Another cut out animation video: Ben Franklin's Advice

Lately I decided to start recording songs that, for whatever reason, I never put out there before. It's a bit mortifying not to sound the way I did a decade or two ago, but this is where I am now. Here's my rendition from last month (just finished the animation this morning):

Ken Bloom and I were hired to do a presentation at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich for their Ben Franklin exhibit in 2006. I wrote a couple of songs for the occasion. One was "Downfall of Piracy," lyrics by Ben Franklin as a 13 year old (note the "purple gore") and published on his brother's printing press. Bob Vasile and I recorded it that year - Bob regaling us with Franklin's enthusiastic history of the pirate Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. 

The other song I wrote was this one, Ben Franklin's Advice (I actually called it Ben Franklin's Aphorisms at first, but too many people didn't know what an aphorism is). I googled up a handful of his pithy comments as printed in Poor Richard's Almanac, and shook them into five verses. I always thought this song would be good for re-enactors and historic events, but we never got a chance to do many of those events so the song got forgotten.

The animation took weeks. I have tried several lighting setups and none of them have worked well so far, so it turns out all the time it took cutting out the figures with little tiny scissors and an X-acto knife was wasted - I had to finish it all in photoshop.

My first cut-out animation music video: The Frozen Girl (Pratie Heads version)

The Frozen Girl was a very popular song from its beginnings in 1840 through the early twentieth century; more than 200 versions have been collected, in thirty states and in eastern Canada, titles including The Fair Sharlot, Frozen Charlotte, Fair Charlotte, and A Corpse Going to a Ball. The heroine scoffs at the notion of dressing warmly to ride in an open sleigh, twenty miles, at night, in Maine, on New Year's Eve, to go to a dance. When her idiot boyfriend (why did he let her go out like that?) gets her to the dance, she is dead. In the newspaper story, it says the ball went on regardless. 

There was even a merchandise tie-in, see the Frozen Charlotte dolls below.

The poem on which this song is based was written by Seba Smith (or, perhaps, his wife, as I have seen in one published broadside), and it recounts in rhyme a supposedly true story which took place on New Year's eve, 1839. At the foot of this post you'll find the original story; originating in the New York Observer, it was reprinted in newspapers across America.

I first heard a version of Young Charlotte sung by Tim Eriksen on an album by Cordelia's Dad. I love Tim Eriksen's voice, and I loved the story, but the tune was so slow and dreary, so I wrote my own tune for it and reworked the lyrics for my own entertainment. I recorded it with Bob Vasile on our cd "Rag Faire: music of the British Isles and beyond."

I've been working on this animation for the last two and a half weeks. It took a lot of time to get set up and do the paintings. I found the colored pencils my aunt gave me in the 70s which I've never used until now. It did feel like playing with paper dolls, as Mike Craver says. (See his cutout animated music video which inspired me here: The Dame of Camellias.) My biggest problem (besides lack of talent) was insufficient light, I hope to fix that by the time I do the next one.