Pete Seeger isn’t normally remembered for his instrumental skills, but that’s mostly because he had so many other skills that took precedence. He was a terrific banjo player and guitarist, and the single most influential player in the early folk revival — the main reason he wasn’t even more influential is that most people on the early scene didn’t even attempt his level of playing, and a lot of people who came along later didn’t realize how good he was.

That might sound paradoxical, but Seeger’s influence was so pervasive that his followers founded myriad separate scenes, and he got to be associated with some of those scenes to the point that a lot of people forgot his role in others. For example, he was the first urban performer to make a serious effort to play rural styles authentically, learning banjo and guitar arrangements note for note from the original artists, rather than using rural recordings as raw material for more urbane performances, a la Richard Dyer-Bennett, Burl Ives, or the Weavers — the same year the Weavers took “Goodnight, Irene” to the top of the pop charts, his Darling Corey LP showed off his mastery of southern mountain banjo styles, and inspired a new strain of revivalists that Dave Van Ronk would dub the “neo-ethnics,” including Dave and the New Lost City Ramblers. (Dave referred to Pete as “the man who invented my profession.”)

His massive role in the banjo story deserves more attention, but I’m not a banjo player… so on to guitar. Pete was not as influential on guitar as on banjo, in part because he favored the 12-string and very few people had the touch, taste, or finger strength to get the delicate, easy sound he got out of that instrument. Of course, he inspired his share of 12-string devotees, from Bob Gibson to Roger McGuinn to Leo Kottke, plus Eric Darling, Ian Tyson… but not a lot of people remember how good he was on guitar, except, of course, for all of us who play “Living in the Country” — which, I’ve found over the years, amounts to a lot of people.

I learned “Living in the Country” from the tabbed-out version in Pete’s Bells of Rhymney songbook, where he provides a typically self-deprecating introduction: “One day when fooling around with a guitar in D tuning (6th string one whole tone low), I developed this.” Judging by the video I’ve linked below, where he plays the piece to finish off a guitar lesson on the simplicity of keeping an alternating bass pattern, he didn’t notice how weird his arrangement is from a guitar point of view — he remains fundamentally a banjo player, and rather than using the bass strings to provide a rhythmic foundation (like an alternating bass), he uses them like the high drone string on a 5-string banjo. He makes this seem completely easy and natural, even whistling a harmony part the second time around:

This is a perfect example of the benefits and drawbacks of tablature, and also of how different the world was in those distant days before the internet. I had Stefan Grossman’s Country Blues Guitar book by the time I was twelve or so, and although I always had trouble making sense of his quirky tablature, I learned how to play one of my favorite songs from it, John Hurt’s version of “Stagolee,” as well as Furry Lewis’s version of the same ballad. I also learned this song by Robert Wilkins — except, in those days we didn’t have the internet and I had no way of hearing Wilkins’s recording.

Wilkins recorded this in 1929, and it was reissued in the early 1960s on an Origin Jazz Library anthology, The Mississippi Blues 1927-1940, but I didn’t have that record and am not sure how I would have found it — it had been a major source for the previous generation of blues revivalists, but like the Harry Smith anthology of American folk music it had been largely forgotten by the time I came along. So I had Grossman’s tablature and his transcription of the lyrics, but didn’t know how the damn thing was supposed to sound. However…

What I did have, by maybe age thirteen or so, was the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet LP, on which they played Wilkins’s Christian rewrite of his old blues song — by the 1960s Wilkins had become a minister and no longer sang blues, but in 1964 he recorded an album called Memphis Gospel Singer that included “Prodigal Son,” a retelling of the Bible story set to the guitar arrangement of “That’s No Way to Get Along.” I’m not sure how I made the connection, but I did, and I was always looking for ways to make my archaic tastes seem hipper and liked the idea of having at least a sort of Rolling Stones song in my repertoire, and in any case that was the only source I had. So with the Rolling Stones in my ears, I sat down with Grossman’s book and learned this song…

Except that when I finally got to hear the 1929 Wilkins recording, it’s much quirkier and more interesting than the way the Rolling Stones did “Prodigal Son,” not to mention the jury-rigged creation I extrapolated. If I were going to do it regularly, I’d go back and listen to Wilkins, but in the meanwhile here it is the way I’ve been doing it since the 1970s, a mix of Wilkins as filtered through the Stones and Grossman, with lyrics vaguely remembered from both sources.

As to the vagueness of my memory regarding the lyrics: I very rarely played in “open” tunings, and never really felt comfortable in them, but this was one of my introductions to the concept, and I eventually turned it into an instrumental, which I played for many years whenever someone requested something by John Fahey or Leo Kottke — I was not a fan of either of them, but wanted to be able to handle the requests, so I worked this up into a fast, noodling meditation in open D, which I titled “The Resurrection of the Great Sea Snail.”  If I really wanted to provide a sense of what I used to play, I could probably work that baby up again, but trust me, the world can live without it.

This has always been one of my favorite John Hurt songs — it’s a murder ballad and a cheating song, in the best southern country tradition, but framed with a quietly philosophical fatalism that makes a striking contrast to the melodrama and violence of the central story.

I often teach this one as an example of Hurt’s brilliant way of getting around the guitar neck — he played what sounded right to him, which sometimes meant holding the chords other people would hold,  but sometimes meant going his own way. This song has a more developed version of the same move he made in “Louis Collins,” taking the G chord that is the root of the song and moving it up two frets to get a high A note — which in this case means he is using the G shape, moved up to A, to play what for other people would be a C chord… that may sound confusing to non-guitarists, and even more confusing to guitarists, until you try it, at which point it sounds just fine, at least for “Got the Blues, Can’t Be Satisfied.”

This was another I learned early on from Donald Garwood’s book, but it was many years before I really appreciated it, or figured out how to play it properly, and more years before it got to feeling or sounding anything like comfortable. Hurt was a deceptively great guitarist, who made everything sound simple and pretty, thereby disguising how hard it is to do what he did. I have the basics, more or less, but the grace and tone of his playing are a whole nother thing.

It’s like the experience of watching Fred Astaire dance, and feeling like you can do that, too, because it’s so relaxed and friendly, and trying it yourself, and it works — just like flying in a dream. I’ve been working on this for over forty years, and I’ve learned a lot of things along the way and consider the time very well spent. But one of the things I keep learning, over and over, is that there never was, is, or will be anyone else who sounds like John Hurt.

I learned Mississippi John Hurt’s arrangement of “Louis Collins” from Donald Garwood’s blues guitar book, which is long out of print but was fundamental to my early understanding of Hurt’s style — for example, his habit of getting a high A note while playing a G or C chord by just moving the chord up two frets. (Actually, Hurt often didn’t hold full chords and played a low G bass with his C chord, so what he was moving tended to just be the paired low and high G notes, but I think of those as parts of C or G chords because I think that way.)

In any case, I don’t know if I would have learned “Louis Collins” as a kid if it hadn’t been in Garwood’s book, so I owe him one, because it’s a great song. I miss having Peter Keane’s harmony on the chorus — we sang this together many times over the years, and I hear him in my head, and if you don’t know his work, he’s worth checking out, on Youtube or various CDs.

As for Louis Collins, when I originally posted this entry all I knew about him was what Hurt sang. Hurt apparently heard about the murder second-hand, and Philip Ratcliffe quoted him explaining that it might have happened in Memphis, Collins “was a great man… and he was killed by two men named Bob and Louis. I got enough of the story to write the song.”

However… I recently found a long article about the murder in the Yazoo, Mississippi, Herald of August 27, 1897. Apparently several fights broke out on a steamboat excursion between Yazoo City and Vicksburg. The specifics were somewhat disputed – a lot of drinking was involved – but at some point Louis Collins got in a fight with someone named Louis Thomas over a woman, the ship’s engineer pulled out a gun and tried to shoot Thomas, and Collins stabbed Thomas in the neck. Collins then attacked Robert Kent—the article doesn’t explain why—and cut him in the hand. Kent knocked Collins down, grabbed a pistol that was lying on a lunch counter—another unexplained detail—and shot Collins, hitting him in the chest. Collins kept coming, Kent shot again, missing him and slightly wounding a bystander, and Collins shortly fell over and died. A witness named Miles Mitchell added that three or four men had subdued Collins and were holding him down when Kent shot him.

As for the angels laying him away… until yesterday, we all thought John Hurt was the only source for this song, but I happened to ask the Library of Congress for a recording John Lomax made of an unidentified prisoner in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville in August 1933 singing “Bully of the Town…” and it turns out to have been mislabeled.  The singer starts by singing “Louis Collins was a bully in the town,” and apparently Lomax was familiar with “Bully” and not with “Louis Collins,” so considered it a variant of the former song… but in fact it’s a short version of the song Hurt recorded in 1928. At first I thought the singer might have learned it from Hurt’s record, but he refers to the shooter as “Little Kent,” while Hurt just referred to him as “Bob…” and since the murder happened more than thirty years before either of them recorded, I’m assuming they both learned it from some earlier version that had Bob Kent’s full name.

If you want to hear the Tennessee recording, here it is, for the first time ever:

I don’t remember where, when, or how I first heard Mississippi John Hurt, but like a lot of people, I fell instantly in love with his gently expressive voice and the perfect swing and precision of his guitar playing. In retrospect, I think I misunderstood a lot of things about Hurt’s playing, one of the reasons being that I was fortunate enough to grow up in the era of tablature and blues guitar instruction books. The first book I had was Stefan Grossman’s Delta Blues Guitar, which my half-brother Dave left with me. At the time, there was nothing in that book I could learn, but it alerted me to the possibilities of tablature, and I shortly acquired Grossman’s Country Blues Guitar and Donald Garwood’s Masters of Instrumental Blues Guitar, both of which were much more helpful, in a large part because they included a lot of Hurt’s pieces.

I am forever indebted to those books, and have no idea what I would be doing today if I hadn’t got them, but I also have mixed feelings about them. Looking through the Garwood book, I’m struck by the extent to which my early John Hurt repertoire was guided by his tastes rather than my own, and my sense of Hurt’s playing was shaped by reading his and Grossman’s transcriptions rather than listening to Hurt’s playing. I’m grateful, because it gave me a sense of the instrument, but what I learned was Garfield’s or Grossman’s understanding of one way Hurt played a particular piece, and for some of these pieces that’s still what I have — it was decades before I sat down seriously with Hurt’s recordings and discovered how quirky and variable he could be. (For example, the way he played “Richlands Woman.”)

Which said, it was a good foundation for the rest of my life, and for better or worse it has stuck with me — I’ve probably heard hundreds of versions of “See See Rider” over the years, but the one I play and sing is still John Hurt’s, more or less as learned from Garwood’s book.

This was one of the earliest “blues” to become a huge, ubiquitous hit in both city and country — and I put blues in quotation marks because it is one of the many songs that very likely predated the use of that term for a song form or musical style, but helped define the style in the teens and twenties. It was a hit for Ma Rainey in 1925, and one of the eternal mysteries of blues history is whether her version was adapted from a song that was already widespread in oral tradition, or whether her record was so popular and catchy that it spawned the vast range of rural, orally-transmitted versions that have been recorded since. Like a lot of folk-blues, the version in oral circulation wasn’t a cohesive song, it was just the key verse, “See, see rider, see what you done done/You made me love you, now your man done come.” Carl Sandburg wrote in his American Songbag about hearing it in a saloon in Austin, Texas, which he visited with John Lomax, sung by the owner, a “Mexican negro” named Martinez, but that lyric is mostly a train song that only gets around to the rider verse (transcribed by Sandburg as “C. C. Rider”) as an afterthought. Sandburg was writing in 1927 and includes another pair of verses collected considerably earlier by the amateur Texas folklorist Gates Thomas, so the song was clearly around in that region before Rainey’s record, and if I had to guess, I’d guess Hurt also learned it before it appeared on record.

The process of oral transmission led to the multiple interpretations of the title phrase, variously given as “See, See Rider,” “C.C. Rider,” and “Easy Rider.” I’d go with the first and last over the one with the initials, but that’s just me. In any case, the term “rider” for a sexual partner is pretty clear and evocative.

I admired Lead Belly’s music more than I actually listened to it, which is why the few guitar arrangements I play of his come from Pete Seeger and Julius Lester’s book, The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly. But the big exception to that rule was Leadbelly’s Last Sessions, Part Two. I liked that album so much that I can’t imagine why I never got Parts one, three, or four… but that’s how it was. I was particularly taken by the odder tracks — odd, that is, for those of us who thought of Lead Belly as an old-time folk-blues singer: my favorite was “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (Cause the Girl in My Arms Isn’t You), and old pop waltz that he played magnificently, but I also liked the Hawaiian song (“It was silent on the island of Hawai’i…”), and the Pig Latin song, not to mention “Silver City Bound,” and “New Iberia,” and “Relax Your Mind.”

Honestly, I don’t know how much attention I would have paid to “Relax Your Mind” if I hadn’t had tablature for it, but I did, and it’s a pretty wonderful object. Frederic Ramsey, who recorded the Last Sessions, reported that Lead Belly wrote it at the behest of the National Automobile Safety Council, but they declined to used it, which, if true, just demonstrates a typical bureaucratic lack of imagination.

I like to think of this song as “Zen and the Art of Driving.” As Lead Belly said:

“A lot of people don’t know to relax — cause I used to didn’t relax, myself….  I made this song just on account of the people driving cars. You can’t drive a car and look all across the road. You got to look down the road, the way you going. Cause that’s caused so much trouble now. So many people lost, that’s true. Not relaxing.”

I learned this song from at least three distinct sources: the first was, yet again, my favorite Cisco Houston LP, Cisco Houston Sings American Folk Songs; then I learned to play a guitar melody on the bass strings from tablature in The 12 String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly; and then my little sister got an autoharp and a book on how to play it, both of which I fairly quickly appropriated, and this was one of the first songs I learned from it, along with “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” and “Wildwood Flower.”

That repertoire suggests the author, Harry Taussig, associated the instrument with the Carter Family. At the time, I didn’t really know their music, except at second-, third-, and fourth-hand, and I associated the autoharp with Mike Seeger, who is still my favorite player on it — but oddly enough, the only sideman gig I’ve been called for in recent years is a Carter Family tribute band, the Wayworn Travelers, in which I play autoharp… and “John Hardy” is one of my featured numbers… though the Carters did not use the instrument on that particular song.

As for John Hardy, he was an actual person, and largely thanks to a researcher named John Garst, we now have a fair amount of information about him. He was executed on January 19, 1894, for the killing of a man named Thomas Drews, and the story was reported in that day’s Wheeling, West Virginia, Register:

Hardy killed Drews… in a disagreement over a game of craps. Both were enamored of the same woman, and the latter proving the more favored lover, incurred Hardy’s envy, who seized the pretext of falling out in the game to work vengeance on Drews, who had shown himself equally expert in dice as in love, having won money from Hardy. Hardy drew his pistol, remarking he would kill him unless he refunded the money. Drews paid back part of the money, when Hardy shot, killing him.

The execution was apparently a major event, with three thousand spectators attending, and Hardy’s scaffold oration in the song’s last verse is in keeping with the newspaper report, which says, “He exhibited great nerve, attributed his downfall to whiskey, and said he had made peace with God…. He was baptised in the river this morning.”

I thought I got this from Cisco Houston, yet again, because his name was on the record jacket… but that was just Everest Records’ way of getting extra mileage from the Asch/Stinson catalog. Their Cisco Houston album was a collection of folk songs  recorded by Cisco with Woody Guthrie, usually with Woody singing lead, and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” also has Sonny Terry playing harmonica and whooping in the background.

Aside from that, I just went back and listened to their recording and find that I mostly sing different verses, which suggests that although I heard it on this record, I learned the lyric elsewhere. That’s not surprising at all, because it was a big favorite by the Carter Family, and their records were picked up as sources for singers all over the South — and since Henry Whitter recorded it shortly before they did, it may have already been common before that. I assume the Carters were Woody’s source, since he sang so many of their songs, even though they sing different verses — closer to the ones I sing, as it happens. They also sing a different chorus, which I switched to last year after playing a gig with a Carter Family tribute band, the Wayworn Travelers: I had always sung “Bury me beneath the willow,” but the Carters sing “Bury me under the weeping willow,” and although that feels less “poetic” and doesn’t scan as well, I just found it felt right for me.

Another song I’ve always known — I’m sure we sang it in school, I’m sure we sang it at the children’s sing-along evenings in Woods Hole, I’m sure I heard it sung by Pete Seeger, and the Weavers, and lots of other people, before I knew who Lead Belly was. Along with “Tennessee Waltz,” “Goodnight, Irene” was one of the two biggest hits of 1950, reaching the Billboard magazine Top Ten in versions by the Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, and Ernest Tubb with Red Foley — for people who haven’t heard all of those, I recommend checking out the Tubb/Foley record, which sounds a good deal folkier than the Weavers with their elegant string section.

Of course, once I heard Lead Belly’s version, I adopted it, and sing all the downbeat verses and “I’ll get you in my dreams” rather than “I’ll kiss you…” Some scholars have argued that he is actually saying “I’ll guess you in my dreams,” which they say is a regional/rural term meaning “imagine,” but the main reasoning behind that argument seems to be that they don’t like to think of him singing about “getting” a girl in his dreams, which they consider unromantic — a pretty damning commentary on the scholarly concept of romance.

There is also a scholarly discourse about the roots of the song, but it doesn’t really add much to the story. Basically, there were various waltzes called “Irene” in the 19th century, including one called “Irene, Good Night,” by the black pop/minstrel song composer Gussie Davis, which has a somewhat similar melody, though no shared lyrics beyond the title phrase. My relatively informed guess is that Leadbelly’s uncle, who taught him the song (or someone else, who passed it on to Lead Belly’s uncle), heard the Davis song, liked it, but didn’t remember much of it, so came up with their own song, inspired by it, but quite different.

That was (and is) very common in oral cultures — someone will hear a song they like, and keep singing a snatch of it, and eventually it gets melded with other bits and pieces, and ends up bearing little or no resemblance to the earlier model. (A good example is “Fishing Blues,” which almost everyone knows in a version Henry Thomas created from his vague memory of Chris Smith’s sheet music composition.) As for the bits and pieces, the “Sometimes I live in the country” verse was collected in Tennessee in 1909, so presumably was floating around the South by the turn of the century, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others were as well.

In any case, it’s a beautiful tune, with a lyric that both fits and undercuts the gentleness of the melody — having been a romantic young man myself, I recognize the pleasure of contemplating suicide if one’s love is rejected, and god knows it was a cliche of romantic fiction back to Goethe’s Werther, but most modern songwriters steer away from that particular romantic fantasy.

And for those who want to hear a snatch of the original, here it is:

I have a vague memory of hearing some older guys — they were probably all of 16 or 17 — playing guitars on the steps of the Woods Hole Community Hall, and one of them sang this, and it sounded familiar, so I went home and found it… but I can’t remember if I found it in a songbook or on a record, or which songbook or record it would have been… and the whole memory may be wrong anyway.

In any case this was one of the first blues songs I learned, so long ago that I don’t remember the details. I do remember seeing the composer’s name attached to it fairly early, Richard M. Jones, and not having the faintest idea who he was for a good many years after that.

That’s not surprising, because I was into folk or country blues, and Jones was very much an urbanite and a businessman. After playing piano with various groups around New Orleans, he moved to Chicago in 1919 to work as a music publisher and then as a record producer, in charge of the local wing of OKeh records “race” division, where he had the idea of bringing Louis Armstrong into the studio as leader of a small group, the legendary “Hot Five.”

Jones also made dozens (maybe hundreds) of records with various female blues singers, accompanying them on piano and often providing material, most famously “Trouble In Mind,” which he first recorded in 1924 with Thelma La Vizzo (an otherwise unknown singer) and again in 1927 with Bertha “Chippie” Hill singing and Armstrong playing cornet. Though he recorded it in Chicago, the lyric places it in Louisiana with the reference to the 219 train, which ran from New Orleans into Texas.

The song has been recorded by hundreds of artists, from blues singers like Victoria Spivey and Georgia White to Bob Wills, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, and the Everly Brothers. I probably had Big Bill Broonzy’s version fairly early, and certainly had Otis Spann doing it on his Archive of Folk Music LP — though I can’t remember ever listening to the Spann record, since I was totally into guitar, except for Memphis Slim — and probably had the Brownie and Sonny LP in that series as well… but I’m guessing a more likely candidate was, once again, Cisco Houston. I have no recollection of his version, but find that he recorded it on an album that I listened to a lot in my distant youth.

In any case, “Trouble in Mind” would have been my introduction to the golden age of blues as black pop music, along with “In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down” — though I would have been horrified if anyone had described it that way, because I thought of it as an old folk blues, the sort of thing guitarists played outside their rural shacks… which it was, too, because guitarists all over the South picked up songs from the urban recording stars and both of those songs quickly became ubiquitous in country and city alike.