I’ve been playing Lemon Jefferson’s “Bad Luck Blues” for at least thirty years, and recorded it on my Street Corner Cowboys CD, but it wasn’t until maybe seven years ago that I figured out the opening lick. The clue was a bass note he doesn’t play — the dog that didn’t bark in the night — which tipped me off that he wasn’t just holding C chord, but was jumping it up a couple of frets.

It’s a cool trick, and I would have posted this much sooner, but delayed for a couple of reasons. One was that I used the basic arrangement for another post, “Keep It Clean,” and didn’t want to repeat it, but I was also dogged by a memory from the CD recording session.

I recorded the CD in a couple of days, in my parents’ living room, with three of my favorite musicians: Washtub Robbie Phillips on one-string bass, Matt Leavenworth on fiddle and mandolin, and Paul Geremia on harmonica. Geremia is one of my longtime heroes, and I was thrilled to have him there, and he seemed to enjoy the session and played some terrific harmonica on another Lemon Jefferson song, “Black Horse Blues…”

…and then I played this one for them, so they could work out their parts, and Paul said, “Why do you play it so square? You do all that African stuff — why not play it more like that?”

What could I say? He was Paul Geremia, and undoubtedly could play Jefferson’s version better than I will ever play it, and I would have done pretty much anything he suggested. Plus, it was the end of the session, we were all tired, and it made sense to shake things up a little. So I played a version of “Bad Luck Blues” that is a sort of half-assed rumba, and everyone found parts, and we recorded it, and I have no regrets…

…but I never played it that way again, and when I fool around with that version, it just doesn’t excite me. So I went back to the four-square Jefferson arrangement, and began playing it again, and instead of trying to get into the heartache of the lyrics, I double down on the humor of the spoken asides, which seem to be kind of kidding the seriousness.

And, on that subject, about my shirt: it’s one of my crazier cowboy shirts, with a kind of harlequin pattern set off by a southwestern pattern, complete with saguaro cacti, which fits Jefferson’s Texas connection… and you can’t really see it in the video, but I’ve worn both elbows ragged, which fits the opening and closing verse about not having “sufficient clothes.” (And, for the Dylan fans out there: he copped that phrase for a verse of “He Was a Friend of Mine,” singing “Never had no money, for sufficient clothes” — one of many Dylan borrowings from old-time blues singers.)

And, speaking of the lyrics… while I was preparing for the CD recording session, it struck me that I don’t say “I ain’t got,” except when I’m kidding around with accents. I’m a school-educated white guy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I say “I don’t have…” which has exactly the same number of syllables. So where Jefferson sang “I ain’t got sufficient clothes,” I started singing “I don’t have sufficient clothes,” and for a while it felt weird — which in itself should have been a sign, because it shouldn’t feel weirder to talk like myself than like a Black Texan in 1927… and that was the beginning of an ongoing project to try to lose the various fake accents I’d picked up from old records, and try to sing in my own voice, like Jefferson and the other people I admired sang in their own voices. That’s still a work in progress, but by now it feels normal to sing “don’t have” in this song, and would feel weird to sing “ain’t got.”

And, finally… after posting this, someone queried me on YouTube, asking why I sing a completely different melody than Jefferson sang. The answer, for better or worse, is that this project is about the songs I have in my head, and I hadn’t realized that over the years I had lost his melody and found another. I’ve just gone back and listened to his version, which is lovely and very different from what I remembered.