Ted Leo

The True Sam Patch

Added 2024-03-28 01:01:40 +0000 UTC

As I mentioned in the overview post, encouraging everyone to take the song in before reading my overlong and overwrought thoughts about it, which, should you find yourself GENUINELY CURIOUS about (that’s a joke that will reveal itself in the writing bit), you’ll find below the lyrics

THE TRUE SAM PATCH

Up from the roil came the true Sam Patch

Having crossed the planes of men

From earth, to air, to water, and then

Back to earth and air again

Born to a world busy rebirthing itself

Little piecer on the creel

And what light does come from the northeastern sun

Is just enough to work the spinning wheel

Just enough to work the spinning wheel

His daddy hit his fill, and his daddy hit the still

And finally hit the rail

His mother said, “Son, oh, you must keep working on

For to keep us out of jail

To keep us out of jail”

But no child would consent nor ever be content

Seeing only Slater’s Mill

When the Blackstone gives way to the Narragansett Bay

The Passaic to the Arthur Kill

Newark Bay and the Arthur Kill

So like gulls above the spray, all the boys would fly away

Seconds of joy to snatch

But the crowds who came to the falls at midday

They’d come for young Sam Patch

They were coming for young Sam Patch

Now, Old Mr. Crane laid a new toll bridge lane

Across the Patterson sky

So for everyone, then, who’d never cross those falls again

The true Sam Patch would fly

He flew from a tall ship’s mast to the ocean wide at last

He flew from town to town

And to every locale along DeWitt’s brand new canal

And from a past that’d drag him down

That’d drag and hold him down

By barge and by chaise, to the Erie shore he came

Drank with society men

And in Buffalo town, he had garnered such renown

He jumped once, and they said, “Jump again”

October did pass to November’s empty glass

Claret and burgundy

And with whiskey and rum, they enticed him to come

To the falls of Genesee

When he jumped for the rough, for the low, for the scruff

Our true Sam Patch would fly

When he jumped for the fine, and the coin, and the wine

Our true Sam Patch would die

Our true Sam patch would die

But who would deny those that needed him to fly

Sam knew his duty well

That the spinners of earth are owed a heavenly berth

And some heaven here in their hell

Some heaven here in their hell

Oh, a bottle up to dare, a bottle down so’s not to care

It turns upon a dime

Which bottle was the one that left young Sam undone

And aware that it was his time

Knowing it was his time

So Sam walked alone to the edge of the foam

One more jump should suffice

But the Genesee’s maw waited until April’s thaw

To return Sam from the ice

Now, Napoleon, they say, was a great man in his day

And so it seems to me

Ah, but old Napoleon, he never done what Sam had done

He never jumped the Genesee

Fortune and fame may be young fool’s game

And all that lives must die

But when all kindly folk can look up from their yoke

We will see our true Sam fly

The true Sam Patch will fly

THE TRUE SAM PATCH (and the electric eel)

I was talking to my friend, great author and modern wit, Rax King, about Instagram DMs (via Instagram DMs) recently because she’d posted a screen grab of a DM from a guy (do I even need to say that this was a guy?) who had managed to pivot from a declaration of fandom to “I like to sit on my balls while my wife watches” within three short sentences; and though I know it’s been a LONG time since anyone SHOULD be agog that this goes on, I’m still kind of agog every time I see it. I honestly believe this kind of thing constitutes a sort of assault - forcing your balls into someone else’s consciousness is akin to flashing, and there’s a vicarious and threatening violence to it that I think must be part of what gets the people who do this off. Like, they’re not expecting anything to IRL to come of it, right? They get off on being sexually threatening by forcing their junk into your face, virtually.

But that all being understood without having to be said, I think, what we were actually talking about was the declaration of fandom lead-in that these types of messages almost always have, in some sort of attempt at a rope-a-dope, I assume. I get a different kind of aggressive DM, but they tend to begin the same way. “Hey, big fan of your [music and/or activism], but I’m genuinely curious - no shade, but - WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT [in my case, these days, bad faith cult-like talking points about x, y, and sometimes even z].” And we were saying that though we know reading past “genuinely curious…” is always the WRONG MOVE, sometimes you’re compelled to find out, specifically, where THIS one is going, even though you already have a general idea that you can predict with 99% accuracy. Rax said, it’s the evolutionary instinct that makes you want to jump when you’re high up on a ledge, but what had popped into my mind simultaneously was, “I want to touch that electric eel.”

Like, if I’m sitting there looking at an electric eel in a tank, I’m gonna have an urge to touch it. I know - what can I tell you. It’s partly, “what does it feel like/how bad could it be?” and partly that I still don’t really understand what goes on there, and I’m fascinated by it.

I’ve been aware of electric eels since I was a child. I’ve read about them, I get the math of the mechanism, but there’s something about a fleshy animal generating dangerous electric current from within itself that just glides right past my sense of the world as it is. I know that we are all, as The Dustdevils phrased it, “Struggling, Electric, Chemical,” but something about the electric part is still just beyond my grasp - just over the line into the realm of fantasy. So I want to touch that eel. Pretty sure it’s gonna hurt me, but I need to feel that shock. I think, also, that I absolutely know that even after that painful transfer of electric current, I’m still not going to understand it - I’ll only have some experience of the pain. I imagine I’ll marvel at it hazily even MORE afterward. But you put that eel in front of me, I’m gonna want to touch it.

Which leads to this song, “The True Sam Patch.”

It’s unclear where or exactly when Sam was born, it’s generally accepted he was born between 1799 and 1807, somewhere in Massachusetts, and named after after an older sibling, Samuel, who had not survived his own childhood. A little bit later, though while still a child, our Sam wound up laboring, spinning cotton in Slater’s Mill, Pawtucket, Rhode Island - the very first water-powered industrial mill in the US, and thus considered the “birthplace” of the industrial revolution over here. It was also here that Sam began attracting attention for jumping over and into waterfalls, as he led the other boys from the mill in the diversionary recreation of jumping the falls where the Blackstone River meets the tidal Seekonk, which then spills on into Narragansett Bay. The whole thing is now a rather grotty post-industrial estuary, overgrown with those jurassic tree weeds you see all along the sides of Northeast Corridor highways and train lines, and seemingly blocked by more than one rusted rail bridge, looking like war movie detritus, locked in mid-swivel like the operators had to abandon their shacks in mid-opening (or closing) and run from or to something; the stories of whether they actually made it or not never recorded, so not even lost to time.

As a young adult, he was working the Hamilton Mill, in Patterson, New Jersey, and began jumping the Great Falls there (highest falls east of Niagara!). He made his biggest impact, and cemented his reputation as a hero of the working class, when he stole the thunder from the ceremony surrounding the opening of a toll bridge across the falls, built by a mill owner and society gentleman, by announcing ahead of time that he was going to make the jump right in front of the ceremony, which he did. It’s said that in all his jumps from then on, he wore the white clothes and red sash of mill workers, standing in for their higher ambitions and encouraging them to raise their gazes to the sky.

His fame was tied up with his era, as the newly opened Erie Canal enabled news of him to travel along it at the speed of a barge boat, which was, compared to what means of conveyance had traveled the route before them, like wildfire; and he followed his fame all the way to Niagara itself, which he jumped twice successfully, before being drawn back to Rochester, New York, to jump the falls of the Genesee. I’ll leave the rest of the narrative to the song.

Of course, my take on Sam, here, is hagiographic, and ignores some of the more ignoble aspects - he passed around a hat at all his events from 1820 on, and then gradually began taking actual payment from sponsors and people who wanted to use his daredevil tactics for their own ends, civic and selfish. I don’t necessarily blame him for any of that, but coming from nothing, quick fame and fortune weren’t exactly his best friend. As his fame grew, and he lost a bit of himself (in my telling of it), he became a boozer, and something of a narcissist, and he unquestionably treated his poor pet bear cruelly. I leave the bear out of my story, entirely (as Harry Dean Stanton said to Willem DaFoe, “MY Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven! I don’t know who YOU are,” or something like that), but the alcohol and the narcissism, I believe, go hand in hand with Sam’s naivety, his own jumble of trauma responses, AND what he believed was his higher calling; and I’m drawn to him.

I knew that writing this song would be somewhat outside my comfort zone, would be long, would be tough, and would make me think a lot more about myself in relation to Sam Patch than I’d want to, ha; but once I had the idea floating in front of me - Sam, himself, floating in front of me, mid jump over the Genesee, surrounded by a song that I could hear, even though it didn’t exist yet, I had to try and reach for it. It IS long, it WASN’T the easiest thing to pull into existence from the realm of the mists that surround the falls (also unknown and seemingly unknowable, to me - mists compelling you to lose yourself in, above a pool of fantasy, like a holy well filled with electric eels, compelling me to jump), but it didn’t sting! It felt good, in fact. That said, I’m still not sure writing and putting out this 10+ minute song about Sam Patch was any wiser than touching an electric eel - YOU WILL BE THE JUDGE - and I will take my lesson from Sam’s second jump at the Genesee, and leave the eels alone now, for a while at least.