Around 2000, as he entered his eighth decade, Crumb embarked on a new project of sweeping scope. He began setting traditional American songs of all sorts — ballads, hymns, black spirituals, Civil War songs, popular tunes, and more — in collections he entitled the American Songbook. “Setting,” however, is too tame a word for what Crumb achieves. These are transformations and re-visionings of the songs, usually retaining their melodies and words intact but framing them in a halo of staccato percussion and haunting resonances. Each volume of the American Songbook — to date Crumb has produced seven — is scored for amplified voices, amplified piano, and a quartet of percussionists with almost one hundred instruments at the ready. This percussion orchestra, combining traditional Western instruments with others from around the world, allows Crumb to explore new combinations and timbres with each new song. His American Songbook forms a powerful testament at once to the vitality of the avant-garde tradition in which he grew up and to the huge expressive compass of American song repertories. We have chosen two songs from the fifth volume of the American Songbook.

“The House of the Rising Sun” is a folk lament set in New Orleans. Its origins are unclear; the earliest recorded performances come from the 1930s, though the song reaches farther back. As is usual in such cases, there are differing sets of words. The most famous version, a number one hit for the Animals in 1964, tells of a man’s life gone awry; but the older versions, including the one Crumb sets, are sung instead in the person of a woman seduced and ruined by a “rambler.”

The tone of despair evokes from Crumb the ghostly, resonant timbres for which he is famous. The song begins with a barely audible pair of Caribbean steel drums — turn up the volume and listen for this electronic-sounding hum — with soft additions from cymbals, maracas, and more. As the sad, bluesy tune closes its first stanza (“And me, oh God, for one”), a vibraphone plays an atonal interlude; Chinese temple gongs and a blown jug quietly mark the moment. The sustained accompaniment for stanza 2 switches from steel drums to louder vibraphones, punctuated with bongo drums. Again comes the vibraphone interlude. Finally, for stanza 3, the steel drums return, but now the vibraphone continues its mournful melody through the stanza. Fade to silence, with the soprano humming her final phrase.

“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” dates back to the first decade of the 1900s, when new, comical words were put to the tune of an older religious revival song. (We encountered revival meetings in discussing Ives; see page 331.) Whereas the original refrain ended “Hallelujah, Thine the glory! Revive us again!,” the new refrain, in this hymn to idleness and alcohol (“hooch”), ends “Hallelujah, give us a handout, and revive us again!” The new version had a long afterlife, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s; there was even a spin-off film musical in 1933 featuring Al Jolson, one of the biggest stars of early sound films.

Crumb’s rendition retains the form of the song — it is strophic, with a refrain at the end of each stanza — as well as its melody and words. Each stanza begins (listen at 0:00, 0:33, 1:06, and 1:40) with an aggressive, bumptious introduction for piano, marimba, and xylophone; cymbals, tambourine, and several other percussion sounds are also heard. Dissonant, static chords on piano support the first stanza with, at the refrain “Hallelujah . . .,” glockenspiel and vibraphone — a jarring combination of shrill bell tones and electric resonance. But the accompaniment grows more active with each succeeding stanza. At the end of the fourth stanza (2:14) the tenor tries to repeat the refrain, but his inebriation gets the better of him and he loses his place. The big bass drum, used earlier in moderation, runs amok, and the music ends in drunken disarray.