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.

One of the Yazoo albums I bought during my year in New York was an anthology of bawdy blues called Please Warm My Weiner — the title of a Bo Carter song — which naturally caught my attention as a teenage boy. (I similarly acquired Stash Records’ Copulating Blues anthology, and their LPs of drug songs.) The Yazoo had a cover by R. Crumb that I found (and still find) offensive for all sorts of reasons, but which now apparently gets good prices on Ebay…

Anyway, I only learned one song off that album, and it is significant only because it sparked my first attempt at songwriting. An extremely obscure duo named James Cole and Tommie Bradley had a track called “Adam and Eve,” with some nice rowdy fiddling, the standard 16-bar ragtime blues progression most of us associated with “Alice’s Restaurant,” and the irresistible verse:

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surely must have shook that thing.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surely must have shook that thing.
‘Cause Adam said to Eve, “You think you’re so cute,
But you wouldn’t give me none of your forbidden fruit.”
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surely must have shook that thing.

The problem was that there was only one other verse, and it was pretty nondescript… so, inspired by Dave Van Ronk’s example of writing new verses to old songs when he thought they were needed, I concocted three further variations on the theme and had my own semi-original full-length hokum blues number.

I worked it over till I was satisfied, then proudly sang it for Dave. He listened with his most practiced poker face until I finished and looked up at him, eagerly awaiting his approbation.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, “We used to play things like that.”

Along with being a fine musician, awesomely well-read, and one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, Dave Van Ronk could be supremely silly. His W.C. Fields imitation was legendary and I treasure his recordings of “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawai’i,” Willie Nininger’s “I’m Proud to be a Moose” (which he adopted as a theme song in later years), and this song, which he first recorded with the Hudson Dusters and again on Sunday Street. I also heard him do this time and again at Passim Coffeehouse in Cambridge, because Bob Donlin, the owner, regularly requested it.

Dave’s typical reaction was to murmur, “Of course,” then growl to me, sotto voce: “There’s nothing funnier to a lace-curtain Mick than a Brooklyn accent.” But he always acceded, and laid on an extra dose of Brooklynese.

The song was originally from Bing Crosby, though to this day I’ve never heard his version — in fact, strange as it seems, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone sing it other than Dave. Crosby was one of Dave’s favorite singers, which surprised me the first time he mentioned it because I grew up in a world in which Crosby was regarded as distantly old and hopelessly square. Dave had grown up in an earlier era, and appreciated Crosby’s insouciance as well as his easy swing and smart phrasing — in the mostly forgotten jazz-world version of the Beatles/Stones split in which fans opted for either Crosby or Sinatra, Dave was thoroughly a Crosby man.

I got to be a pretty fair Crosby fan myself, but favored the early stuff with the Rhythm Boys, and then with hot pick-up groups including the Dorsey brothers, Joe Venuti, and Eddie Lang, his regular guitar accompanist and reputedly his closest friend (by some accounts his only close friend). The first side I fell in love with was “My Honey’s Loving Arms” with the Mills Brothers, on which they not only sang, but did a mouth-instrumental break — I’m pretty sure I bought that record at Dayton’s during the year with Dave, just to see what he was so excited about, but it may have been a bit later.

In any case, it’s still Dave’s version of “Swinging on a Star” that’s in my head, and I love it and miss him.

This may well have been the first old pop song I worked out for myself on guitar, and I played it regularly on the street in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard. Indeed, it was Rob who taught me the verse and helped me work out the chords to it, following the melody he recalled — I don’t know where he’d heard it, and in those days before the internet I had no idea how to find sheet music or a recording of the verse, since all the books I found in stores or in the library had only the chorus.

“Darktown Strutters’ Ball” was one of the biggest hits of the teens, published in 1917 and composed by Shelton Brooks, who had hit back in 1909 with “You Ain’t Talking to Me,” followed in 1911 by the wildly popular “Some of These Days,” then “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” and the dance craze hit “Walkin’ the Dog.” Brooks went on to have a fairly successful recording career in the 1920s, starting with “The Darktown Court Room,” but is little remembered today in that context because on records he was primarily a “monologuist” (what we’d now call a comedian) rather than a singer, and his monologues tended to be in exaggerated blackface minstrel dialect — an even more distant affectation than usual for an African American performer, since he was born and grew up in Ontario, Canada. Brooks was also popular as a stage comedian, known for his imitation of Bert Williams, who reputedly saw him perform and commented, “If I’m as funny as that, I got nothing to worry about.” You can get a taste of his style from the one surviving film clip of him in performance, made in 1939, in which he sings a variation on the Strutters’ Ball theme, “Hole in the Wall.”

According to some reports, “Darktown Strutters” was inspired by an annual ball in Chicago that was kind of a modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misrule, financed by wealthy society folk but with a guest list of pimps and prostitutes. On the other hand, Brooks told Ian Whitcomb that he wrote the song after hearing a story about an ordinary working stiff who got “an invitation to an affair to be given by the local pimps. A big ball. All a mistake and he should never have been asked.” As far as I can find, this event was not called the Darktown Strutters’ Ball, but I guess that seemed like a more marketable title than “Pimps and Hookers Ball.”

Howard Armstrong, with whom I played this song for several years in the 1990s, took it back to its roots by following the straight chorus with a truly filthy parody — though he did not tend to perform that version onstage. If you care to check it out, be warned: the language is as raw as can be, an apt reminder of all the folklore of the jazz and blues world that never got recorded due to prudery, and hence the mistaken impression that modern gangsta rappers use nastier language than their great-grandparents used in the 1920s.

I haven’t performed this song in decades because it feels weird — at best — to be a white guy singing about going to the “Darktown” ball… for a while I tried changing the lyric to “Uptown Strutters Ball,” but that felt differently weird, since it’s a well-known song and that’s the title phrase. The odd thing is that in all the years I sang this on the street and sometimes in clubs, no one ever suggested it might be in any way offensive to anybody, or that I might want to think about what I was singing… which just shows how white my audiences have tended to be and what an amazingly sheltered life white people tend to lead in this great land of ours.

I picked up “Sister Kate” from Dave Van Ronk’s album with the Red Onion Jazz Band, and started playing it regularly on the street with Rob Forbes, because his mother, Grace, came by pretty much every week and would sing lead on it. She was from a fine old New England family, with what was known as a “swamp Yankee” accent, and had apparently contemplated running off to be a chanteuse in her youth — I have no idea what she sounded like then, but by 1977 she had many years of cigarettes behind her, and her voice had a soulful rasp that worked perfectly with this one.

The song’s composer of record was Armand Piron, a New Orleans bandleader and violinist who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams, though his authorship has frequently been disputed, in particular by Louis Armstrong. Piron, who apparently copyrighted it in 1919 (though it wasn’t published till 1922), told Al Rose that Louis was kind of partly right, but…

…that’s not Louis’ tune or mine or Pete [Bocage]’s either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company…. The way Louis did it didn’t have anything to do with his sister Kate:

Gotta have ’em before it’s too late,
They shake like jelly on a plate.
Big ‘n’ juicy, soft an’ round
Sweetes’ ones I ever found.

That’s the way Louis sang it, his words… There’s just so many places you could do a number like that. Not in my band, you know.

Though Piron and his band cleaned up the lyric, they kept the sense intact, since the generally accepted derivation of “shimmy” fits Armstrong’s verse pretty well. The etymology isn’t solid, but most authorities derive it from chemise — “shimmy” seems to have been American slang for a lightweight women’s blouse as early as the 1840s — and the dance move was to “shake your shimmy” by vibrating the relevant area as rapidly as possible.

Once again, I’m reminded of the extent to which the history of American vernacular song has been forever obscured by the prudery of publishers, folklorists, and literate amateurs who for various reasons chose not to write down what people actually sang, back in the days when a lot of people were singing in situations that did not require drawing room prose. Armstrong apparently sang the song in honor of a local prostitute, and I find an internet source reporting his original title as “Up in Maddie’s Bunk.” I don’t know the evidence for that (if you do, please let me know), but it doesn’t seem unlikely and would have been very much in the mainstream of what was sung around “the District” in the formative years of jazz. Jelly Roll Morton provided some choice examples in his Library of Congress recordings, but the overwhelming majority of these lyrics survive only in expurgated versions, if at all, leaving us with only a few tantalizing hints and rumors of the originals. Which is, of course, better than nothing…

I heard this one, yet again, from Dave Van Ronk, who got it from Reverend Gary Davis,* but either of us could have learned it from any number of other sources. Indeed, this song became somewhat a bane of my existence in the 1970s, because whenever some musician or musicians who were roughly my age came by with mandolins, guitars, or something of that sort and asked if they could sit in (it happened rarely, but it happened), they were likely to ask if I knew “Hesitation Blues,” and then, inevitably, after maybe following up with “Winin’ Boy,” they’d want to play “Friend of the Devil…”

At that point I’d never heard Hot Tuna (who also got this song from Davis) and was only vaguely aware of the Grateful Dead, but for a lot of kids my age or a few years older, that was the only reference point for anything that sounded like what I played, and I got pretty tired of it — though when I eventually did an opening act gig with Jorma Kaukonen, he sounded great and was very nice to me.

Anyway…

I did a deep dive into the history of  “Hesitation Blues” for my book on the censorship of early Black blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Blues, and suggest that it  was the first twelve-bar blues to be known throughout the country, circulating in print and reworked in oral tradition, mostly in versions that were far too dirty to be printed or recorded. Robert Winslow Gordon and Hubert Canfield both collected multiple versions in the 1920s, and Jelly Roll Morton recalled one for Alan Lomax that he’d apparently heard in New Orleans around the turn of the century. Most versions seem to have included verses in the same basic pattern:

I ain’t no butcher, no butcher’s son,
But I can cut your meat until the butcher comes.

I ain’t no milkman, no milkman’s son,
But I can pull your titties till the milkman comes.

I ain’t no sergeant, no sergeant’s son,
But I can handle your privates till the sergeant comes…

…and so on, as well as such straightforwardly descriptive verses as, from Canfield’s collection:

A fist full of teats, and a mouth full of tongue,
Takes a long peckered daddy to make his baby come.**

As best I can tell, this was normally a group song, the point being to keep adding and improvising verses until everyone ran out of ideas or got bored. Like a lot of dirty blues that were popular in oral tradition, it was cleaned up and published when blues caught on in the teens, with competing sheet music versions appearing in 1915 by W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues,” and the white team of Scott Middleton and Billy Smythe. It seems to have first been recorded in 1919 by Al Bernard, a white singer who had a close relationship with Handy, and then by various singers, both black and white, through the twenties and beyond, surviving as a rural standard.

Between the published and oral/dirty versions, it seems to be one of the songs, like “Frankie and Johnny,” that was known everywhere from juke joints to college dorms in the days before Prohibition curtailed the tradition of men gathering to drink and sing in public places where women were not permitted (or where the only women were working), and hence tended to revel in this kind of thing. (This practice survived, of course, in some enduringly all-male environments, and many dirty songs in turn-of-the-twentieth-century folklore collections are still sung as “rugby songs” — though not, as far as I know, this one.) (One neat twist being that, with the appearance of female rugby players, such songs are now also sung in some all-female environments. For all I know, they always were, but no folklorists happened to be present.)

* As Dave Van Ronk explained, Reverend Davis refused to sing songs like this in later years, regarding them as sinful, but would sometimes get around that by playing the melody while speaking the verses. In a particularly extended recording, he goes on for over ten minutes, including plenty of “Ain’t no _____, no ______’s son” variations.

** Mark Ross recalls hearing Van Ronk sing a similarly explicit verse to “Hesitation” during a guest set at the Gaslight Cafe in the late 1960s:
Pussy ain’t nothing but meat on a bone,
You can fuck it, you can suck it, you can leave it alone.
And to demonstrate the continuity of the folk process, that same couplet took a victory lap in 1990 as a chant ending 2 Live Crew’s “Face Down, Ass Up.” (Which they followed with a gender twist, asking the “ladies” to chant along with “A dick ain’t nothing but…”

A bit of Newyorkiana from Dave Van Ronk’s second album and the nimble pen of his friend Lawrence Block. Now well known as a mystery/thriller/private eye writer, Block was then churning out naughty novels at a terrific pace under numerous pseudonyms, many of them set in the Greenwich Village Bohemian milieu he and Dave knew so well… for example the slender volume at right, written as Sheldon Lord, with its tempting tagline: “Anita was a virgin — till the hipsters got hold of her!”

Block first visited in the Village in 1956, and soon became a lifelong resident. He met Dave in Washington Square Park, where folk musicians congregated on Sunday afternoons, and, as he wrote in the introduction to The Mayor of MacDougal Street:

This was… before the folk music renaissance, and before the curious synthesis of drugs and politics made college kids a breed apart. The great majority of collegians were still gray-flannel members of the Silent Generation, ready to sign on for a corporate job with a good pension plan. Those of us who didn’t fit that mold, those of us who’d always sort of figured there was something wrong with us, sat around the fountain in Washington Square singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and feeling very proud of ourselves for being there.

One of the ways folk/bohemians amused themselves in those days was writing parodies of familiar songs — also a common pastime in the jazz world, where pretty much everyone knew dirty lyrics to pretty much every pop hit. Block and Van Ronk, along with Lee Hoffman and Roy Berkeley, wrote a bunch of anarchist/Trostkyist parodies of folk songs making fun of the Communist folk crowd, called The Bosses Songbook, and Block also composed this urban train wreck ballad.

The model was “Engine 143,” which had  been recorded by the Carter Family in 1927 and reissued on Harry Smith’s influential six-LP anthology, American Folk Music. You don’t have to know that to enjoy this song, but Block kept enough details from the original to make his lyric particularly amusing for the hardcore folk crowd, from the first line (“Along came the FFV, the swiftest on the line”) to the last (“And the very last words poor Georgie said was ‘Nearer My God, to Thee'”). The original song was a true story about a train wreck in 1890 and the death of the engineer, George Alley.

I recently ran into Larry at a tribute concert for Dave’s 80th birthday, and he was kind enough to provide a bit more background:

As a new New Yorker, I found the subway fascinating, and I’d heard “Engine 143,” which I believe David had called one of the few authentic pieces of scab folk music. I don’t know what suggested the parody to me, perhaps the thronged platform at the Times Square Station one evening…. I know I found decapitation amusing, though I’d be hard put to tell you why. Here’s a blog post I ran back in September, in which I say a little about the song and reference another song I heard David sing several times.

I learned this off Dave’s album, and one night on the street in Harvard Square, someone asked if I could sing a song about New York, and I sang them this. I don’t remember their reaction, but when I told Dave about it, he was horrified.

Growing up where I grew up, when I grew up, I had no understanding or appreciation for country and western music. That may seem strange to a lot of younger music fans, who think of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard as “Americana,” along with the Carter Family, and bluegrass, and blues, and Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty and Los Lobos and heaven knows what else. But in the 1960s and into the 1970s, a lot of folk and blues fans had minimal appreciation for anything coming out of Nashville.

In part, that was a matter of politics. Our news of the South was of the civil rights movement and, by and large, the country audience was not on our side. Obviously that was an oversimplification — there were white southerners who supported civil rights, and black southerners who liked country music, and people on the folk scene who were more broadminded, or less political: the Newport Folk Festival invited Cash in 1964, and shortly had Dave Dudley, Roy Acuff, and George Hamilton IV. But to take an example close to home, Dave Van Ronk drew a sharp distinction between black rural southern music and groups like Gid Tanner and the Skillet Likkers — I remember him growling, “That’s the soundtrack to the lynch mobs, and I want nothing to do with it.” (That wasn’t just Dave’s northern urban prejudice; there’s a notable photograph of Fiddlin’ John Carson and other participants at a 1925 Tennessee fiddlers convention sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan.)

Aside from politics, there were musical issues. For people who didn’t like electric instruments, there was the electric guitar and pedal steel, and by the time I was hearing country there were also string sections, and choirs, and basically it sounded to me like pop-schlock.

So I don’t remember how or why I ended up with an album called 18 King Size Country Hits — my guess is that it was in a cut-out bin at a price so low I couldn’t pass it up — nor do I remember listening to it more than once or twice, though in retrospect it has some great tracks, all from Cincinnati’s King record label. But a lot of people on the folk scene had one or two country songs that we learned as jokes, because we thought they were so bad they were funny (Van Ronk’s was “Hit Parade of Love”), and I found one on that album: Hawkshaw Hawkins singing “Lonesome 7-7203.”

Again, some younger folks may not understand that title, since it’s been a while since we had telephone exchanges. When I was growing up, the dial of a rotary telephone still started with the exchange, a word whose first two letters were part of the number: BEechwood 4-5789 (a hit for the Marvelettes), TIdewater 4-1009 (the number Chuck Berry asks to speak with in “Promised Land”), UNiversity 8-7748 (my parents’ number), or, in the case of Hawkshaw Hawkins’s number one country hit from 1963, the evocative LOnesome 7-7203.

So anyway, I learned that song and played it on the street, as a joke, singing in my most comically doleful tones. And then the MBTA started giving out permits for musicians to perform in particular subway stations on particular days during morning rush hour, and Rob and I snagged a few mornings at the Harvard Square station, and we were playing down there at maybe 6:30 a.m. on a workday, and a guy came by and asked if I could do any country music… so I sang this one, and he not only took it seriously, he appreciated me singing it for him, and gave us a dollar (which was a good tip in those days), and reminisced for a while about growing up on a farm down south and how much he missed that kind of music in Boston.

It was not exactly a revelation, but it was an important lesson for me. I had to learn that lesson a few more times before it really sank in and I developed a serious repertoire of country hits, and recognized the fact that a lot of the musicians I loved, like Woody Guthrie, were closer to country singers than to folk singers (whatever that means) in a lot of ways — one of which was that they learned the current hits because that was what regular working folks tended to want to hear: when Woody and Pete Seeger hitched out west in the late 1930s, Pete remembered Woody teaching him “It Makes No Difference Now,” the current jukebox favorite, so he’d have something to play in bars. And I won’t claim “Lonesome 7-7203” remained a very active part of my repertoire, but every once in a while I’d pull it out in a crowd of older country fans and they’d get nostalgic, remembering where they were and what they were doing back in 1963, when music was still good.

(To wrap this up, the song was written by Justin Tubb, son of Ernest, and was a huge posthumous hit for Hawkins, who died in the plane crash that also killed Cowboy Copas and Patsy Cline.)