I’m Moving On (Hank Snow/Ray Charles)

In the mid-1980s I was looking for songs in the wide area of overlap between blues and country, and Ray Charles’ terrific version of this Hank Snow hit made it an obvious choice. In that period I was touring across country twice a year, with most of the gigs in bars around Montana and the Idaho panhandle. The patrons in those rooms ranged from blues fans to country listeners to folks who were just down for a drink in their local bar, and I was trying to find material that suited their tastes and also fitted with the rest of my repertoire and guitar style. If I hit the right balance, they’d even get up and dance, which never happened in the folk clubs back east.

I don’t remember whether I heard Ray’s version before or after Hank Snow’s, but it was definitely my main influence, though I also listened to Snow’s a bunch. I had only one Hank Snow album, a greatest hits set I bought after reading Peter Guralnick’s chapter about him in Lost Highway. He and Guralnick didn’t hit it off in person, but Peter clearly admired his musicianship and I checked out every artist in that book. In Snow’s case the exploration ended with that one album, but I liked his guitar playing and learned several songs off it. I still do “I’ve Been Everywhere”  and though I don’t remember all the words to “Rumba Boogie,” can never forget the verse that goes:

When Madame Lazonga was teaching the conga
In her little cabana in old Havana
We were doing the charleston and balling the jack
And that old black bottom till they started the jitterbug rag…

That’s about all I have to say about this song, except that when I was working it up for this video I started playing the banjo roll from Sam McGee’s “Railroad Blues” for the final V-chord section, and then added McGee’s full “train coming into Nashville” break . And I need to credit Steve James here, because I worked out a version of that guitar part from McGee’s record, but when Steve and I did a split bill at Johnny D’s in Somerville, Mass, I played it for him in the green room and he straightened me out. He’d actually spent time with Sam McGee, and showed me a couple of cute tricks, like the way McGee played the bass on the E section of that break — instead of alternating between the 6th string and the 5th (actually, the 5th and 4th together), he played the 6th for the first beat, then stayed on the 5th for the next three: 6-5-5-5, 6-5-5-5. I hadn’t noticed that, and it’s a great sound.

As for the rest, it’s just basic acoustic fingerstyle honky-tonk and a lot of fun to play.

I’ve Been Everywhere (Hank Snow)

So, to start off with, I have hitchhiked out of Winnemucca, Nevada. I don’t remember if I was picked up by a semi, but I’ve had rides from a lot of truckers over the years, in a lot of places, both in and out of the United States. Which said, I’ve never been to Ombabika, nor have I been to Jellicoe* — both pretty far north in Ontario, though not as far north as Schefferville, Quebec. Nor have I been to Barranquilla, Colombia, or Tocopilla, Chile, and I have no idea what either is doing in this song, nor yet Diamantina, which seems to be in Brazil (or, my old traveling partner Jasper Winn suggests, Australia).

The Canadian place names make sense, because Hank Snow, who put this together, was from Brooklyn, Nova Scotia–which sounds like a joke to me (and more so because it’s in Queens County), but apparently is real, though not included in the song. Actually, I should say Hank Snow put this version together, because I just learned that the original was Australian, by a fellow named Lucky Starr, who sings it significantly faster than Snow or I do.

I’ve always taken pride in my ability to memorize and remember song lyrics — that’s partly what this whole project is about — but this was undoubtedly the toughest lyric I ever memorized. I still have a perfectly clear picture of the evening I spent on it, walking back and forth across my bedroom floor, reciting till I made a mistake, checking the lyric, starting again, walking some more… I always recommend memorizing last thing in the evening, because then your brain keeps churning in your sleep — and it clearly worked, since that was almost 35 years ago and it’s still stuck in those cerebral crenelations… which admittedly might have been better used for other purposes.

I was spurred to learn this by my friend Monte in Vancouver, a Canadian ex-rodeo rider and wonderful harmonica player discussed in earlier posts. I used to hitchhike back and forth across the US every few years, and once across Canada, and Monte figured if I were going to make that part of my stage persona I’d better know this one.

Incidentally, I last hitched across country in 2006, on the book tour for Riding with Strangers, which was about the previous cross-country trip in 2005… so I guess I’m about due for another…

…and finally I’m forced to recall Dave Van Ronk telling me apologetically that despite my fine example he couldn’t bring himself to pick up hitchhikers, because they always insisted on chatting and were almost always boring… and I guess this song is a good example of what he was complaining about.

 

 

*I find there is also a Jellico, California, and a Jellico, Tennessee. I’m betting Snow meant the one in Ontario, which was his turf — but what do I know?

Lone Star Beer And Bob Wills Music (Red Steagall)

I forget who loaned me the Red Steagall album with this as its title song, but I know it was in Vancouver, BC, and I taped all the songs I liked–which was most of them–and learned this one and “Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You),” which remains a staple of my repertoire.

At the time I barely knew who Bob Wills was and had never tasted Lone Star, so I’m in Steagall’s debt for introducing me to Western Swing, one of the most exciting and influential byways of American music.

That first album also spurred one of my rare and abortive ventures into songwriting. Under its influence, I composed a pseudo-western swing number called “The Beer Stain on the Counter Looks Like Texas.” I don’t remember the first and only verse, but the chorus went:

That beer stain on the counter looks like Texas,
The peanuts are El Paso and the ashtray’s San Antone.
Yeah, that beer stain on the counter looks like Texas,
And I wish that I was back there now, down in my Texas home.

Which may explain why I don’t do more songwriting. Around the same time I wrote half a George Jones-style weeper called, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now.” I tried to get Bill Morrissey to collaborate on that one, but he wasn’t biting.

I don’t think I’ve heard another Red Steagall album, but along with Willie and Waylon — particularly Waylon, who composed a parallel song, “Bob Wills Is Still the King” — he focused my attention on Texas music, and I’m duly grateful. I’ve since spent a fair amount of time in the state, hitching and driving around and across it, and I won’t claim I know it well, but I’ve certainly developed a deep respect for its musical offspring. I’ve spent many interesting hours immersed in Wills’s canon, and that took me to Spade Cooley and Milton Brown, and then the long line of honky-tonkers following Ernest Tubb, Dave Dexter, and the marvelous Floyd Tillman, and later-generation songwriters like Terry Allen, Jo Carol Pierce, Joe Ely, and Lyle Lovett. Not to mention all the Mexican and Chicano music that’s come out of there, and all the blues, and jazz — Flaco Jimenez, Little Joe, Steve Jordan, Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Ornette Coleman… it’s a big state, but still disproportionately rich and generous in terms of its music.

And while I’m touching on this subject, I should plug a wonderful book that never got enough attention: Lone Star Swing, by Duncan McLean, a Scottish novelist who won a literary prize that had to be spent on travel outside the UK and, having never been further than London, decided to spend it hunting up Wills’s surviving bandsmen. It’s a very funny book, with a wonderfully off-kilter view of the American southwest, and an affectionate primer on the music. McLean’s Scottish rewrite of “That’s What I Like About the South” is worth the price of admission by itself, notably overshadowing my own half-assed efforts in that direction.

Sioux City Sue (The Donlins and Passim)

This one always makes me think of Rae Anne Donlin, who was from Iowa, which I didn’t know until I sang it one night in the club she ran with her husband Bob, and she told me it made her think of home and asked me to do it again next time I played there. The club was Passim Coffeehouse in Harvard Square, and it’s not easy to explain how important it was to me, or in how many ways. For one thing, that’s where I met Dave Van Ronk, who appeared there twice a year for weekend residencies, and where I saw him play dozens of times. For another, it was the first club that booked me for paying gigs, starting with six weekend shows opening for Norman Blake, then a weekend with Tony Bird, a split-bill weekend with Geoff Bartley, and eventually weeknight shows on my own.

The Donlins knew me before all of that, though, because my grandmother used to go to Passim every Sunday afternoon for coffee and pastry with her brother, reliving their past lives in Vienna, and I sometimes went along. And then in high school I started going once a week with a small group of friends to talk about deep, personal matters that required serious discussion. It was a good place for talking, because it was quiet and on a weekday afternoon we could sit as long as we liked, and the pastries were wonderful.

Bob was a legendary character — he’d been a  beat poet and running buddy of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, mentioned as “Bob Donnelly” in a couple of Kerouac’s novels — but that was a long time before Passim, and by the time I came around he was notoriously taciturn and curmudgeonly. Beyond that, he was a reformed alcoholic and particularly crabby with performers who drank — he loved Dave despite the drinking, but never really warmed to Bill Morrissey, and the lack of affection was mutual. But he was always nice to me, asked about my family, booked me for good showcase gigs, and even smiled and laughed his creaky laugh at some of my jokes.

As for Rae Anne, she was nice to everybody, despite the headaches of running a coffeehouse, music club, card shop, and whatever else it took to keep the place afloat. She loved Bob and he loved her, and they provided a home for folk and acoustic music in the tough years between the collapse of the 1960s folk revival and the arrival of the singer-songwriter scene. Those six-show weekend residencies were my school, a chance to study Dave, Rosalie Sorrels, Utah Phillips, Townes Van Zandt, oddities like Leon Redbone and Martin Mull, and interesting newcomers like Claudia Schmidt and Greg Brown — I remember one weekend when Greg did six hour-long sets of original songs without repeating himself.

As for “Sioux City Sue,” I learned this off the Willie Nelson/Leon Russell double album, which was the first album I had by Willie, and the only one for quite a while. I loved the first record, which had more western swing on it, and learned a bunch of the songs, but this is the only one that stuck with me. It was originally a hit for its composer, Dick Thomas, and then for Gene Autry and Bing Crosby, but I don’t recall hearing any of those versions, and I don’t think I’ve performed it since Bob and Rae Anne finally gave up the coffeehouse. The room is still there, now run as a non-profit (it was at least as non-profitable in their day, but not officially) under the slightly altered name of Club Passim, and I’ve played there a bunch of times since, and it’s still a nice gig… but I miss them.