Among the records I assembled during my year in New York, combing the second-hand bins at Dayton’s, were all five volumes of Bessie Smith’s complete recordings, with their comprehensive notes by Chris Albertson. That set was an oddity of the LP era: the records were issued with the notion that they could be stacked and played in order, all ten of them, so volume one had Smith’s first and last recordings, and the subsequent albums narrowed to volume five, which was the only one to include four sides of music from a single period…

I listened to all those records at least once, but my guess is there were some sides I heard only that once. I knew how important Smith was, and in particular what a major influence she was for Dave Van Ronk, who had come to blues from trad jazz, so I wanted to immerse myself in her work. But, for one thing, I was a teenage boy with a guitar, and had come from Woody Guthrie rather than Louis Armstrong, so I was more inclined to the rural blues guitar guys. And, for another, the completeness of those records did not serve her well, particularly in the early period, where she tended to just be accompanied by piano and the songs tended to be straight twelve-bar blues, one merging into the next, all slow, majestic, and somber. Some had great lyrics, but after a while I just tuned out.

So call me a lightweight, but my favorite Bessie Smith sides were the ones that mixed blues inflections with more vaudevillian or ragtime pop settings. Of course, Dave had already turned me on to “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon,” and I loved “Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle,” and then there was this gory little confection. It was a great recording, with Fletcher Henderson on piano, Charlie Green on trombone, and Joe Smith on cornet — much as jazz fans love Louis Armstrong’s accompaniments, Bessie Smith herself apparently considered Joe Smith a more sensitive sideman, and she sounds terrific in this company.

The composer credit on this song was to George Brooks, apparently a pseudonym for Henderson, but I’m dubious — the lyric is pretty ornate for someone who was not generally known as a lyricist, and I’m guessing Henderson hired someone else to do those  duties. Since another song at the same session was “Them’s Graveyard Words” and six months later Smith recorded another Brooks song called “Dyin’ By the Hour,” it seems to have been a pretty doom-laden period for whatever lyricist was involved.

I have been singing this now for forty years, and keep going back and forth on the gender pronouns. Dave tended to sing Smith’s songs from the point of view of a woman, as they were written, and Mississippi John Hurt did the same when he did songs learned from blues queens, so at first I did that. Then I switched and began singing it from a male point of view, because it’s in the first person and that suited me as a protagonist… and then I switched back, because I decided I’d rather not be the protagonist of this particular story and was happier presenting it as a story about a woman striking back against a man, regretful though she might be afterwards.

I got this from Dave Van Ronk, who presumably got it from Clara Smith’s, Alberta Hunter’s, or Margaret Johnson’s recordings — he sings a somewhat different lyric, but that may just be a quirk of memory or he may have decided to do some rewriting, which he often did when he found an old song he liked. I have to say, though, now that I’m going back and listening to their versions, I’m a bit startled that he would have softened their final verse, which goes:

I even hate to hear your name this morning,
I even hate to hear your name this morning,
I even hate to hear your name,
I could kill you quicker than an express train.
Nobody knows the way I feel this morning.

Be that as it may, it’s a good song, and a great guitar arrangement. Dave recorded it on his Sunday Street LP, so it was fresh when he taught it to me, and he was particularly happy with the way it adapted techniques he had honed in his ragtime arrangements to frame and support the singing.

Of the many things I owe Dave, one that has endured was his fondness and appreciation for the work of the early blues queens. Most of the blues revivalists of his generation — or at least the white, male, guitar-playing blues revivalists — shied away from the blues queens as too formal, or too jazzy, or not rootsy enough, or maybe just too female. But Dave loved their singing, and the piano or small combo arrangements that framed their singing, and he also had a keen appreciation of professional songwriters — he thought the folk scene’s tendency to praise products of the oral tradition over the products of people like Cole Porter and Duke Ellington was basically a middle class affectation — he liked to use the French term, nostalgie de la boue, a yearning for the mud. Dave thought of himself as a professional musician and liked the company of professional musicians, and he took particular took pride in having known Clarence Williams, who had organized the Hunter, Smith, and Johnson recording sessions.

Dave also tended to credit Williams with writing this song, but it was actually by a prolific blues songwriter and pianist from Charleston named Tom Delaney, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the confusion dated back to Dave’s time hanging out with Williams, who was notorious for making a buck of other people’s material — he credited Delaney on the records he produced, but the fact that he used this song with multiple artists suggests he probably owned the publishing, and maybe a cut of the composer royalties as well. In any case, it’s a nice example of the sort of song Dave loved and that I probably wouldn’t know if he hadn’t done it… though it was way more popular than the country blues songs I favored, and when I started playing on the street with my friend Rob Forbes in the summer of 1977, this was one his mother always requested because she had performed it as a band vocalist in the 1940s.

In his notes to this song, Dave Van Ronk wrote, “Jelly Roll Morton, certainly the greatest jazz composer before Ellington and a singer of incredible subtlety claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. There is little point in argument.”

This was one of Morton’s most subtle efforts, and one of Dave’s. Dave stripped the spare piano accompaniment down to an even sparer guitar arrangement, and sang it simply and directly, just telling the story.

On his recording, Morton recalled, “This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life. Mamie Desdunes, this was her favorite blues. She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number.”

Desdunes (sometimes written Desdoumes) was a well-known singer and pianist in “the District,” as Black New Orleanians called the area now generally remembered as “Storyville,” and the Black saloons and honky tonks further uptown. Bunk Johnson recalled playing numerous dates with her and told Alan Lomax: “She was pretty good looking — quite fair and with a nice head of hair. She was a hustling woman. A blues-singing poor girl. Used to play pretty passable piano around them dance halls on Perdido Street. When Hattie Rogers or Lulu White would put it out that Mamie was going to be singing at her place, the white men would turn out in bunches and them whores would clean up.”

I wrote a good deal more about this song, and what little more is known about Desdunes, in my book Jelly Roll Blues. Morton remembered that she was missing a couple of fingers on her right hand, and I found a newspaper clipping that told how her hand was crushed in a trolley accident. I also turned up a bunch of songs with overlapping verses, especially about the hard life of streetwalkers, but never managed to sort out the train schedules…

The song title is often given as “2:19 Blues,” as if the number was for a train time, but Charles Edward Smith recalled Morton explaining that the 219 was the train that “took the gals out on the T&P [Texas and Pacific railroad] to the sporting houses on the Texas side of the circuit… [and] the 217 on the S.P. [Southern Pacific] through San Antonio and Houston brought them back to New Orleans.” I can find no confirmation that those numbers matched trains on that route, and another scholar has the same trains running between New Orleans and Chicago — so I’m dubious, especially since the matched numbers would make more sense for trains going back and forth on the same line, but Morton assigned them to different lines.

My guess is Morton was improvising an explanation to match the lyric, and very likely shifting the location: there was a 219 train that ran from Memphis to Little Rock, with the 220 returning, and this couplet may well be from Memphis, another strong blues town. On the other hand, another famous blues lyric that mentions the 219 is “Trouble In Mind” (“Gonna lay my head on that lonesome railroad line/ Let the 219 ease my trouble in mind”), by Richard M. Jones, who was also from New Orleans.

In any case, this was one of a half-dozen songs I got from Morton via Van Ronk, and I’ve elsewhere posted about “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “Winding Ball” (a.k.a. “Winin’ Boy”), “Michigan Water,” “Sweet Substitute,” and “The Pearls.”

Dave Van Ronk had numerous musical heroes,  but Jelly Roll Morton was number one. Over the years, I got used to the idea that if I stayed late enough at his place we would likely end up listening to Morton records (often back to back with Phillipe Koutev’s Bulgarian ensemble), and it was an addiction I was happy to share. We often listened to the Red Hot Peppers recordings — by some standards the first examples of jazz that was both carefully arranged and brilliantly swinging — but in terms of Dave’s repertoire the most significant Morton record was an album recorded in 1939 as a commercial follow-up to his Library of Congress sessions, featuring Morton alone at the piano and titled New Orleans Memories. It was reissued on LP in the 1950s with one side of instrumentals and one of Morton singing. There were five songs on the latter side, all of which Dave played, and eventually I learned them as well, in roughly equal parts from Dave and Morton.

“Buddy Bolden’s Blues” was a descriptive title for a song Morton credited to Bolden, who led one of the defining New Orleans jazz bands at the turn of the twentieth century.  As he explained at the Library:

This is, no doubt, is the earliest blues that was the real thing. That is a variation from the real barrelhouse blues. The composer was Buddy Bolden, the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard or ever was known. The name of this was named by some old hunky-tunk people. While he played this, they sang a little theme to it.

That theme, “funky butt, funky butt, take it away,” has often been glossed by jazz historians as a reference to farting, possibly because the historians were more comfortable with pre-adolescent naughtiness than with adult sexuality. Bolden was famous for the audience of prostitutes who patronized his dances, and everyone in that world seems to have associated the “funk” in his lyrics with the strong smell of female bodies after a long night’s work. In my book, Jelly Roll Blues, I quote a brilliantly imagined recreation of Bolden’s performances from the New Orleans musician and historian Danny Barker:

Lots of folks would faint and pass out from the heat and the strong body odor, ‘cause there wasn’t many colored people who had bath tubs in those days. In fact, very few white folks owned one. Lots of times when the crowd would be jammed in front of Bolden he would stop blowing, take his hat and fan the air in front of him and holler loud:
“MY CHILLUN’S HERE. I KNOW IT ‘CAUSE I CAN SMELL ‘EM.”
That used to tickle the crowd, and everybody would clap, scream, laugh and holler. I’m tellin’ you, when that odor used to rise it smelled like burnt onions and train smoke…

Zora Neale Hurston recorded a variant of this song in Florida, with a verse that made that theme explicit:

I’m so glad the law is passed,
The women in Tampa got to wash they ass.

This was a key song in Dave’s history, because it was a standard part of his repertoire in the late 1950s (though the only recording was unissued until the Mayor of MacDougal Street CD), and he expanded it in the early 1960s into a guitar transcription of the classic ragtime composition, “St. Louis Tickle” — the first full transcription of a piano rag to guitar, which inspired generations of ragtime guitarists. Morton always insisted that the main strain of “St. Louis Tickle” was stolen from Bolden, and I’m guessing it was this connection that led Dave to work out the rest of the composition, first as a solo piece, and then in an string band arrangement for his Ragtime Jug Stompers. He would go on to arrange several other piano rags, including Morton’s masterpiece, “The Pearls” — which I’ve covered in another post, along with numerous Morton pieces I picked up from Dave: “Mamie’s Blues,” “Winding Ball” (a.k.a. “Winin’ Boy”), “Michigan Water,” and “Sweet Substitute.”

I arrived on Dave Van Ronk’s doorstep just as he reached the high-water mark of his interest in ragtime guitar, so I emerged from my year of study with “St. Louis Tickle,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” “The Entertainer” (which was so overdone that I quickly forgot it), and Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Pearls.” (I don’t think Dave had yet composed his own contribution to the genre, “Antelope Rag,” but it followed in the next couple of years.)

“The Pearls” may have been my favorite — though audiences never got as excited about it as they did about “Maple Leaf,” so I played it a good deal less. I was not familiar with Morton’s piano version at the time, so Dave’s guitar arrangement was the first way I heard it, and it was so damn pretty, with neat chords and interesting harmonies. Morton was Dave’s favorite composer and one of his favorite musicians, alongside Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Dave would later say he worked out these piano rags as research projects to improve his understanding of the guitar, and that was certainly part of it, but there was also some pride involved. He was trying to get off the road and make his living from teaching, and he wanted to feel like he was the kind of guitarist an ambitious young student might want to study with, even in the musical mecca of Manhattan — and, damn it, he was the acknowledged pioneer of classic ragtime guitar and wanted to justify his reputation.

That had gotten a lot harder by the mid-1970s, because like many pioneers he had inspired a wave of followers who didn’t have to labor under his handicaps — starting with his own lack of predecessors, but also a clumsy right hand that kept tripping him up, since he was a natural lefty. Dave Laibman and Eric Schoenberg had credited him on their debut LP, which was the first full album of ragtime guitar instrumentals, but soon a bunch of players came along who were only marginally aware of his contribution. He was particularly taken with the Dutch guitarist Ton Van Bergeyk, and also Leo Wijnkamp, and then I introduced him to Guy Van Duser’s work, which led him to begin musing about the unique affinity Dutch and Dutch-American guitarists seemed to have for ragtime… until his lady, Joanne, broke in to point out that he had about as much Dutch ancestry as he had Cherokee.

I later got to know Leo, met Ton a couple of times, and took one lesson from Guy, but I continue to particularly like Dave’s arrangements, because they both feel and sound like something a guitarist would naturally play. Most classic ragtime guitar arrangements sound to me like attempts to play piano compositions on an instrument that has too few strings — like Dr. Johnson’s hind-leg-walking dog, one is impressed that it can be done at all, not because the results sound particularly pretty. Dave’s arrangements always sounded pretty — and when I finally heard Morton’s piano recording, I was struck by how much of it he had managed to translate into guitar language, and reasonably simple guitar language at that.

Dave Van Ronk always took pride in the fact that, having started on the folk scene as part of the traditionalist wing (which he dubbed the “neo-ethnics”), he became at least equally known for his interpretations of material by the new wave of songwriters who emerged in the 1960s. For a while in the latter half of that decade he had some major label money behind him, and hopes that he might get a hit that would break him beyond the bar and coffeehouse circuit and make life a little easier (for more on this, check out my post on “The Gambler“). His likeliest brass rings were the songs being written by friends like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, or maybe his interpretations of Bertolt Brecht, or Jacques Brel, or Randy Newman, or… Peter Stampfel.

Dave was an early and avid supporter of Mitchell, but it is rarely noted that the album on which he first recorded one of her songs also had a Stampfel song, and his most solidly singer-songwriter album of the 1960s had  two Stampfel songs. He considered Peter a genius — the specific quote was “He is undoubtedly some kind of genius, though so far no one has determined what kind” — and although this rococo Roy-Rogers-on-mescaline cowboy song was the only item of Stampfeliana that remained in his repertoire in later years, that was because the others required more accompaniment than his guitar — for example, the avant-garde art-rock cacophony of “Romping Through the Swamp” (the link is to a live recording with the Hudson Dusters, even weirder than the LP version).

Dave kept singing “Random Canyon” throughout his career, often as a concert closer — the obvious place for it, since it rose to a raucous, howling finale, ending with a shouted, sustained note that was so perfectly, magnificently, painfully off-pitch that it was a work of art and invariably left the crowd pleading for an encore.

The only time I heard Dave sing this near the beginning of a set, it was a disaster and one of the greatest shows I ever heard him do: as he hit that final note, he broke the D string on his guitar, and he didn’t have a spare. The stores were closed, the opening act had gone home, so he had no choice but to do the rest of the concert a cappella. He sang blues, he sang Brecht, he sang street songs from his Brooklyn childhood… it was one of the most varied and fascinating performances I’ve ever seen.

As for me, I learned “Random Canyon” because how could anyone hear this lyric and not want to learn it?

It is to  ordinary cowboy songs what Antoni Gaudí’s Cathedral of la Sagrada Familia is to a clapboard country church.

That year of 1976-77 was a hard time in Dave Van Ronk’s life. The sixties were over and he’d had some good times but hadn’t caught the brass ring. He’d done a half-dozen albums for major labels — two for Mercury, two for Verve, one for Polydor, one for Cadet — all putting decent money behind him and hoping for at least a modest hit, but the last of those had been in 1973 and now he was with Philo, a small Vermont folk label, and although he was proud of the music he was making, it was clear he wasn’t going to get out of his one-bedroom apartment with its windows on an airshaft, and not entirely clear how he’d manage the rent on that.

He was also overweight and drinking a lot of whiskey, and by the second bottle he had a tendency to get depressed and angry. As I recall, it was in one of those moods that he first played me Don Schlitz’s demo cassette of “The Gambler.” He’d heard the song, picked it for a hit, and asked for a recording hold on it — the right to do the first record of it, or at least the first single. But he hadn’t been able to get anyone interested. Philo didn’t do singles, and the majors had written him off as a has-been or almost-was.

Honestly, I couldn’t blame them: it wasn’t the kind of song I associated with Dave and I forgot about it until he reminded me a couple of years later, after Kenny Rogers sold a gazillion records with it.

It still wasn’t the kind of song I associated with Dave, but that was about me, not him. I preferred him with just a guitar and wasn’t wild about his more ambitiously orchestrated recordings, and a lot of his other fans agreed with me, and that was why I was still coming around and he was stuck in that tiny apartment.

Herewith I must interject a story that includes some raw language:

One of the first times I met Dave, he was playing at Passim Coffeehouse, and during the break a reporter from the BBC asked for an interview. We went to the quiet bar at the nearby Chinese restaurant, and everything was going fine until the reporter said, “Dave, one thing I’ve always admired about you is that you never sold out.”

There was a long pause, and then Dave leaned into the mike and growled, “Listen: I’ve been standing on 42nd Street for twenty years, bent over with my pants around my ankles… it’s just that nobody’s fucked me.”

He knew how the business worked, and was sure with the right song and the right production and the right promotion from the right record company he could get a hit — and it hadn’t happened. He’d tried forming a rock band; he’d tried recording with strings. He had ideas about what he did best and what music he preferred, but also saw himself as a craftsman and a professional who could have more than held his own with Kenny Rogers.

Maybe he was right and if all the pieces had come together, “The Gambler” could have done it for him. He certainly had the requisite world-weariness, and was a good actor and terrific storyteller, and I can imagine his gruff whisper being perfect for this role.

The reasonably happy ending to that story is that he eventually pulled himself together, lost the weight, switched to wine, got some European and Japanese tours, managed to keep paying the rent, made a lot of fine music, lived another 25 years, and hosted many more long evenings of great conversation with good friends. He never got a hit, never got out of that apartment, but he settled into being the eminence grise of the Village folk scene and made the best of it. Like the man said: “Every hand’s a winner, just like every hand’s a loser.”

Dave Van Ronk took pride in the fact that he recognized Bob Dylan’s talent early, back when a lot of people thought Bobby was just a weird kid with too much nervous energy and a scratchy voice. Dave and his wife Terri Thal were major boosters for the kid, mentoring him, finding him jobs, and teaching him songs.

Dave also recorded a handful of Dylan songs: this one, a jazz band romp called “If I Had to Do It All Over Again (I’d Do It All Over You),” which I’ll get around to at some point, Dylan’s version of “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and, much later, a nice version of “Buckets of Rain.” He might have recorded more, but Dylan took off like a skyrocket and Dave had no interest in tagging along, so he stuck to older material for a while, then began singing the work of less-known newcomers like Niela Horn (a.k.a. Niela Miller) and Joni Mitchell, and even writing a few himself.

This was an exception, because Dylan hadn’t recorded it and it was so simple, and such a New York story. I’m pretty sure Dave was the first person to record it, on his No Dirty Names LP in 1966, but Dylan had written it about five years earlier during his first spate of songwriting. The melody was from a song called “The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn,” which I’m assuming Dylan, like everyone else, got from Pete Seeger, who recorded it in the mid-1950s on an album of frontier ballads.

The original began:

I’ll sing you a song, it’s not very long,
About a young man who wouldn’t hoe corn.
Strange to say, I cannot tell,
This young man was always well.

Dylan took the pattern of that verse, changed the age of the man, and turned it into a stark parable of modern city life — a small, perfectly-observed vignette with a touch of brilliance that Dave often noted: “bully club,” rather than “billy club.”

I don’t want to go on, since the song itself is so concise, but… I’d add that Seeger was a very important source for Dylan, as for virtually everyone else in the folk revival, and some later scholars have tended to erase that influence by tracing Dylan songs to more obscure sources, in particular the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. The Smith anthology was an important source for a lot of people on that scene, but nowhere near as important as Seeger — I’d guess even the New Lost City Ramblers, if you’d locked them in a room and forced them to sing everything they knew, learned more songs from Pete than from any other single source. (If you want to know more of what I think about Dylan and Seeger, there’s plenty in Dylan Goes Electric!)

This was one of the first songs I ever heard from Dave Van Ronk, and remained a staple of his repertoire throughout his career. When he recorded it in 1963 he credited it to Bob Dylan, but in later years would say, “I learned this from Bob Dylan, who learned it from Eric Von Schmidt… who learned it from me.”

That was a good line, but not appreciated by Eric, who was indeed Dylan’s source and took pride in having adapted the song from a record in the Library of Congress. Eric recorded his version on his first album, a duet LP with Rolf Cahn for the Folkways label that has not been treated well by history but was a seminal source for the folk-blues revivalists of the early 1960s. His source was a singer and guitarist named Smith Casey or Smith Cason, or possibly Smith Carson, who was recorded by John Lomax for the Library in 1939 at the Clemens State Prison Farm in Brazoria, Texas. In the LOC files it was titled “Shorty George,” and it is clearly related to the Texas prison song of the same name that was recorded by Lead Belly and James “Iron Head” Baker, but distinctive enough to justify Eric’s treating it as a different song and renaming it.

Eric made some changes in the song, but his version was still pretty close to Casey/Carson’s recording. Dylan’s version was substantially different — the people who accuse Dylan of copying or stealing songs and melodies from traditional sources aren’t exactly wrong, but should add that he frequently improved on his sources, and this is a case in point.

Dave picked it up from Dylan and didn’t change it much, but as was his wont he created a distinctive guitar arrangement that turned a fairly generic blues lament into something great and enduring. Play his version back to back with Dylan’s, and the only difference is that Dylan’s is one of the many good but ultimately forgettable folk-blues songs he was singing in 1961-62, while Dave’s is a masterpiece.

I’m not sure what the moral of that story is, or even if it has one. But if you ask me where I got this song, I’ll say Dave Van Ronk, and that isn’t the whole story but it’s as good an answer as any and better than most.

To continue that story… Phil Ochs asked Dave to sing this at the tribute concert he organized for Victor Jara, after which Dave began introducing it with the story of Jara’s heroic last hours in the Santiago soccer stadium;  a year or so later, Phil was dead and for a few years Dave sang it for him; then, with more years, Dave would introduce it with memories of Mississippi John Hurt, Gary Davis, and all his other old friends and mentors who were gone; and now Dave’s gone, and I sing it for him, and for Eric.

A quirk of the blues reissue situation was that, as a record buyer, I ended up following the lead of the folks who managed the reissue projects, which were very different from the tastes of black record buyers in the twenties and thirties, and also from what I would have heard if I had just followed my own inclinations. For example, I ended up with three Bo Carter albums, though I was never a huge fan of his music. I liked his playing and singing, and some of his songs, but he was the master of double-entendre  novelty blues lyrics, which got tiresome after a while. All things being equal, I would have been more likely to gravitate toward Walter Davis or Roosevelt Sykes… but all things weren’t equal: he was a guitarist and they were pianists, and the reissue market was very guitar-centric.

So I ended up with several albums of his recordings, and listened to them, and found a couple of songs and some guitar parts I liked, and this was one of them (another was “Let’s Get Drunk Again“). I gather from friends who know more about his work that he played it in a semi-open tuning, with his lowest strings tuned down to D and G, but I worked it out the way it sounded to me, and ended up in normal tuning, key of D…

… and, honestly, I don’t have more to say about this one. It’s just a song I liked, and learned, and remember. But I should add that Carter was born Bo Chatmon, brother of Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, with whom he played in the Mississippi Sheiks, the most popular Mississippi-based recording artists of the first rural blues boom. He also played very effective vaudeville violin on a record by an older singer named Alec Johnson called “The Mysterious Coon,” which has typically offensive minstrel-show lyrics, but is a fascinating example of what some of these guys could play when they weren’t being paid to record blues.