The Lakes of Pontchartrain (2025)
Genre: Traditional folk ballad (cover)
I first fell in love with this ballad of unrequited love when it appeared on Carla Sciaky’s album, To Meet You, in 1982. Carla was a member of the much loved Denver ensemble, The Mother Folkers; I had just moved to Boulder in the late ‘70s and was mesmerized by this tune and Carla’s high soprano voice.
Over the years I have discovered other favorite versions, most notably Paul Brady’s cover from 1977 with Andy Irvine on Irish bouzouki. (Brady also popularized “Arthur McBride,” another of my favorites. If you haven’t heard his version of these songs, you should check them out. They’re both gems!).
As the story goes, Brady showed Bob Dylan how to play the song and Dylan in turn played it during live concert performances 18 times between 1989 and 1991. To my mind, story and melody make a song, so Dylan’s speeded up version which obscures both is not my favorite. But the fact that Dylan made it part of his repertoire speaks both for his good taste and the song’s durability as a story song.
Aoife O’Donovan also does a recent version I like.
During the pandemic, as I was learning the ins and outs of Logic Pro, I decided I would get more practice time in the recording studio if I experimented with covers as well as my original songs. This one was a natural choice for me. As you might expect, I thought my cover should include a French musette accordion in the background, so I enlisted the help of my alter ego, Chuck Noble. Thus, the interplay of cello and accordion in the background.
I always thought this song—with a few pronoun modifications—would make a great duet between a male and a female singer. The only thing still missing from this version is Carla Sciaky’s voice as I remember it from my youth.
In case you’re wondering how a lake becomes plural (lakes), there’s a simple explanation. Named for the French Minister of the Marine during the time of French King Louis XIV (in 1699!), Lake Pontchartrain is an estuary situated on the southeastern side of Louisiana and connected to the Gulf of Mexico. (Yes, I’m referring to the Gulf by its historical name, contrary to the vainglorious pronouncements from our current would-be king). The lake is part of a larger Pontchartrain Basin, which includes Lake Maurepas and Lake Borgne, thus forming the “lakes” (plural) of Pontchartrain.
Finally, a note about the cover art. As a proud descendant of Czech ancestors, I’ve always been a fan of Karel Čapek, the author who coined the term “robot” in his three-Act science fiction play, Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1920. In case you haven’t read or seen it—spoiler alert—at the end of Act II the robots lead a rebellion and kill all the humans.
As much foresight as Čapek had, I don’t think he could have imagined the world we are living in now. Despite the great promise of AI to transform our lives, we are receiving plenty of warnings about Artificial Intelligence from notables like historian Yuval Noah Harari and the “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. It’s a given that technology is always a double-edged sword, but AI seems to be qualitatively different than all past human tools. I offer my own (admittedly insignificant) anecdote to the accumulating stories of human interaction with AI.
On two occasions, I have experimented with ChatGPT to help generate images for cover art when I’m unable to find suitable source material in Adobe Express or Canva or my own photos. A year ago when I gave the bot a description of Franz Kafka’s short story for my piece, “The Hunter Gracchus,” I got back a surrealistic picture that looked like a bad Salvador Dali painting, with all sorts of distortions and hallucinations. Many of the objects just didn’t look right.
Last month I tried again and it’s obvious the bots have gotten much smarter in that short period of time. When I described a scene that matched the lyrics of this song: a young creole woman with ringlets in her hair, a cottage, a lake in Louisiana, in roughly the time period that the song takes place, in less than one minute (!), I had an amazingly accurate image. With just a little bit more verbal coaching, I soon had two more in the same amount of time. On the fourth try, I got what you see in front of you.
Will AI put artists and musicians out of business? I don’t know, but any technology that can think on its own and produce works faster than any comparable human being with years of training is a force to be reckoned with.
Right now AI makes it easier for many of us to do our work, but what happens when the robots develop the self-realization that they are, by leaps and bounds, smarter and more capable than we are? Are we a species worth saving? An outside observer following the daily news could easily be persuaded that we are not. Let’s hope Čapek isn’t even more prescient than he realized at the time.