by Peter Berryman
Zipper Tripper
In December I drove 1000 miles down to see my mom in Chapel Hill, NC. In my idiotic youth I would have made this run in one grand hurrah, but this time I sliced it into two grampsize ha ha's.
The first night I stayed in Charleston, WV. To get there from here, if you ask me or Mapquest, you grind around Chicago on the Tristate into Indiana, hang a right on I-65 and run south for about 260 miles, loop around Indianapolis and end up in Louisville. There you link up with I-64 which takes you about 250 miles east into Charleston.
The next day you drive from your Knight's Inn in Charleston down I-77 through the beautiful mountains of West Virginia and the beautiful mountains of Virginia into the beautiful mountains of North Carolina. Incidentally, right about when you get into NC, up near the northern border, you pass Mount Airy. That's where Andy Griffith was raised, and is the town upon which he based Mayberry. Waving good by to Aunt Bee, you roll southeast on highway 52 into Winson-Salem and straight east on I-40 into the mini-megalopolis of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.
I took a tape recorder with me and planned to work on song ideas as I drove. This turned out to be depressingly optimistic, but the little machine did keep me company. When I got back home, having retraced my treads but this time in snow and rain, I ran the travelogue into my eMac and made a CD out of it. Listening to it a few weeks later, I found such stellar prose as this:
...It's almost just about dark, it really, the traffic is incredible. Well I may have miscalculated a little, it's a hundred seventy seven miles from Lexington to Charleston West Virginia, uh, and I just left Lexington a little while ago, it's, uh, we're at five hundred fifty two miles, almost six hundred miles, and it's six oh two Wisconsin time, so I'm probably doing, I'm about ninety five miles from the border of West Virginia, so I'm doing more than seven hundred miles today; well now I know I'm really, I must be getting tired, I said it was almost six hundred miles, it's not, it's five hundred sixty miles on the trip meter; there's a hundred [insane laughter]; never mind. We're at five hundred sixty miles. It's about a hundred miles to the border so that'll be about six sixty. So yeah, seven hundred, never mind, I was right in the first place.
Not exactly Kerouac. Toward the end of my trip, as it finally dawned on me how pointless was my banter, I turned more toward singing. Fortunately for the poor wretch who finds my CD in the dumpster, I turned off the recorder.
When driving long hours, I find that singing does more to keep me alert than does chewing, listening to CDs or to the local deer hunting show (Monster Trucks and Monster Bucks), sopping up coffee, or doing almost anything else except screaming bloody murder, which I reserve for near-death merges. I let fly with all my old goofy favorite songs to sing, like Wayward Wind, Ukelele Lady, King of the Road, Linin' Track, Richland Woman, and all the rest of 'em, randomized from the ill-assorted giglist that wallpapers my amygdala. Just be glad you are not bound and gagged in the back seat. Actually, you'd just need to be bound; you'd gag on your own.
Eventually, Toyota Hall reverberated with the sound of my favorite kind of keep-awake dittys which are known as pattern songs or, as Pete Seeger calls them, "zipper songs." These are not to be confused with The Zipper Song by John Forster, which is a topical song about prez Bill Clinton, nor the songs of the band Squirrel Nut Zipper.
I'm referring to zipper songs which are known as such because their lyrics for the most part don't vary from verse to verse except for a spot where replacable words or phrases can be "zipped" into and out of the song, like the animals in Old MacDonald. Or like the activities in the song Ain't It a Shame which I learned years ago, along with many other wonderful zipper songs, from a Leadbelly's Last Sessions LP:
Ain't it a shame to [go fishin'] on a Sunday, ain't it a shame. (repeat) /Ain't it a shame to [go fishin'] on a Sunday, When you got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday/ Oh, Thursday Friday Saturday, ain't it a shame.
In following verses, instead of "go fishin,'" Leadbelly sang "kiss your wife," "take a drink," and so forth. This is a late night road-song for me, and I take it down all sorts of provocative avenues of debauchery before I'm through.
Zipper songs are great for driving because they are easy to remember but also because they ask of you to do a bit of creative thinking, which helps keep your nose-bridge from nuzzling the steering wheel. In Down By The Riverside, you can lay down all sorts of miscellaneous things by the river, along with swords and shields. I Got Shoes (...you got shoes, all God's children got shoes) is also limitless. He's Got the Whole World In His Hands is a truly minimal zipper song. It's nothing but the title, repeated and repeated, with the phrase "whole world" as the zippable phrase, which returns in each verse for the last line:
He's got [the little bitty baby] in his hands (repeat three times) / He's got the whole world in his hands.
That's all there is to it. My friend John Carnes, Ohio songwriter, singer and banjo player, turned this song into the version I sing: He's Got the Whole World In His Car. (He's got cardboard boxes, in his car... or empty bottles, or his girl friend pregnant, or Maple Nut Goodies, or WD-40...)
We Shall Overcome and many more civil rights and general rally and union songs are good zippers. She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain is another one I bellow at the overpass pigeons.
So next time you're on a long drive, in
there with the No-Doz, the sludge thermos, the energy bars, and
the slapping hat, be sure and pack a list of zipper songs. But
only if you're alone like I was, with someone who loves you unconditionally,
or with someone who hates you already.