Lily Tomlin was the host. I watched it as a rerun. She was singing in an affected voice. The whole thing was at odds with anything I understood about music, singing, gender, and anything else I thought I understood when I was 7 years old.
I loved it.
Anytime I got to watch Saturday Night Live as a kid I was in heaven. It meant I was getting to stay up late. Sometimes because my Dad had been working late in the ER at L.A. County Medical Center. My Dad was an actual nurse, so the men in the ladies’ Nurse Uniforms were doubly funny.
We were all awake and my parents were in a good mood.
The AV Club described it this way:
In the biggest musical number, Tomlin, with a white flower in her hair, sings “St. James Infirmary” accompanied by “Howard Shore and His All-Nurse Band”—i.e., the show’s musical director and the house band, including Paul Shaffer at the piano, dressed in nurses’ uniforms.
Wikipedia rightly describes the point where a song that’s a ballad to a late loved one becomes, well, weird.
The hallmark of nearly all the variants is the uncanny pivot from the visitor initially mourning his deceased beloved, to boasts about himself and how she’ll miss him, to instructions for his own grand funeral.
I loved songs that got weird. At that age I loved Short People, by Randy Newman. I remember talking to my dad about it and he explained “irony” to precocious 7-year-old me.
In 2009 I was reading Metafilter and came across this post. The link it links to is down but exists, as so many good www pages do, in the Internet Archive: So Young, So Cold, So Fair : The Saint James Infirmary Blues. I was fascinated by the variants of the song on that page.
I love the medley by Harry Connick Jr.: it combines St. James Infirmary with Just Closer Walk With Thee. The juxtaposition of the left turn of Infirmary with the devoutness of Walk is right up my alley.
I went down,
To the Saint James Infirmary.
I found my baby there.
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So calm. so calm, so bare.
Let her go. I said let her go.
May God bless her.
Wherever she may be.
Well, she can search the whole wide world over, yeah,
But she’ll never find a sweet man like Harry.
Now when, I die–
I want to be buried.
In a box with a black coat and a Stetson hat.
I want a twenty dollar coin on my watch chain.
So all the boys know I died standing pat.Oh–
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, if you please,
Daily walking
Close to Thee,
Let it be,
Dear Lord,
Let it be.Oh–I am weak
Thou art strong,
Thou art strong;
Keep me Jesus from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied
Just as long,
Just as long as You walk close to me.Now folks, this is the end of my story.
Bartender pass me another bottle of booze.
If anyone should ever ask you,
You can tell them I’ve got the Saint James Infirmary Blues.
Here’s audio of both those songs.
Harry Connick Jr.:
Lily Tomlin & Howard Shore & His All-Nurse Band
