This is Joseph Spence’s best-known guitar piece, and by the time I recorded my CD it had become a regular in my sets. At the time I thought I was pretty close to his sound, and I played a couple of my versions of his arrangements to Ernie Hawkins, and Ernie was kind enough to call Stefan Grossman and suggest that I would be a good person to do an instructional video on how to play Spence’s style. Stefan knew of me as a writer but had never heard me play, but he trusted Ernie and signed me up. So then I had to figure out how Spence actually played… and immediately realized I had most of it wrong.

That was frightening, but also exciting, because it forced me to engage with Spence’s recordings in a different way. Over the next few months I listened to them more closely than I’d ever listened to anything.  In the past I had worked out reasonable versions of several of his pieces — this one, “Glory of Love,” and a much simplified “Brownskin Girl” — but I’d approached them one by one, as individual arrangements, rather than immersing myself in the way he thought and moved.

Now, I realized I needed to approach his music the way I would learn a language — not by memorizing sentences, but by learning how it fitted together as a whole system. Spence played everything in the same tuning and key (key of D, with the lowest string tuned down to D), using essentially the same chord shapes and techniques —  the instrumental equivalent of a vocabulary and grammar. Techniques from one piece appeared in other pieces, and sometimes a voicing would be more obvious in a new piece, so as I learned more of his pieces I kept discovering things I’d misunderstood in other pieces… and although I never lost my accent, I eventually reached a basic level of fluency.

I also hunted up a couple of people who had watched Spence and played with him. Jody Stecher  had recorded Spence and studied him closely, and was kind enough to let me come over to his place and play what I had, then correct some of my mistakes. But the real expert is Guy Droussart, who visited Spence for extended periods over many years.

I first tried to persuade Guy to do the video himself, since he was the obvious person, but he refused because he doesn’t like instructional videos. Guy thinks it is important to approach Spence directly and immerse oneself in his music and his world – not only the guitar style, but the Bahamian gospel vocal tradition, and also to develop the physical strength Spence had from a life as a stonemason, and the rhythm of the fishing boats. So he said no, and also declined to help me… but when I played my versions of some Spence pieces for him, he was horrified and pointed out particularly egregious errors, then told me how I should be fingering particular passages… and I listened and asked questions until he began feeling like he was getting too involved with the video project. So we’d end our conversation and I’d spend a few months assimilating his corrections, send him a tape of my current versions, and he’d still be horrified and would correct me some more… and it never got to a point where he was happy, but my playing certainly improved and I am infinitely grateful.

Eventually I felt comfortable enough with Spence’s language to make the video and this was one of the songs I taught. The way I play it now is a mix of choruses Spence played on his first recordings, made by Sam Charters for Folkways Records, with some more impromptu choruses using the same basic grammar and vocabulary.

On the Folkways LP this song was titled “Happy Meeting in Glory,” and I still tend to think of it that way, but its legal title is “That Great Reunion Day.” It was published in 1940 and composed by a gospel songwriter named Adger M. Pace. An online biography says he was born in South Carolina in 1882 and became the first president of the National Singing Convention, a teacher at the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and the bass singer for the Vaughan Radio Quartet on WOAN, one of the first radio stations in the South.

I always appreciated Blind Lemon Jefferson’s records, but didn’t attempt to learn his guitar style until shortly before recording my CD, Street Corner Cowboys — and then went through a crash course and ended up recording two of his songs, playing a bunch of others, and eventually teaching his style at a couple of blues camps.

Jefferson was the defining “down home blues” artist — quite literally, since as far as I can tell that phrase was first used in print to advertise his records. That was in 1926, when the blues record business was still dominated by women like Bessie Smith and Ida Cox. The only significant male artist was Lonnie Johnson, who had a smooth urban style like the blues queens — but a Dallas record store employee wrote to Paramount Records saying there was a street singer there who was very popular and suggesting they take a chance on him.

That was Jefferson, and I’m guessing the Paramount folks were dubious when they heard him. His guitar playing was quirky and idiosyncratic, with an odd, jerky rhythm, and his voice was a full-throated street corner shout. To everyone’s surprise, his records instantly took off, selling spectacularly to black consumers throughout the South and Midwest, and soon scouts were combing the South for other quirky street corner guitarists. The result was one of the richest periods of American recording, preserving the music of Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, Jim Jackson, William Moore and myriad others… a world of astonishingly varied and creative musicians reaching from the Southwest to the Atlantic Coast. None of them equaled Jefferson’s sales figures, but they redefined blues as a rural style with guitar as its main instrument — an image that would fade on the African American market a few years later with the arrival of Leroy Carr, but remains central to folk-blues and blues-rock.

Getting back to my own experience… I learned a bunch of Jefferson’s pieces and it was a thrilling and liberating project. His guitar work was brilliant and opened up new possibilities in several keys, exercising my fingers and my mind, and I loved playing his stuff.

Nonetheless, over the next few years most of his songs drifted out of my repertoire. They were fun and interesting to play, but somehow never felt natural to me, and most of his arrangements were developed to fit his singing, which I couldn’t begin to match. So I went back to listening and admiring his work, and just kept a couple of his pieces in my repertoire: “Bad Luck Blues,” which I’ve used in this series as the accompaniment to “Keep It Clean,” and “Black Horse.”

“Black Horse Blues” was one of Jefferson’s first recordings and is unusual because the guitar part stands alone. Usually he played licks that followed or answered his voice, but for this one he created a quirky but thoroughly developed instrumental composition, full enough to serve both as accompaniment and an instrumental break . That meant I could learn it, then come up with a different way to sing the song rather than trying to imitate his vocals. It struck me that Jefferson was from Texas, and one of the things about his guitar playing, compared to players from further east, is that he sometimes relaxes into a kind of cowboy strumming — so I went with that, and sing in a cowboy-blues style, closer to someone like Woody Guthrie, who came from Oklahoma and grew up on Jefferson’s records.

The lyric is also interesting as an example of an American singer borrowing and reshaping an English ballad verse for blues performance. I noticed this when I was writing a chapter on blues poetry for my pocket guide for Oxford: The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. In the ballad of Gypsy Davy–which I first heard on one of Woody’s records–a woman runs off with a troupe of Gypsies and her husband follows her and tries to convince her to come home. Being a lord, he has servants, and when he finds his wife is gone he cries:

Go saddle me my old grey horse, the black one’s not so speedy.
I’ll ride all day and I’ll ride all night, until I find my lady.”

Jefferson reworked those lines for his title verse:

Go get my black horse, saddle up my grey mare
I’m going after my good gal, she’s in the world somewhere.

Another from Townes Van Zandt, though I don’t play his chords. I don’t remember why I changed them, or even if I was aware I had, and when I recently listened to his version I thought his were more interesting… But I’ve been playing it this way for a quarter century and it feels right to me.

As with all the Townes songs I do, I learned this off his Live at the Old Quarter double album from 1973 — it’s the pure, stripped down experience, and reminds me of what he was like live: dry, difficult, and magical. I’ve already written about my experiences of Townes over the years and my problems performing his songs in my post for “Waiting Round to Die.” The short version is I always loved his concerts and his writing, but most of the songs were so dark I couldn’t do them convincingly.

The exceptions were “Pancho and Lefty” — partly because I tended to do it as a duet with my pal Monte and partly because it’s pretty much foolproof — and this one.

To me, this is less a song than a modern saloon recitation in the tradition of classics like “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” T. Texas Tyler’s “Deck of Cards,” and Chuck Berry’s “Downbound Train.” It’s only marginally weirder, and similarly moralistic, and in its way it may be the most traditional thing Townes ever wrote.

Other than that, I don’t have much to say about it except that Townes was a terrific wordsmith and I love the way the lyric flows. And the way the card game anchors the fantasy. And the moral.

I heard this song all my life, but only started playing it when I recorded my CD, Street Corner Cowboys, in 2000. One of my sure-fire songs at that point was Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of “Green Rocky Road,” but it seemed silly to record that since everyone knew Dave’s version… and then it struck me that I could do his version of “Old Blue” with pretty much the same arrangement. So I took a crack at it,  liked it, and recorded it with Matt Leavenworth on mandolin and Paul Geremia on harmonica. I pretty much stuck with Dave’s lyrics, but when I tried to sing it like he did, with a sort of long moan on both lines of the chorus, it felt draggy, so I shortened the final line, and was thrilled when Paul said he’d never much liked the song, but that way it worked.

“Old Dog Blue” was first recorded in 1928 by the singer and guitarist Jim Jackson. Since he was recording in the blues era and had a huge hit with his first record, “Kansas City Blues,” Jackson is often called  a blues singer, but he was a versatile all-around performer who had traveled with minstrel and medicine shows all over the South, then settled in Memphis working the clubs on Beale Street, and even held down a residency at the eminently fashionable Peabody Hotel. Checking back over his repertoire, I’m struck by how many songs I picked up from people who may well have got them from his records: the flip side of “Old Blue” was “He’s In the Jailhouse Now,” and he also cut versions of “Traveling Man” and “Hesitation Blues,” as well as such unique masterpieces as “I’m Gonna Start Me a Graveyard of My Own,” “I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop,” and “Bye, Bye, Policeman.”

Samuel Charters, the blues scholar who roomed with Dave on MacDougal Street in the late 1950s, devoted several pages to Jackson in his groundbreaking The Country Blues and singled out this song for comment, saying that it was mentioned by Abbe Niles in The Bookman literary magazine: “…between articles on e.e. cummings and Virginia Woolf, there was a note about ‘Old Dog Blue… a wholly fascinating story of a hound who treed his possums anywhere he found them, from a holler stump to Noah’s Ark.'”

I figured Jackson was probably Dave’s source, though in the liner notes to his LP he said he couldn’t recall where he learned it and suggested the source might have been Guy Carawan. Back then I had no way to check and I’d forgotten about that note until today, when I went online to see if Carawan ever did it… and, by gum, he did. It’s a lovely performance, on a duet album with Peggy Seeger, and he sings a lot of the verses Dave sang, so apparently Dave’s memory was right. And, as it happens, he shortens that last line I was feeling so proud of shortening. So no credit to me, and I’m sorry Paul never heard Guy’s version.

My proudest musical memory is the five years I played guitar for Howard Armstrong. I’d heard Howard’s old records as Louie Bluie and his later ones with Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong; I’d seen Terry Zwigoff’s film about him; and I’d learned some of Carl Martin‘s songs… but I ended up working with him by pure happenstance. Bruce “Utah” Phillips happened to be staying at my place in Cambridge sometime around 1988, and the “Masters of the Folk Violin” tour was touching down somewhere in the area, with Howard, Michael Doucet, a teenage Alison Krauss, and two or three other players.

Joe Wilson, the tour organizer, invited Bruce to the show and dinner with the crew, I went along, and Bruce wanted to sit next to Howard. So we went over and introduced ourselves, and the lady with Howard got great big eyes and said, “Elijah Wald?! Ruth and George’s son!? I know you!”

She was Barbara Ward, who had worked for many years at the Harvard Biological Laboratories and been married to a young biologist who was a student of my father’s. She also had been involved with my parents in the defense committee for the father of Jhugh Price, a student at my high school who was shot in an ugly racial incident in North Cambridge, where he and his father stood up to a gang of white toughs in front of their house, Jhugh was killed, and his father was charged with the killing… (Yes, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Don’t tell black Bostonians how liberal that area is.)

A few months later I ran into Howard and Barbara in Boston Common and they mentioned he was looking for a local guitarist and bass player. I suggested myself and Washtub Robbie Phillips, and Howard was skeptical about using a one-string bass… but we went over to Barbara’s and he and Robbie hit it off immediately, both musically and socially.

I didn’t know the swing repertoire, but I was willing to take orders — like, when Howard told me to play an augmented chord in the bridge to “Lady Be Good,” I asked him how and he showed me. He was patient, I was eager, and it worked fine. We mostly just backed him on gigs around New England — the money was rarely good enough to take a full group further afield — but we also traveled to the Chicago Blues Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which I’d never have played any other way.

As anyone knows who has seen the two movies about him, Howard was a brilliant, funny, and supremely varied character and a terrific musician. We mostly played pop standards, with the occasional blues, hoedown, or gospel number, his comical reworking of “La Cucaracha,” a self-penned Hawaiian dialect number called “You’ll Never Find Another Kanaka Like Me” (he was in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked), and his ridiculously fast version of  “John Henry,” always introduced with an admonishment to the band: “Watch out now — cause if you can’t keep up, you sure can’t catch up!”

And, of course, we played “Barnyard Dance,” the title song from the first Martin, Bogan and Armstrong album. As far as I know, this was another of Howard’s compositions, as was the album cover — which prompted me to ask him if he would paint a cover for the CD I recorded near the end of my time with him, which he graciously did.

I am still absorbing lessons I learned from Howard, musical and otherwise — far too many to detail here, but I’ll finish by testifying that I could never have written “Escaping the Delta” without the insights I got from those years with him… which is another way of saying I have no idea what I’d be doing today if that string of coincidences hadn’t brought us together.

I can’t remember when I first heard Rev. Gary Davis, but he was one of my guitar heroes long before I could even think about playing his music. I loved the power and virtuosity of his playing, the soulful  excitement of his singing, the dynamics, the dynamism… So by my high school years I had assiduously hunted down all the extant LPs — as well as taping a library copy of the out-of-print American Street Songs LP from the 1950s that he shared with Pink Anderson, which still may be my all-time favorite.

Of course, as a Dave Van Ronk fan and eventually Dave’s student, I learned Candyman and Cocaine Blues, but mostly I worshipped Davis from afar. Part of the problem was that his greatest performances were of Evangelical Christian music, and much as I loved them, I had no interest in singing those lyrics. The other problem was that even if I’d wanted to sing them, I couldn’t make the guitar parts sound right. After studying with Dave I worked out a couple of Davis’s ragtime instrumentals, and even began performing Cincinnati Flow Rag, but it was only after I got back from Africa that I took serious crack at the gospel arrangements.

That trip had convinced me that if I wanted to understand how someone played I needed to try to replicate their tool kit — which in Davis’s case meant wearing fingerpicks and trying to play with just thumb and index finger. The fingerpicks were a first hurdle, because they always felt clumsy, but they definitely got me closer to his sound. As for that thumb-and-index style, it took ages to get the hang of it, and I never figured out the roll Davis used in his ragtime showpieces until I met Ernie Hawkins — about whom more in a future post — but it fundamentally reshaped my understanding of early blues guitar.

As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of early players used only those two fingers. There were exceptions, including John Hurt, Josh White, and Blind Blake, but they were outliers: from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the Mississippi Delta masters, Gary Davis to Merle Travis, thumb-and-index seems to have been the rule. To some extent, that was just a matter of custom, but it also was a matter of power — those are the two strongest fingers, which mattered in the days before amplification — and an even attack: when you use the index finger for all your treble notes, they all have the same attack. (Charlie Christian got a similar effect by playing only down-strokes with his flatpick.)

So anyway, I went through an extended Gary Davis period and learned a dozen of his gospel arrangements, though the only one I performed regularly was “Samson and Delilah,” which felt like a story rather than a religious exhortation. As for the rest, I sang them as part of the learning process, but mostly just for my own amusement, and that’s still where they fit in my repertoire. I particularly kept playing instrumental versions of these two, “A Little More Faith” and “I Belong to the Band,” because they work nicely as an instrumental medley — but more for fun than performance, and as an exercise. They’re a great way to practice that thumb-and-index style, to work on relaxing and freeing up the thumb to play brushes and accent some of the melody notes — I particularly like the power it gives to the bend in the F chord on the verse of “I Belong to the Band.” As for using fingerpicks, I eventually decided I preferred the feel of bare fingers, but I doubt I could have got here without them.

I first learned an instrumental version of this from Perry Lederman. Perry was a good friend and playing with him reshaped my understanding of the guitar. He was particularly noted for his vibrato, which was incredible — he had exceptionally strong hands and could hold a full chord and get a stinging vibrato on top of it using only his little finger. (He could also do crazy numbers of chin-ups on the edge of a door molding, holding on with just his fingertips.) His version of “Railroad Blues” included some of that, but I learned it as a right-hand exercise, and his smooth thumb-and-index-finger bass patterns became a (somewhat less smooth)  basic part of my own playing, as well as preparing me to tackle Rev. Gary Davis.

Perry’s standard repertoire included several Sam McGee tunes — joining a small personal pantheon of great fingerstyle players alongside Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt — and that made me pay added attention to McGee’s work. I first learned a couple of his instrumentals, “Franklin Blues” and “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” and it was probably another dozen years before I got around to this song. I had gotten interested in the playing of some white “hillbilly blues” players like Dick Justice and Clarence Greene, thanks to anthology LPs on the Yazoo and County labels. That subgenre was one of the many retrospective inventions of the folk revival, and it succeeded in drawing the attention of blues revivalists to some terrific white fingerpickers — but like most such inventions it also led us somewhat astray, since most of those players (like their black contemporaries) played a lot more than blues, and also (unlike most of their black contemporaries) recorded a lot more than blues. McGee, for example, was a regular on the Grand Ole Opry and did much of his touring and recording with the Opry’s reigning star, Uncle Dave Macon. He also played regularly with his brother Kirk, and as a trio with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith. (Their gigs included the legendary blues workshop at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival at which Alan Lomax got in a fistfight with Albert Grossmann over the Butterfield Blues Band.)

Anyway, McGee recorded this in 1934 and I fell in love with it, tackled it assiduously, and eventually worked out a halfway decent simulacrum of what he played. Then Steve James happened to be playing at Johnny D’s in Somerville and I was down in the green room with him and we got to talking about Sam McGee, and I mentioned I’d been working on this and played it for him. Steve wrote the one book on hillbilly blues guitar and spent some time with McGee, so he’s the go-to guy for this stuff, and he was generally ok with what I was playing, but gave me a couple of tips: First, that the bass on the opening riff (and later the “train coming into Nashville” section) is 6-5-5-5 rather than 6-5-6-5, which gives it a nice propulsive feel. And second, he said McGee played the descent to the B7 as a three-finger banjo roll, index-middle-thumb… which is not what McGee plays on the old record, but what the hell — I’m not going to argue with Steve James.

(Actually, we argue all the time, but not about how to play like Sam McGee.)

I got this from Josh White, of course. It was his big hit, and a terrific performance. I’ve written about Josh in a previous post, and before that I wrote a whole book about him. It was my first book, and a true labor of love — it took five years to write, and for most of that time a good agent was trying to find it a good home, and he never found one so we ended up at a UMass Press, which was fine, but we’d hoped for someplace that could have gotten it into a lot more hands. Not because it was such a great book (though I’m happy with it), but because I’d hoped to spark a major Josh White revival.

He sure deserves one, and the most annoying thing is it was songs like this that keep standing in his way. Because it’s a great song and he did it brilliantly, but it’s a New York cabaret number, and when people revive black singer/guitarists of the 1930s or ’40s they seem to always want bluesmen from the deep, dark Delta, or at least street singers from the Carolinas.

As it happens, Josh was from Greenville, South Carolina, and spent his early teens roaming the South as a “lead boy” for blind street singers — which is to say, he was as “authentic” a blues artist as anyone could want. But he was also very smart, hip, and versatile, so when he got a chance to reshape himself as a nightclub singer, he became one of the most popular cabaret artists in New York. His main venue was Cafe Society, and he was the star attraction there for four years straight, as well as appearing in movies and on Broadway, touring across the country and later around the world, becoming the first performer ever featured on all three BBC channels, and all sorts of other triumphs–because he was a terrific musician, a charismatic performer, and handsome, and funny, and charming.

He was also one of my all-time favorite guitar players, and although I don’t really play this in his style, I do use his unusual F7 chord,* which I learned from his son, Josh Jr. —  who  is also a fine musician and performer, and worthy of more attention.

As for the song, here’s the story roughly as I wrote it up for the liner notes to the Smithsonian/Folkways CD of Josh’s work:

The song was copyrighted by two Tin Pan Alley pros, Lou Singer and Hy Zaret, who had previously given Josh the pseudo-pastoral “The Lass with the Delicate Air.” Singer said they brought it to Josh and first arranged for him to record it as a wartime V-disc. The cover of the original sheet music describes the song as “presented by Barney Josephson,” Josh’s boss at Cafe Society, at both his Uptown and Downtown locations, the Uptown version being done by the singing pantomimist Jimmy Savo. The Andrews Sisters picked it up as well, putting it on the flip side of “Rum and Coca Cola” and taking it to number 15 on the pop charts.

Once the song hit, there was a hot debate about its origins, and PM magazine devoted a full-page article to elucidating the mystery. It traces the song back to a burlesque epic poem, “The Lay of the Lone Fish Ball” apparently written by a Latin professor at Harvard University around 1850. Two other Harvard men, the poet James Russell Lowell and the folklorist Francis James Child, expanded this into an burlesque Italian opera, Il Pescebello. Then, many decades later, Zaret and Singer heard someone sing a partial version of “One Fish Ball” at a party, and were inspired to write a modern song on the same theme, using many of the original lines, but putting them to a new tune and removing the mock-heroic language.

Though the Andrews’ version was the one that made the charts, most people associated the song with Josh. As a New Yorker critic put it: “Listening . . . to Josh White apply his expert talent to ‘One Meat Ball’ (which is getting to be something of a nuisance around town), I was moved to wish that the city would make it a crime for anyone else to attempt it. Come to think of it, it already is.”

*As for that F7, it’s played by wrapping your thumb around the 6th string on the first fret; barring the 1st through 4th strings with your index finger, likewise on the first fret; and holding down the 3rd string on the second fret with your middle finger.

This was originally recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1926 and issued as “I’ve Got the Mourning Blues.” Folk revivalists have tended to correct that title to “Morning Blues,” and for familiarity’s sake I’ve gone with that… but my guess is it should actually be “Moaning Blues.” That was a common title: Ma Rainey had a “Deep Moaning Blues,” Clara Smith had an “Awful Moaning Blues,”  Crying Sam Collins had a “Moanin’ Blues,” and so on.

In any case, it’s a nice example of an older rural artist refitting his style to suit the new blues craze. Uncle Dave Macon was born in 1870, and his recordings are among the best surviving examples of 19th century rural music. His usual instrument was banjo, and his style was deeply grounded in African American traditions.

There is a story about John Jackson, the great blues singer/guitarist from Virginia, that when an interviewer mentioned DeFord Bailey as the only black star of the Grand Ole Opry, Jackson responded, “What about Uncle Dave Macon?” I once asked Jackson if the story was true, and he cheerfully confirmed it: “The way he sound on the radio, I always thought he was black until I seen him.” It would not just have been the sound; there was also the “Uncle” before his name, which was the standard way southern white people addressed older black men they liked: Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben, and of course Aunt Jemima…

Macon grew up around the hotel his father ran in Nashville and learned his music–as well as jokes, stories, and the tricks of an old-time entertainer–from the show people who stayed there. Fortunately for the world, he did not go into show business himself at that point, but instead made his living from farming and hauling goods in a wagon–which meant he didn’t keep changing his style to suit the times and when he finally took to the stage in the 1920s he arrived as an old man playing the music of his youth. Hence the “Uncle” before his name.

This song was in some ways atypical of his repertoire: for once he didn’t play banjo, leaving the lead chores to his guitarist, the great Sam McGee (I’ve played his “Buck Dancer’s Choice” in an earlier post, and there’s more to come), and it is nominally a blues song. Which said, it is only nominally a blues, and both the style and lyrics reach back to earlier minstrel comedy. (I’ve edited the lyrics to omit the more offensive remainders of that tradition.) Honestly, it’s not my favorite Uncle Dave record–that would be something like “Hold the Woodpile Down” or “Down the Old Plank Road”–but it’s the one where his style overlapped mine and I could come up with an interesting arrangement.

As for Macon, he went on to become the first great star of the Grand Ole Opry and continued to be a popular entertainer on stage and radio into his eighties. There’s a lovely clip of him at age 69, singing, dancing, twirling and swinging his banjo, and eventually playing it with his hat:

One of my great honors and privileges in the 1990s was being able to play a bunch of gigs with Eric Von Schmidt. I’d been playing his “Joshua Gone Barbados” for twenty years, and met the man himself when he came to Cambridge to play a Club 47 reunion show and needed a place to crash. (I also hosted Jack Landron–better known to the Cambridge folkies as Jackie Washington–for the same show, which led to me writing Josh White’s biography, but that’s another story.) This story is that we were jamming in my living room and Eric invited me to play harmonica with him onstage for “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” and then a year or so later I did a big piece on him for the Boston Globe Magazine, and that led to more jamming, and he started using me and Washtub Robbie Phillips, along with his daughter Caitlin, as his backing group.

Eric was an amazing performer, always 100% in the moment, and his recordings only hint at how great he could be when the spirit descended — which said, the best recordings are pretty great. This song was on his final CD, produced by Sam Charters in the mid-1990s, and written as part of his immersion in the story of the battle of Little Big Horn. He had painted an epic canvas, “Here Fell Custer,” for which he became something of an expert on the battle and events leading up to it. In an article about that project, he wrote that he never really understood the story until he went to Washington, DC, and looked at the original drawings of the battle by the Sioux warrior Red Horse, who had fought there:

I was struck by page after page of carefully drawn tipis. Nothing but tipis. I guessed that they had never been reproduced before because they were repetitious–boring? Old Red Horse was trying to tell us something. We weren’t quite getting it….

Custer didn’t get it either. It wasn’t until I got back down to my studio that I finally got it…. Considering that the village was over three miles long, there would have been a whole lot of tipis, a thousand, give or take a few. Red Horse was telling us in pictographic terms what Custer himself had refused to believe….

One of the interpreters, Mitch Bouyer, reckoned that Custer and the whole command, himself included, were as good as dead. “Lonesome Charlie” Reynolds (“Lucky Man” was one of his Indian names) had expected as much and had given away his belongings the previous night….

Eric added some colorful details in this song, but when I came across a photostat of Reynolds’ diary leading up to the battle, I was pleased to find that it begins just where Eric did, with a notation on May 17, almost forty days before the final confrontation: “Left Fort Lincoln…” I assume Eric had read the same pages, and it was a good feeling to be following his trail.

Eric was a magnificent madman, a true Bohemian, and also the son of a famous painter of Western scenes. He grew up with cowboy and Indian stories and I got the impression he mostly tended to side with the Indians. He identified with Reynolds, who presumably had spent a lot of time absorbing Native culture, but also with the people who turned the tables on Custer’s murderous cavalry, and this song shifts between those viewpoints with wry and angry humor.