Jackson C. Frank - My Name is Carnival

"I read your words like black hungry birds read every sowin'..."

Jackson C. Frank, From the cover of "Blues Run the Game"

Here’s one in the Autumn poem series that’s not normally viewed as a poem. It’s a song by Jackson C. Frank, legendary folk songwriter of the sixties. Frank put out one album in 1965, and then was completely forgotten until a resurgence of interest in the early noughties.

 Sad music in the night sings a scream of light out of chorus...

Promotion Stills, Jackson C. Frank

 When he was eleven, the boiler in his elementary school in Buffalo, NY, blew up. The explosion killed fifteen children in his class, but he survived with burns across fifty percent of his body. While recovering for months in the hospital, a teacher brought him a guitar and he began to learn to play and write songs. 

Years later he received a settlement from the company who built the boiler - amounting to over 600,000 dollars in today's exchange rate. He took a boat to England and started his brief career as folk singer, while burning through the money at a feverish pace.

Here there is no law but the arcade's penny claw, hanging empty...

While in England he recorded his one album, Blues Run the Game, produced by flatmate Paul Simon, and accompanied on guitar by another flatmate, Al Stewart. Around this time, he was dating Sandy Denny. He was the one who persuaded her to leave her nursing job to sing full time.

Re-issue of original album in early 70's

 The album went nowhere. But there were amazing songs on the record, including My Name is Carnival and Milk and Honey. I first heard My Name is Carnival some time this summer. And then I began exploring the rest of Frank's short catalogue... 

 And the shadow-lion waits outside your iron gates with one wish granted...

Frank had PTSD from the explosion and had many physical problems from the burns that plagued him for the rest of his life. As with most untreated PTSD (or treated in the wrong way), it led to mental disorder. At the time, when he went for help at various institutions and clinics he was lumped into the catch-all world of "schizophrenia." Or he was mis-diagnosed as "manic-depressive." At the time, there was no understanding of PTSD, what was really happening in the body (energy trapped in fight, flight or freeze in the body, the brain stuck in a feedback loop in the past traumatic moment and so constantly feels threatened - when this goes on for too long, the brain begins to break down).  

Colors fall, throw the ball, play the game of Carnival...

 

  Without going into more of the downhill slide that was a direct result of the untreated PTSD, he ended up homeless on and off for about ten years in the eighties in New York (he'd journeyed there in '84, thinking to seek out Paul Simon to get his career back on track). He died in 1999, at the age of 56.
 

This is a Halloween song/poem, if there ever was one. Full of the sadness and mystery and confusion (because the veils between worlds are thin) of the season. 

A memoir about Frank was written by Jim Abbott, who befriended him in the nineties, and published in 2014, called "Jackson C. Frank: the clear, hard light of genius." It can be found here.

I posted the song from Youtube after the lyrics. Also, another version of "My name is Carnival" by Erland & The Carnival.

**************

 My Name is Carnival

I've seen your face in every place that I'll be goin'
I read your words like black hungry birds read every sowin'
Rise and fall, spin and call, and my name is Carnival

Sad music in the night sings a scream of light out of chorus
And voices you might hear appear and disappear in the forest
Short and tall throw the ball, and my name is Carnival

Strings of yellow tears drip from black-wired fears in the meadow
And their white halos spin with an anger that is thin and turns

                                                                                               to sorrow
King of all, hear me call, hear my name - Carnival

Here there is no law but the arcade's penny claw, hanging empty
The painted laughing smile and the turning of the style do not

                                                                                                    envy
And the small can steal the ball, to touch the face of Carnival

The fat woman frowns at screaming frightened clowns that move

                                                                                                    enchanted
And the shadow-lion waits outside your iron gates with one wish

                                                                                                    granted
Colors fall, throw the ball, play the game of Carnival

Without a thought of size, you come to hypnotize the danger
The world that comes apart has no single heart when life is

                                                                                                    stranger

Wheel and call, clawed dreams all, in the name of Carnival
Wheel and call, clawed dreams all, in my name of Carnival

This song appears on the album Jackson C. Frank (1965) and on the compilation album Blues Run the Game (2003).

 Here's another song off that album: Milk & Honey. Interpreted by Sandy Denny, before she joined Fairport Convention.

Articles about Frank:

Article about JCF in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/09/jackson-c-frank-tragic-tale-forgotten-60s-legend

Article about JCF in Buffalo News: https://buffalonews.com/2018/10/22/wherever-buffalos-jackson-c-frank-roamed-it-was-apparent-blues-run-the-game/