I have no idea how I ended up with a copy of Kris Kristofferson’s first album — I was buying hardly any country, or rock, or pop at that point — but however it came into my hands, I was instantly hooked. The writing was like nothing I’d ever heard: a perfect combination of hip, smart, soulful, literary, and simple as a great country song. It matched Kris’s unique background: Vietnam, Oxford University, flying helicopters to oil rigs, emptying ashtrays at Columbia’s Nashville studio. But I didn’t know that at the time; I just knew how much I loved his writing. In retrospect some of the songs feel a little over-romantic — in a 19th century literary sense — but I was the right age for that, and others have held up as well as any songs I know.  I’ll probably get to “Me and Bobby McGee” before this project is over, because overdone as it is, it’s a great song; and I don’t think I can write about busking in Norway without doing “Help Me Make It Through the Night”; and I don’t know many better phrases than “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” and have a soft spot for “Just the Other Side of Nowhere”…

But my favorite to play and sing was always “Best of All Possible Worlds,” because it came along just when I was getting into Jim Kweskin and Willie McTell and all those guys who played rural ragtime circle-of-fifths tunes, and I figured out that a riff from McTell’s “Kill It, Kid” would fit perfectly with Kristofferson’s song. Plus, I never heard anyone else do this one, unlike all the other Kristofferson songs I liked, which were mostly covered to death.

Also, obviously, I love the story, and the wry humor:

They finally came and told me they were gonna set me free,
And that I’d be leaving town if I knew what was good for me.
I said, “It’s nice to learn that everybody’s so concerned about my health.”

I was lucky enough to meet Kris a couple of times, and interview him, and he was one of the most likeable people in the music business. He carried a band made up of songwriters who enjoyed hanging out and playing together, including Billy Swan and Donnie Fritts, and I once came back to the dressing room and asked Swan, who was acting as the bandleader, if he had a set list for the show I’d just heard, and behind me Kris quietly said, “You got a pen?” And then, while his band drank beer and relaxed, he wrote out the set for me. That may not sound like much, but headliners don’t typically act that way — not to mention headliners who are also movie stars. But he has always been atypical, in a lot of ways: that night, he’d done a country set about the Nicaraguan revolution, including a moment when he named Sandino, Che Guevara, and other Latin American revolutionary heroes, and the bandmembers pumped fists in the air and yelled “¡Presente!” after each name. (The album was called Third World Warrior. It wasn’t a great record, but it was heartfelt and a very unusual project to be touring around county fairs in middle America in 1990.)

It was Kris’s first album, though, and his follow-up, The Silver-Tongued Devil, that changed the course of country music, and if anyone reading this hasn’t heard either, or both, you’ve got a treat in store.

I got this from Lead Belly, but more specifically from The Leadbelly Songbook — I have no clear memory of hearing him sing it, and may have heard it by Pete Seeger or any number of other people, but I have a photographically clear memory of  the page in that book,* with a picture of a pretty young woman walking along a city street in a nice dress and an impressively broad-brimmed hat. She was, presumably, one of the “yellow women” whose doorbells the singer would no longer be ringing. At the time I had no idea what the word “yellow” meant in that context, though I’m pretty sure I understood him to be talking about prostitutes.

I didn’t sing the song much, though I noted Johnny Cash’s reworking of it as “I Got Stripes” on his Folsom Prison album, but I always appreciated the way the story is told in brief, precise images, and how much it leaves to the listener’s imagination.

Then, when I was sitting down to do it for this project, I began thinking about all the implications of that reference in the chorus to “yellow women.” when I first sang this, I don’t think I separated the women in the chorus from the woman he loves who has thrown him out of doors, presumably leading to the crime that has ended him in prison. But that generic use of “yellow women” goes along with an old and widespread stereotype — I even ran across it when I was living in Lubumbashi, in the Eastern Congo — about light-skinned black women. And that, in turn, leads into the complex and brutal history of colonialism and slavery, and in particular the long history of white men publicly decrying the idea of white-black sexual relations while privately indulging by means of rape and economic coercion… and the pervasive double standard whereby women who fail to remain “pure,” whether voluntarily or not, get blamed for being temptresses, or loose, or whores.

One of the complicated things about singing old songs is that they reflect times, cultures, customs, and viewpoints that are historically and sociologically interesting, but when I sing them they cease to be artifacts and become living performances, in the present, sung by me. I enjoy that process more in some instances than in others, and am more conscious of it sometimes than others. This time, I played this song for a few days, not having done it in at least thirty years and thinking about how I might play it on guitar, then filmed a first version… and it wasn’t until I was actually doing it in front of the camera that it struck me how unpleasant it was for me to be sitting there singing about ringing yellow women’s doorbells — and also by the fact that when I sang this as a kid, no one ever suggested there was a problem.

So I filmed it again, with the lyric changed to “pretty women” — which still leaves the sexism intact, and stereotypes about good-looking women being sexually available, and me sitting in Cambridge, Mass, assuming elements of Huddie Ledbetter’s persona and describing the trials of wearing prison stripes and chains…

I love the range and breadth of American vernacular music, and am fascinated by the history embedded in these songs, and have been living with them my whole life, and plan to keep singing them. Lead Belly sang not only about his own life and experiences, but about being a cowboy shooting it out with Jesse James, and about paddling his canoe on the island of Hawai’i, and he did his best to assume those personas and make them come alive. But he also changed lyrics when he thought they were wrong for him, and if I had his talent I’d change more to suit my own tastes and reality.

*Having tracked down a copy of The Leadbelly Songbook, I find that my “photographically clear memory” of that photo was right, but it illustrated a different song, called “Yellow Gal.” I don’t know if there’s a moral to that.

I mostly missed the hottest groups of the pop-folk craze. I was born in 1959 rather than 1950; I started out with my grandparents’ 78s, listening to the Almanac Singers and Josh White; my half-brother Dave introduced me to old-time country blues recordings; and I guess I was already something of a loner and a contrarian by age five, more attuned to Woody Guthrie than to the perky collegiate approach. In any case, I missed the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Brothers Four, and only heard Peter, Paul and Mary because my little sister liked them, but never listened to them voluntarily.

However, somewhere along the line I picked up Vanguard’s Greatest Folksingers of the ‘Sixties, and along with Cisco and Kweskin and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott it included the first tracks I ever heard by Ian and Sylvia, and by Richard and Mimi Fariña, and “Walk Right In,” by the Rooftop Singers. Those were not really my kind of music — the Fariñas a bit more than the others, and I did pick up their “best of” double LP, but didn’t listen to it very often — but it was hard to resist the rhythmic drive of “Walk Right In,” propelled by Eric Darling’s 12-string guitar. (Incidentally, Ian and Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind,” also on that album, has a very similar 12-string arrangement, which I’d guess was not coincidental.)

The Rooftop Singers, as it happened, were formed by Darling specifically to record “Walk Right In,” which he’d presumably heard on Sam Charters’s The Country Blues reissue LP. I preferred the Cannon version, of course, but didn’t learn it because the song was already so overdone, due to the Rooftop version, which was a number one pop hit in 1963… the rub being that I could not avoid knowing the Rooftop version, more or less, because it was unforgettably catchy, and fooling around with my own variation of the bass part, because it was fun. And then there was José Feliciano…

He was on Greatest Folksingers of the ‘Sixties as well, blowing away the Newport Folk Festival audience with his flamenco-ized version of “La Bamba,” and sometime later I managed to acquire a copy of his first LP, which is a truly weird and wonderful record, recorded when he was seventeen years old and including his versions of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” “High Heeled Sneakers,” and “Walk Right In,” which he sings in English, Spanish, and Yiddish.

Whatever my reasons for not learning the Cannon or Rooftop versions, my reason for not learning Feliciano’s is simple: there was no possible way I could even dream of playing like him… and yet, the bassline in my head is more Feliciano than Darling, and I’ve got that Spanish verse (I don’t speak Yiddish, which didn’t stop José, but I’m not seventeen, or a genius). So, here it is, for what it is.

If there is one reason I ended up where and who and what I am today, it is that I had an older half-brother who was into acoustic blues. Dave was nineteen years older than me, and apparently he was a great guitarist, though I never heard him during my childhood, because he didn’t like to play in front of people. But he had all the right records, and there were a few years when I guess he didn’t have a regular place to live, or anyway a place for the records, so he left them with us. That’s where I first heard Joseph Spence, and Jelly Roll Morton, and he had all the first round of country blues reissue albums, starting with the canonical, seminal The Country Blues, compiled by Samuel B. Charters.

For a while I thought of that LP as kind of a blues “greatest hits” collection, since it had “Stealin’,” “Walk Right In,” “Statesboro Blues,” “Matchbox Blues,” “Key to the Highway,” “Fixin’ to Die”… all these songs that everyone seemed to know and play, including a couple that even turned up on the radio. It was only later that I realized those songs were so familiar because Charters compiled and released them. We all knew “Walk Right In” and “Stealin'” — even if we got them from Jim Kweskin, Dave Van Ronk, or the Rooftop Singers rather than directly from Cannon’s Jug Stompers or the Memphis Jug Band — because Charters chose those songs to represent those groups on that LP.

It also included the first reissue of a Robert Johnson song, and tracks by Leroy Carr, Washboard Sam, and Lonnie Johnson, which actually led to a wonderfully tiny tempest in the hardcore bluesophile teapot: some rival collectors were so incensed at the inclusion of these obviously urban blues performers in a collection of country blues that they rushed out their own anthology, Really! The Country Blues, which didn’t include any urban artists. It was great, too, and my brother had both of them, so I also got to hear Tommy Johnson’s “Maggie Campbell” and Skip James singing “Devil Got My Woman.”

I didn’t actually play many of the songs on The Country Blues, but both “Stealin'” and “Walk Right In” were so ubiquitous that I couldn’t avoid learning them, just by osmosis — hell, I remember Arlo Guthrie’s version of “Stealin’,” and Jose Feliciano’s performance of “Walk Right In,” with verses in Spanish and Yiddish. (Which, incidentally, is coming in my next post, at least the Spanish part.)

This is another amusing tidbit from Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger, and is probably the first song I learned off that record, because if you hear it once or twice, you know it, like it or not. I don’t know where Dave learned it,* but a similar four-verse version was printed in Frank Shay’s My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, a wonderful book published in 1927 and illustrated with woodcuts by one of my favorite illustrators, John Held, Jr. The concept behind the book was to preserve the songs men used to sing in saloons, which were endangered due to Prohibition — which had not ended drinking, by any means, but had ended loud singing around the piano in the local bar. (Held also illustrated a book called The Saloon in the Home, or a Garden of Rumblossoms, which purported to present an evenhanded debate for and against Prohibition, the “pro” side represented by severe tracts on temperance and the dangers of alcohol, and the “anti” represented by cocktail recipes.)

Shay titled this song “Brother Noah,” and it was apparently a popular favorite for barroom harmonizers, with a mock-religious chorus of “Hallelue, Hallelue, Hallelue-eu-eu-eu-ya.”

Dave’s version replaces the hallelujahs with “doodlee-doo,” an improvement I would recommend to singers of Handel as well.

Other than which, the song speaks for itself very nicely.

*Andy Hedges writes to tell me that Billy Faier learned this as a kid and taught it to Dave, which makes perfect sense.

One of the pleasures of Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger was that along with the blues performances that made it a classic of the 1960s revival, it had oddities like “Mr Noah” and “Chicken Is Nice.” I learned Dave’s versions of both almost immediately, because the lyrics stuck in my head on a couple of hearings and they were easy to play. It was only some years later that I was singing “Chicken Is Nice” and noticed that one of the towns mentioned was Monrovia, looked at a map of Liberia, and found a Robertsport, which sounded enough like “Robert’s Falls” that I called Dave and asked if the song was Liberian, and indeed it was.

It appeared on an obscure collection, Tribal, Folk and Cafe Music of West Africa, recorded in 1949 by an ethnomusicologist named Arthur Alberts from a blind pianist and composer named Howard Hayes, who also recorded the classic “Bush Cow Milk,” and the whole Hayes set is now wonderfully available on CD. It was reissued by Alberts’s nephew, Guthrie Alperts, who was kind enough to send me a copy, and I heartily recommend it… but, despite the opportunity to learn the original version, I still sing Dave’s.

I must add that Dave Van Ronk was one of the most amazing cooks I’ve ever known, and one of the great pleasures of being his friend over the years was indulging in the dinners he typically spent hours cooking every night. His mole poblano was to die for, and he regularly tried novel experiments that somehow worked — I particularly remember an attempt to cook a fiery Indian meal without using any capsicum peppers, since they did not exist in pre-British India. He used a mountain of black pepper, and it should have been awful, but although I can’t vouch for its historical accuracy, it was delicious.

So anyway, one day I called him up and he said, “Guess what I cooked for dinner last night?”
And I said, “What?”
And he said, “Chicken with palm butter and rice.”
And I said, “How was it?”
And he said: “Nice.”

First of all, I must state with pride and pleasure that the first time I ever tried cocaine was courtesy of Dave Van Ronk. It was in my parents’ living room, late at night, after a fair amount of whiskey had been drunk, and he had it in a twist of plastic wrap and gave me a line. To the best of my recollection it had no effect whatsoever, or at least any chemical thrill was dwarfed by the thrill of getting my first taste from the man who had recorded “Cocaine Blues.” I should also record for the sake of history that it was the only time I knew Dave to have or use that drug, and subsequent experience taught me it was not my thing, at all.

(For anyone who thinks I’m making a startling public admission here, I have a more involved anecdote about coke in my book Narcocorrido, describing a long evening in Monterrey, NL.)

Going back a bit, “Cocaine Blues” was life-changing for me because it was one of the first songs I heard by Dave, on a Fantasy Records sampler, and the combination of the two songs on that sampler and a couple on Blues at Newport were sufficient to persuade me and my mother to go see him in concert. It was a split bill with Patrick Sky at Jordan Hall, with Patrick on first, and he and Dave had clearly been doing some drinking ahead of time, but both were in great form. Patrick’s set included “The Pope,” off Songs That Made America Famous, which caused my mother literally to fall out of her seat, she was laughing so hard. (The clincher was probably, “They know that they could never quibble/With a man who is infallibibble!”)

Then Dave came on. I don’t remember what he sang, but from the moment he started to sing, we were hypnotized. That’s not just a figure of speech, either — I was interested in magic, and had been exploring hypnosis, and I clearly remember trying to look away from the stage, and realizing that I couldn’t. (Actually, the feeling is that you could look away, but yet you don’t, and don’t, and don’t.)

I saw Dave on some great nights after that, including a couple of hypnotic ones, but that first time was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. He seemed to expand and fill the whole room with his presence. It wasn’t just me: my mother, who had always loved Dylan Thomas and always regretted that she had never seen one of his legendary, boozy, brilliant, hypnotic readings, walked out saying, “That must be what it was like to see Dylan Thomas.”

I soon had a collection of Dave’s records, including the Fantasy double album that included Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger and Inside Dave Van Ronk, both recorded in 1963 or ’64. Through a quirk of CD reissuing, most people now remember Inside as the great album, but Folksinger was the one. I still know nine of the twelve cuts, and a couple of them became part of the common language of the 1960s folk-blues scene — there are still hundreds, if not thousands of people who can play Dave’s arrangement of “Come Back, Baby,” and “Cocaine.”

“Cocaine” was the closest thing Dave had to a hit, and people yelled requests for it at virtually every concert he gave for the rest of his life, which was almost another forty years. He quickly came to regard it as a millstone, reacting first by adding silly verses and comic throw-away lines, and by the time I heard him, probably in 1972, he’d quit singing the damn thing. Which was kind of too bad, because he did it like no one else — but he had plenty of other great songs.

There’s more to be said, some of which is in our book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, but for the moment I’ll just add that Dave got the song from Reverend Gary Davis, and worked out a guitar part based on Gary’s, with the basses played backwards, and I never bothered to learn that arrangement until a few years ago, after playing the song for almost forty years. So I do some back-picking in the breaks, because I love the way he played it, but not much in the verses, because I still feel more comfortable singing over my own variation.

Like many of the songs I’ll be singing over the next couple of months, I got this from Dave Van Ronk. He did it on one of my favorite LPs of all time, No Dirty Names, and I’m guessing it was supposed to be the title song, since when I mentioned that album to him, Dave’s response was a pained grimace and the comment, “They even got the title wrong.” I never figured out why he disliked that album so much, and am convinced the problems were in the process rather than the result, since the result was one of his best records, with a terrific range of material, from old country blues to Bertolt Brecht, William Butler Yeats, and Mose Allison.

“Keep It Clean” was one of the first songs I learned off that album, and it is kind of typical of Dave’s approach to the blues tradition. His source was a record by Charley Jordan, recorded in 1930, but Dave sang different verses, changed the chorus, and set it to a guitar arrangement that bore no relation to Jordan’s. Unfortunately for those of us who enjoyed that arrangement, this was during a passing period of infatuation with open C tuning, and by the time I knew him he’d dropped it from his repertoire — when I asked him to teach me the chart, he said he couldn’t remember it. However, the obvious inspiration was Lemon Jefferson’s “Bad Luck Blues,” which is in standard tuning, so I copped that — not very well, for the first few decades, but four or five years ago I went through an intensive Blind Lemon period and figured out the nice move from C up to D in the opening riff.

As for the song itself, I discuss it briefly in my book on the Dozens, and at greater length in Jelly Roll Blues, a deeper exploration of the uncensored African American lyrical tradition, and its censorship in print and on record. It was recorded in a few different forms during the ’20s and ’30s, my favorite probably being Luke Jordan‘s “Won’t You Be Kind,” with its cheerfully euphemistic “keep your back yard clean.” The more common phrase, which still turns up in rap lyrics, was “keep your booty clean,” and one of the curious facts I turned up while researching the Dozens book is that “booty” seems to derive from a West African term, bo-da, meaning, literally, ass-hole. I’ve never seen this derivation in any other source, but came across bo-da, with that meaning, in a glossary of Afro-Caribbean terms, and Mance Lipscomb explains on tape that “booty” means precisely that, noting that it is the dirtiest part of the body and even if you wash it thoroughly, in a couple of hours it will get nasty again — hence the frequency of the admonishment.

Through the wonders of metonymy, the term often shifted a couple of inches forward, and what is being kept clean in this song need not be that specific anatomical region. As Charley Jordan (no relation to Luke) sang:

If you want to hear that elephant grunt,
You take him down to the river and then wash his trunk.

Obviously, the sexual politics of this song are egregious, in the long tradition of “Roll Her Over In the Clover” with an overlay of “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” No defense is possible for performing something like this in the 21st century, and I generally don’t — but I learned it around age 13 and it is an excellent example of what attracts teenage boys to blues.

A hit in 1924 for Papa Charlie Jackson, the New Orleans banjo player who was the first male recording star of the first blues boom, “Salty Dog” was popular throughout the South, with black and white musicians alike, in numerous versions — and I’m sure the ones that got recorded were considerably expurgated and bowdlerized, compared to what was being sung in barrelhouses. I first heard it from Mississippi John Hurt, and still play pretty much his version, though I seem to have picked up some vocal inflections from Lead Belly, and wouldn’t be surprised if Jack Elliott gets in there as well.

According to Steve Calt’s glossary of blues language, the use of “salty” to describe a female dog in heat can be traced back to 1603, and by the late 18th century it had acquired the more generalized meaning of “lecherous” — though it clearly retained the canine association.

As to that bowdlerization, this is one of many recorded blues songs that were obviously based on unrecorded, and at the time unrecordable, lyrics. Jackson’s version, instead of referring to “my buddy” as the person who caught the singer kissing his wife, refers to “Uncle Bud,” a legendary figure of black folksong, and “kissing” would not have been the word used in barrelhouse performances. Zora Neale Hurston sings a common variant of “Uncle Bud” on a Library of Congress recording, and a typical verse goes:

Uncle Bud’s got corn that’s never been shucked,
Uncle Bud’s got daughters that never been fucked.

Or, in some versions:
Uncle Bud’s got corn that’s never been shucked,
Uncle Bud’s got daughters that never been to Sunday school.

I’m sure Lead Belly had some similarly filthy verses to this one, and I’m guessing John Hurt did as well… but they are, alas, lost in the mists of history, and we have to make do with what we’ve got.

This was one of the biggest hits to come out of the Mississippi Delta in the early blues era, recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks in 1930 — I don’t know if any other recording from rural Mississippi came close to it in sales during that period. I love the Sheiks, especially Lonnie Chatmon’s fiddling, but didn’t hear them until I was in my late teens or twenties, and had no idea who they were when I first heard this song on Doc Watson’s first album. I got the guitar part from Doc’s songbook, which provided tablature, and it may well have been the first piece I ever learned in open D tuning, and remains one of the few — I have trouble enough just keeping a guitar in tune, without attempting to retune it on a regular basis.

I don’t think Doc used open tunings all that often, either, but he explained in his notes to this song that he adapted his arrangement from Frank Hutchison’s “The Train that Carried my Girl From  Town” and “Worried Blues.” At the time, I didn’t know who Hutchison was, either — and when I finally heard him, all I could think was how much he reminded me of Doc, except quirkier.

Doc described “Sitting on Top of the World” as about an “old boy whose woman has run off and left him…. He wants her to come back, but he isn’t about to let her come back — he’s bragging, sour grapes kind of bragging. He’s sitting on top of the world, but he’s so lonesome that he can hardly stand it without her.”