After I discovered Larry Johnson’s Fast and Funky LP, I happened to be back at the Cambridge Public Library and came across a record that must have been there during my high school residency, but which I’d never noticed. It was on the Prestige label, and the artists were billed as Larry and Hank, and the Larry was Larry Johnson – so I instantly checked it out, brought it home, and listened.

It wasn’t Fast and Funky, but I was prepared for that, because the notes to that album said Johnson had been playing for years without really finding his style, then broke his hand in an accident and had to relearn everything, at which point he decided to follow Gary Davis’s advice and learn the “hard chords.” Presumably the Larry and Hank record was from before the accident, and the playing was a lot simpler, and honestly I don’t remember a great deal about it, though I taped it on cassette and listened to it quite a few times.

The main thing I got from it was this song, which I’ve never come across anywhere else. The LP notes, by Sam Charters, describe it as a variation on a work song, and the lyrics fit that description, but the melody is more in a ragtime vein, and I’m guessing this was a Johnson original. I haven’t heard it in at least thirty years, and may have forgotten a verse or so, but I always loved the way it flowed, and I’m pretty sure they played it in E, because otherwise I can’t imagine why I would have at that point — which would make this a pretty significant record in my education, since playing ragtime progressions in E and A fundamentally changed my thinking about the guitar.

Before getting to the history and meaning of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a bit of personal background: in 1976-77 I was living in New York, devoting virtually all my record buying to prewar blues reissues, but the same collection that had filled Dayton’s with all the Yazoo reissues also included LPs on Yazoo’s sister label, Blue Goose, which featured modern recordings in prewar blues and ragtime styles. Following my generally archaeological inclinations, I didn’t get around to those until I’d laid in a stock of prewar stuff, and the first Blue Goose albums I bought were of Son House and an elderly black guitarist named Bill Williams, but eventually I got around to the label’s one young black player, Larry Johnson, and what still stands as the greatest ragtime blues album recorded in the modern era — or ever, since before the modern era there were no albums — Fast and Funky.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but Johnson was such a great player — he had been a student and sometimes harmonica player for the Reverend Gary Davis — and a fine singer, and created songs that were clearly based on older models but completely in his own voice… and he just blew me away.

I didn’t learn much off that album, because I was so dazzled that I didn’t make the attempt, but for a while I played rough versions of his “Frisco Town” and “The Beat From Rampart Street,” and his version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” became an enduring staple of my repertoire — I later heard older recordings of the song by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas and by Luke Jordan, who I’m pretty sure was their source as well as Johnson’s, and I’ve added some lyrics from Jordan, but it’s still Johnson’s voice I hear in my head when I think of it.

As for the song itself, there seems to be a good deal of confusion and disagreement about what it means. The original ad for Jordan’s version in the Chicago Defender suggests it’s about gambling, and he certainly refers to “gambling for Sadie,” but then there’s the recurring refrain about “I’ll be satisfied having your family” and the verse that is mistranscribed in that ad, which is an obvious example of the dozens, the Black tradition of verbal battling that often involved insults directed at mothers and other female relatives:

If you have that gal of mine, I’m gonna have your ma
Your sister, too; your auntie, three
If your great-grandmammy do the shiveree, I’m gonna have her four…”

In my book about The Dozens, now titled Talking ‘Bout Your Mama, I note this theme and suggest that the reference to picking poor robin clean may be similar to the French “Alouette,” which uses the metaphor of picking feathers from a bird as a stand-in for disrobing a woman… but that’s just a guess.

In any case, thanks again to Larry Johnson, whom I have seen off and on over the years, and who always blew me away with the brilliance, depth, and power of his music. I also had the pleasure of doing an interview with him in 1998, and he was bitingly eloquent on a number of subjects, including the racial problems of the modern blues scene. I had not run across him in quite a while, and recently learned that he died in August 2016 — I wish I’d seen him more often, wish he’d recorded more, and wish he was better known; he was truly one of the greats.

Like most people in the 1960s and ’70s, I first heard this on Dave Van Ronk’s second Folkways album and figured he’d picked it up somewhere in the blues world, but during my year of lessons with Dave he steered me to his actual source: the Bahamian Blind Blake and his band from the Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau. It is obviously related to a song recorded in the late 1920s by James “Stump” Johnson, Tampa Red, and others as “The Duck’s Yas Yas,” and that discographic primacy has led a lot of scholars to describe Blake’s song as a variant of Tampa Red’s. However, Blake’s lyric shares only the opening verse of the Red/Johnson version, and since his repertoire is full of turn-of-the-century minstrel survivals like “My Name is Morgan, But It Ain’t J.P.” and “Watermelon Spoilin’ on the Vine” (as well as the sole surviving version of a bloodthirsty minstrel masterpiece, “Jones, Oh Jones“), I would guess this is in fact an earlier version, from which Johnson, Tampa and others remembered only the first verse.

There is strong internal evidence for that guess, since all Blake’s verses are neat comic creations tailored to the “Yas, Yas, Yas” theme and rhyme, while the Johnson/Tampa version mostly consists of generic, unrelated verses after the opening. If that’s right, the latecomers seem to have vaguely remembered it, since a couple of those verses include phrases from the Blake verses — for example, a reference to the “gasoline station” from the John Dillinger verse.

The relationship of early recordings, oral traditions, and printed compositions is complicated and — to some of us, at least — fascinating. Much as I love a lot of old recordings, they are simply snapshots, frequently unrepresentative, from a huge pool of material people were singing in the early 20th century.  Van Ronk still came up in a world where songs were often learned from other singers rather than from records, or from records he had only heard a couple of times and vaguely remembered. That was a disadvantage in a lot of ways, but also gave his generation a degree of freedom — they couldn’t remember how the “original” version went, exactly, so they had to do the best they could, and the result was sometimes better than the assiduous imitations that became more prevalent by my time, when we all had the old records on reissue LPs and could study them with infinite care.

I could go on about this — and often do, at great length — but for now will just note that Blind Blake’s recordings from the Bahamas, though made in 1950, are worthy of a lot more study than they have received as a repository of African American songs that failed to be recorded on the mainland in earlier eras.

(One final thought: John Dillinger was active in the early 1930s, so when I suggest that Stump Johnson’s gasoline verse in 1929 was a vaguely recalled survival of the Dillinger verse, it’s an anachronism. My guess is that the verse itself is older and Dillinger replaced an earlier protagonist, but that’s just a guess — if other people want to credit Blake with writing a whole new set of verses and turning a relatively generic blues song into a cohesive comic creation, the evidence supports their guess at least as well as mine.)

The first time I saw Paul Geremia perform, he was opening for Dave Van Ronk at Passim Coffeehouse. I was standing with Dave at the back of the room, and as Paul played a particularly gorgeous and intricate guitar break, Dave turned to me with a typically wry expression and murmured, “He doesn’t teach.”

In my world of acoustic blues players, Geremia has always been the musician’s musician. Non-musicians sometimes got it and sometimes didn’t, but pretty much all the players acknowledge his unique gifts: not only his superb guitar playing, rack harmonica work, and singing, but the way he always made the songs seem personal and quirky. He is an assiduous student of the old masters, spent the requisite years painstakingly hovering over scratchy 78s, figuring out how Blind Lemon Jefferson or Blind Willie McTell played a particular lick, but no matter how loyally he tried to capture their styles, his own individual touch and sensibility remain instantly recognizable.

That first time, I only recall two songs he played: his own “Kick It In the Country” (which he introduced, inaccurately, as a song about soccer) and “Jones, Oh Jones.” Both were on his then-current album, Hard Life Rocking Chair, and I was particularly struck by the latter, a catchy and bloodthirsty expansion of some familiar blues themes. When I expressed this preference to Dave, he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s from the Bahamian Blind Blake. He’s got a lot of great material: that’s where I got ‘Yas, Yas, Yas.'”

I had never heard of this Blind Blake, who was born Blake Alphonso Higgs and was no relation to Arthur Blake, the superlative ragtime blues guitarist — but once I had the name, I easily found his records. He led the house band at the Royal Victoria hotel in Nassau, and thousands of tourists came home from island vacations with his albums, many of which eventually made it to the secondhand record bins. I snapped them up, eventually amassing a complete collection, and even bootlegged a CD of my favorite selections for a while, until the legal owners sent me a “cease and desist” letter. (I felt no moral compunction, since they had derailed a reissue project I attempted with Rounder — they refused any exclusivity, retaining the right to give other labels all the same tracks, which obviously would not fly with the Rounder folks.)

Anyway… Dave was right about Blake’s material: he had terrific taste in songs, including all sorts of old minstrel survivals that had somehow made it to the Bahamas. “Jones, Oh Jones” is in that category: it was demonstrably around in some form by the 1920s, because Bessie Smith copped a bunch of lines from it for her “Hateful Blues” and others were collected by folklorists. My guess is that it dates from the first decade of the twentieth century, but so far no one has found sheet music or any other solid example before Blake recorded it circa 1950, and there’s no way to know how much it had changed over the years.

As with a lot of Blake’s songs, the move to the Bahamas meant that some lyrics had been changed or simply misunderstood: that’s a common event in oral traditions, another example being the song “Delia’s Gone,” which was composed about a murder in Savannah and had the tag line, “He’s one more rounder gone.” In the Bahamas, they didn’t know the term “rounder,” so that became a call for drinks: “Delia’s gone, one more round.”

As it happens, one of the more interesting misunderstandings in “Jones, Oh Jones” is equally prevalent here on the mainland — generations of blues scholars have transcribed Bessie Smith singing about taking her “wedding butcher” to chop up her lover, some glossing it as a butcher knife received as a wedding present (the original ad for the record shows it as a butcher’s cleaver). I figured that was a mishearing, and sang it for years as “whetted butcher knife,” which made more sense — but a few years ago this became a hotly debated topic on a blues scholar list-serve and Yuval Taylor eventually solved the mystery: Wade & Butcher was the most popular brand of straight razor, the weapon of choice for minstrel-show comedy.

Incidentally, circling back to my opening paragraph, Dave was wrong: Geremia didn’t give guitar lessons, but every time I’ve seen him, I’ve learned something. There are a lot of ways to teach, and in all the ways that count, Paul is one of the most generous teachers I know.

Dave Van Ronk was not primarily a songwriter, but he turned outsome gems and oddities over the years. This was his first attempt to compose a multi-section rag, and his paean to the room that was his professional home for much of the 1960s: the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

The lyric contains some anachronisms: John Mitchell, who originally opened the Gaslight in 1958 to host poetry readings, sold it in 1961, so by the time Patrick Sky and Phil Ochs were on the scene it was no longer “Mitchell’s cafe.” But Dave was its reigning star for much of its heyday, doing feature nights and hosting a regular Tuesday evening hootenanny (what we’d now call an open mike), and if some facts are jumbled, the song conveys his wry affection for a unique time and the place he described as “my office and second home.”

Dave’s years at the Gaslight are described at length in The Mayor of MacDougal Street — an honorary title he was given during that time by the bartender at the Kettle of Fish. That was the bar upstairs from Mitchell’s “hole in the ground,” where Dave tended to spend the time he wasn’t onstage, since the Gaslight served only coffee (and, as Dave recalled, dreadful coffee at that).

The regular denizens of the Gaslight included Tom Paxton, whom Dave (and no one else) called “Pogo,” (I’ve previously posted Paxton’s musical vignette of the Gaslight scene, “The Name of the Game Is Stud“), and a motley array of poets, comedians, folksingers, flamenco guitarists, and blues singers. It was a place where you could see a double bill of Skip James and Doc Watson one night, Len Chandler and a Middle Eastern group the next, and then Mississippi John Hurt with Dave and Paxton opening… and I was three years old and two hundred miles away. If anyone invents a time machine, book me passage.

(Incidentally, the fish shirt I’m wearing in the video is a tribute to Dave’s sartorial tastes — he would have described it as “horrible,” meant as a compliment.)

Dave Van Ronk was hailed as the pioneering arranger of “classic” ragtime for fingerstyle guitar more or less by default. In the early 1960s he did an arrangement of “St. Louis Tickle” that was the first recording of a multi-part piano or orchestral ragtime composition on fingerstyle guitar — but he tended to argue that other people had probably played something similar in the ragtime era, and simply failed to be captured on disc or cylinder, like most music of that time.

Be that as it may, he was hailed as a pioneer, and when ragtime became news thanks to The Sting, the Joshua Rifkin recordings of Scott Joplin piano rags, the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, and suchlike, Dave took up the challenge and began arranging more classic rags. Among them, not surprisingly, was Scott Joplin’s masterpiece, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” which Dave recorded on his Sunday Street LP. However, when I interviewed him about this he said he never really saw himself as a ragtime instrumentalist:

“When I played ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ there are probably a hundred fifty guitarists around the world who could tear me a new asshole on ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ playing pretty much the same arrangement as I did…. But I never did that so I could do that. That was a research project. And what I learned from learning how to do that has been applied hundreds and hundreds of times to accompaniments for songs. Which is what I do do.”

He also explained that Reverend Gary Davis was the source for his arrangement: “I would have tried to play ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ in C, but I saw Gary fooling around with it and he did it in A. It was like a light bulb going on: ‘Right, that’s it!’ The rest of it came kind of easy, but only because Gary had shown me the way.”

All of which being said, what is striking about Dave’s arrangement is how simply and comfortably it falls on the guitar. Although he plays all four sections of Joplin’s rag and Davis only attempted the first section, Dave’s version is much easier to play. And although other guitarists have come closer to an exact transcription of the piano chart, none (to my knowledge) has come up with an arrangement that feels like something a guitarist might have generated naturally on the instrument. Dave’s gift was that although he loved piano music, when he arranged for guitar he thought like a folk-blues guitar player who liked ragtime, and his ragtime arrangements are completely accessible to anyone with decent fingerstyle blues guitar skills. Which, I suppose, is just a way of saying I can play the damn thing without tying my fingers in knots, and am forever grateful.

Judging by surviving evidence, “Bout a Spoonful” was a very popular song throughout the black South in the early twentieth century. In Sweet Man, a racial protest novel from 1930, Gilmore Millen named it along with “Pallet on the Floor,” “Stavin’ Chain,” and “The Dozens” as “forerunners of the blues, at least in honk-a-tonk popularity, those old songs crammed with Anglo-Saxon physiological monosyllables and lascivious purpose.”

The original honky tonk, juke joint, and barrelhouse versions of these songs were not going to be recorded by commercial record producers in the early 20th century and tended not to be collected even by the most assiduous folklorists. Among the few lyrics that survive, we have one uncensored version of “Pallet on the Floor” from Jelly Roll Morton, an uncensored “Dirty Dozens” from Speckled Red, and an uncensored “Stavin’ Chain” from Mance Lipscomb, but as far as I know, no one has ever found a version of “Bout a Spoonful” that includes any of those “Anglo-Saxon physiological monosyllables” – a much more colorful and descriptive phrase than “four-letter words.”

Fortunately, the underlying “lascivious purpose” survived expurgation in versions by Lipscomb and Rev. Gary Davis, which also provide eloquent testimony to how widespread the song must have been, since Davis was from the Carolinas and Lipscomb was in Texas, but they not only shared some lyrics but played variations of the same guitar accompaniment.

I first heard this song from Dave Van Ronk, and play his guitar part, which he adapted from Davis’s. It was the first guitar arrangement of his that I worked out from the record, during the year I was studying with him, which meant that when I got it smooth I was able to play it for him… and he pointed out that I was making it harder by playing the thumb-around-the-neck bass notes for the opening D chord, while he just played open strings. He added, “It sounds nice that way. Keep it.” So I have.

Dave only sang four verses, and omitted the key word from the tag line, writing: “Not everybody knows what a spoonful means. But they know what a pause means.” John Hurt took a similar approach in his “Coffee Blues,” and I’ve stuck with it here. The rest of the lyric is a mix of Dave’s verses, a couple from Lipscomb, a couple from elsewhere, and a couple I made up or adapted over the years.

One of Dave Van Ronk’s great flagwavers — he generally called it “Gambler’s Blues” — this was my father’s favorite out of his repertoire. They were friends from the moment I had Dave over to my folks’ place and my father came out of the kitchen to ask if he liked Russian red cabbage — he did, and then they got to trading stories about their youths in Brooklyn, and talking about African and Pre-Columbian art, and the relationship developed from there. Each took great pride and pleasure in knowing the other, and when my dad died in 1996, I asked Dave to sing this at his memorial service, and also to say a few words.

Dave talked a little about their shared love of art, then got around to his initial diffidence at knowing a world-class biologist, and told how, after a year or so, he finally got up the courage to ask my dad what he’d done to earn a particular prize. He said my father looked at him very solemnly and said, “Dave, they gave me that prize for fitting lobsters with contact lenses.” Then he sang “St. James Infirmary,” in all its grand, shouting majesty. Those guys were made for each other.

As for the song and Dave’s relationship to it, I summed that up as well as I could in the notes to his final album:

Dave would sometimes tell of singing this song while sitting in with a jazz group at the Stuyvesant Casino in the early 1950s, and having Jimmy Rushing, the legendary vocalist of the Count Basie Orchestra, add a couple of verses from a seat at the bar. On his old repertoire cards, he gave his source as “Josh White/‘Unfortunate Rake’ cycle.” White’s version was the standard template for folksingers of Dave’s generation, and The Unfortunate Rake was an album compiled for Folkways by the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, who produced Dave’s first two solo albums. Goldstein assembled the LP as a teaching aid, showing the evolution of this ballad from a nineteenth century English broadside about a young man dying of syphilis, through a change of gender and continent into “The Bad Girl’s Lament,” a journey west to become “The Streets of Laredo,” and various other permutations, including Dave’s recording of this African-American variant. Goldstein wrote that the original St. James Hospital was “a religious foundation for the redemption of ‘fourteen sisters, maidens, that were leperous, living chastely and honestly in divine service.’” Not Dave’s kind of joint, but fortunately the folk process provided him with more congenial surroundings.

Dave’s early recordings of this song did not include the guitar break, which he told me he added in the early 1960s just to piss off Danny Kalb. Kalb, who became the lead guitarist in Dave’s Ragtime Jug Stompers and something of a rock star with the Blues Project, took guitar lessons from Dave and annoyed the hell out of him by learning all the arrangements instantly and playing them more cleanly than Dave could. In revenge, Dave said, he gave Kalb one last lesson, at the end of which, as Kalb was walking out the door, he played him this guitar break, then threw him out without showing him how it was done.

I don’t believe that story, but I enjoy it. Likewise the song, which I play more or less the way Dave taught it to me, though I make no attempt to emulate his singing.

One of the first records I bought during that year in New York was a Blind Boy Fuller album on the Blues Classics label. I had vaguely known Fuller’s name, but that record bowled me over — there was a verve and power to his singing and guitar work that was much more exciting to me than the smoother, lighter style of Blind Blake. I suppose part of what attracted me was that I already loved Gary Davis’s playing, and Fuller was somewhat similar, but singing about rattlesnakes, rambling, and girls rather than praising God. It didn’t hurt that a lot of the tracks had Sonny Terry’s harmonica, a favorite back to my Woody Guthrie days, and I even enjoyed the washboard, which pushed a few of the cuts up a notch into obvious dance music.

I couldn’t play like Fuller, but somehow his “Bus Rider Blues” inspired me to come up with my own arrangement, not exactly in his style but inspired by his playing. It was one of the first “arrangements” I ever put together, undoubtedly inspired by the care with which Dave Van Ronk tried to give his songs unique flavors by using distinctive arrangements for each. My tendency was just to play a blues in E as a generic blues in E and a ragtime song in C as a generic ragtime song in C — which, frankly, is what a lot of the original blues artists tended to do as well, at least judging by their recordings. But Dave thought like an arranger working for a singer: his method was to work out a “chart” — his term of preference, though he did it in his head, not on paper — practice it until he could play it comfortably and consistently, then think about how to sing over and around it.

When I listened to the older guys with that in mind, a lot of them used the same approach: some would just play guitar around their vocals, but a lot of them worked out basic arrangements that they played pretty much identically from verse to verse, and often used as a break between verses as well. I don’t know why “Bus Rider Blues” became my maiden effort in that direction, nor why it turned out the way it did — I was seventeen, and moving very fast, and that just happened to be what I did one week, and then I moved on to whatever Dave was teaching me next, or to something from another record.

Many years later I got to be friends with Chris Strachwitz, who had the Arhoolie record label and ran Blues Classics as his reissue subsidiary. His model was Moe Asch, who had the Folkways label, but reissued old 78 recordings on a separate label, RBF — the reason being that neither of them wanted to buy the rights to the records they were reissuing and if they got sued they didn’t want their main labels involved. Chris had actually started Blues Classics in 1964 as a sort of Robin Hood operation to channel money to Memphis Minnie: he had visited her in Memphis, and she was in bad shape from a stroke and in dire poverty, and Columbia wasn’t going to pay her any royalties, ever, so he released an album of her old recordings and paid the royalties directly to her, ignoring any claims Columbia might put forward. (He also had a note on the back of the album suggesting fans send further contributions and giving her mailing address.)

The end of that story is that eventually, after the Blind Boy Fuller LP had appeared, Columbia sent Chris a severe “cease and desist” letter. He figured he’d probably have to either pay up or withdraw the albums, but he went to his lawyer for advice, and the lawyer said, “Let’s send them a letter demanding proof that they own the recordings.” Chris had taken for granted that they owned the recordings, since they owned the label that had issued the original records… but he sent the letter and that was the last he heard from Columbia, and we all got to hear Blind Boy Fuller and Memphis Minnie.

I spent 1976-7 in New York studying with Dave Van Ronk and listening to Yazoo pre-war blues reissues,  but only got up the nerve to attempt a handful of the pieces I heard on the old records. Of the few I managed to work out, my favorite was “Ragtime Millionaire,” recorded in 1928  by William (Bill) Moore, a barber who was born in Georgia but apparently lived most of his life in coastal Virginia. It was included on the Guitar Wizards anthology, from which I also eventually picked up a couple of Carl Martin‘s songs and some of my favorite Blind Blake numbers — but that first year, Moore’s song was the one that caught my attention, in part because of the jaunty lyrics, but also because it had a catchy guitar riff in the chorus that was one of the first guitar licks I managed to pick up off a record without help from tablature.

I don’t think anyone knows where Moore learned to play guitar, but I later became fascinated with his rhythmic quirks — he mostly stayed in basic ragtime rhythm, but every once in a while he’d throw in a sort of Latin or Caribbean accent on the bass strings, which caught my attention as I got deeper into African guitar styles. (For example: “Masanga,” “Iko Iko,” and Moore’s “One Way Gal.”)

The song itself was Moore’s reworking of a ragtime hit from 1900 by one of the most popular African American songwriters of that period, Irving Jones. As Paul Oliver noted in Songsters and Saints — a foundational book on the broad variety of African American singing often subsumed under the catch-all term “blues” — Jones’s compositions seem to have been particularly popular with early guitarists, or at least the ones whose work was preserved on record. Gus Cannon recorded an earlier Jones hit with the same theme, “My Money Never Gives Out,” and it’s easy to see how both songs would have appealed to a street singer trying to catch some passersby with a fun lyric that included a subliminal suggestion to reach in their pockets and be generous.

I couldn’t understand all of Moore’s lyrics, so I changed the words around some, but basically do it like he did it, and for a while this was my big showpiece, aside from a bunch of Van Ronk songs. The fact that it was my one big non-Ronk number incidentally led to its being what I played on my radio debut — Dave was doing a six-show weekend at Passim Coffeehouse in Cambridge and WERS wanted him to do a morning interview, and he hated to sing in the morning, so he brought me along as a (poor) substitute. I obviously wasn’t going to do one of his songs in a situation where everyone listening would just wish he was doing it, so I played “Ragtime Millionaire.”

To finish that story, when we got to the club that evening, Dave asked Bob Donlin, the owner and booker, if he’d listened and he said he had, and Dave said, “So what’d you think?” and Bob said, “He was OK,” in a voice that clearly conveyed his lack of interest in having me play there anytime soon… And to finish that story, he relented a couple of years later and gave me the chance to open for Norman Blake, and then for Tony Bird and some other people, and a lot of people considered him grumpy, but I liked him and miss him.