Frankie and Albert
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-04-23

Day 38 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

When begin today on a new chapter: FRANKIE AND HER MAN

"A Frankie song is like a grand opera role; interpretations vary. The Leighton brothers run  a gamut of emotions; John Lomax delivers a quizzically mournful monotone; Sig Spaeth vocalizes it like a gnome riding a gnu with gnats mellifluously. The maxim, "Life is a tragedy to those  who feel, a comedy to those who think," may go for viewpoints on this ballad. It is stark and fierce,  it is serio-comic, or it is blah-blah as you like it.

"If America has a classical gutter song, it is the one that tells of Frankie and her man.

"Josie,  Sadie, Lillie, Annie, are a few of her aliases; she has many. Prof. L. M. Belden of the University of Missouri showed me sixteen Frankie songs, all having the same story though a few are located in  the back country and in bayous instead of the big city.

"Then I met up with R. W. Gordon; he has  110 Frankie songs, and is still picking up new ones. R. Emmett Kennedy in his remarkably thorough  and valuable book, "Mellows" has a song, "My Baby in a Guinea Blue Gown," which belongs in  the Frankie discussion because its tune may have been the grandfather of the most widely known  Frankie melodies.

"The Frankie and Albert song, as partly given here, was common along the  Mississippi river and among railroad men of the middle west as early as 1888. It is a simple and mournful air, of the short and simple annals of the poor."