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.

I loved this from the first moment I heard it, and worked up an arrangement a few years later because I was regularly singing “Mole in the Ground” and wanted an alternative song that would fill the same slot in my sets. This fit the bill perfectly: banjo-style guitar part, goofy animal lyric. Then came the barking, but I’ll get to that in a minute..

This was recorded in 1936 by a banjo player and singer named James or Jimmie Strothers, a wonderfully versatile musician whose one recording session included blues, work songs, a ballad, and this unclassifiable masterpiece.

Strothers was born in Virginia in 1883, which makes him one of the oldest black rural musicians whose work got preserved on records, and his music reaches back before the blues era, to styles that a lot of people now associate with Euro-American country music. By the time southern rural music began being captured on record a lot of Afro-American musicians and listeners had moved on to other styles, and the selective processes of both folklorists and commercial recording companies further cemented the idea of separate ethnic traditions.  So it’s worth underlining that the kind of banjo playing Strother (and Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Uncle Dave Macon) did was originally associated with black musicians and African traditions.

Getting back to Strothers, he apparently became blind in a mining accident sometime around the turn of the century and lived much of his life in Baltimore. He was recorded for the Library of Congress by John Lomax and Harold Spivacke while serving a second degree murder sentence in the Virginia State Penitentiary, and a collection of correspondence related to his parole includes a letter in which he explains that since becoming blind he had traveled widely on his own and “I am also a musician and can easily earn my money for living expenses.” Those were the good old days.

So anyway, I started playing this around the house, getting the guitar part the way I wanted. At that point I was living with Suzannah, who had been raised as an only child in a house full of dogs and tended to prefer them to people. She naturally approved of me adding a dog song to my repertoire — and, one afternoon as I was playing it, began barking along in appropriate places.

That was obviously the missing ingredient, and I persuaded her to perform this with me a couple of times — I’d introduce her as the second vocalist and she would sit demurely on a stool until the appropriate moment, then bark. It brought down the house… but we only did it a couple of times, then life intervened and that was that.

I kept doing the song, of course, but it never occurred to me to do my own barking until I was recording this video. Then the spirit descended upon me, and the result is before you.

Along with all the great African American blues artists who recorded in the 1920s, there were also some interesting Euro-American players who came up with distinctive styles. The most famous was Jimmie Rodgers, but the best guitarists tended to come from around the mountain communities of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and the Carolinas. I’ve already paid tribute to Dick Justice, who deserves to be a lot better known, and this song is from an even more obscure artist, Clarence Greene. Greene was born in North Carolina in 1884 and recorded a  scant dozen songs, including some on fiddle with Byrd Moore’s Hot Shots. This is by far the best known, and with good reason: his other recordings are in more standard white country styles, but this is a unique and brilliant guitar blues.

Greene’s playing is admirably quirky, and shows the clear influence of one of the greatest early blues recording stars, apparently learned first-hand. As his friend Walter Davis recalled:

“Me and Clarence Greene was in Johnson City, Tennessee, and there was an old colored fellow, blind man, that was playing down there on the street, and I thought he was the most wonderful guitar player that I had ever heard. He could really play the blues… Blind Lemon Jefferson. And he was really good… I stayed there two or three days, trying to pick up some of his chords and some of his tunes.”¹

Greene’s playing is very different from Jefferson’s, but made up of distinctly Jeffersonian components – the way someone might play if they spent two or three days watching Jefferson, then went home and came up with a guitar arrangement based on what they’d seen That’s very different from sitting down with a record, because Greene doesn’t sound like he’s imitating any particular Jefferson piece and some of the ideas he uses seem based more on how Jefferson’s hands moved than on how the results sounded. At least, that’s my take on this arrangement, based on admittedly limited evidence – but it makes sense.

As for the song, it’s a close adaptation of a 1923 recording by Ida Cox titled “Chattanooga Blues.”² Cox has been overshadowed by Bessie Smith in the history books, but was at least as influential among rural musicians and listeners. She couldn’t match Smith’s power and virtuosity, but had a more straightforwardly conversational style and terrific taste in material, much of which she seems to have written herself. She was also a very astute businesswoman and continued to tour with her own company of musicians, singers, and dancers through the 1930s, invested her profits in real estate, and retired comfortably to Knoxville, where she died in 1967.

As for my version: one of the things I love about both Jefferson and Greene is the way they casually add or subtract a couple of beats now and then to fit their singing, rather than keeping within standard European measures. I started playing this song before I got seriously into Jefferson’s music, and it was an education in freedom — it comes out a bit different every time, and that’s fun and relaxing.

Yet another I learned from Joe Ely. Among the many debts I owe to Joe is that he introduced me to Butch Hancock’s songwriting. Joe and Butch had teamed up way before I heard of either of them, in a band called the Flatlanders, which also included Jimmie Dale Gilmore — another songwriter I first learned about through Joe’s records. They were and are a terrific trio, but Joe was the first one to hit nationally and internationally, so most of us learned about the others from him.

If it hadn’t been for Joe, I would probably still have learned about Butch, because Dave Van Ronk heard him someplace in Texas — maybe the Kerrville festival — and was blown away. I recall Dave telling me he had tried to persuade Butch to come to New York and insisted he’d be the biggest thing to hit the local folk scene since Dylan… which is the kind of advice Butch probably was wise to ignore.

As best I can tell, Butch never cared to tour much anyway. The only times I’ve seen him are once with the Flatlanders at Newport and once when Dick Pleasants, a wonderful Boston folk radio programmer, got the chance to program a city-sponsored Fourth of July concert at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River. Dick brought in Odetta, Rosalie Sorrels, Riders in the Sky, and several other people — and brought Butch’s entire band up from Texas. As I recall, it was a ten-piece group, with back-up singers, a horn section, and a musical saw.

All of which said, I got this, along with “Me and Billy the Kid,” from Joe’s Live at Liberty Lunch album and recorded it on my cassette, Street Corner Cowboy in the early 1990s, and again almost ten years later on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys. (Note the subtly different titles.) The first version had Mark Earley playing lonesome prairie harmonica, and the second had Matt Leavenworth playing lonesome prairie fiddle, and I miss both of them… but I kept playing it on my own, because it’s such a great lyric.

To my way of thinking, Butch’s one major handicap was that he often overwrote — he’d come up with a great chorus and some great verses, but then he’d write more verses and pretty soon he’d have a six minute song that would have been a lot stronger if it were shorter. That’s not a rare disease for writers — I’m sure I’ve succumbed to it myself on occasion — but anyway, Joe seemed to act as a kind of brake: the songs of Butch’s he did were mostly shorter and a few of them were damn near perfect. This one, for example, is just four short verses and two choruses (actually, I just went back and listened, and Joe and Butch sing a different line on the first chorus — so apparently I did a bit more editing.

Anyway, this grabbed me from line one, and just kept getting better: “They say a fool never knows what he misses/ And a wise man never misses what he knows.” That’s damn good.

I got this from Bascom Lamar Lunsford, as did we all. Lunsford was a complicated and interesting man, a lawyer from North Carolina who was born in 1882 and grew up playing local fiddle and banjo songs. In 1928 he organized one of the first official folk festivals — by some accounts the first — in Asheville, which became a yearly event and among other things is notable as the place where a sixteen-year-old Pete Seeger first became interested in folk music and five-string banjos.

That would not have been Lunsford’s choice for a biographical credit, since he strongly objected both to northern city performers playing “mountain music” and to the association of folk music with leftist politics. I gather from his biography, Minstrel of the Appalachians (by Loyal Jones, who tries to put his views in the best possible light), that he was considered a difficult man back home as well, and it has often been noted that in all the decades he ran the Asheville festival he never presented a black performer (though Jones writes that he did present black musicians in other settings).

So the biography is messy… but he collected a lot of great music over the years, and in 1928 he recorded this song, which is wonderful.

I began playing this in the late 1980s as part of a project to adapt clawhammer banjo pieces to guitar (another example is “The Cuckoo“), and recorded it on the cassette I made in the early 1990s. Which said, I don’t recall playing it all that regularly until I read Robert Cantwell’s book about the folk revival, When We Were Good. There is some smart stuff in that book, but also some spectacular passages of academic prose, and the analysis of this song was so rich that I took to reading it from the stage:

[W]hy does Bascom wish to be a mole in the ground? Perhaps because he is a man not at home where destiny has placed him. He has been in the “Bend,” quite likely a prison, too long, “with the rough and rowdy men” of whom, I think it is fair to say, he is not one. And he has had a bad experience with railroad men, who “drink up your blook like wine.” Even Tempe, his woman, doesn’t love him in the way he deserves, wanting him only when he can supply the cash for the nine-dollar shawl she covets; that doesn’t prevent him, though, from loving her… To hear her sing, he would wish himself not only a contemptible mole but a vile “lizard in the spring.”

A lizard, a mole: Bascom is not the first man in love to feel his rodent-like unworthiness and reptilian cupidity… Nor is he the first to feel, under the influence of love, the roughness of his own sex, or whose heart has learned the arcane and curious language in which nature, in the form of mole and lizard, little miracles of creation and perhaps, in the metaphorical field of sexuality, covert genital symbols, both speaks to his condition and brings him into unconscious sympathy with his beloved.

Indeed.