Though my record-buying at Dayton’s focused on prewar blues, there were a handful of notable exceptions – most significantly, a trio of reissue albums on the Atlantic label featuring the Drifters, the Clovers, and – far and away most memorably – the Coasters. Aside from Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, I don’t think any other R&B hitmakers in the 1950s recorded a body of work I love as much as the Coasters’. Unlike Berry and Charles, though, the Coasters were a collaborative project, and it is not easy to define them or what made them unique.

On the one hand, there were the actor/singers who brought the songs to life. As with many groups of that period, they were not completely consistent from record to record, the personnel sometimes changing and occasional ringers taking the lead (not a common occurrence, but “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” featured Richard Berry, the composer of “Louie, Louie,” who appeared on no other group track and was recorded when they were still based in Los Angeles — whence “The Coasters,” for West Coast — and were called the Robins).

On the other hand, there were Jerry Leiber  and Mike Stoller, who wrote the songs and produced the records. Leiber and Stoller were expert, versatile hitmakers, and did a lot of other stuff as well, but the Coasters records are their definitive artistic statement, the perfect match of playwrights and actors, composers and musicians, producers and artists.

The story of the Coasters and Leiber and Stoller has been told elsewhere, and what I want to emphasize here is just how much I loved that first LP collection and how much it affected my understanding of musical performance, then and forever. It was funny, and smart, and soulful, and musically challenging, and danceable, and collaborative, and individual – it was pure entertainment that was also rigorous and edgy, enjoyable and admirable on any level you might choose.

I can sing all but a couple of songs on that record, as well as lots of other Coasters songs I heard later, but I don’t perform most of them because I can’t do them even well enough to amuse myself. This and its prequel, “Framed,” are exceptions because they are such neatly crafted story-songs, and don’t demand a group treatment the way “Youngblood,” or “Along Came Jones” do. They also appealed to me because at that point I was immersing myself in blues, and they solved a problem: Dave Van Ronk could sing “Hoochie Coochie Man” convincingly and I couldn’t, but I liked that musical framework, and this song provided a combination of the setting Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters created for that song with a lyric that didn’t demand the singer be believable as its protagonist – everyone understood that I was presenting the story of a prison break, not pretending I might lead one.

Actually… to be absolutely honest, that is a later rationalization: at the time I also sang “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and it took  a while for me to figure out why it didn’t work, while this one and “Framed” did. In which context, two relevant anecdotes:

The first is Leiber and Stoller’s recollection that the songs they wrote for Elvis were big hits and made them lots of money, but were lightweight fluff compared to what they’d done with the Coasters, their particular example being “Jailhouse Rock.” They apparently wrote all the songs for that movie soundtrack in one afternoon, and Leiber dismissed the title song as Hollywood silliness, saying: “We used to write things like ‘Riot in Cell Block Number Nine’.” What he meant was that they used to write songs that were funny but also felt real, and in an online biography of the Robins, Marv Goldberg quotes Terrell Leonard, one of the group members, recalling that Leiber and Stoller wrote the song with bass singer Bobby Nunn in mind, but he refused to sing it, apparently considering it low class. “We didn’t understand our heritage,” Terrell recalled. “These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn’t do it so they brought Richard Berry in.”

The second anecdote, to balance that one, is Van Ronk’s story of arriving late at a blues festival, with no idea who else was on the bill, rushing onstage, and ending his set with a shouting, macho version of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” then coming off and finding Muddy Waters had been sitting and listening to him. Dave was embarrassed, but Muddy, as always, was polite and helpful: “That was very nice, son,” he said, encouragingly. “But you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.”

Most of the early blues albums I bought during that year with Van Ronk were by male guitarists, with a few by male pianists. Aside from the complete Bessie Smith sets, the only album by a female blues singer I recall buying in that period was of Lil Green, and I’m pretty sure I bought it only because her accompanists included Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim, and because I’d heard one song of hers, “Knockin’ Myself Out,” on a compilation of songs about drugs.*

Green has not been much remembered or enthroned in the blues pantheon, but for a moment in 1939 she and Billie Holiday were hailed as co-leaders of a blues revival – the African American press had pretty much stopped writing about blues after Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and the other pioneering blues queens ceased to get hits in the late 1920s, and when Holiday hit with “Fine and Mellow” just as Green hit with “Why Don’t You Do Right?” it was treated as a significant new wave.

They were superficially similar singers, with lighter, thinner voices than their most famous predecessors, but otherwise were very different. Holiday favored hip, forward-looking musicians – most famously Lester Young – and changed jazz singing forever, while Green was in the mainstream Chicago style of the mid 1930s, complete with Slim and Broonzy backing her on piano and acoustic guitar. That made her work a good deal less distinctive, but also a good deal more approachable for me – especially since Broonzy’s guitar solo on her biggest hit was particularly simple. It was not a great solo, and I have completely forgotten it, but it was probably the first single-string lead I ever learned.

As for the song, I’ve continued to sing it off and on ever since. It was composed by Kansas Joe McCoy, Memphis Minnie’s ex-husband and the leader of the Harlem Hamfats (which I like to think of as “the Harlem Hamfats, a Chicago band led by a Mississippi guitarist named Kansas Joe”). He’d recorded another lyric to the same tune, called “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” and apparently rewrote it for Green. In any case, it was a well-written lyric to a distinctive minor-key 12-bar blues melody, and did well for her, then even better for Peggy Lee, who got a career-establishing hit with it as vocalist for Benny Goodman’s band.

I didn’t perform this much, but sang it for my own amusement or for friends late at night, until I did a tour of Japan with the folk-rock-avant garde singer-songwriter/ performance artist Mikami Kan. Between our first and second gigs he asked me why Americans never did any songs in minor keys, since Japanese people like that sound,  so I said we did, and sang him this one, and ended up doing it on every show for the rest of the tour, and fell in love with it all over again.

*I also learned “Knockin’ Myself Out,” which Green did wonderfully, and although I don’t remember all the verses, I still perfectly remember the way she phrased the tag line:

I’m gonna knock myself out, I’m gonna kill myself
I’m gonna knock myself out, gradually, by degrees.

That year I lived in New York was a very rich time for me musically — not in other ways, since I basically spent it in my room listening to records and playing guitar, when I wasn’t contemplating the next record buy at Dayton’s or schlepping over to Van Ronk’s place for a lesson, meal, and lecture… but there’s clearly a “before” and “after” in my musical life, with that year in the middle.

Which said, in retrospect I have somewhat mixed feelings about the way I was learning, and the way a lot of musicians of my generation and afterwards have approached the music of the early 20th century. For example, take Big Bill Broonzy’s “Long Tall Mama.” It was on a Yazoo collection of early Broonzy songs, and also in Woody Mann’s book, Six Black Blues Guitarists, and when I first got the book it was beyond my abilities, but by the end of that year I had a rough approximation of the accompaniment and two solos that Mann had transcribed, and a few years later I worked out the introduction, and it’s the one Broonzy guitar part that I still have more or less in playable shape — rusty, but serviceable.

The mixed feelings come in because, first of all, it’s not the song I would have picked out of Broonzy’s repertoire if I hadn’t had tablature handy for it, so I was following Yazoo’s and Mann’s tastes rather than my own. And second of all, as best I can tell Broonzy was just playing and singing a song he had recently composed and improvising guitar breaks in his usual C-position style, and if he’d recorded the same song a second time he would have played different breaks. It wasn’t a composition, per se, it was just the way he happened to play it that one time. And if Blind Willie McTell or Blind Blake, or  Eric Von  Schmidt or Dave Van Ronk had wanted to play the song, they would have worked out their own guitar parts — maybe close to Broonzy’s, maybe not — and sung it in their own styles.

By and large, all the generations of musicians before me who played this kind of music also heard the musicians who originated it, playing it live, and understood it as a living form that changed from minute to minute and day to day and person to person. They had some recordings, but typically not many, and records were in any case secondary to musicians, so they mostly used them as sources for songs, not like formal scores.

By the time I came along, all but a handful of the older players were gone and companies like Yazoo had done beautiful reissues of their early recordings. So to a great extent the exercise of learning acoustic blues had become learning what the old guys recorded back in the 1920s and ’30s on particular records, as closely as possible. When I was lucky enough to meet other people who played prewar blues, we’d show one another the secrets we’ve managed to figure out — how Mississippi John Hurt fingered a particular chord; how Blind Blake played that syncopated bass figure.

There’s a whole world of us, and by now we’ve been doing this for decades, and we teach at guitar camps, make instructional videos, and even record our careful transcriptions of guitar solos that people like Big Bill Broonzy happened to play once, improvising in front of a microphone, eighty or ninety years ago.

It’s a great exercise, and I’ve learned a lot by doing it, but I’ve also spent a lot of years trying to unlearn that process — trying to stop singing in a southern accent, to stop singing words I don’t understand, to stop trying to duplicate licks that will never really feel like they are my licks, even if I can execute them cleanly.

This isn’t about originality vs. imitation. I play plenty of songs that do feel like mine, though they were written by someone else, and play plenty of licks that do feel like my licks, though I know more or less where I learned them — and so did Big Bill Broonzy. But I was recently listening to Paul Geremia’s version of “Long Tall Mama,” off his second album, which is an attempt to recreate Broonzy’s recording, pretty much solo by solo, and he did it better than I ever could, but it’s still a lot less interesting than what he was playing a few years later, when he had assimilated the music and was generating solos in the moment, the way Broonzy did — even if they were solos in Broonzy’s style. And even back then, the singing sounds like Paul, not Broonzy, which to me makes it a lot more interesting than the guitar playing.

The thing is, I have the Broonzy record, and when I listen to someone try to recreate the solos, all I’m thinking about is how well or badly they are managing to sound like Broonzy. If they do it well I admire their expertise, but it’s still just an exercise and I’d still rather hear him do it.

All of which said, it’s a great exercise, and I love the experience of hearing some of Broonzy’s licks come out of my fingers, and if someone else wants to learn this, it may be helpful to see what my fingers are doing, since we don’t have any video of Broonzy playing these breaks… and I’m glad to have learned it, and will undoubtedly learn more licks off more records before my last go round… and, since I haven’t played this in a while, it feels good to get it more or less up to speed.

So here it is, with no apologies and no regrets… but if you like it and don’t already know it, listen to Broonzy’s version, too.

Incidentally, there’s a dig at Memphis Minnie in the last verse that some folks may miss — she’d established her recording career with a song called “Bumble Bee,” about a boyfriend with a particularly effective “stinger,” and Broonzy is suggesting that he’s got something more substantial to work with.

[Note: I’ve learned a lot more about this song since writing this post, and have a long section about it in my book Jelly Roll Blues.]

I picked this up from the Holy Modal Rounders, presumably in my late teens, since I’d had enough training from Dave Van Ronk to hear that it included a diminished chord. I don’t remember what appealed to me about it at the time, but when I got deeper into the history of American popular music, it was unavoidably significant. Depending on one’s definition, it was arguably the first nationally popular ragtime or “coon” song — an offensive term that became generic in the early 20th century, though the original lyrics of “The Bully Song” (as it was originally titled) used a more offensive term.

It was a huge hit in 1895 for a Scots-Canadian singer named May Irwin, who performed it in a stage play called The Widow Jones — which is also notable because a brief scene in which she kisses one of the other actors was filmed by Thomas Edison in 1897 and hence is one of the first filmed love scenes. Irwin followed with other songs about African American badmen, generally performed in exaggerated dialect — though, unlike most white singers who specialized in that sort of material, she did not wear blackface make-up — and was one of the few pop stars of the late 19th century to record some of her hits, including “The Bully Song.”

All of which said, the song seems to have predated Irwin’s involvement. W.C. Handy wrote that he heard it in the early 1890s and its success inspired him to try his own hand at writing “a ditty fit to go with twanging banjos and yellow shoes”:

Songs of this sort could be tremendous hits sometimes. On the levee at St. Louis I had heard Looking for the Bully sung by the roustabouts, which later was adopted and nationally popularized by May Irwin. I had watched the joy-spreaders rarin’ to go when it was played by the band…

The most assiduous researchers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century black popular music, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, have turned up an early mention of the song in the Leavenworth Herald from 1894, which also seems to be the first printed appearance of the word rag to mean a kind of music: “Kansas City girls can’t play anything on pianos except ‘rags’ and the worst ‘rags’ at that. ‘The Bully’ and ‘Forty Drops’ are their favorites.”

Like much other black music of that period, this song had mostly fallen out of favor with African American musicians and listeners by the time they began recording in large numbers in the 1920s — though some fragmentary verses were recorded by significant black performers, including Henry Thomas, Lead Belly, and the Memphis Jug Band — but remained popular white rural musicians. It was recorded by some two dozen “hilbilly,” “old time” and “country” players and groups (up to and including the Everly Brothers), whence the Holy Modal Rounders, whence me — and I learned it knowing none of this history, or even that the bully and his antagonistic narrator were originally supposed to be African Americans.

Final note: In the early 1980s I did a six-show weekend at Passim Coffeehouse opening for Norman Blake and the Rising Fawn String Ensemble. The dressing room in Passim was tiny, and they were the headliners, but I had to get my guitar in tune and my fingers warmed up, so despite the fact that Norman was sitting two feet away from me, I had to play something. I had been fooling around with this song, and didn’t remember that he had recorded it, so I started picking it as a warm-up exercise… and, without saying a word, he picked up his guitar and began backing me, quietly and perfectly, not taking over but just playing back-up and making me sound better, until I nodded to him for a solo, and he played something simple and pretty, then went back to playing rhythm. He had never met me, never heard of me, and it was the nicest thing he could possibly have done, and I’ll love him forever.

One of the records I bought during that year in New York forever changed my understanding of the world. Like much of what I was buying, it was a reissue of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s on the Yazoo label, but this one had a particularly strange cover and a title cribbed from a James Baldwin novel: Mr. Charlie’s Blues. Its concept was to collect recordings by white rural musicians who played similar material in a similar style to the many black musicians on Yazoo’s other LPs, presenting them as blues musicians rather than as hillbilly, country, or old-time musicians.

What was life-changing about that was not the idea of white musicians playing blues — obviously, I was in New York to study with Dave Van Ronk, so I was familiar with that concept. Nor was it that the musicians on the Yazoo LP were particularly adept or skilled white blues musicians — their skills and my appreciation for their work varied, as with the white blues revivalists in Cambridge and New York.

What was different about them was that, at least to my ears, they were not trying to sound black. Some of them were playing guitar parts clearly imitated from records by black players, and a lot of them would have called their style “n—er picking,” a standard term for fingerstyle guitar in the rural South that was later cleaned up to “Travis picking.” (A change that removes the derogatory racial term while shifting credit for the style from its African American originators to one of its most expert white practitioners — a familiar message from white America to black America: “Heads I win, tails you lose.”) But they were singing in their own voices, sounding like white rural southerners, and in general choosing material that fit their own lives and perspectives.

Take Dick Justice, my favorite artist on that collection: he had two songs, both of which I instantly added to my repertoire, and sounded completely natural singing them. I’ve recently learned a lot more about Justice, having assembled a chapter about him for the book that accompanies the American Epic film and recording project,  which includes lots of new information about him. (As well as some very nice photographs, which I’m currently not at liberty to reproduce here.)

Justice was a coal miner and something of a hell-raiser in his youth, in a community with a small clique of exceptional musicians, and apparently this song was very popular with them. His children don’t recall him singing it, but the son of Bill Williamson, whose father was a friend of Justice and recorded with the Williamson Brothers and Curry, recalls it as a favorite of his dad’s, saying: “He could get on the piano and play blues like crazy, you know. He used to do a song called ‘Cocaine’, but it had a verse in it about the furniture man, so he liked to the call it ‘The Furniture Man’. And he would just do it like a comedy skit, and just crack everybody up.” (For more on the comic implications of furniture men with particular relevance to this song, here is an interesting post from another blog site.)

“Cocaine” was the title of Justice’s record as well, and he’d learned the song off a record called “Cocaine Blues” by a black guitarist and singer from Virginia named Luke Jordan — which is why, when Dave Van Ronk recorded a completely different song called “Cocaine Blues” it was initially credited to Jordan… and why I and others have chosen to give it a title that differentiates it. Jordan is another wonderful artist, and his record is very similar to Justice’s, and if I’d heard it first I’d credit him as my source… but I didn’t…

And frankly it was a better lesson for me to hear Justice, because, as I began to write above, he didn’t try to sing with a “black” voice, and over the years I have tried to assimilate that lesson, and also to try not to sing with a “southern” voice. I don’t always succeed, by any means, because those voices have been in my head all my life — and there are some lyrics that don’t work in my accent, because the words don’t rhyme or scan — but I’m trying, because I was struck by something Martin Carthy told me when I asked why he didn’t sing a Scottish ballad in Scots dialect:

I won’t try and put on a Scottish accent or put on an Irish accent or put on a regional English accent, cause I think that’s nonsense, I think it’s silly actually. It makes the whole thing into a pantomime. It’s much more serious than that for me. And much more fun, as well. You’re actually being able to concentrate on the song, to concentrate on the job at hand, instead of wondering whether you’ve got the accent right. It’s like you’re playing a character, but that’s not how I see singing.

I had never thought of it quite that way, and I don’t think it necessarily applies to all songs and styles, but in general it made sense to me. I still like to sing some songs in character, and think they work well that way — acting is just as valid artistically as music or poetry, though in a different way — but in general I think it’s a good idea to try to sing like yourself, especially if you’re singing something like blues, where the whole point is direct communication. So as best I can I’ve been  trying to figure out how to do that — for better or worse, and for what it’s worth.

Among the records I assembled during my year in New York, combing the second-hand bins at Dayton’s, were all five volumes of Bessie Smith’s complete recordings, with their comprehensive notes by Chris Albertson. That set was an oddity of the LP era: the records were issued with the notion that they could be stacked and played in order, all ten of them, so volume one had Smith’s first and last recordings, and the subsequent albums narrowed to volume five, which was the only one to include four sides of music from a single period…

I listened to all those records at least once, but my guess is there were some sides I heard only that once. I knew how important Smith was, and in particular what a major influence she was for Dave Van Ronk, who had come to blues from trad jazz, so I wanted to immerse myself in her work. But, for one thing, I was a teenage boy with a guitar, and had come from Woody Guthrie rather than Louis Armstrong, so I was more inclined to the rural blues guitar guys. And, for another, the completeness of those records did not serve her well, particularly in the early period, where she tended to just be accompanied by piano and the songs tended to be straight twelve-bar blues, one merging into the next, all slow, majestic, and somber. Some had great lyrics, but after a while I just tuned out.

So call me a lightweight, but my favorite Bessie Smith sides were the ones that mixed blues inflections with more vaudevillian or ragtime pop settings. Of course, Dave had already turned me on to “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon,” and I loved “Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle,” and then there was this gory little confection. It was a great recording, with Fletcher Henderson on piano, Charlie Green on trombone, and Joe Smith on cornet — much as jazz fans love Louis Armstrong’s accompaniments, Bessie Smith herself apparently considered Joe Smith a more sensitive sideman, and she sounds terrific in this company.

The composer credit on this song was to George Brooks, apparently a pseudonym for Henderson, but I’m dubious — the lyric is pretty ornate for someone who was not generally known as a lyricist, and I’m guessing Henderson hired someone else to do those  duties. Since another song at the same session was “Them’s Graveyard Words” and six months later Smith recorded another Brooks song called “Dyin’ By the Hour,” it seems to have been a pretty doom-laden period for whatever lyricist was involved.

I have been singing this now for forty years, and keep going back and forth on the gender pronouns. Dave tended to sing Smith’s songs from the point of view of a woman, as they were written, and Mississippi John Hurt did the same when he did songs learned from blues queens, so at first I did that. Then I switched and began singing it from a male point of view, because it’s in the first person and that suited me as a protagonist… and then I switched back, because I decided I’d rather not be the protagonist of this particular story and was happier presenting it as a story about a woman striking back against a man, regretful though she might be afterwards.

I got this from Dave Van Ronk, who presumably got it from Clara Smith’s, Alberta Hunter’s, or Margaret Johnson’s recordings — he sings a somewhat different lyric, but that may just be a quirk of memory or he may have decided to do some rewriting, which he often did when he found an old song he liked. I have to say, though, now that I’m going back and listening to their versions, I’m a bit startled that he would have softened their final verse, which goes:

I even hate to hear your name this morning,
I even hate to hear your name this morning,
I even hate to hear your name,
I could kill you quicker than an express train.
Nobody knows the way I feel this morning.

Be that as it may, it’s a good song, and a great guitar arrangement. Dave recorded it on his Sunday Street LP, so it was fresh when he taught it to me, and he was particularly happy with the way it adapted techniques he had honed in his ragtime arrangements to frame and support the singing.

Of the many things I owe Dave, one that has endured was his fondness and appreciation for the work of the early blues queens. Most of the blues revivalists of his generation — or at least the white, male, guitar-playing blues revivalists — shied away from the blues queens as too formal, or too jazzy, or not rootsy enough, or maybe just too female. But Dave loved their singing, and the piano or small combo arrangements that framed their singing, and he also had a keen appreciation of professional songwriters — he thought the folk scene’s tendency to praise products of the oral tradition over the products of people like Cole Porter and Duke Ellington was basically a middle class affectation — he liked to use the French term, nostalgie de la boue, a yearning for the mud. Dave thought of himself as a professional musician and liked the company of professional musicians, and he took particular took pride in having known Clarence Williams, who had organized the Hunter, Smith, and Johnson recording sessions.

Dave also tended to credit Williams with writing this song, but it was actually by a prolific blues songwriter and pianist from Charleston named Tom Delaney, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the confusion dated back to Dave’s time hanging out with Williams, who was notorious for making a buck of other people’s material — he credited Delaney on the records he produced, but the fact that he used this song with multiple artists suggests he probably owned the publishing, and maybe a cut of the composer royalties as well. In any case, it’s a nice example of the sort of song Dave loved and that I probably wouldn’t know if he hadn’t done it… though it was way more popular than the country blues songs I favored, and when I started playing on the street with my friend Rob Forbes in the summer of 1977, this was one his mother always requested because she had performed it as a band vocalist in the 1940s.

In his notes to this song, Dave Van Ronk wrote, “Jelly Roll Morton, certainly the greatest jazz composer before Ellington and a singer of incredible subtlety claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. There is little point in argument.”

This was one of Morton’s most subtle efforts, and one of Dave’s. Dave stripped the spare piano accompaniment down to an even sparer guitar arrangement, and sang it simply and directly, just telling the story.

On his recording, Morton recalled, “This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life. Mamie Desdunes, this was her favorite blues. She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number.”

Desdunes (sometimes written Desdoumes) was a well-known singer and pianist in “the District,” as Black New Orleanians called the area now generally remembered as “Storyville,” and the Black saloons and honky tonks further uptown. Bunk Johnson recalled playing numerous dates with her and told Alan Lomax: “She was pretty good looking — quite fair and with a nice head of hair. She was a hustling woman. A blues-singing poor girl. Used to play pretty passable piano around them dance halls on Perdido Street. When Hattie Rogers or Lulu White would put it out that Mamie was going to be singing at her place, the white men would turn out in bunches and them whores would clean up.”

I wrote a good deal more about this song, and what little more is known about Desdunes, in my book Jelly Roll Blues. Morton remembered that she was missing a couple of fingers on her right hand, and I found a newspaper clipping that told how her hand was crushed in a trolley accident. I also turned up a bunch of songs with overlapping verses, especially about the hard life of streetwalkers, but never managed to sort out the train schedules…

The song title is often given as “2:19 Blues,” as if the number was for a train time, but Charles Edward Smith recalled Morton explaining that the 219 was the train that “took the gals out on the T&P [Texas and Pacific railroad] to the sporting houses on the Texas side of the circuit… [and] the 217 on the S.P. [Southern Pacific] through San Antonio and Houston brought them back to New Orleans.” I can find no confirmation that those numbers matched trains on that route, and another scholar has the same trains running between New Orleans and Chicago — so I’m dubious, especially since the matched numbers would make more sense for trains going back and forth on the same line, but Morton assigned them to different lines.

My guess is Morton was improvising an explanation to match the lyric, and very likely shifting the location: there was a 219 train that ran from Memphis to Little Rock, with the 220 returning, and this couplet may well be from Memphis, another strong blues town. On the other hand, another famous blues lyric that mentions the 219 is “Trouble In Mind” (“Gonna lay my head on that lonesome railroad line/ Let the 219 ease my trouble in mind”), by Richard M. Jones, who was also from New Orleans.

In any case, this was one of a half-dozen songs I got from Morton via Van Ronk, and I’ve elsewhere posted about “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “Winding Ball” (a.k.a. “Winin’ Boy”), “Michigan Water,” “Sweet Substitute,” and “The Pearls.”

Dave Van Ronk had numerous musical heroes,  but Jelly Roll Morton was number one. Over the years, I got used to the idea that if I stayed late enough at his place we would likely end up listening to Morton records (often back to back with Phillipe Koutev’s Bulgarian ensemble), and it was an addiction I was happy to share. We often listened to the Red Hot Peppers recordings — by some standards the first examples of jazz that was both carefully arranged and brilliantly swinging — but in terms of Dave’s repertoire the most significant Morton record was an album recorded in 1939 as a commercial follow-up to his Library of Congress sessions, featuring Morton alone at the piano and titled New Orleans Memories. It was reissued on LP in the 1950s with one side of instrumentals and one of Morton singing. There were five songs on the latter side, all of which Dave played, and eventually I learned them as well, in roughly equal parts from Dave and Morton.

“Buddy Bolden’s Blues” was a descriptive title for a song Morton credited to Bolden, who led one of the defining New Orleans jazz bands at the turn of the twentieth century.  As he explained at the Library:

This is, no doubt, is the earliest blues that was the real thing. That is a variation from the real barrelhouse blues. The composer was Buddy Bolden, the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard or ever was known. The name of this was named by some old hunky-tunk people. While he played this, they sang a little theme to it.

That theme, “funky butt, funky butt, take it away,” has often been glossed by jazz historians as a reference to farting, possibly because the historians were more comfortable with pre-adolescent naughtiness than with adult sexuality. Bolden was famous for the audience of prostitutes who patronized his dances, and everyone in that world seems to have associated the “funk” in his lyrics with the strong smell of female bodies after a long night’s work. In my book, Jelly Roll Blues, I quote a brilliantly imagined recreation of Bolden’s performances from the New Orleans musician and historian Danny Barker:

Lots of folks would faint and pass out from the heat and the strong body odor, ‘cause there wasn’t many colored people who had bath tubs in those days. In fact, very few white folks owned one. Lots of times when the crowd would be jammed in front of Bolden he would stop blowing, take his hat and fan the air in front of him and holler loud:
“MY CHILLUN’S HERE. I KNOW IT ‘CAUSE I CAN SMELL ‘EM.”
That used to tickle the crowd, and everybody would clap, scream, laugh and holler. I’m tellin’ you, when that odor used to rise it smelled like burnt onions and train smoke…

Zora Neale Hurston recorded a variant of this song in Florida, with a verse that made that theme explicit:

I’m so glad the law is passed,
The women in Tampa got to wash they ass.

This was a key song in Dave’s history, because it was a standard part of his repertoire in the late 1950s (though the only recording was unissued until the Mayor of MacDougal Street CD), and he expanded it in the early 1960s into a guitar transcription of the classic ragtime composition, “St. Louis Tickle” — the first full transcription of a piano rag to guitar, which inspired generations of ragtime guitarists. Morton always insisted that the main strain of “St. Louis Tickle” was stolen from Bolden, and I’m guessing it was this connection that led Dave to work out the rest of the composition, first as a solo piece, and then in an string band arrangement for his Ragtime Jug Stompers. He would go on to arrange several other piano rags, including Morton’s masterpiece, “The Pearls” — which I’ve covered in another post, along with numerous Morton pieces I picked up from Dave: “Mamie’s Blues,” “Winding Ball” (a.k.a. “Winin’ Boy”), “Michigan Water,” and “Sweet Substitute.”

I arrived on Dave Van Ronk’s doorstep just as he reached the high-water mark of his interest in ragtime guitar, so I emerged from my year of study with “St. Louis Tickle,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” “The Entertainer” (which was so overdone that I quickly forgot it), and Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Pearls.” (I don’t think Dave had yet composed his own contribution to the genre, “Antelope Rag,” but it followed in the next couple of years.)

“The Pearls” may have been my favorite — though audiences never got as excited about it as they did about “Maple Leaf,” so I played it a good deal less. I was not familiar with Morton’s piano version at the time, so Dave’s guitar arrangement was the first way I heard it, and it was so damn pretty, with neat chords and interesting harmonies. Morton was Dave’s favorite composer and one of his favorite musicians, alongside Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Dave would later say he worked out these piano rags as research projects to improve his understanding of the guitar, and that was certainly part of it, but there was also some pride involved. He was trying to get off the road and make his living from teaching, and he wanted to feel like he was the kind of guitarist an ambitious young student might want to study with, even in the musical mecca of Manhattan — and, damn it, he was the acknowledged pioneer of classic ragtime guitar and wanted to justify his reputation.

That had gotten a lot harder by the mid-1970s, because like many pioneers he had inspired a wave of followers who didn’t have to labor under his handicaps — starting with his own lack of predecessors, but also a clumsy right hand that kept tripping him up, since he was a natural lefty. Dave Laibman and Eric Schoenberg had credited him on their debut LP, which was the first full album of ragtime guitar instrumentals, but soon a bunch of players came along who were only marginally aware of his contribution. He was particularly taken with the Dutch guitarist Ton Van Bergeyk, and also Leo Wijnkamp, and then I introduced him to Guy Van Duser’s work, which led him to begin musing about the unique affinity Dutch and Dutch-American guitarists seemed to have for ragtime… until his lady, Joanne, broke in to point out that he had about as much Dutch ancestry as he had Cherokee.

I later got to know Leo, met Ton a couple of times, and took one lesson from Guy, but I continue to particularly like Dave’s arrangements, because they both feel and sound like something a guitarist would naturally play. Most classic ragtime guitar arrangements sound to me like attempts to play piano compositions on an instrument that has too few strings — like Dr. Johnson’s hind-leg-walking dog, one is impressed that it can be done at all, not because the results sound particularly pretty. Dave’s arrangements always sounded pretty — and when I finally heard Morton’s piano recording, I was struck by how much of it he had managed to translate into guitar language, and reasonably simple guitar language at that.