Two Live as Three

A Poetry Tale about James Weldon Johnson, told by Hello Doggo.

Before he was a diplomat, a civil-rights leader, and the man behind a hymn sung by millions, James Weldon Johnson wrote pop songs. Hit pop songs.

Around the turn of the century he joined his younger brother, the composer Rosamond Johnson, and the writer and performer Bob Cole, in New York. Three Black songwriters, selling tunes to Broadway.

Florida had given him reasons to stay away. In nineteen-oh-one, back home in Jacksonville, armed men found him in a park with a fair-skinned woman journalist, and by his own account he came close to being lynched.

In nineteen-oh-two the trio had a smash. The star Marie Cahill sang it in a show called Sally in Our Alley, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies of sheet music. It was called Under the Bamboo Tree. The tune, it’s said, was built on a spiritual: Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, quietly turned into ragtime. And the chorus promised: One live as two, two live as one, under the bamboo tree.

Some forty years on, Judy Garland would sing it in Meet Me in Saint Louis.

But my favourite fan is T. S. Eliot. In the nineteen-twenties, the most buttoned-up man in modern poetry wrote a jazzy verse play called Sweeney Agonistes. And two of his characters strike up: Under the bamboo. Bamboo bamboo. Under the bamboo tree. Two live as one. One live as two. Two live as three.

Eliot added a third person. Of course he did.