Yet another I got from Joe Ely, penned by Butch Hancock. I’ve paid tribute to that pairing a few times already, in my posts for “West Texas Waltz,” “Row of Dominoes,” and “Wishing for You,” and don’t have more to say about them… Joe reshaped my ideas about what I liked and wanted to do musically, Butch supplied a bunch of the best songs in Joe’s repertoire, and I learned a bunch of them, though I only performed a couple onstage.

This is one of the ones I didn’t perform, because I kept hearing Joe’s band in my head and couldn’t figure out how to get that sound with one acoustic guitar… but a few weeks ago I gave it another shot and I’m pretty happy with it. The bassline is key, because it gives the song that rolling train feel, and it occurred to me that if I shifted to drop-D tuning, it would fall neatly under my fingers.

In the early years of my friendship with Peter Guralnick, I mentioned my passion for Joe — who he liked, though less passionately — and he told me that he’d tried to get Sleepy LaBeef to do this one, but Sleepy was a serious churchgoing Christian and couldn’t see himself singing the third verse. To me, that verse seems the opposite of blasphemous, but in any case I love this one for the train feeling rather than the philosophizing.

I was never a full-on train guy, but I read Bound for Glory as a kid and did one trip across the West on freights, and a couple of years later got kicked off a boxcar I hopped out of Minneapolis… some of which I’ve written about in my posts on “Danville Girl” and “Vigilante Man”. I haven’t hopped a freight in many years and don’t expect to try it again, but I still enjoy watching them roll past, and keep an eye out for cars that might be good to ride.

I have to start this post with a Dave Van Ronk story: As he told it, he was playing on a blues festival someplace and arrived late, not knowing who else was on the bill. He rushed onstage and did his show, ending with a romping, stomping, macho version of “Hoochie Coochie Man…” and walked off to find that Muddy Waters had been watching from the wings.

Dave was consumed with embarrassment, but recalled, “Muddy was very gentlemanly, as always. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That was nice, son… but you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.'”

I’ve never been entirely sure I believe that story, but I took it to heart. It’s the same point John Hammond made about how people miss the humor in Robert Johnson’s lyrics: like, “You can bury my body by the highway side/ So my old restless spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” A lot of blues lyrics are funny — not only funny, but also funny. Like NWA’s lyrics; a lot of people who thought “Fuck the Police” was scary were surprised when Ice Cube started writing comedies, but if you actually listen to it, that record was as funny as it was angry.

Willie Dixon wrote this one and gave it to Muddy, and it changed Muddy’s career. It was by far his biggest hit, but that wasn’t the only thing; it was fundamentally different from the deep Delta blues style that originally put him on the map in Chicago. For one thing, his early hits featured his ferociously amplified slide guitar, but he didn’t play on this one. For another thing, it was clever, and funny.

When it hit, the R&B audience picked up on that. Within a few years, there were lots of other songs that used the trademark “Hoochie Coochie Man” riff, and virtually all of them were funny: Ray Charles’s “It Wasn’t Me,” Ruth Brown’s “I Can’t Hear a Word You Say,” Johnny Guitar Watson’s “Gangster of Love…” and three that I’ve already posted about: Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” and The Coasters’ “Riot In Cell Block Number Nine” and “Framed.”

I’ve rarely performed this one, because frankly I felt ill-equipped and silly singing the big, scary, macho lyric… but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t have to pretend to be Muddy Waters, or even Dave Van Ronk. So I started fooling around with it, playing with the lyric rather than trying to puff myself up to fit it, and discovered that it was fun. Like it was supposed to be.

Not incidentally, Willie Dixon started out doing funny recitations — he recalled that as a teenager in Mississippi he printed up a dirty version of the “Signifying Monkey” toast to sell to his schoolmates, and when he moved to Chicago and went professional he bowdlerized it, added a chorus, and made a hit recording with the Big Three Trio that was covered by Cab Calloway and Count Basie as “The Jungle King.” And there were lots of others: “Wang Dang Doodle,” for example, which reworks an older toast, “The Dance of the Freaks.” (I get into some of this in my book Jelly Roll Blues.)

This is neither the first nor the last Butch Hancock song I learned off Joe Ely’s terrific string of records in the 1970s. (Actually, I just checked, and this is off his 1981 album, Down on the Drag, which was not quite up to that standard, but still had some killer tracks.) I’ve already posted “West Texas Waltz” and “Row of Dominoes” (the latter of which I also recorded on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys), as well as Ely’s own “Because of the Wind” and “Me and Billy the Kid,” and there are more to come, because I immersed myself in those albums, and credit them — and later Joe’s solo live shows — with transforming my ideas about what I wanted to be playing and how, and why.

I know that sounds over the top, but somehow Joe showed up exactly when I needed him. I’d come out of my year with Dave Van Ronk playing a huge repertoire of Van Ronk songs, and a lot of old blues guitar arrangements, and some half-assed swing… and yet, I had always loved rock ‘n’ roll, and a lot of my skills were better suited to country music, which I had never understood… and Joe showed up, rocking hard and playing a blend of all of that, plus some Latin rhythms, and making it all sound like solid bar-band music rather than an attempt at some kind of innovative fusion.

And that band. Lloyd Maines on steel, long before he nurtured the Dixie Chicks; Jesse Taylor on lead guitar, sometimes playing too much for my taste, but often right in the pocket; Gregg Wright on bass and Steve Keeton on drums; and Ponty Bone on accordion, adding some Mexican flavor — my guitar break on this one starts out directly mimicking his accordion break, which I hadn’t heard in probably twenty years until I just went back and listened to it, but is engraved in my brain.

And that songs. A lot of the best ones were by Butch, and prompted me to hunt up some of Butch’s albums — Van Ronk was a huge fan; he once suggested Butch was the only songwriter in the US who could have hit New York the way Dylan did — but to my tastes, Joe had picked the cream of the crop. And there were also some fine ones by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and by Joe himself.

This isn’t one of the masterpieces — I love the first verse and chorus, but the second doesn’t stand up — and I’ve never performed it onstage and don’t expect to, but it was one of my first attempts to fingerpick a Caribbean rhythm, and I’ve been playing it for my own pleasure for almost fifty years.

As noted in the posts for “Swinging Doors” and “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” I’m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It’s one of his most autobiographical songs — pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year stretch in San Quentin, not “life without parole.”

In an indication of how things have changed, he tried to conceal that part of his life for the first years of his career — but this song was released in 1968, shortly after the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison LP, and between that album and Merle being hailed as the most soulful country singer and songwriter since Hank Williams, a stretch in prison became a kind of hallmark of country authenticity.

Merle tended to describe his criminal youth as a mix of unfocused rebellion and stupidity — in particular the event that led to that three-year stretch, which involved him and a buddy getting drunk and deciding to rob a local restaurant, breaking in through the back door at what they thought was three in the morning, but was actually around ten p.m. The owner recognized them and asked why they hadn’t just come around to the front. “If we’d had any sense at all, we would have just laughed and walked around to the front like it was some big joke,” he wrote in his memoir, Sing Me Back Home. Instead, “Like fools, we ran.”

He wrote this song about ten years later, and it was his fifth number one country hit, following “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” (about a man on death row),” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” You get the idea.

While researching this post, I learned that this was the theme song to a movie, Killers Three, which also marked Merle’s acting debut –though his appearance is limited to two or three lines and some bemused head-shaking. The movie includes a couple of other songs by him and his wife (briefly) and singing partner (long-term), Bonnie Owens, but this one is just played as an instrumental under the opening credits. The movie is a complicated tale of bootlegging, romance, and a nice boy gone wrong, produced, co-written, and co-starring Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame. It’s up on Youtube. I’m not recommending it.

As for the song, I was startled to read Merle explaining in an interview with Paul Zollo that his approach on the recording was “trying to land somewhere in between Peter, Paul & Mary and Johnny Cash.” It would never have occurred to me that he was going for the PP&M crowd, but of course Cash had broken into the mainstream with appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and on the TV folk show Hootenanny (and a ghastly movie called Hootenanny Hoot), so that made commercial sense. And when you listen to the record with that in mind, you can hear it. It starts with James Burton playing “folky guitar” in Haggard’s words — fingerpicking a repetitive riff on a Dobro — and Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell fill out the two-guys-and-a-gal vocal harmonies on the chorus.

I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was the electric guitar bend that comes in over Burton, which I thought was Burton, since I once heard him play it live, but turns out to have been Roy Nichols. Since the idea of the Songobiography is that I’m playing all these songs from memory, I didn’t check the record until I’d done my video, but I had that bend in my head, and the way it comes back to end the song, and kind of echo those bits, kinda sorta.

I never really learned either of these songs, but they’re both blues standards and I’ve been playing them together since the 1970s. It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that I had a guitar stolen in Morocco in the winter of 1978-79 and needed to buy a new one, and Jasper Winn was in Sevilla, Spain, and willing to help out, and it was Carnival week, when there were lots of people in the bars all the time, and I had some harmonicas, so Jasper played rhythm guitar and I played harmonica and sang, and by the end of the week I’d made enough money that I could buy a guitar.

To be absolutely frank and come clean after all these years, we switched a price tag so I could buy a somewhat better guitar than I could afford, but in my defense it was at the Corte Ingles, a huge department store, not at a regular music store.

Anyway… I hated having the guitar stolen — it was a 1950s Gibson B-25, the first really nice guitar I ever owned (in those days worth maybe $250) — but that week taught me how to make money as a busker. Before that, I’d been doing street pitches and making almost nothing; after that, I worked bars, cafes, and restaurants and lived very well for the next few years while traveling all over Europe and on to the Indian Subcontinent, Central America, and much of Africa.

I generally played guitar, but if I wanted to work the noisy bars I’d find someone who could play a basic 12-bar blues and play harmonica, which was louder and left me free to jump around and work the room. I’d typically do a slow blues (generally “Call It Stormy Monday,” a choice I actually feel guiltier about than switching the price tags, since it is so, so, so overdone…), then “Johnny B. Goode,” which always got a good reception, and then, if it looked like they wanted another, this medley.

I always liked Jimmy Reed’s recordings, because he sounded so relaxed, and I loved his weird harmonica playing. I never tried to play like him — honestly, I never worked on playing harmonica like anybody, except briefly on some Robert Lee McCoy licks, which I no longer remember, and I really should buckle down and study…

…like at least learn some basic tongue-blocking…

…but meanwhile, I’ve been playing this a lot recently, and it’s fun.

A good indication of how deeply Woody Guthrie affected my life is that I grew up the son of two college professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the first time I saw the Columbia River Gorge I was riding a flatcar on a freight train.

I’ve written about that trip in my posts for “Roll on, Columbia” and “Vigilante Man,” and the gorge was gorgeous, but as far as I remember I’ve still never seen the Grand Coulee Dam.

As for the song, I feel like I’ve known it forever. I don’t remember when I got the record I learned it from, but it would have been back when my mom was still required for that purpose, and fortunately was more than willing to feed myhabit. I just checked and found that  the LP I had was issued in 1967,   as the first of a cheaper line of Folkways records that had glossy covers and lacked the enclosed booklets that were standard in their main line of albums.

The song was one of the two dozen Woody wrote in 1941 on commission for the Department of the Interior, celebrating the Bonneville Power Administration, and apparently intended for the soundtrack of a documentary film. They included some of his best compositions: “Pastures of Plenty,” “Roll On, Columbia,” and “Talking Columbia,” with its great line, “Now, I don’t like dictators none, but I think the whole country oughta be run by ee-lectricity.”

Actually, looking at the list, some of the songs don’t have much to do with the Bonneville Power Administration. “Ramblin’ Round” is about the troubles of the Dust Bowl refugees, and “Hard Travelin’” is about all sorts of folks out on the road.

I’ve posted about a couple of those already, with more to come, but had passed over this one because, frankly, I’ve become skeptical about its message. The patriotism makes some sense in the context of World War II, but I grew up in the Vietnam era and was never much taken by lines like “there stands a towering fortress in the fight for Uncle Sam.” And that was before I read Cadillac Desert, which left me permanently disenamored with the big Western dam projects. And the defense of fortress USA has gotten uglier and uglier through most of my lifetime, and if I sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia for Woody’s patriotism, for the idea of a “simpler time,” I just have to reread my post for “Roll On, Columbia,” which recalls the generally omitted verse celebrating the genocide of northwestern Natives.

All of which said, I’m posting this because this is a memoir project as well as a celebration, and this song is part of my life. The fact that I’ve carried it in my head for more than fifty years is evidence it’s a well-written lyric, and it’s set to a great tune Woody borrowed from the “Wabash Cannonball.” So here it is, a historical artifact, both personal and general, which — if I don’t overthink it — is still a lot of fun to sing.

Oh, yes, and… while preparing this post I found that the Department of the Interior documentary including snatches of Woody’s Columbia River songs is now online, and is pretty interesting:

Bill wrote a lot of mill-town songs, and in an odd mental disconnect I always put “Run You Through the Mill” in that context, imagining him and the woman racing each other through one of the big brick mill buildings along the river in Newmarket, New Hampshire; maybe the same one he was thinking about when he wrote “Snow Outside the Mill,” “Night Shift,” or “Small Town on the River.”

Of course, the song has nothing to do with mills. It’s a bitter, drunken man’s meditation on a messed-up relationship, which he’s messing up further as he sings. At least, that’s what I hear, and by now I hear it as a prophecy of sorts, because Bill messed up a bunch of relationships in the process of drinking himself to death. But he also wasn’t this guy, who, under the cloak of misogyny and self-loathing, is a romantic fiction.

People who came to Bill late — which is to say, after he’d left the lousy bar gigs behind and was performing for sober, quiet audiences that liked the singer-songwriter stuff that passes for “folk music” on NPR  — may be perplexed if I say he admired and resented Tom Waits for having built the career he wanted, playing hip, jazz-flavored songs that conjured visions of Kerouac, Bukowski, and Slim Gaillard.

It was summertime and the city was burnin’
I was drinking beer with a sweaty woman
I was stealing lines off the radio
When over the box they played “Oop Bop Sh’Bam”
And that woman sighed like a flim-flam man
And I thanked Dizzy Gillespie that night for backing up my little show.

Back in those days, Bill wasn’t a heavy drinker — he was getting drunk pretty often, but would get tipsy on a couple of beers, so if it was already a problem, it wasn’t doing much physical damage. That came later, with age and disappointment and whiskey. It’s a complicated story, and I keep being tempted to write about him, if only as a way of dealing with my anger. I was first angry about his artistic choices — he called me over and over through the years, saying he was practicing clarinet or trumpet and the next record would have some solid jazz players… and then would cut another safe singer-songwriter album, which pleased his new fans but wasn’t the kind of music he admired or liked to listen to. I have to think that was part of the reason he was killing himself — which is what I’m really angry about — but there were lots of reasons…

…and if I’m honest, the fact that back in his twenties he was writing songs like this is part of the story: there’s an obvious pathology in the macho drunken loser bullshit that admirers of Kerouac and Bukowski so often embrace.

And, of course, Hemingway. As I was preparing to record this, I happened to pick up A Moveable Feast for the hundredth time, and there it is, in the first paragraph: “The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time…”

I don’t know if Bill was consciously riffing on that passage, but Hemingway was one of his touchstones. I remember him onstage, pausing after a song, lighting a cigarette, and beginning the routine: “He lit a cigarette – Period – Took a drag – Period – It was good – Period – He looked at the audience – Period – What a rowdy crew, he thought – Period – He took another drag – Period – Oh, my God – Exclamation point – I’ve become a character in a Hemingway novel – Period – Now, I have to go out and shoot a zebra….”

I loved that guy and learned a lot from him, and I’m angry at him, and I miss him.

I’ve been singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” for almost fifty years, back to my days busking in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard — and I can date it because Rob taught me the verse, which I don’t sing here, because I never came up with an interesting arrangement of the song, and just played it in G (that is, starting on E), which was dull and, in my hands, frenetic…

…so I shortly dropped it from my repertoire and only picked it up again when I began playing with my wife, Sandrine, on clarinet and we were doing “Lazy River,” and I noticed that until the last six bars it had roughly the same chords as “Sweet Georgia Brown,” if you layered two measures of the latter over each measure of the former. So I tweaked the lyric to cover those final measures, and fell in love with the combination.

I don’t remember when I started singing “Lazy River,” but it was probably when I was taking vocal lessons, which happened a few years after I recorded my LP, Songster Fingerpicker Shirtmaker, when I happened to listen to it again and was horrified at how bad I sounded.

As part of that process, I worked on singing some difficult melodies, and a lot of my favorite difficult melodies were composed by Hoagy Carmichael. “Stardust,” of course, and yes, I worked on singing that, but promise never to do it in public–and fortunately for everybody, I never even attempted “Skylark” or “Baltimore Oriole.” But I did try “Lazy River,” which felt more approachable, especially when I listened to Carmichael sing it. To be fair, anything sounds more approachable when Carmichael sings it; he had a gift for intricate melodies, and also for simplifying them when he sang them himself. But that’s a subject for another day.

For now, the rest of the story is that playing with a clarinetist forced me to experiment with the flat keys (F, Bb, Eb, Ab), which normally are considered unfriendly by guitarists. To my surprise, I found that F and Bb were actually very friendly, and nowadays when I play pop standards I tend to gravitate to those keys even if I’m playing solo. Eb is less accommodating, because there aren’t a lot of comfortable ways for a “cowboy chord” guy to play an Eb… but, as it happens, “Lazy River” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” rarely touch on the root chord, so it works just fine, and it’s a perfect key for my voice.

And that’s that, except maybe I should add that I found clever medleys to be an excellent substitute for genuine jazz chops.  I don’t remember whether this one preceded “Somebody Stole My Gal”/”All of Me” but it’s a similar attempt to come up with something that falls within my instrumental wheelhouse while adding a twist that might interest some better musicians.

This may be my favorite Jimmy Buffett lyric, though I haven’t tended to perform it (unlike “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” and “Margaritaville,” both of which have edged into my repertoire at times, and which I’ve covered in previous posts). I’ve mostly played it for myself, remembering old guys I knew in bars, often in beach towns, back to when I was the house musician for a while in a bar called Maggie’s Farm in Torremolinos — which calls for a digression, because I thought I’d written more about that, but apparently didn’t.

Maggie’s Farm was owned by a big American biker named Bernie, who worked as an underwater demolition guy on the North Sea oil rigs in the summer and bought it for his English girlfriend, Maggie. Bernie tended bar in the winter, along with his Spanish “partner,” whose name I remember as Carlos — the “partner” is in quotation marks because Spanish law said all properties had to be half-owned by Spaniards, but his ownership didn’t extend beyond the official paperwork.

Bernie hired me and my washboard player, Rob Forbes as a house band, playing every other night, four or five hours, no amplification… but we were young and strong and he treated us well — one time he went to the free port in Ceuta and brought back a huge bottle of Johnny Walker Black, which sat behind the bar and was only for people drinking on the house, which included us till it was gone. The regular house drink was a Dirty Mother, which consisted of equal parts milk, cointreau, kahlua, tequila, and vodka. It tasted like a milkshake, and young women who came in for the first time were often served a pint of it on the house.

It was a nice gig for a couple of months, but we were playing a quirky mix of old jug band songs, Woody Guthrie songs, and blues, and eventually the customers got sick of us. Bernie was very nice about it. He asked me outside, explained that the other singers he’d hired lived in Torremolinos, hung out with the customers on the beach, and were part of the scene, but we were living in Malaga and weren’t, we played weird music, people were complaining, and… “I’ve never fired anybody in my life, so would you be willing to quit?”

I said, “Bernie, you know how much I like playing here, and I don’t want to let you down, but we’ve been thinking of going to Sevilla, and if it’s not too big a problem, would it be ok if we moved on after this week?”

He said, “I hate to see you go, but I’ll try to work something out.” Then we went inside and had some more whiskey.

So anyway… I spent a fair amount of time knocking around places like that and this song reminds me of various old guys I knew, generally artists or writers of one kind or another, who drank and hung out with the kids, and usually had some young woman or women who took care of them. Jack Belden, who wrote China Shakes the World, was one of them, in Paris, but I mostly associate them with warm places near the ocean, maybe partly because of this song.

Buffett said this song was inspired by a legendary figure in Chicago, Eddie Balchowsky, who worked as a janitor at a club called the Quiet Knight, and painted, and played classical piano, and sang songs of the Spanish Civil War. I got to hang out with Eddie for a few days in Vancouver, when Utah Phillips brought him there to play at the Folk Festival. He had lost the lower part of his right arm fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in that war, but could play plenty of music with his left, and he had endless stories. Utah wrote a fine song about him, “Eddie’s Song” — “One hand on the keyboard, moonlight fills the room/ One hand on the Ebro, no regrets…” There’s a nice piece about him by a writer named Jeannette Cooperman, called “The Beloved Poet King,” and you can see examples of his artwork on a couple of LP covers, for Loudon Wainwright and the Siegel-Schwall Band. I can still picture him, pounding out fierce one-handed piano and singing “Viva la Quince Brigada,” with all of us joining in on the “rumbala, rumbala, rumbala!” (You can see and hear him singing “Freiheit” in a documentary on the Lincoln Brigade.)

So that’s a bunch of memories… but these days, I hear this song differently, because I’m in my mid-sixties and the world is going to hell, and I sometimes think it would be nice to just quit everything, grow a beard, find a beach town, somewhere warm, with some relatively quiet bars and young people around who might enjoy my stories and music, and just be this guy… and who knows, maybe in twenty years I’ll be there, and the kids won’t have heard Buffett’s non-hit album tracks, and I’ll claim I wrote this song about myself and say I want the final words on my tombstone: “Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way.”

I don’t remember hearing “Exactly Like You” before I started working with Howard Armstrong, which is strange, because it was a popular standard recorded by pretty much everybody, from Ruth Etting to Aretha Franklin. Be that as it may, I learned it from Howard and still play it the way he taught me, with his chords and at least a couple of his melodic variations — though I don’t include his interpolation, “why should I spend money on an X-rated show or two…”

I knew nothing about the background of this song until I started researching this post, and just learned that it came from the fertile pens of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, first appearing in the score of Lew Leslie’s International Revue in 1930, along with “Sunny Side of the Street.” Fields and McHugh were also responsible for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Don’t Blame Me (for Falling in Love With You” — sense a pattern here? — and hundreds of other songs, together and separately. Fields did words, McHugh did music — his non-Fields hits included “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer,” which I’ve posted about elsewhere, since it was a favorite of the Bahamian guitar master, Joseph Spence; she not only wrote innumerable lyrics, but also teamed up with her brother to supply the “book” for a bunch of Cole Porter shows and Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun.

I don’t have much else to say about this one. I played it regularly with Howard, didn’t think about it much after I stopped playing with him, then picked it up again when I started playing with my wife Sandrine on clarinet. I still prefer to play it with Sandrine, but she hates making videos, so I had to work up a solo version — which turned out to be useful, because I came up with the cute work-around at the beginning to get the high A note with the F bass without worrying about playing the full chord, then playing the open E string while dropping down to a regular F shape. Nice little song, nice little trick.