Song of the Day 1/3: R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders, “Alabama Jubilee”

The Mummers Parade is in trouble again, this time because two members of the Froggy Carr comic brigade wore blackface during their march. This has elicited, yet again, calls from minority groups for the city to stop funding the parade, which is in the awkward position of having to defend many of its beloved century-plus-old traditions. This isn’t surprising, because many of the old tunes, and the Mummer strut itself, are based on minstrelry, which was fading but still popular when the parade became organized in 1901 but offend people in a more multi-cultural society.

I won’t even attempt to defend the idiocy of wearing blackface in the parade, considering it was banned in 1963. But I’d hate to see the parade itself end, because I’ve grown to like the string band music that I scorned when I was younger, partly because they are keeping alive a form of music that’s almost impossible to hear anymore. The bands have no brass instruments, just reeds, strings and percussion. Banjos were popular because they’re louder than other acoustic stringed instruments; same with saxophones.

Outside of the Mummers, the music of the early 20th century was kept alive for many years by Leon Redbone, but there have been other practitioners of the style. One was put together in the Bay Area by cartoonist Robert Crumb and some of his friends in the early ’70s. Crumb grew up in lower Delaware, where he went door-to-door in black neighborhoods asking people if they had any old records they would sell him, and when he and his friends recorded a vanity LP, others who heard it said they should release it for real. The band ended up releasing three albums, the first in 1974, before frontman Crumb moved out of the area. Many of those tunes are the same ones known to fans of the Mummers — for example, “Alabama Jubilee,” one of the parade’s unofficial anthems.

Believe it or not, a string band version actually made the charts. The Ferko String Band released an LP in 1955 that included the tune. When it was released as a single it reached No. 14 on Billboard’s jukebox chart.