The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

This history of the St. James Infirmary song is an interesting one. While hanging around a folk music bar in Scotland, I found it interesting that there of all places, someone to whom I showed the early lyrics for the song was able to identify that St. James Infirmary has a common musical ancestry to The Streets of Laredo. Something in the lyrics that is lost on many modern listeners is the implication that the "baby" of the St. James singer, who is dead at the infirmary, has died of syphilis or some other venereal disease. This is the reasoning behind the "chilling" sense that Sarah Vowell complained of  where the narrator seems more concerned with his own funeral arrangements than longing to rejoin his dead lover -- thing is, he already KNOWS that he's next in line, hence the hurry toward " impressing his buddies with a big dumb coin". She's dead, and she gave him the same stuff that did her in.  The original St. James' Hospital song i...

There is an old tradition in New Orleans, if you ever make your way to the St. Louis Cemetery #1. There is a tomb in front of which one often sees offerings of flowers and candles, and the structure is covered over with X shapes scratched or drawn on the walls. This is the tomb of the famous Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. History -- written largely by whites who didn't approve of her practice -- has claimed she began as a hairdresser who learned secrets about her wealthy clients, and passed herself to them as a fortune teller and magician. Recent scholarship finds no evidence of her having been a hairdresser, and instead it appears she married, and was subsequently widowed, at a young age. She then took up with a man descended from French nobility, whom she couldn't legally marry because he was white and she was black, though she stayed with him for many years, had children with him, and technically it is his family's tomb she's buried in. She was apparently...