Golden Vanity from May 1997

featuring Mike Seeger and The Coffee Club Orchestra

The Santa Fe Opera

Just announced: A Prairie Home Companion visits The Santa Fe Opera House on September 7th with the full cast and crew.

Tickets on sale May 9 at 10 a.m. MDT - More information here.

Listen to the May 10, 1997, show

This week, we travel back to 1997 for a show that was performed Live from Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, Virginia, with Ruth Brown, Rob Fisher, and Mike Seeger. Highlights include talk about spring, which leads into Rob Fisher’s compositions “Spring Fever” and “Nickel in the Slot.” Mike Seeger kicks in “If the River Was Whiskey,” Ruth Brown adds in “If I Can’t Sell It, Gonna Keep Sittin’ on It.” Garrison joins the band for a couple of tunes, including “Golden Vanity.” Plus Powdermilk Biscuits, Monback, Golf, the Titanic Restaurant, and the latest News from Lake Wobegon. Listen to the show.

Mike Seeger's music was true to its British Isles and African-American origins. Seeger sang and played in an extraordinary range of traditional styles, accompanying himself on a multitude of instruments — banjo, guitar, fiddle, mandolin, jaw harp, harmonica, quills, dulcimer, and autoharp. He collected traditional music since his childhood, and in 1958, he was one of the founding members of the prolific group The New Lost City Ramblers, who produced a series of recordings that have become a reference encyclopedia for traditional music. A driving force for traditional music in general, Seeger produced the first recordings of musical pioneers performers such as Elizabeth Cotton, and he produced concerts for hundreds of other great traditional musicians. His wide repertoire and recordings won him numerous accolades and awards, including the several Grammy nominations and the 1995 Ralph J. Gleason Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation.

Rob Fisher is known to longtime listeners of A Prairie Home Companion for his 1989–1993 tenure as music director and as conductor of the Coffee Club Orchestra, which he formed for the program The American Radio Company, whose “sponsor” Fisher’s Coffee was named for Rob Fisher. Fisher grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, where he started playing the piano at age six. He went on to earn a botany degree at Duke University before giving himself to music. Fisher went from pianist to assistant conductor at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. He has since conducted many musicals on Broadway and on tour, including Me and My Girl with Tim Curry, The Threepenny Opera with Sting, and the smash hit Chicago. As a pianist, he has played solo performances with orchestras around the country, and has played the music of George Gershwin at Carnegie Hall and at concert halls across the U.S. and around the world.

Born Ruth Weston in Portsmouth, Virginia, soul singer Ruth Brown started singing at the local church, where her father was choir director. In 1945, she ran away from home to go on the road with singer-trumpeter Jimmy Brown, whom she soon married. After a one-month stint singing with big-band leader Lucky Millinder, Brown found a job singing at the Crystal Caverns, a Washington, D.C., club operated by Blanche Calloway, sister of Cab Calloway. Brown's appearances at the Crystal Caverns eventually landed her an audition with a new label called Atlantic Records. In 1949, she recorded the soon-to-be-hit “So Long,” which was followed by chart-toppers such as “[Mama,] He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” “Oh, What a Dream,” and “Mambo Baby.” By the mid-’50s, Ruth Brown had become one of the biggest-selling Black female recording artists and her star continued to rise with songs like “Lucky Lips,” before walking away from the spotlight in the 1960s to become a full-time mom. In 1976, Brown’s old friend, Redd Foxx got her to move to L.A. to play Mahalia Jackson in Selma, a civil-rights musical that Foxx was producing. She got back into the world of song and screen, and was cast in the sitcom Hello, Larry by renowned television producer Norman Lear and in the cult film Hairspray by director John Waters. Brown has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and awarded with a Tony for her performance in the musical Black and Blue, and a Grammy for her album Blues on Broadway. She passed away in 2006.

Today’s show features the song “Golden Vanity.” Here are the lyrics to Garrison’s new version of the tune:

THE GOLDEN VANITY

It was the tallest ship come to the Norfolk quay
And the name of the ship was the Golden Vanity
And it sailed upon the Lowland, the Lowland, the Low,
And it sailed upon the Lowland sea.

And the owner of the ship was as proud as he could be
As he stood upon the deck in his gold and finery
There upon the Lowland, the Lowland, the Low,
He sailed upon the Lowland sea.

And the people stood and watched from the crowded thoroughfare
And among them was a maiden with sunlight in her hair
And the owner trembled sorely to see her standing there
Standing by the Lowland sea.

Said the owner to the captain, “Get you inland, I implore.
I wish to go a sailing with that maiden on the shore.”
Said the captain to the young man, “You’ve never sailed before,
Sailed up on the Lowland sea.”

But the captain he departed and the young man, tenderly
Called out to the maiden, “Oh won’t you sail with me?
For the sunbeams they are dancing on the bright blue sea
Dancing the Lowland sea.”

She stepped aboard the boat so fancy and so fine,
He hoisted up the mainsail and he let go the line,
So handsome at the rudder he steered her out to sea,
Out upon the Lowland sea.

The wind came up and blew them onto the rocky coast
And it broke beneath the pounding, every plank and every post
The Vanity it rolled and soon gave up the ghost
There upon the Lowland sea.

Not every lousy sailor who ventures on the sea
Is drowned for his troubles — good news for you and me.
We are sailing up on the Lowland, Lowland, Low
We’re sailing on the Lowland sea.

Both lovers they were washed ashore, both soaked to the skin
And there embraced each other as the mighty waves rolled in.
Farewell to the Vanity, now romance can begin
There upon the Lowland Sea.

New Lyrics ©1997 by Garrison Keillor

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