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.

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.)