Though Dave Van Ronk was not principally known as a songwriter, he wrote some damn good songs. But before he got into songwriting in more ambitious ways, he recorded a handful of blues songs for which he took author credit. He didn’t consider these fully original compositions, since they had a mix of old and new verses, some adapted, some borrowed, set to guitar parts and melodies that were likewise a mix of traditional influences and personal quirks. They were original (or unoriginal) the way a lot of blues songs are original: as he liked to put it, “Blues is like a kielbasa — you don’t sing a whole one, you just cut off a section.”

This was one of those original blues, which he recorded a couple of times in the mid-1960s, on his Just Dave Van Ronk album and more powerfully on an Elektra sampler of the current blues scene titled The Blues Project. (One of the featured artists was Danny Kalb, who shortly copped the album’s name for his blues-rock band.)

Like “Keep It Clean,” this was one of the arrangements Dave did during his transitory love affair with open tunings, and was likewise dropped from his repertoire when he decided re-tuning was too much trouble. The odd thing about both pieces is that the tuning gave them a distinctive flavor, but the basic arrangements were clearly based on standard-tuning models, and he could easily have come up with something suitable in standard had he cared to. This one is reminiscent of some of Mississippi John Hurt’s charts in E, and I just took that route.

As I recall, I didn’t actually learn this one. I just happened to think of it one day during that winter in Spain, and started fooling around with it, and found that I knew most of the verses. I’ve always thought that was the mark of a particularly well-written song: it sticks in your head, because the pieces fit together so neatly that one reminds you of the next. When I heard Dave do this I don’t remember noticing that it was more than a loose assemblage of generic verses, but when I started singing it, they all fell into place in a particular order, and if I’ve sometimes left one or two out and needed to jog my memory, they’ve mostly stuck.

As for Dave’s more ambitious compositions, I’ve posted a bunch of them: “Sunday Street,” “Another Time and Place,” “Losers,” “Gaslight Rag,” “Blood Red Moon,” and the instrumental “Antelope Rag.”

I’m pretty sure I got my first Jimmy Buffett album after getting back from my first two-year stint in Europe, but it fits that part of my songobiography because this was the first song of his I learned, and I learned it as a souvenir of my brief life of crime. That period began during the week or so I lived under a bridge in Carcassonne with a Guyanan guy named Rohan and an English guy named Martin. (Yes, Rohan and Martin. I later lived in Morocco next to an American named Byron and and Englishman named Shelly.) They had dragged an old mattress under the bridge, and we all slept there and pooled our resources.

It was the fall of 1978, and they were waiting for the vendange (grape harvest) to begin. In those days, the vendange was still done completely by hand and swarms of young folks would descend on the South of France from all over Northern Europe to do the picking. The problem was that a lot of them arrived early in hopes of finding a good job, and then were stuck for a couple of weeks before the work started.

Rohan’s solution was to go out every night and search through people’s garbage. He was careful to select items that were still wrapped or otherwise seemed safe and sanitary, and it was surprising how much he found. (To be fair, he also accumulated full bottles of wine by pouring together the dregs from discarded bottles, which was pretty foul, but we were young and strong.)

Martin, meanwhile, shoplifted. I’d probably taken occasional candy bars from stores before, but he was serious and professional — the biggest difference being that I was terrified of getting caught, while he didn’t mind getting caught if the result was nothing worse than a night in jail. Back in England he’d done time in borstal (reform school) — which he assured us had been good for him — but in France he usually just got an angry lecture, which he considered irrelevant.

So Martin would head off to the stores, and I went with him because he had no idea what to steal — I mean, he was in France and could steal the most wonderful cheeses on earth, but was taking La Vache Qui Rit because the package was familiar. I didn’t actually steal at that point — I was busking and contributed loaves of fresh bread, which were too big to steal and didn’t get thrown away. But I studied his technique, which was to fill up the crotch of his jeans — as described in Buffett’s lyric — a particularly good spot because, even if someone noted the bulge and thought it looked suspicious, they might be embarrassed to mention it.

To make a long story short, I went on to pillage the supermarkets of Paris — never small groceries, only the Monoprix and Uniprix, which could obviously afford it — and dined on steaks for a while. And then, hitchhiking through Denmark, I stopped at a supermarket, shoved a nice lump of cheese down my pants, walked out, and was promptly accosted by a polite employee, who said, “We believe you have an item you have not paid for.” I admitted that to be the case, and he said, “Please go back and pay for it.”

So I did, and that’s the last time I ever shoplifted — the moral being that bougie wannabe hoboes are hopeless lightweights… and to make it worse they celebrate their crimes with Jimmy Buffett songs.

This was the one Van Ronk original on Dave’s first album, and another song I’d brought to Europe on cassette. I don’t remember where I took the time to figure out the guitar part, but in my memory it is forever linked to my first performance at a rock festival. (Which was also my last, but why mention that?)

I was hitchhiking out of Salzburg, Austria, and it was getting late when a van pulled over and a bunch of long-haired guys said they weren’t going far, but if I needed a place to sleep I could come with them. They were members of a rock band, headed for a house in the country where they all lived together. Of course I said yes, and we spent the evening playing music, and it turned out they were having a rock festival on their land in a couple of weeks and offered me a spot on it. So I traveled around a bit, came back to their place, and did the gig.

There was nothing particularly memorable about the festival itself — aside from the moment when I went into the house to use the bathroom and interrupted the guitarist’s lovely lady friend shooting up — but the headliner was a Scottish singer and guitarist named Les Brown, who was living in Austria at the time. He was a fair blues fingerpicker and knew Van Ronk’s repertoire, so we hit it off and he took it upon himself to give me some tips on playing around northern Europe.

His two main tips were that there was lots of work in Germany and I shouldn’t take a gig for under 200 Deutschmarks (about a hundred dollars). That sounded like a lot to me, but I headed west and spent a month or so wandering from Tübingen up to Münster, and booked a half-dozen gigs for a couple of months in the future — my first tour of anyplace, ever. At that point American folk-blues guitarists were an easy sell in Germany: I’d just walk into a club with my guitar case, say I wanted to book a gig, and they’d book me. Not a single manager asked to hear me before giving me the job.

It was also very easy to find places to sleep — if I was playing on the street I’d put a sign on my guitar case saying I needed a bed for the night, or if I didn’t feel like playing I could go into a pub that catered to young people and ask the bartender for advice. I remember one giving me the address of a student commune, and I went over and rang the bell, and a young woman opened the door, stark naked. I explained what I wanted, and she took me to a big room with several mattresses on the floor and pointed out which one I could have for the night. It was like that in the 1970s. (And no, I didn’t sleep with her. She was on another mattress, and we both were there to sleep.)

There are plenty of other memories of that month or so — a run-in with the cops while sleeping in a park in Dusseldorf, for example — but to finish up for the moment, I had the good fortune to wangle a guest set followed by a gig at the legendary Folkclub Witten, the oldest folk club in that part of Germany (maybe in all of Germany), run by a force of nature named Hildegard Doebner. I don’t remember much about the gigs, but she was wonderful, and when I later met and worked for Lena Spencer at the Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, I was instantly reminded of  Hildegard.

One other thing: Les performed a song at the Austrian rock fest that has stuck with me ever since, and I just hunted it up on the internet and present it for your delectation. He wrote out the words and recommended learning it for the US soldier bars, and I didn’t want to do that circuit, so never learned it completely, but I got the chorus just by hearing Les sing it through. It turns out to have been recorded in 1961 by a Germany-based country singer named Eddie Wilson, and the chorus went:

Dankeschön, Bitteschön, Wiedersehn,
Noch ein Bier, kommen sie Hier.
Grosser und kleiner und nicht verstehn,
I wish I could sprechen sie Deutsch.

None of which has anything to do with “If You Leave Me, Pretty Mama,” a lovely example of Dave Van Ronk’s early style, except that I played it that afternoon for Les and remembering it triggered the chain of memories.

By a quirk of memory, this urban, late night, heartsick song always makes me think of a sunny afternoon on a grassy hillside in Tuscany.

Like “Miss Brown to You,” this Fred Neil composition was one of the three songs Judy Roderick sang on a Newport Folk Festival collection, backed by John Hammond on harmonica. I loved her version, included it on my homemade cassette of contemporary folk songs, and had just figured out how to play it during the few days I spent in Annecy.

From Annecy, I hitchhiked east and slept by the side of the road near Chamonix. I woke up wet and cold, stood for a couple of hours with my thumb out in a grey, steady drizzle, then got a ride through the Mont Blanc tunnel and emerged on the other side of the Alps, in warm, sunny Italy.

I hitched down to Rome for a week or so, then up the coast to Grosseto and inland to Gabellino, the smallest town I’ve ever seen on a map. It was only on the map because it had been a way-station for travelers between the coast and Siena since the middle ages, and it was still just one building, an inn with a few bedrooms and a restaurant.

I was there to visit my ex-half-sister-in-law — she had been married to my half-brother Dave, or actually was still married to him, but hadn’t seen him in over a dozen years — who was living on a mountaintop a few kilometers from Gabellino in a small stone house with no electricity, raising sheep and chickens. Her postal address was:
Hazel
Gabellino
Grosseto
ITALY

Someone pointed me in the right direction and I walked up to her house and she was out back feeding the chickens. A while later we were sitting on a grassy hillside with a bottle of local wine and I was playing songs for her. This was one of them and she particularly liked it, and since I never played it much after that, it always reminds me of that afternoon.

Which, I grant, is not much of a story… but a few years later Hazel came back to the United States and when I booked my first cross-country tour she came along for the ride, and we had so much fun that she rode along on each tour I did after that, twice a year for the next three years. I drove, and she smoked endless cigarettes, cooked incredible meals, and kept annotated set-lists of every show with stars next to the songs she liked and instructions on what to do differently on the ones she didn’t. By the end she was living in California and I’d drive out there on my own, pick her up, and we’d head up to Vancouver, east through Montana, eventually end up in Boston, and she’d catch a train back to the West Coast. She was one of my favorite people ever, and it’s strange to think that when I met her on that mountaintop she was just 35 years old, and now it’s damn near forty years later and she died in Lucca, about a hundred miles from Gabellino, a few years ago.

So, this one’s for Hazel.

Before heading to Europe, I sat down with my records and made four or five cassettes that served as my music library for the next couple of years. I had various criteria for choosing the cuts, but most were songs or guitar parts I wanted to learn. It was a pretty good method, since with so few options I heard those tracks over and over, and kind of absorbed most of them by osmosis.

There were some, though, that involved concentrated attention, and I still remember the two days I spent working on this one, in a small bedroom in Annecy, France. I’d spent a month there when I was sixteen as part of an exchange program — I’ve written about part of that trip in my post on “Suzanne” — and when I headed north from Spain I decided to stop through and see if I could find my host family. I can’t remember their name, but the mother was a judge and the son was named Etienne, and memorably took me out riding on the back of his moped one night, went down a steep hill, and turned into a street that had a metal barrier across it at night… with the result that I scraped the skin off one side of my face and came near losing an eye, while he was walking with crutches for the next few weeks.

They had moved, but a neighbor gave me their address, I showed up at the door, and the mother welcomed me and invited me to stay a few days. Typically, having the chance to spend some time in one of the loveliest parts of France, a famous vacation destination with a lake and rivers and beautiful old stone houses, I spent that visit holed up in my room learning how to play a Joseph Spence arrangement — the only local culture I picked up was when the mother came in one day having found fresh donkey meat at the market, and made steak tartare, which apparently is best made from donkey….

None of which has anything to do with Joseph Spence or “Glory of Love,” but it’s etched in my memory because I had never attempted to learn anything like this off a recording before, and I found that I could actually do it. It wasn’t perfect, and I’ve added a lot of Spencifications since that I didn’t get on that first pass, but it was a breakthrough and started me off on one of my favorite musical journeys.

(For those who want more  on my attachment to Spence, I’ve posted my recollections and versions of his “Sloop John B,” “Brownskin Gal,” “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” and a medley of his arrangements of Bahamian hymns, and have a full page about him and my instructional DVD on his style. As for “Glory of Love,” it’s been done by dozens of people, but I’m pretty sure I got the lyric from Werner Lammerhirt’s recording, discussed briefly in my post on the German version of “Cocaine Blues.”)

Heading north from Spain for my first summer in Europe, one of my first stops was Liechtenstein, where I had an invitation to spend a few days with the family of a young woman named Ruth who I’d known in language school in Málaga. It’s the only time I was ever in Liechtenstein, and my main memory of the (tiny) country is of standing on a mountainside looking down on the clouds that covered the valleys.

My other memory is of my introduction to the alternate universe of European blues guitar. I had my guitar with me and played for Ruth’s family, and I think it was her brother who immediately asked if I knew Werner Lämmerhirt. Of course I didn’t, so we went up to his room and he played me Lämmerhirt’s first album. I could see why he was playing it for me — it obviously came out of the same tradition, complete with versions of “Hesitation Blues” and Mississippi John Hurt’s “See See Rider” — but I was not thrilled. For one thing, Lämmerhirt’s accent was lousy and his singing unconvincing, and for another thing, he was a spectacularly clean, fast, and intricate guitarist, and I was envious… though the way I phrased that, even to myself, was that he had lots of chops but no soul.

At that point, I had no sense of the world of European fingerstyle. I had one John Renbourn album and a couple by Pentangle, had heard a bit of Bert Jansch, but had never even heard of Davey Graham or Wizz Jones, or Marcel Dadi… so I didn’t understand the history of what I was hearing on that Lämmerhirt LP.

I was more taken with another German (actually Austrian, but, heaven help me, I didn’t make the distinction at that point) blues guitarist, Oscar Klein — I would have said because he was more soulful, and I still think that’s true, but also because he was playing like Lightnin’ Hopkins, not exploring or expanding a new, European take on blues, so I was more familiar with what I was hearing. He was a jazz trumpet player and had a great feel on guitar, and he didn’t try to sing, which also helped.

And then there was Hannes Wader, or at least “Kokain” — I don’t recall hearing Wader himself sing that or anything else, and I wonder whether it was Ruth’s brother or one of his friends who played the song for me. Whoever did it, he also wrote out the lyrics and explained what they meant, and I learned the first few verses, mostly because I figured I should have at least one song in German, but also because I felt like it was exactly what I wanted Europeans to be doing if they were going to play blues.

The thing was, my whole existence as a wandering musician in Europe was predicated on the fact that Europeans liked American music, but didn’t have a lot of Americans around to play it. They were listening to German and French and Dutch and Spanish blues singers, singing in varying simulacrums of American accents, and some could play good guitar but when they opened their mouths it was mostly funny or just lame. As an eighteen-year-old white kid from Cambridge with fair-to-middling pitch problems, I wasn’t a world-class folk-blues singer myself, but in those days I could walk into pretty much any folk or blues club in Northern Europe and book a gig simply on the strength of being American, without them asking to hear a note. I might not be great, but I could at least pronounce the words right.

So what I particularly liked about “Kokain” — and what made it a unique object, in my experience — was that Wader not only was singing in German, but had written a thoroughly German, thoroughly modern lyric to the Gary Davis/Dave Van Ronk version I knew so well. He had translated one couplet in the chorus, and kept the original tag-line, but the rest of the song was a long, funny, and completely original fantasy about an extended family caught up in the German drug scene of the 1970s:

Meine Tante dealt seit einem Jahr
Seitdem geht sie über Leichen, fährt ‘nen Jaguar
Cocaine, all around my brain
Immer wenn sie kommt, bringt sie ein Stückchen Shit
In der Radkappe für die Kinder mit
Cocaine, all around my brain

(Roughly — and I welcome corrections from German-speakers:
My aunt has been dealing for a year,
Since then she’s on top of the world  [literally “walks over dead bodies”], travels in a Jaguar…
Whenever she visits she brings a chunk of shit [hashish]
In the hubcap, for the children…)

I never memorized that verse — I had enough trouble with the first four and am amazed that I still remember them forty years later… and I apologize to any German listeners for the mistakes and mispronunciations… but hey, I had to listen to a lot of Germans sing blues in butchered English, and now it’s your turn.

I always thought “Wandering” was one of Dave Van Ronk’s most hypnotic performance pieces — he would seem to expand and fill the stage with his presence, singing the early verses in a gruff whisper, then gradually increasing the volume until he was shouting, but always musically, always in control. He recorded it in the mid 1960s but rarely sang it after the 1970s, though I continued to request it and he occasionally complied.

As with “Tell Old Bill,” “Dink’s Song,” and quite possibly some other songs in his repertoire, this came from Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, though I think Dave’s direct source was Josh White’s recording. As for Sandburg’s sources, he lists two for what he calls a “lyric of tough days,” the second being Hubert Canfield — which is interesting, because Canfield was  a collector of bawdy folklore, assembling a large collection of typescript and handwritten lyrics in the 1920s, and the verses Sandburg took from him were part of a multi-page collection of floating blues verses, some of which I’ve previously quoted in connection with “Hesitation Blues.”

Once again, this brings me to the censorship of folksong in general and blues in particular. The two verses Sandburg took from Canfield are not censored, but his opening verse, credited to another source, is clearly a bowdlerization of some common verses Canfield gives in rawer versions, to whit:

Mother takes in washing,
Papa drives a hack,
Brother sells bootleg,
And Baby pulls his jack.

Mother’s on the poor farm,
Father’s in the jail,
Brother runs a cat house
And Sister peddles tail.

The significant thing about this is not that Canfield’s dirty verses are better than the ones Sandburg gives, but that Sandburg had access to Canfield’s material and never mentioned that he was leaving out the rougher material he came across in his quest to present American song in all its raw majesty, “a volume full of gargoyles and gnomes, a terribly tragic book and one grinningly comic…”

Sandburg was constrained by the mores of the time, and I’m not taking him to task — but it’s worth noting because this kind of censorship was both ubiquitous and invisible, with the result that even serious, experienced scholars who have devoted their lives to researching blues and other vernacular styles are unaware of the extent to which their sources reflect the prudery of collectors. The simple fact is that any collection of sailor, cowboy, or juke joint folklore from the 1920s or earlier that does not include explicit sexual material, complete with four-letter words, is a censored collection. The odd corollary being that most collections were compiled later than that, at times by editors who would have been willing (maybe even eager) to present uncensored texts, but who didn’t realize that their sources were systematically expurgated.

I still sing the version I learned from Dave, which he learned from Josh, who got it from Sandburg, who was a poet and amateur folklorist of unusual taste and discernment. I don’t think my own performance would be improved by reinserting the Canfield verses. I’m just noting the process by which this became something we all could sing in respectable settings, and the fact that, whatever its virtues, it is not what Canfield or Sandburg found rough workingmen singing back in the 1920s.

As for why this song fits at this point in my songobiography… towards the end of our stay in Málaga in 1977-78, Rob and I spent about a month crashing on couches, and two weeks of that was with a Japanese couple — they worked in film and were in Spain for language classes — and they  were particularly taken with the high, strained way I sang the first verse, which they said sounded a bit like Japanese music. So I sang this often for them, and that’s the only time it was regular part of my repertoire.

Working  with a washboard player, I naturally played a lot of Kweskin Jug Band material — “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” “Borneo,” “Ukulele Lady,” “Beedle Um Bum,” “I’m Satisfied with My Gal” (that was a call-and-response with Rob:
“She don’t wear no–”
“Yes, she does!”
“Oh, no, she don’t!”
“Oh, yes, she does!”), and a raft of others, among which this one (from a live recording at the Newport Folk Festival) was a favorite.

When we were playing in Harvard Square a fair number of passersby knew the Jug Band stuff — the Kweskin gang were local heroes and it had only been a dozen years since their heyday — so we often got requests and tried to be ready for them. In Torremolinos we didn’t have a lot of listeners who knew Kweskin’s repertoire specifically, but British skiffle fans were familiar with the style and enjoyed the good-time ragtime rowdiness.

At the time, I had only a vague sense of where the Kweskinites got their material — I knew about the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and was aware that they were drawing on a lot of other sources, but in those days before the internet it was not easy to track those sources down. Honestly, I still have no idea where a lot of those songs came from — I’ve never heard anyone else do “Borneo” and the only people I’ve heard singing “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” (a.k.a. “Washington at Valley Forge”) got it from Kweskin.

“Sadie Green, the Vamp of New Orleans” was in that category until I looked it up on the internet a couple of days ago and found the Five Harmaniacs, whose 1926 recording was obviously the Kweskin band’s model. What had first attracted me to this particular song was Mel Lyman’s wailing, swinging harmonica break, which turns out to be directly based on the Harmaniacs’ intro, though I still think Lyman’s is better.

I wasn’t aware of the Harmaniacs, though a few of their recordings appeared on a jug band reissue LP in 1967, and my first assumption was that they were a white band imitating black groups like the Dixieland Jug Blowers and Memphis Jug Band. At some level, that may indeed be the case, but the tradition went a lot further back among both black and white players, and the Harmaniacs were one of the first bands to get it on record.

According to Dave Samuelson, who interviewed three group members:

Dave noted that they hit right off with “Sadie Green” and went on to record for several labels, while a similar act in this period, Ezra Buzzington’s Rustic Revelers, went on to form the basis of the Hoosier Hot Shots, a very popular novelty band of the 1930s… yet another historical byway to be explored, though not, I think, by me. But I do enjoy playing the song.

From London, Rob and I took the ferry to France, then hitchhiked down the coast to Spain. It was slow going with two young men together, and in Zaragoza we gave up on that tactic and made our separate ways to Málaga — my way started with a driver who made a pass at me, then dumped me in the middle of the desert, where fantasies of dying of thirst were finally ended with a nice ride with a family en route to Madrid, where I spent a couple of days busking in the metro and got enough money to take a night train south.

By the time I reached Málaga I was in love with Spain, so I got a cheap apartment and enrolled in language school. Rob took a detour north, hoping to run away to sea, returned a month later after sundry adventures that belong in his memoir, and we buckled down to learning Spanish and got a job playing every other night in a bar in Torremolinos. It was called Maggie’s Farm, owned by an American biker named Bernie who worked doing underwater demolition in the North Sea during the summer and had used his savings to buy the bar for his English wife, Maggie.

Spain is famously guitar country, and that winter included my first desultory attempts to pick up some classical and flamenco techniques. In later years these would involve learning a couple of pieces by Bach and a couple more by John Renbourn, none of which I remember, and an abortive attempt to trade blues guitar lessons for flamenco lessons, in which I learned just how terrifically skilled even a fairly good flamenco guitarist is, especially compared to me.

That first winter, my attempts centered on a book with some basic flamenco rhythms, directions on how to play a rasgueado, and some simple semi-classical pieces, of which I retain only “Romance.”

I learned this because it was easy, and continued to perform it for the next few years for reasons arising from that fact — as “Spanish Fandango” became ubiquitous in the American South, “Romance” was ubiquitous in much of Europe, because even a novice guitarist could make it sound pretty. In particular, several generations of French teenagers embraced it as their cultural equivalent to “Stairway to Heaven” or “Blackbird” — it was the tune a sensitive, somewhat long-haired boy would play for a small circle of misty-eyed girls. (My wife, a French-American of the right generation, is so sick of this song that she flees the room if I even hint at playing it.)

Like “Spanish Fandango,” this seems to have been composed as a beginner exercise sometime in the 19th century, perhaps by a Spanish guitarist named Antono Rubira. It was first recorded by another Spanish guitarist, Simon Ramírez, on a wax cylinder around 1900, and published and recorded several times over the next few decades.

The Spanish classical guitarist Narciso Yepes somewhat confused this history in the 1950s by saying he had composed “Romance” for his mother in 1934 at age seven — which would be quite believable were it not for the earlier recording and manuscripts. In 1952 Yepes’s recording of the piece was the theme to René Clément’s film Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), which was an international success, hence the name by which it is known in France and generally throughout Northern Europe.

If you want to know more, there is plenty on Wikipedia and elsewhere, because lyrics were composed to it, and it was sung by everyone from Mireille Mathieu to Miriam Makeba to Tom Jones, and played by everyone from Yepes to Eddie Vedder to  Rob, who watched me play it a couple of times, then borrowed my guitar and played the first section back at me, though he didn’t play guitar — like they say, it ain’t brain surgery. (Though, God knows, Yepes played it a lot less clunkily than I do.)

Rob and I finished our summer in Harvard Square with savings of about $700, and Freddie Laker had just started his budget flights to London from New York for $100, so we hitched down, caught a flight, and arrived in London with $500 between us and plans to spend the winter busking in Spain. That plan almost got derailed because the British immigration authorities were convinced the Laker flights were bringing a bunch of American bums eager to get on the British dole, and Rob’s washboard instantly caught their eye… but, as it happened, a distant cousin of his was about to be sworn in as Lord Mayor, and Rob was invited to the ball, so they sent us to a little room and left us for four hours, trying to figure out whether it would be worse to bother the new Lord Mayor with our ridiculous story (assuming we were lying) or to send the Lord Mayor’s cousin back as Yankee riff-raff (if we weren’t), and finally realized they had to call him, so did, and he vouched for us, and we were in.

We caught a train into the city, checked the folk club listings, and headed over to the Cecil Sharpe House, which was having its monthly club night. I don’t remember who the featured act was, or if there even was one, but I do remember that they gave me two songs, and I played “Wild About My Good Cocaine” and “Sporting Life Blues.” The weird thing was, those were two fairly obscure songs, and I certainly hadn’t planned them as sing-alongs, but there was this middle aged man sitting at the edge of the stage who sang along with both of them. It threw me off a bit, but I muddled through as best I could, and a bit later the middle-aged man got up with a fiddle, and turned out to be Tom Paley, of the New Lost City Ramblers…

That was a pleasure, and he had brought a young American fiddler who told me one of my all-time favorite busking stories: He had just arrived in London the previous week, and on the weekend had gone out to find a good street pitch. After trying a few places, he found a busy corner near a market, set out his case, and began to play. It was going well, with passersby throwing coins and some sticking around to listen, and after a while he noticed a bobby standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the road, chatting with someone and apparently enjoying the music. So, when the bobby crossed the street in his direction, he thought nothing of it and continued fiddling. The bobby was furious, told him to stop immediately, and gave him a stern lecture: “When a British policeman approaches you, you stop playing, you put away your instrument, you leave the area, and you do not come back for at least ten minutes.”

None of which has much to do with “Sporting Life Blues,” except that it’s one of the few times I remember playing this on stage. I learned it from Dave Van Ronk, who would record it a couple of years later, and he got it from its composer, Brownie McGhee. McGhee, of course, is best known as half of a long-time duo with Sonny Terry, which is fine as far as it goes, but obscures what a hip musician and songwriter he was. He and Sonny had a solid career as acoustic folk-blues artists, but he also did some great R&B sides, most famously working with his brother Stick McGhee on “Drinking Wine, Spo-dee-o-dee,” but also writing “Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock ‘n’ Roll” and a bunch of other songs, including this one. Dave changed it some, adding new lyrics on the turn-arounds, and it’s his version I still hear in my head, but he always credited it to Brownie, telling a long, funny story that is one more good reason to buy his final recording, …And the Tin Pan Bended, and the Story Ended.

I came up with my own guitar part, mostly because Dave hadn’t yet recorded it, so I learned it from hearing him live and I didn’t have the ears to work out his part from memory.