 1929 and available on the compilation Gastonia Gallop: Cotton Mill Songs and Hillbilly Blues.

9.  "Work Song" by Dan Reeder

Since Mr. Reeder's chain-gang lyrics really said everything he needed to say so simply, perhaps it's best if we don't use a lot of words either.

8.  "There Ain't No Use In Me Working This Hard" by The Carolina Tar Heels

The Carolina Tar Heels feature two heavyweights in Carolina music traditions.  Dock Walsh became known as "The Banjo King of the Carolinas."  Gwin Foster recorded first with the Tar Heels, then met David O. Fletcher and formed The Carolina Twins, a brilliant and haunting duo.  This song, recorded in 1927, became a staple in black music, with variants that included "Crawdad Song" and "Sugar Babe."

7.  "Bang on the Drum All Day" by ToddRundgren

Todd Rundgren presents two options in this pop hit from 1983.  The song has since been used to poke fun at members of the Occupy movement to celebrating touchdowns by the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. 

6.  "Maggie's Farm" by Bob Dylan

While the folk movement of the Sixties liberated many people, Bob Dylan wrote "Maggie's Farm" as a protest against the protest singers.  He described this song as a liberation against the expectations of the folk community, even going so far to play it with an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, much to the ire of many music critics and fans. 

 5.  "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee ErnieFord

"Sixteen Tons" details the troubles of the American coal miner who lives "another day older and deeper in debt."  The company store mentioned in the song often was the culprit in mining communities as the miners were paid in scrip rather than cash, which essentially equaled a voucher that could only be spent in stores backed by the coal mining company.  This led to many laborers unable to spend their wages outside of the community or to save money. 

4.  "Dirty Work" by Steely Dan

It should be pointed out that Steely Dan got its name from a steam-powered dildo in William S. Borrough's Naked Lunch and that their original drummer was SNL veteran Chevy Chase.  Just in case you didn't know.

3.  "Take This Job and Shove It" byJohnny Paycheck

If you love the Johnny Paycheck or David Allan Coe song, you will really love the film of the same name from 1981, starring Robert Hays, Barbara Hershey, and Art Carney.  The film was famous not only for its witty comedic screenplay, but for being robbed of its Oscar by Chariots of Fire.

2.  "Frankly Mr. Shankly" by The Smiths

First released on the awesome 1985 album The Queen is Dead, "Frankly" is said to be written about the studio head at The Smith's Rough Trade record label who wrote "bloody awful poetry."  However these lyrics can apply to any boss in any job in any industry. 

 1.  "Take This Hammer" by Lead Belly

And then there's Lead Belly, the quintessential lyricist from long, long ago.  This song could be played in the cotton fields, on the chain gang, or in your office cubicle.  Every worker in America should keep a hammer at their job and, when the time comes, hand it over the Captain to "tell him I'm gone, tell him I'm gone."

What do you think... am I missing any??

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For those of you who didn't make it.

The Flood, The Levee, and the Blues

The end of the world has long been contemplated, with many stabbing wildly in the dark at what may bring about the end of times.  Most recently, global pandemics provided the scare.  Ask your parents and they'll tell you that the threat of nuclear war made them "duck and cover."  Runaway asteroids, zombie apocalypses, and global warming are other popular extinction theories, but one is older than all of them and has a further reaching audience and that is the Flood.

Every culture has their great Flood story.  Whether it be due to an angry deity seeking divine retribution, as in the Christian mythology, or creation missteps needing correction, as with the Maya, the Flood reigns supreme in anthropological studies.  The stories and art inspired by these deluges are even more captivating.  Children of both Judeo-Christian and Islamic faiths are indoctrinated with stories of Noah's Ark.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known stories, deals with the Flood.  But it is the art sprung from a more recent calamity that provides the greatest cultural contribution to  the theme: The American blues.

After the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, flood songs were like the zombie and sparkly vampire movies of the 2000s: everybody was doing them.  One of the "Fathers of Blues Music," Charley Patton chronicled the tragedy with "High WaterEverywhere," one of the seminal works in the genre.  Son House ("Levee Camp Moan") worked and sang with Patton, then taught McKinley Morganfield how to play guitar.  Morganfield moved to Chicago, plugged in an amplifier and changed his name to Muddy Waters.  The rest is history.

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS took the act global.  Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie recorded the song in 1929 to little fanfare.  However, the rise of Muddy Waters brought attention overseas to the American Blues and nowhere else was this more evident than in the British Invasion.  The Rolling Stones and Beatles' love for Chess recordings caused other sensational recording stars to mine old Delta musicians for inspiration and in 1970, Jimmy Page and RobertPlant set down to record.  What developed was a mind-blowing account of one of two greatest tragedies: 1) the displacement of thousands of people following a natural disaster and 2) the fact that it takes a Brit to cause a song about it to rise in the charts.

But BACKWATER BLUES cashed in much earlier than that.  Bessie Smith knew better than to let a good disaster go to waste.  In February of 1927, when the waters were still rising, she recorded the haunting and compelling hit in New York for Columbia Records.  The song is a first-person account of what many Delta sharecroppers experienced as they gathered what they could and headed for higher ground.   Singers from B.B. King, Dinah Washington and Meschiya Lake have  "stood up on some high old lonesome hill" and delivered the song to wider audiences and new generations.

Flood songs continued to be the rage even after the Delta waters receded.  Johnny Cash's FIVE FEET HIGH AND RISING followed the trend, chronicling his own dread following rising waters on his boyhood Arkansas farm.  Mattie Delaney recorded THE TALLAHATCHIE RIVER BLUES, which dealt with the same issue in a different part of the state years later.  Hurricane Katrina of 2005 has caused the canon of blues music to be revisited with new significance and a clear division in the music of New Orleans. 

Katrina presents a salient point to those seeking the end of times from a science fiction or horror movie.  While zombies are the rage right now, and pandemics are pretty damn sexy, the chances that the angry god may want to go "old school" are still high.  As poles melt and waters rise and sinners continue to thrive, who is say it isn't time to hit the reset button and begin anew?