I always liked the Everly Brothers, though I tended to go for their more upbeat stuff, like “Wake Up, Little Susie” (which I’ve already posted) and “Bye Bye Love” (which I should get around to), as well as the relatively obscure (and frankly dreadful) “Poor Jenny.” I’m not sure how I ended up knowing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” except that it was a huge hit and kind of unavoidable, and pretty, and was probably one of the songs my sister and I used to sing with friends at night on the beach.

Like most of their early classics, it was composed by the husband and wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, and I just learned that the back-up on their record was Chet Atkins on guitar. Speaking of which…

…I was kind of stymied about what to do with this song, because although I’ve always known it, its charm is in the Everlys’ gorgeous harmony singing, which I couldn’t replicate even if I had a brother. So I put it off till now, when I’m past 400 songs and getting around to things I don’t normally play, and on a dive into 1950s pop hits because I’ve just published a short history of rock ‘n’ roll, which of course includes the Everlys.

Since I don’t normally sing this, I had to find a key and arrangement, and I started out in C, because that’s where I always start out for the basic rock ‘n’ roll ballad chord pattern: C-Am-F-G. As it turned out, that was clearly too low for me to sing, so I tried D… and warning: technical guitar stuff ahead.

My main guitar teacher was Dave Van Ronk, who loved dropped D tuning (like standard tuning, but with the bass string dropped from E to D). Joseph Spence, the Bahamian guitar genius, was even more devoted to that tuning, and between them I got a thorough schooling in it.  So I gave that a shot, and was entranced by the way the chord shapes fell together. Reverend Gary Davis, another hero of mine, was a master at conserving energy by  playing chords that used nearly the same fingering with minimal changes, and in dropped D that basic r’n’r ballad sequence is elegantly simple: start with a barre on the second fret that covers three strings for the D, four strings for the A, and five strings for the Bm, with another finger or three thrown in to finish the chord…

…except, it kept sounding clunky when I went from the D to the Bm in the opening phrase, because I had to lift the barre, and I wanted to let a note ring longer. And then (eureka!) I thought of fingering the Bm Gary Davis style, with the thumb reaching over to the 5th string. I only recently discovered that chord shape — which is weird, because I’d been using the major equivalent for fifty years — and it makes me inexplicably cheerful.

Not that anyone cares, including lots of guitarists, but that made the arrangement sound better and someone may want to pick up on the shape. Or not. I know a lot of folks don’t like those thumb-on-the-fifth-string chords. But for those of us who grew up on Davis, Van Ronk, and Jim Kweskin, they are absolutely basic, and very handy when you need them.

Otherwise, this is just a pretty song. “Only trouble is… (gee whiz)… I’m dreaming my life away.”

“Save the Last Dance for Me” is yet another Latin-flavored classic of vocal group rock ‘n’ roll, an apt follow-up to last week’s “Little Darlin’.” It was  a number one R&B and pop hit for the Drifters in 1960, and their all-time best-selling record.

I’ve written about the Drifters before, in my posts for “Money Honey,” from the original group with Clyde McPhatter, and “Under the Boardwalk,” which was similarly Latin-flavored and would be their final major hit before the Beatles and Motown changed the world.

“Save the Last Dance” is a lovely piece of writing with a wrenching back story. Doc Pomus, one of the all-time great rock ‘n’ roll songwriters, was crippled by polio as a child, and he came up with the idea on his wedding night. As his wife tells the story in a wonderful documentary (which is online for free and highly recommended), the reception was full of show-business people, with a great band, and everyone was dancing. Pomus could get around on crutches, though he mostly used a wheelchair, but there was no way he could get out on the dance floor. She was going to stay with him, but he urged her to go out and dance with his father, his brother, his friends. So she did, and later found the initial notes for this song written on the back of one of their leftover wedding invitations.

That was in 1957, which was his breakout year as a songwriter. He’d started out in the mid-1940s as a crippled Jewish blues shouter working Black clubs around New York and New Jersey. He made a bunch of records, wrote his own material, and eventually some publishers caught on to the quality of the songs. He became a regular writer for the new Atlantic Records label and got his first major hit in 1956, when Ray Charles’s record of “Lonely Avenue” made the R&B top ten. The next year, the Coasters took “Young Blood” to the pop top 10, and for the next few years he made a nice living, bought a house on long island, had two children, and things were good.

Rock ‘n’ roll had become the music of teenage America, and Pomus teamed up with a young songwriter named Mort Shuman to get a more youthful touch. I’ve posted about “Teenager In Love,” their breakthrough hit for Dion and the Belmonts, and they went on to write hits for lots of other artists, including a bunch for the Drifters and some of the best later Elvis records (“Little Sister,” “Suspicion,” “Viva Las Vegas,” and lots more).

By the mid-1960s, times were changing. The hits dried up, Shuman moved to Europe, Pomus got divorced. He was living in a cluttered apartment, running a poker game in his living room, trying to make ends meet and take care of his kids. There were some bleak years, but eventually he got a second act (or third, or fourth — it was quite a life). His classic songs started getting major play as oldies, turning up in movies, getting covered by new artists, and he also began writing with some new partners, including a long association with Dr. John, and mentoring young artists, including Bette Midler. (He played a major role in her early career, but things ended badly and the documentary doesn’t mention her.)

There’s plenty more; the documentary is an excellent place to start, and there’s also a good biography, aptly titled Lonely Avenue. He was a fascinating character, and I can’t sing “Save the Last Dance” without thinking about him sitting on the sidelines, watching all the happy dancers.

One of the less-explored byways of rock ‘n’ roll history is the influence of “Latin” or Caribbean rhythms, styles, and instrumentation. I have a section on this in my new book, Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, including such relatively familiar touchstones as “La Bamba” (which I will post about at more length one of these days); “Louie Louie,” which took its trademark riff from “El Loco Cha Cha,” by the Cuban bandleader René Touzet; and the use of the Brazilian baião beat on “Stand By Me,” “Spanish Harlem,” and a bunch of hits by the Drifters.

There are plenty of other examples, like the mambo-inflected bassline of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” played on the original by the Puerto Rican bass player Mario Delagarde and mimicked on the Elvis version. But the most explicitly Latin percussion on a rock ‘n’ roll hit is rarely mentioned: the Gladiolas’ “Little Darlin’,” composed by the group’s lead singer, Maurice Williams (who went on to have a huge hit with “Stay” a few years later, with another group, the Zodiacs) and recorded in Nashville in 1956. It’s a classic doo-wop record, and opens with some kind of shaker, then claves, then some kind of conga drum — all kind of makeshift. (I asked my friend Wayne Marshall, who has better ears for this stuff than I have, to identify the shaker, he couldn’t, and then pointed out that the conga wasn’t really a conga, and the claves probably aren’t really claves.) Who knows what instruments were handy in a Nashville studio in 1956? Whatever they were using, they provide creditable Latin percussion and a straight-ahead mambo beat.

I didn’t know any of that when I first heard the song, which is another I’ve known forever. Typically for my age, race, and place, I first heard it done by Sha Na Na, who were my entry to the world of doo-wop, then picked up an oldies set that had what I thought of as the original version, by the Diamonds, and only years later heard the real original. Sha Na Na were also imitating the Diamonds, a white Canadian doo-wop group, and, listening back, I realize my version of the spoken monologue in the middle of the song is still theirs, rather than the Gladiolas’.

To be fair, the Diamond’s treatment of the monologue is sillier, which in this case may be a plus — but I see from Wikipedia that some modern critics think the Diamonds’ version is better overall, and no. Just no. I’ll grant that their pitch may be a bit more solid, but the Gladiolas’ record is clearly superior. To my eternal shame, as a 13-year-old I similarly preferred the Crew-Cuts’ version of “Sh-Boom” to the Chords’ original. (That’s another case of clean-cut white Canadians covering a hit composed and performed by Black teenagers and outselling the original in a racist pop market. I write about all of this in my book.) But I grew up. Maurice Williams and his crew, all the way.

I sang this occasionally for fun when I got together with other folks who knew doo-wop — that used to happen fairly often. I particularly remember a very early morning in Vancouver, BC, when a bunch of us who had drunk our way through the night on Jameson’s Irish Whiskey wandered to the back porch of someone’s third-floor apartment and sang a bunch of this stuff, and at dawn a neighboring couple came out on their porch to sit and listen to us.

Since I don’t have a doo-wop group at the moment, I had to come up with an alternative and did what I always do for this kind of rhythm, which is fall back on what I learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo in the  Congo and Herbert Misango in Nairobi, reworked in various ways. It’s all pretty absurd, but fun.

I’ve got a new book out, a history of rock ‘n’ roll in Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series, and it prompted me to revive a bunch of songsI’ve known since my early teens but rarely perform, since I rarely have a rock ‘n’ roll band or vocal group handy.

This one is a bit of an exception. I’ve performed “Great Balls of Fire” in various venues and situations over the years, when I did have the chance to work with a band, or just when someone asked me to play some rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not sure why, but it has always felt right for me in a way that all the various Little Richard and Elvis songs didn’t,  much as I may have liked them.

And Jerry Lee Lewis… he seems to have been a difficult, mercurial, and potentially dangerous character, but a hell of a singer. I put him up with Ray Charles for his ability to take on material in all kinds of styles and genres — country, pop, rock, soul — and put them across with a depth, skill, and personal touch that made them uniquely his own. (Aretha Franklin is another one, but different, because whatever she sang was transformed from its original genre into hers; Lewis and Charles were stylists rather than virtuosos, and although their singing was wildly distinctive and instantly recognizable, their rock songs sounded like rock, their country like country, their pop like pop.)

I’ve written a bit about Jerry Lee’s country stuff in my post for “Crazy Arms,” and that still may be my favorite period of his work, but of course I first heard him singing rock ‘n’ roll, either “Great Balls of Fire” or “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” To me, he has always been in a class by himself among the white rock ‘n’ rollers of that period. I like Elvis fine, especially in the early movies, but he was doing an act, while Lewis was a genuine rock ‘n’ roll wild man. For better or worse–if you don’t know the biography or all the other stories, I’m not going to recap them here but they’re easy to find.

What matters here, at least to me, is how much I’ve always loved to play and sing this one. Again, I’m not sure why it felt so right, but it always did. Ridiculous, maybe, but right. I particularly remember playing it one afternoon in a hall of the Odéon stop on the Paris Metro.

I normally worked on the trains, where there was a captive audience and we made a lot more money, and at that period was in a trio with Vince McCann and a bass player named Doug (covered in my post for “Truck Driving Man“). Vince wasn’t around that afternoon and Doug and I tried playing as a duo in the hall. I was doing a lot of rock ‘n’ roll songs, especially this one, and we weren’t making any money, and at some point another musician came by, and said, “The thing about that music is you have to have the energy.” To which Doug responded, “Oh, that’s not his problem; he has the energy.”

Which could have been a compliment, but also might have suggested that energy was pretty much all I was bringing to the table. Be that as it may… there’s something about this song that still energizes me like nothing else I play. It’s just so much fun.

I’ve known “House of the Rising Sun” forever, in many different versions. I don’t know which I heard first; maybe the Animals version, which was a number one hit in 1964, when I was five years old, but if so it would only have been as background music, or coming from the window of a passing car. I’m more aware of hearing it from Josh White, Lead Belly, and probably a bit later from Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, as well as from lots of people who sang it all over the place, mostly having learned it from the Animals.

I also heard it from Woody Guthrie, whose version was quite different, and my video is descended from Woody’s. I know the Josh White/Van Ronk/Dylan/Animals version, of course. Dave said he got it from Hally Wood, who got it from Alan Lomax, but my sense is that he was more influenced by White, who was a major early influence on him, and who also got it from Lomax. 

I’m emphasizing that because Lomax recorded three versions of the song in eastern Kentucky in 1937, all from white singers, and the only previous recording was made in 1933 by Clarence “Tom” Ashley, a white musician from eastern Tennessee. There was one earlier text, sent to Robert Winslow Gordon for his “Songs Men Sing” page in Adventure magazine, and likewise heard from a white singer. But Lomax was convinced that it was originally from Black tradition and confirmed that assumption to his own satisfaction by asking older New Orleans jazz players about it, though as best I can tell, the confirmation was just a couple of them responding that it sounded familiar. So, considering it a Black blues song, he taught it to Lead Belly and Josh White, and it descended from them to Van Ronk, Dylan, Eric Burdon, and a few million other people who sing it as a blues song from New Orleans.

That was how I originally thought of it, as well, and when I occasionally sang it, I sang the Dylan/Van Ronk/Burdon version. But when I was writing Jelly Roll Blues and delving into its history, it struck me that all the early sources were white singers in the southern mountain region and there is no reason to think the song isn’t from that region and culture. New Orleans was the mythic capital of sin for the entire South, so it makes sense that a singer from that region would make it the site of a young woman or man “going astray,” and the protagonist is not someone from there; s/he’s someone who went wrong there and is going back there.

There’s lots more to be said about the song — for example, that there were also “unprintable” versions circulating in the southern mountains, giving more explicit descriptions of the house. I’ve written about all of that in my book, with some of those verses. (“There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun/And when you want your pecker spoilt, that’s where you get it done.” Or the milder, “Beware the red light out in front an’ the pictures on the wall,/ An’ yellow gals dressed in purple shoes, without no clothes at all.”) I’ve also published a long story about the Van Ronk/Dylan/Animals version in Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, including Dave’s suggestion that the “house” was actually the women’s prison in New Orleans, rather than a house of prostitution.

But what’s relevant for the purposes of this blog is that I didn’t see any point in recording one more version descended from the Van Ronk/Animals arrangement, so I went back to Woody Guthrie’s, as best I remember it. That means the lyrics are somewhat different, but the main difference is the accompaniment. I don’t play any minor chords and the guitar part is a lot faster than the vocal, a style I think was inherited from banjo players. The homemade banjos people played back in the hills had virtually no sustain, so had to be picked pretty fast, and southern mountain ballad singers came up with the solution of picking fast, dance-style rhythms even when they accompanied slow ballads. It’s a weird idea, and there was no particular reason to keep playing that way once folks had guitars, but by then it was a tradition, and it has the advantage of balancing a doleful vocal with some musical energy.

Perhaps more to the point, for my purposes, it has the advantage of not sounding like the Animals’ version. I have nothing against that version, except that I’ve heard it so many times that I never need to hear it again — and, having played it many times as a request in my European busking days, am very, very tired of it. Whereas this version feels kind of fresh and interesting to me. No matter how far I wander in my musical life, I keep going back to Woody, and it’s always a pleasure.

(I should note that there was a significant series of recordings of the song by women before Van Ronk or Dylan did it; Hally Wood recorded it in 1953, adapting Georgia Turner’s version; Judy Collins did it on her first recording, a 1959 album of performers at the Exodus gallery and coffee house in Denver; and Joan Baez recorded it on her first album in 1960. Josh White, as well, seems to have first learned it when he was accompanying the Broadway singer Libby Holman in the early 1940s [a partnership nurtured by Alan Lomax], and his son, Josh Jr., said that although he performed it for the rest of his career, he always thought of it as a woman’s song and felt kind of weird about doing it.)

(I should also add that Clarence Ashley’s original recording was issued as “Rising Sun Blues,” so Lomax wasn’t the only person who placed it in a blues tradition — but I’d suggest it was more a blues in the sense of feeling blue than in the sense of being from African American sources.)

I don’t remember when, why, or how I learned “San Antonio Rose.” I assume I heard it on a Bob Wills record, but even that’s up for grabs — it’s been done by so many people, including people I would have seen live rather than hearing them on record. For example, John Lincoln Wright, who ruled the Boston Area country scene when I was coming up.

That’s not a scene most people are aware of — virtually nobody outside New England, and plenty of New Englanders missed it as well. But it was a solid bar-band scene in the 1970s, ’80s, maybe getting into the ’90s… though by then I remember Lincoln complaining that the line-dance craze was killing it.

I didn’t know Lincoln well, but I liked to drop in occasionally at the Plough and Stars — in memory, that was where I had my first drink of Irish whiskey, though the dates don’t work out; I’m guessing it was actually where I had my first legal drink of Irish whiskey in a bar, bought by my friend and washboard player Rob Forbes when I turned eighteen.  Anyway, that was Lincoln’s regular hang-out, and I hung out with him there a few times.

I admired Lincoln as a singer, bandleader, songwriter, and for nurturing a small, valuable scene. There were a lot of people who thought of him that way, and he knew and appreciated us, but he clearly thought he should have done better. He’d had his moment as a rock star back in the 1960s, when MGM tried to promote the “Bosstown Sound” as an East Coast parallel to the San Francisco scene. His band, the Beacon Street Union, was their flagship group, and got some brief attention, but the overblown promotion probably did them more harm than good. So he went back to country music, which he’d always loved, and I always had the sense that he felt he’d missed the brass ring.

That said, he always had good bands and a devoted audience. I saw him perform a bunch of times, in various settings, including one of his annual jamborees at Jonathan Swift’s in 1986, which was memorable because it included Treat Her Right, and I gave them one of their first reviews — I particularly remember Mark Sandman, later to form Morphine, singing a song called “Doreen,” which somehow never made it onto a record. He was another guy I ran into at the Plough, though we never hung out together; he wasn’t there as often as Lincoln, and wasn’t as sociable.

Lincoln was sociable, and endlessly supportive to young musicians — at least, that was my experience. At some point in the 1980s I briefly got a manager who knew nothing about the music business and as a result called Jack’s, a legendary Cambridge club that would never have hired me, and for some reason they did, and some friends showed up and joined me on a few songs, and the owner was there and liked it and hired me to host an “Elijah Wald and Friends night…” though after the first one, Jack’s burned down…

…but that one night was something. On a side note, I heard a terrific singer playing on the street in Harvard Square that afternoon and invited her down, and she was noncommittal and didn’t show, and that was the first time I heard Tracy Chapman. But Kenny Holladay did show, and we played a version of “Mustang Sally” that brought down the house, and my erstwhile manager was recording and was surprised to find that on tape it was a complete mess, which I could have told her — I’m no Wilson Pickett, and you had to be there, but if you were, the energy covered over the flaws. There were some horn players as well, and I’m sure Robbie Phillips was there, and I don’t remember who-all else, but it was a fun night.

Jack’s was just down the street from the Plough, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask Lincoln to perform on my show — he was a star, I wouldn’t have dared — but I mentioned it to him and he said he’d drop by. To my surprise, he did and asked if he could sing something, and I was thrilled. So he asked if I could play “San Antonio Rose” in G, and, as I wrote in the beginning, I don’t remember how or why I’d learned it, but I could and did, and he sang it beautifully.

It wasn’t just a one-off, either. I will always be grateful to Lincoln for the fact that, although I’m pretty sure he was first aware of me as a writer for the Globe, he always treated me as a musician. If we were in the Plough and he introduced me to someone, it would be as a guitar player, and when I did my CD release party at Johnny D’s — where he’d played regularly for years before it transitioned from a neighborhood place into a major touring venue — he showed up again and sang “San Antonio Rose.”

He might have done another song as well, or come up to sing with me on choruses; and I think we performed together at least one other time. He was generous that way, happy to do a guest spot or sing harmony with someone who wasn’t in his league.

He was a beautiful singer, and a sweet guy.  Too many long days and nights at the Plough didn’t help his health and he went way too soon, and I miss him, and think of him whenever I hear this song. I always liked playing it, and I enjoy singing it, but he sang it way better.

I was going to stop there, but came across this taste of Lincoln singing one of his classics, “Too Old to Die Young,” right at the end of his career… he wasn’t looking too good, but still sounded great, and I wish he’d lived to be a hundred years old, despite his doubts.

I wrote some initial thoughts about Leonard Cohen in my post for “Suzanne,” and don’t really need to expand on them, but what the hell…

The short version is, I’m at best agnostic about most of the hallowed singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s. I have nothing against them; I just didn’t listen to much of that music, so have no opinions about them. Cohen is a bit different because my friend and mentor, Dave Van Ronk, liked him and thought he was a good poet, and recorded a nice version of “Bird on a Wire…” which I learned and actually made into one of my showpieces back when I was 17 and full of nostalgie de la boue (a term I learned from Dave).

And, as I wrote before, I often was called upon to sing “Suzanne” when I was around French people (especially female French people). So I was somewhat interested in him, and read Beautiful Losers (about which I remember nothing) and some of his poetry (about which I remember less). And I read a few interviews, and sometimes found them interesting, and sometimes annoying…. bit too much the sensitive, tortured, handsome poet-man for my taste.

But I always thought “Sisters of Mercy” was a terrific song. Beautiful, evocative lyrics perfectly matched with a lovely melody. I’ve known it for over fifty years and still find new resonances in it. And that’s before mentioning the scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with the prostitutes trekking through the Alaskan wilderness as this song plays in the background. Ever since I saw that for the first time –and I’ve seen it multiple times since — a picture of that scene goes through my head when I sing this. All in all, it’s a deep and lovely piece of work. For me, it’s his masterpiece.

All of which said… Van Ronk always said that Cohen and Mitchell were more careful writers than Dylan — not more brilliant, but more willing to go back and work on their songs, and fix the lines that needed fixing. He thought Dylan was a genius, but, for example, “All Along the Watchtower” — he would point out that a watchtower isn’t a wall, it’s a tower, and you can’t go “along” it. In which spirit…

“They are not departed or gone…”? It scans nicely, but if they are departed they are gone, and if they are gone they are departed. There’s no “or” about it; it’s just repetitive. Albeit lovely. Poetic license, and all that. Best not to think too much.

(Oh, yes, and… I just went back to get a photo from that scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and find that it doesn’t look the way I remember it, and “Sisters of Mercy” is in a different part of the film. And it’s not set in Alaska, it’s in Washington state, though filmed in British Columbia. But I still see that scene in my head when I sing.)

(And… my rule for this project is that I do all the songs from memory — that’s the point; they are the songs in my head — and don’t check them before filming, and when I checked afterwards, I found that the lyric should be “they touched both my eyes…” not “both my hands.” It’s definitely better that way. He’s a poet; I’m not. Sorry.)

I have no idea where I learned this — definitely not from Merle Travis’s recording, which I only heard much later. My guess is that I just heard it around, which is something a lot of people don’t seem to understand about the folk revival and folk music in general.

I came along late enough that I got most of my repertoire off records, especially because by my time very few kids my age were into this kind of music. But there was still lots of it around. There were guys playing banjos and guitars and even the occasional autoharp on the street in Harvard Square, and local coffeehouses, and when I became a wandering busker at age 18, I often wound up staying with other musicians, or hanging out with them in all sorts of places, and picked up a bunch of songs that way.

That included some current busker standards like “The Boxer,” which I think I learned before I even knew it was by Paul Simon, and certainly before I was aware of hearing his version — but also lots of folk/blues/bluegrass songs, things we all kind of knew by osmosis, like this one. I actually hadn’t thought about this one in a while, but last fall I did a tour of the Czech Republic and one of the gigs was with Jiří Míža, a local singer-guitarist who sings a bunch of those songs with Czech lyrics, including this one and “Deep River Blues.” So we did some of them together, trading verses and languages, and  I was reminded of how much fun this is to play.

It was one of the songs Travis wrote when records by “folk singers” like Josh White, Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennett, and Susan Reed began selling in the 1940s. An A&R guy at Capitol records asked him to do a folk song album, and he responded that Ives and other people had already recorded all the folk songs — he was known for fancy guitar picking and upbeat hillbilly jazz like “Smoke, Smoke Smoke (That Cigarette)” and presumably thought he’d gotten past that kind of thing.  But the A&R guy said, “So, write some new ones,” and a gig was a gig, and he did. The results included this one, “Dark as a Dungeon,” “I Am a Pilgrim,”  and, most famously, “Sixteen Tons,” which was inspired by a couple of Josh White songs and became a huge hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I eventually heard Travis’s version of this, but only sing a couple of his verses — he sang four, including one that was pretty generic and a final one about making his tombstone from “number nine coal,” a phrase that also turns up in “Sixteen Tons.” I just got curious and looked it up; apparently it refers to a particular seam of coal in Kentucky, where he grew up in a mining family.

My other verses are maybe from Mississippi John Hurt or Lead Belly? I’m not sure, but they’re from the general pool of mining and railroad songs, reaching back to work songs men sang to keep their hammers falling in unison. The guitar breaks are just what I ended up playing because I ended up doing this in E; if I did it in another key, I’d play something else, but this felt comfortable.

Yet another from Joe Ely’s Honky Tonk Masquerade album, written by his buddy Butch Hancock. I’ve already done posts about a bunch ofsongs from that album, and from Joe’s other records, some of them written by Butch, some by Joe: “Boxcars,” “Because of the Wind,” “West Texas Waltz,” “Row of Dominoes,” “Me and Billy the Kid,” “Wishing for You…”

I’ve said it all before: Joe was a seminal artist for me, first on record and then live, many times, in all kinds of formats. I interviewed him several times, hung out with him a little, drove him to the airport once. I loved his music, liked him a lot as a person, was pleased that he liked Narcocorrido, was pleased that he recognized me when I turned up at shows, and dragged a lot of other people out to see those shows, because they were incredible.

I don’t think I ever learned this song, in the sense of sitting down and trying to; I just listened to that album enough that at some point I realized that I knew it. I don’t ever recall performing it onstage; it’s always just been something I played for my own pleasure. I don’t remember if I always played it with the Latin/Caribbean rhythm and half-assed rasgueados, but it makes sense for the same reasons it made sense when Joe started touring with a flamenco guitarist. The Texas sound has always been heavily Mexican, with a Gulf Coast/Caribbean tinge. (In fact, that Spanish/Mexican feel is a lot of what makes the “Western” part of Country and Western sound different from the eastern/Appalachian part.)

As for the lyrics, Butch often gives a twist of wry humor to failed romances, and sometimes even ridiculous humor: “I went through such a hassle trying to learn myself to float/ Cause every time I stormed your castle, I’d wind up in the moat.” That’s gorgeously silly, both the idea and the use of language, the “hassle/castle” rhyme and “learn” for “teach” — a classic bit of American slang that I grew up with from my father’s memories of Brooklyn.

So, to sum up: just a song I’ve been playing for almost fifty years, because it’s fun.

This is Gary Davis’s take on a couple of marches, which were, like everything he played, transformed in his hands. The second section is a loose paraphrase of John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March”; I don’t recognize the first section; if someone else does, please let me know and I’ll rewrite this.

Like most of Davis’s instrumentals, I first heard this on the LP The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis. I would have been maybe twelve years old  and have to admit I probably found this piece particularly appealing, maybe even more exciting than “Cincinnati Flow Rag” or “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing the Guitar at the Same Time), because I could identify it with something other than ragtime-blues guitar, and play it for people who weren’t into those styles, and they might be impressed.

It was also the first Davis instrumental I learned, thanks to Sing Out!, which printed tablature for it in 1972. As I’ve explained in a previous post, the Cambridge Public Library, which was right next to my high school, had a surprisingly good music department, and among other things subscribed to Sing Out! I didn’t get there till 1973, but they kept five years of back issues, and around that time I read in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book that libraries de-accessioned old magazines and would happily give them to anyone who asked, so I asked, and for the next couple of years got the six-year-old copies of old Sing Out! Then got a phone call that the library was stopping its subscription and I could pick up the whole remaining five years of copies…

…so I did, and still have them, including the one with tab for this, which it anachronistically titled “Civil War Parade.” The transcription was provided by Jack Baker, who I see is still giving guitar lessons and has tab online for lots of classic fingerstyle pieces, though not this one. I have no idea how accurate it is, since by the time I got serious about studying Davis’s playing, I was far more interested in his gospel and ragtime arrangements (like “Samson and Delilah,” “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” “You Got to Move,” “Cincinnati Flow” and a bunch of others), and I never went back to work out how he played this one — with the result that I would guess what I’m playing here is pretty much what I learned from Baker’s tab.

I’m not a fan of military marches and pretty much put this aside, but it had an important role in my education, since it was the first piece I ever learned in the key of F — which became one of my favorite fingerpicking keys — as well as being the inspiration for “Perry’s March,” by Perry Lederman, which I recorded on my lone LP. And, more than fifty years later, though I’ve forgotten lots of other pieces I learned over the years, I find that I still remember how to play it.