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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

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The song around which I formed my eternal-mystery theory was not some illegible bebop map or a question mark from "Big Science." The song that hammered home the notion that listening to good music was like watching a quiz show without cue cards was from a genre not known for its elliptical subtleties -- Dixieland. Specifically, it was Louis Armstrong doing that old dirge, "St. James Infirmary." When I was 14, I listened to the one Armstrong record I had every night before I went to sleep -- theoretically to help my own trumpet playing (which is what I told my sister across the hall when she'd had quite enough), but really because I was hooked on getting spooked. "St. James Infirmary" never stopped scaring me, never opened up -- and thus never closed down.

Every time the song came on, I closed my eyes and went to the movies. It's that cinematic, the minor key working as a kind of lighting, midnight blue gels on a few random spots. You hear the smudged brass of Armstrong's trumpet before you hear his voice, harking back to the sad joy of a New Orleans funeral parade. The camera comes in for a close-up as the band slides into a smooth shuffle and Armstrong starts to sing: "I went down to St. James Infirmary/Saw my baby there/She was stretched out on a long, white table/So sweet, so cold, so fair." It's a stark yet moving image, a thrilling twofer, the way the sentimental action takes place in a place as clinical as a hospital morgue.

Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday. + Biography + Archives

Armstrong's timbre as both a trumpeter and a vocalist is the perfect match for such a mood, a perfect American marriage of the gruff and the tender -- which is one reason the song's next turn is such a surprise. "She can look this wide world over/But she'll never find a sweet man like me." She's dead, right? She won't be looking. This doesn't make any sense unless you take into account the selfish way the living regard the dead. Mourning is often pure solipsism -- what am I going to do? But the narrator of this song is curiously so stuck up that he feels sorry for his loved one, not because she won't be doing any more breathing, but because she just lost the grace of his presence. It's so petty. And so human.

The next verse omits the dead girl altogether. Now he's imagining his own death, and it couldn't get more selfish. When he sees himself as a corpse, it's as an ad for his own success. He doesn't think about the people or places he'll miss. He wants to be buried in a Stetson hat. "Pin a $20 gold piece on my watch chain," he commands the air, "So the boys will know I died standing fat."

This song gave me the shivers then and it gives me the shivers now. Not just because it's a morgue scene, not just because of the cold body lying there on a table instead of a bed, but because of the chill of the man's words. Hearing it as a young girl, hearing it before I ever fell in love myself, it frightened me because of the way it shoots down the idea of love as a true possibility. If you need love in part to know you'll be missed when you're gone, what does it mean if your sweetheart stands over your icy corpse and -- instead of wishing to rejoin you on some astral plane -- fantasizes about impressing his buddies with a big dumb coin?

That's an ugly thought. But the song's so pretty. The bad thought is expressed in good poetry -- cool phrases such as "sweet man like me," "Stetson hat," "$20 gold piece" -- phrased by a captivating voice working through an addictive blues melody and orchestrated to clarinet and piano perfection. The reason I could listen to the song over and over and never quite figure it out, never get bored -- and the reason the song has been covered by so many performers -- lies in its utter ambiguity. Which is to say, in its freedom. The fact that the song doesn't entirely make sense is an invitation for everyone from Cab Calloway to a new trip-hop band called Snakefarm to get in there and do a little detective work. That jump-cut from the morgue's cold white table to the man's cold dark heart demands interpretation.

Next page | Lily Tomlin's weird take