Learned Hand, the singing jurist

Magnificent. I have always been impressed by the works of Judge Learned Hand (not least because of that most magnificent name.)

I was unaware, however, that there were recordings of him. And least of all would I have expected a sea ballad. But there it is.


Double click to enlarge.

The Iron Merrimac

The iron Merrimac, with others at her back,
Commanded by Buckanoy and the Grandee-O,
From Norfolk started out for to put us all to route,
And to capture little Yankee Doodle Dandy-O.

The Cumberland went down, Minnesoty fast aground,
Which made the Yankee cause look quite disastee-dO,
When, hark, three hearty cheers, and the Monitor appears,
And the music struck up Yankee Doodle Dandy-O.

The rebel shot flew hot, but the Yankees answered not
Till they got within a distance neat and handy-O.
Then said Worden to his crew, "Boys, let's see what we can do,
Oh, we'll fight for little Yankee Doodle Dandy-O!"

At the end of the recording, Hand provides the little he knows of the origin of the song.

"That song I learned about, I should suppose 60 years ago in Elizabethtown, which is a very small village in the Adirondack Mountains, Essex County, New York, about eight miles from Lake Champlain. It was then sung by boys of my own age, a few, and I know nothing more about it than that. I think possibly it was sung by my uncle's hired man, who had been in the Civil War, but that I'm very uncertain of. I don't know where we boys picked it up."

I was quite astonished how almost English Hand sounds. I can hear the patrician accent of William F. Buckley but the cadence is much more English accented than I ever notice with Buckley.

The other thing I take away from this little fragment of a cultural artifact is an echo of that time when people still knew friends and family who had fought in the Civil War, when the sorrows and tragedy of that apocalyptic contest were still being processed. You get a feel of that shadow time from the works of cartoonist and humorist James Thurber, particularly his short stories and autobiographical sketches. As in The Night the Bed Fell, where the action is set in the 1910s but refers to his grandfather, a veteran of the Federal Army and prone in his dotage to reverting back to his Civil War days.

Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or eight days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the Federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)

Or this slightly longer story in My Life and Hard Times, Chapter 2 - The Car We Had to Push.

Our poor old Reo came to a horrible end, finally. We had parked it too far from the curb on a street with a car line. It was late at night and the street was dark. The first streetcar that came along couldn't get by. It picked up the tired old automobile as a terrier might seize a rabbit and drubbed it unmercifully, losing its hold now and then but catching a new grip a second later. Tires booped and whooshed, the fenders queeled and graked, the steering-wheel rose up like a spectre and disappeared in the direction of Franklin Avenue with a melancholy whistling sound, bolts and gadgets flew like sparks from a Catherine wheel. It was a splendid spectacle but, of course, saddening to everybody (except the motorman of the streetcar, who was sore). I think some of us broke down and wept. It must have been the weeping that caused grandfather to take on so terribly. Time was all mixed up in his mind; automobiles and the like he never remembered having seen. He apparently gathered, from the talk and excitement and weeping, that somebody had died. Nor did he let go of this delusion. He insisted, in fact, after almost a week in which we strove mightily to divert him, that it was a sin and a shame and a disgrace on the family to put the funeral off any longer. "Nobody is dead! The automobile is smashed!" shouted my father, trying for the thirtieth time to explain the situation to the old man. "Was he drunk?" demanded grandfather, sternly. "Was who drunk?" asked father. "Zenas," said grandfather. He had a name for the corpse now: it was his brother Zenas, who, as it happened, was dead, but not from driving an automobile while intoxicated. Zenas had died in 1866. A sensitive, rather poetical boy of twenty-one when the Civil War broke out, Zenas had gone to South America--"just," as he wrote back, "until it blows over." Returning after the war had blown over, he caught the same disease that was killing off the chestnut trees in those years, and passed away. It was the only case in history where a tree doctor had to be called in to spray a person, and our family had felt it very keenly; nobody else in the United States caught the blight. Some of us have looked upon Zenas' fate as a kind of poetic justice.

Now that grandfather knew, so to speak, who was dead, it became increasingly awkward to go on living in the same house with him as if nothing had happened. He would go into towering rages in which he threatened to write to the Board of Health unless the funeral were held at once. We realized that something had to be done. Eventually, we persuaded a friend of father's, named George Martin, to dress up in the manner and costume of the eighteen-sixties and pretend to be Uncle Zenas, in order to set grandfather's mind at rest. The impostor looked fine and impressive in sideburns and a high beaver hat, and not unlike the daguerreotypes of Zenas in our album. I shall never forget the night, just after dinner, when this Zenas walked into the living-room. Grandfather was stomping up and down, tall, hawk-nosed, round-oathed. The newcomer held out both his hands. "Clem!" he cried to grandfather. Grandfather turned slowly, looked at the intruder, and snorted. "Who air you?" he demanded in his deep, resonant voice. "I'm Zenas!" cried Martin. "Your brother Zenas, fit as a fiddle and sound as a dollar!" "Zenas, my foot!" said grandfather. "Zenas died of the chestnut blight in '66!"

Grandfather was given to these sudden, unexpected, and extremely lucid moments; they were generally more embarrassing than his other moments.