"I've Been Working on the Railroad"

So someone (or me) needs to set up a 2nd I've Been Working on the Railroad song as an adaptation of the first and move the modern era versions into that? I can at least do that part if no one else wants to bother with it that had orig worked on this. Just want to be sure this is correct before I attempt this.

Quote from mduval32323

So someone (or me) needs to set up a 2nd I've Been Working on the Railroad song as an adaptation of the first and move the modern era versions into that? I can at least do that part if no one else wants to bother with it that had orig worked on this. Just want to be sure this is correct before I attempt this.

Marvelous idea Mark

Looks like all the versions after 1958 have to be moved

JoJo greets

I got sidetracked today dealing with Shannon Quartet/Shannon Four/Revelers so cleaned that up somewhat. I'm not crazy about their being called The Revelers on SHS since that was their 3rd name but oh well. Anyway, I have added the Shannon Quartet release. Jojo, I'd appreciate your scrutinizing the release and the two performances I added. This not only is the earliest I've Been Workin' on de Railroad but also the song we call Get Along Little Dogie (so can I change it to Whoopee Ti Yi Yo since this is the first one now?????)

The song titles on both releases are very quirky. 1) Levee Song - Workin' on de Railroad 2) Cowboy Song - Whoopee Ti Yi Yo. I quickly realized they weren't medleys, they were just saying 1) is a levee song & 2) is a cowboy song. I added Comments explaining this on each performance but frankly I'd prefer to just name them without the intro parts as this really looks dumb naming the performances the way I have (especially since they end up being the first releases and the first title everyone sees and will sow confusion), but I'm assuming I can't here (this isn't the same as saying - Fox Trot or something). Thoughts?

As far as I've Been Workin' on de Railroad. It def. had much of the familiar refrain I know and did even mention the line about Dinah, but clearly I never knew it's roots as a levee song.

I will now add the adaptation you suggested but I forgot to ask one important question. Normally when we set up a lyrical adaptation the instrumentals end up in the root work. Is that what you want here for any modern instrumentals? I'm okay with this but want to be certain that we want the typical lyrical only adaptation here.

Cowboy Song - Whoopee Ti Yi Yo

Michael/Sebastian I'd like your advice as well on the two performance titles please. Since these may be the originals on SHS they will be the first one's anyone sees. I cannot stand the titles I set up now but the prob is normally when songs have explanatory info that we ignore (e.g., - Fox Trot, - Waltz, - Theme from Movie XX...) it's after the song title, not before. But if I leave them the way I have them now, one it looks very dumb and two it's misleading as one will think it's a medley. I added explanatory notes but still.

Also, since Sebastian you and Bastien preach to me I have to name a song based on first release period, I assume we need to change Get Along Little Dogies to Whoopee Ti Yi Yo (but I absolutely refuse to name that Work - Cowboy Song - Whoopee Ti Yi Yo). So let me know.

I just re-read this thread and I saw Murray reference "The Levee Song" and the closely related "I've Been Working on the Railroad" so that implies they are two songs. The one I just added is 100% not a medley but could they have combined the lyrics? I'm not hearing levee references in the other performances we have on SHS. Now I'm even more confused here. I do know that the Cowboy Song - Whoopee Ti Yi Yo is just the familiar song we know and isn't a medley.

Murray I just copied you on this too. I'm happy to do all the grunt work on SHS but I'm not always equipped on the heavy analysis part and not comfortable making calls here.

Quote from mduval32323

Michael/Sebastian I'd like your advice as well on the two performance titles please. Since these may be the originals on SHS they will be the first one's anyone sees. I cannot stand the titles I set up now but the prob is normally when songs have explanatory info that we ignore (e.g., - Fox Trot, - Waltz, - Theme from Movie XX...) it's after the song title, not before. But if I leave them the way I have them now, one it looks very dumb and two it's misleading as one will think it's a medley. I added explanatory notes but still.

I'd probably keep the prefix in this case. But it's unusual enough that you could do it either way without setting a precedent.

Now for the Adaptation. I have set a first pass at one up and moved all the performances as you recommended. So I found a web page that discusses that Dinah was an enslaved woman and about the 2nd half of the song that you had referenced, “Old Joe, or Somebody’s in the House with Dinah,” and also mentioned that the 2nd half tune came from "Goodnight Ladies" (We just really had no real performances on Thom's Goodnight Ladies for me to discern this but the Internet Archive link you sent to the one performance was clearly a match).

So it appears I must find a way to create "Old Joe, or Somebody's in the House with Dinah" and then have the new adaptation of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" be an adaptation of both songs. But it gets way way more complicated to bring in the 3rd piece also saying it's an adaptation of Goodnight Ladies. It's going to become a nightmare for someone to assign an instrumental performance. Clearly you can't put it with the trad I've Been Working on the Railroad (which we are doing currently) but you also can't put it in Goodnight Ladies necessarily either. This is why I said earlier this seemed like a monster to set up and this is not my forte. But I also can't stand when we set up so many complex pieces that people just give up when trying to assign a performance. We butchered so many Christmas songs it's scary to even venture into some of them.

https://vovatia.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/dinah-wont-you-blow-your-horn/

Thom, when I referenced you I was referencing Goodnight Ladies that you had added. I kept reading reference to the tune of it but we didn't have any performances of it where I could compare them.

Quote from mduval32323

Now for the Adaptation. I have set a first pass at one up and moved all the performances as you recommended. So I found a web page that discusses that Dinah was an enslaved woman and about the 2nd half of the song that you had referenced, “Old Joe, or Somebody’s in the House with Dinah,” and also mentioned that the 2nd half tune came from "Goodnight Ladies" (We just really had no real performances on Thom's Goodnight Ladies for me to discern this but the Internet Archive link you sent to the one performance was clearly a match).

So it appears I must find a way to create "Old Joe, or Somebody's in the House with Dinah" and then have the new adaptation of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" be an adaptation of both songs. But it gets way way more complicated to bring in the 3rd piece also saying it's an adaptation of Goodnight Ladies. It's going to become a nightmare for someone to assign an instrumental performance. Clearly you can't put it with the trad I've Been Working on the Railroad (which we are doing currently) but you also can't put it in Goodnight Ladies necessarily either. This is why I said earlier this seemed like a monster to set up and this is not my forte. But I also can't stand when we set up so many complex pieces that people just give up when trying to assign a performance. We butchered so many Christmas songs it's scary to even venture into some of them.

https://vovatia.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/dinah-wont-you-blow-your-horn/

This is a somewhat complicated piece but it's really the only way we can have it on site. We can figure out the instrumental thing later.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "butchered" Christmas songs. Many of those also have long and complex histories - especially the carols.

Michael what I meant to say in reference to many of the Christmas songs is I doubt most of us have a clue where to put some of them because we break them all out by tune. On some there is no real guidance. I wrote up a report on Away in the Manger last year saying we prob had minimum of two hundred performances in the wrong Work that went upon deaf ear.

As far as this current song I have and will do my best to contribute but I have no interest in being in charge of this work structure I just tried to help Jojo so things got started. There are many editors much more capable than me in these gray areas

Quote from mduval32323

As far as this current song I have and will do my best to contribute but I have no interest in being in charge of this work structure I just tried to help Jojo so things got started. There are many editors much more capable than me in these gray areas

Well we help each other, don't we.

And now I really need an editor to help me out.

I just added the first recording of the "Eyes of Texas" adaptation.

SEE: The Eyes of Texas

As you see it ended up in the wrong adaptation branch. And I don't have the authority to fix this.

JoJo greets

Jojo, are you speaking of the Colonial Club "eyes of texas" submission? I'm trying to process this now but it's a little consternating. SHS had already set Colonial Club Orchestra as an alias of Bob Haring for 3 releases. I'm not sure how we can say well this Colonial Club Orchestra release shouldn't be Bob Haring, it should be Louis Katzman. I notice we do this a lot we just assign every orchestra to a person instead of a group and this presents a problem when bandleaders change. The 3 Colonial Club releases on SHS now had visuals and there was no mention of Haring's name on the vinyl labels. So what do you recommend I do here if you are saying this should be assigned to Katzman, not Haring. I could make Colonial Club Orchestra an Artist but i saw on Haring's Arist page we have assigned a bunch of Orchestras to him. I really don't want to create a Colonial Club Orchestra [US2] as that will make people think this is an unrelated band.

Last edit: 2020-10-28 18:15:45 UTC by mduval32323

This Internet Archive page has The Eyes of Texas & Aggie War Hymn on a Bob Haring compilation

https://archive.org/details/ColonialClubOrchestra1926-1931/TheEyesOfTexas1928Col…

DAHR has well over 100 recordings of Colonial Club Orchestra on their site and the 10 or so I spot checked not a one even mentioned Bob Haring's name

According to Wikipedia, Haring became leader of the Colonial Club Orchestra in 1926, but they don't provide any source for that info.

Right. I’m very well versed in this band now I spent a rather long time today cleaning up all of our releases. We tend to always take the easy route and assign bands to individuals but with these orchestras the “leaders” might vary. Jojo’s submission is one of those. So I’m not certain what to do here just yet. I’ve reached out to Thom for advice. If this were just a band this would be a simple add but Haring has quite a few band aliases.on SHS.

CCO has around 130-140 performances on DAHR. Various people are credited and almost never actually Haring. Usually it would be the vocalist additionally credited which makes sense. Normally we don't really care about the conductor per se if they aren't mentioned on the release but I guess since DAHR mentioned Katzman he wanted it assigned to him and not Haring. Haring didn't even perform on the record so I get it. It would simpler just to set CCO up as a band with the additional vocalist credits. If the "director" isn't listed on the vinyl then to me who cares. But the problem doing this is then you have to consider all the gazillion other orchestra aliases assigned to Haring. I didn't see them all clearly but I never saw an actual label credit anyone but CCO and the vocalists. We weren't even crediting the vocalists on the releases so I had to create visuals and add DAHRs and create a few Artists to do it properly today.

Just because DAHR lists the participants on a recording is moot to me if they aren't noted on the actual single release. But again, because we chose to call the band a person and that person isn't actually a participant on some of the releases it's problematic. So it sounds like I've talked myself into converting this to a band. I'm awaiting Thom's opinion here as he has dealt in a lot of this and he's the one who set up Katzman and said he was CCO in his artist bio as well.

If the band existed prior to his involvement then yes it should be an actual group rather than linked to a specific person.

Thom came up with some workaround and added their Eyes of Texas release to SHS. So at this point I’m just going to bow out of this one. I know dealing with the orchestra genre can be challenging at times and there never is a perfect answer