Folks, I’m goin’ down to St. James Infirmary
See my baby there
She’s stretched out on a long, white table
She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair

Let her go, let her go, God bless her
Wherever she may be
She will search this wide world over
But she’ll never find another sweet man like me…

Have you ever known anyone who died from venereal disease? Asking for a friend.

OK seriously though, this must have been a big thing once. There was an 18th Century British folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” about some poor slob wasting away from some accursed drip.

This tune became a huge hit in the collective unconscious, because, oral tradition working the way it does, the song endured. And transformed. By the time it traveled overseas to the colonies, the melody evolved into “The Young Man Cut Down In His Prime”, the cowboy ballad “Streets of Laredo”, and finally our subject for this post: St. James Infirmary Blues.

The original St. James was reportedly a medieval leper hospital that dates back to the Middle Ages. Of course, by the time it drifted into the orbit of New Orleans jazz, it had become wholly other. A metaphor for any grim, back alley hospital, clinic… or morgue.

Which is where we find Cab Calloway’s recording of the tune, doing it incredibly sly justice. Here we have a man visiting the infirmary to find the corpse of his dead girlfriend. He shrugs, bids her bon voyage, and then imagines his own death and funeral.

The implication that her may have murdered her in a jealous rage is not lost on the listener…

Still, the vision is actually pretty joyful. T’aint no way he’s changing his ways. Life is a one-way ticket, so he’ll continue to enjoy all the vices of the physical world… even as he’s about to be dropped into the Earth.

Booze, cash, gambling, every naughty bit imaginable? He’s taking it with him.

Fatalistic? No question. Mournful? Of course. But it handles mortality with both reverence and swagger, a kind of 20th-Century existential poetry of sorts.

St. James Infirmary Blues ain’t no back porch lament. Not with Cab Calloway’s silk-gloved hands on it. New Orleans voodoo comes to life, transforming sorrow into something wonderfully transcendent, haunted, and beautiful. Where you drink to remember, sing to forget, and raise the dead just for a dance.

Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches
Put on a box-back coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat

Then give me six crap shooting pall bearers
Let a chorus girl sing me a song
Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head
So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along…