"Ain't Goin' Down to the Well"

'Orphans: Brawlers', 2006

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All of the Orphans box set was new to me. The liner notes didn't make it obvious where the various songs originated - or even that they weren't all brand-spanking-new tracks - so the fact that a large number had been previously released on soundtracks, tribute albums, and more escaped my notice. Fifteen years on, I'm still not sure off the top of my head where most come from.

For those as ignorant as myself, Waits' cover of the Leadbelly song "Ain't Goin' Down to the Well" first appeared in a 2001 movie called Freedom Highway: Songs That Shaped a Century. Though I have yet to find anywhere one can actually watch this movie, it was apparently an Irish documentary that included a number of musical performances by the likes of dyed-in-the-wool folkies (Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Billy Bragg) and folk-fan allies (Bono, Willie Nelson, Waits). Despite the all-star cast, there’s very little other info about the movie online. If anyone has actually seen it, let me know how it was in the comments.

There are, however, two clips from the film on YouTube. They’re both of Tom’s contributions. One of them we’ll get to when we hit the letter "L." The other is this:

On Orphans, the song is driven primarily by harmonica and beatboxing. In this movie version, though, there's no harmonica, and the beatboxing is more subtle. It's more like breathing rhythmically…though I guess that’s basically the definition of "beatbox." He also plays the banjo - not an instrument you see him with often. In a 2004 Irish Times interview, the film’s director Philip King set the scene:

"Tom Waits walked into the room with the barn door and he threw it onto the ground and he threw a chair on it and he sat up on it. And the door creaked and the chair creaked and he threw that tambourine into the door and he put his foot on it and a banjo in his hand and he said: 'I'm ready'. I knew he was ready, but I wasn't ready. Because his voice was like a whirlwind that just blew me across the room when he started to sing. He was consumed by the act of doing what he was doing."

On his last tour, way back in 2008, Tom Waits opened almost every show with a mashup of "Lucinda" and "Ain't Goin' Down to the Well." "Lucinda" also came off Orphans, which he was promoting even two years after its release (on that same tour, he played songs off Orphans more times than he did songs off classic albums like Franks Wild Years or Swordfishtrombones). Here's that mashup version:

Up next: Tom meets The White Rabbit