I was born in 1959, so I missed the height of the “Great Folk Scare,” and by the time I was a teenager this music was very much out of fashion. I suppose, in retrospect, that may have been part of its appeal to me, but in any case I was living in my own musical world and felt completely out of sync with what was on the radio — in fact, I tended to have no idea what was on the radio, since my parents only listened to news and I didn’t have one of my own. So this may well be the only song I ever learned after hearing it on the radio.

It was a hit for Arlo Guthrie in 1972, and of course I was ready to be interested in Arlo because of Woody, and it was a good song. I never bought the record, but when Sing Out! published the lyrics and chords, I learned it.

I must have seen that it was composed by Steve Goodman, but the name meant nothing to me — which was true of pretty much everybody outside Chicago when this song hit. I saw him in concert in 1976-77, though, and he was magic. The only thing I remember distinctly was a Supremes medley, which shouldn’t have worked for one little guy on stage with an acoustic guitar, but did — and I’m pretty sure he also played the “Chicken Cordon Blues.” In any case, everything worked, and the songs were terrific and he was very funny.

The story of this song has been told a million times, but to recap: Steve wrote it after taking a trip with his wife to see her grandmother, riding the City of New Orleans, the day train running from Chicago to the title city. (The night train at that point was still the Panama Limited, immortalized by Booker White in the 1930s.) When he got back, a friend mentioned that Amtrak was planning to discontinue the train, so he wrote the song as an elegy — which may have contributed to the fact that a train of this name is still running today (though now it’s the night train). Steve described the lyric as pretty much straight reportage, a list of what he saw out the window, except for the third verse, which he had to make up since he was only going to southern Illinois: “I figured I couldn’t write a song about a train that went 900 miles through the center of the country and stop the song in Mattoon because I was getting off.”

Finally… for young folks who don’t understand that line about “The passengers will please refrain…” I offer Oscar Brand’s version of the widespread and impressively scatological lyric to “Humoresque,” which will clarify this historical lacuna.

I always enjoyed bluegrass, but rarely loved it — the precise and phenomenally fast banjo solos and impeccably close harmonies tend to sound too clean and mechanical for my taste, and it made perfect sense that so many of the bluegrass musicians I met seemed to be expert mechanics or technological wizards of non-musical kinds… But I loved the Greenbriar Boys’ Ragged But Right album. It was partly John Herald’s voice, and the way Ralph Rinzler and Bob Yellin played mandolin and banjo, and partly the exceptionally varied repertoire — bluegrass, and old-time country, but also ragtime and old-time pop tunes — but mostly it was the energy and humor. They were fine musicians, but also sounded like they were having a terrific time and weren’t worrying about getting everything perfect — the title summed it up, as well as being a great song that I later used as my regular opening number when I was playing bar gigs.

Along with the upbeat, ragtimey tracks that first caught my ear, that album had one of the loveliest mountain ballad-blues-type songs I’ve ever heard, called “Roll On, John.” It hadn’t been recorded anywhere else, as far as any of us knew, and although they credited it on the record, a lot of us paid minimal attention and remembered it as possibly original to them. But Ralph Rinzler, along with playing fine mandolin (and, in other situations, banjo and guitar), was a prolific folklorist and researcher — as scout for the Newport Folk Festival, he was instrumental in getting Doc Watson into the folk scene and reviving Bill Monroe’s career, a story told in an excellent interview/bio by Richard Gagné — and he had found this while burrowing in the archives.

It was recorded in 1946 by a singer and guitarist named Palmer Crisp, and seems to be the only song he ever recorded (though he also appears on a half-dozen recordings accompanying a fiddler named Sam Leslie). Even this one was captured more or less by accident, in a long series of sessions Margot Mayo (founder of the American Square Dance Group in New York, and hence of the whole idea of urban square dancing) conducted with his father, Rufus Crisp. A selection of these recordings was finally released by Folkways in 1972, including Palmer’s lone solo venture (mis-credited to Rufus on the Smithsonian/Folkways website), and is still available and well worth hearing. I wish I’d heard it back when I was learning this song, though I’ve got to say the Greenbriar Boys did a fine job.

Interestingly, in her liner notes Mayo points out exactly the thing that seemed strangest to me while singing this song, the way the melody lingers on words like “and,” “to,” and “that.” She writes, “In his singing Palmer holds certain words which are not ordinarily held or stressed in song or poetry. This is typical of genuine mountain folk singing.” Although I’ve been singing old-time music since I was a kid, this felt strange enough that I experimented with other ways to sing the lines — I’ve been on a personal mission to try to stop singing in a southern accent and to rephrase lyrics to fit my own speech, but in this case I decided I should leave it the way it was, and now I’m glad I did.

Josh White was one of my first musical heroes, and when I began to try to play blues, his songs figured prominently in that effort. That was one of the things that endeared me to Dave Van Ronk, who was heavily influenced by Josh’s work — though if memory serves, we didn’t actually get around to discussing Josh until we were already pretty close, since by the mid-1970s his work had generally fallen out of fashion. The 1960s generation of white urban blues fans tended to consider him too slick, and to prefer performers who sounded more rural, or who had had the grace to die back in the 1930s, or — perhaps most significantly — whom their parents hadn’t heard of.

Josh was slick, indeed. His guitar work was smooth and clean, with a vibrato unequaled by anyone this side of Lonnie Johnson; his voice was light and sexy; his diction was immaculate; and he was an expert urban cabaret performer, the model for Harry Belafonte among many others.

As I wrote in his biography, Society Blues, my parents used to have regular arguments about the first time they saw Josh. It was at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and my father always remembered him as an earthy, masculine performer, glistening with sweat as he sang rough blues and work songs. My mother, by contrast, remembered his elegant silk shirt, and the second shirt he changed into during the intermission. They agreed about the sweat, but my mother did not associate it with work songs — like most of Josh’s female admirers, she thought of him as suited to a more intimate environment.

Josh did sing a lot of traditional blues and work songs, but he also sang pop songs, and British ballads, and some unique nightclub confections composed for him by professional Manhattan tunesmiths. According to the liner notes of his 1955 Elektra LP, The Story of John Henry/Ballads, Blues, and Other Songs, the lyrics of “Where Were You Baby” were by someone named Frank Warren — a songwriter of that name is credited with a few other compositions, including one recorded by the Black folksingers Joe and Eddie — and the music was Josh’s own. The notes added, “It has been a favorite of his audiences in recent years; its clever wording is always good for a chuckle and Josh’s unique phrasing milks every line of its full meaning.” To me, it is the perfect encapsulation of the mix of solid blues skills with sexy charm and humor that made him a cabaret star and suited him so perfectly that it seems kind of silly for anyone else to do it…

…but what the hell. I’ve loved this song since I first heard it, and very few people know it (except a coterie of hardcore Don McLean fans), and it’s a great piece of work. It also played a vital part in my musical education, since it was the first song I ever learned that required a diminished chord. (Thankfully I had the Josh White Song Book, or I wouldn’t have known that, and God knows what I would have played instead.)

Like everyone else, I got this from Mississippi John Hurt, and for all any of us knew it was his composition. He sang it in that lovely, gentle voice, evoking a sort of charming “old South” nostalgia, and I thought of it as kind of a companion piece to “Goodnight, Irene.” It was also one of his most basic guitar arrangements, in the key of C, and particularly easy for those of us who already had “Freight Train.” So I learned it early and kept playing it, despite the fact that the lyrics didn’t go very far.

It was probably another twenty years before I heard the original, a ragtime composition published in 1900 by the Danish-born violinist Jens Bodewalt Lampe, and recorded in 1902 by a presumably ad hoc outfit billed as the Edison Concert Band. Lampe’s version had several sections, the second of which is what Hurt played, and Lasse Johansson, who has recorded a lovely guitar arrangement of the full rag, informs me that the original lyric was close to what Hurt sings:

My Creole belle, I love her well,
Around my heart she has cast a spell.
When stars do shine I call her mine,
My dusky baby, My Creole belle.

I always assumed the Creole belle of the title was African American, given Hurt, and ragtime, and this lyric confirms that assumption. But judging by the damsels adorning the cover of the sheet music for the instrumental version of the rag, at least some people thought of the titular belle as Creole in the original American sense of the term, which did not indicate race. In both French and Spanish, the word was used primarily for European-Americans born in the colonies, and only secondarily and by extension for African-Americans born on this side of the Atlantic.

That usage was continued in Louisiana, where Creole meant anyone of French heritage. After the Haitian revolution, thousands of French Creoles immigrated to Louisiana, many of them bringing their slaves and/or servants, who became a sort of in-between class in New Orleans, not white but also not black, and were racially designated as “Creoles of color” to distinguish them from white creoles. In recent decades, the term’s meaning has shifted yet again, being adopted by the African American Francophone population of rural south Louisiana, who were previously just known as black French. In linguistic terms, this shift is confusing, because the black French did not in general come from Haiti, but are descended from people bought as slaves by Francophone planters, and speak their own dialect, which is closer to Cajun French than to the Creole French of black New Orleans.

For a taste of the difference, compare the language of any Francophone zydeco song with a song like “Mo Pas Lemme Ca” (a unique orthography, but that’s what they wrote) on the wonderful Jazz a la Creole session featuring Danny Barker and Albert Nicholas, and sung in Creole French. A simple clue is the use of moi or mwa (or, in the LP orthography, mo) for the active first person singular, which is standard in Haitian Kreyol or New Orleans Creole, whereas a French, Cajun, or Black French speaker of non-Haitian heritage would use je.

I got this from Dave Van Ronk’s first album — once again, it was the kind of violent, bragging song that perfectly suited the tastes of a teenage boy who was getting into blues. Dave had learned it from Bessie Smith’s recording, and had the bright idea of combining her lyric with the guitar part from Scrapper Blackwell’s “Down South Blues” — I didn’t make that connection until very recently, because when I used to listen to Dave’s first record I had not yet heard the Blackwell song. Dave introduced me to that one as well, when he recorded it on Sunday Street in the 1970s, and toward the end of his life he tended to use it as his regular opening number. And, when I got my hands on some live recordings from the 1950s, I found he’d already been singing it back then — but for his album debut he apparently decided to come up with something unique by melding the Smith song with the Blackwell chart.

That exegesis is not particularly germane to my version, since I sing it in a different key, and in any case I didn’t know about Blackwell at the time — I just knew it was a deep, dark, exciting blues, and the title song of Dave’s album (not, as it happens, of the original issue, or even the second issue, but Folkways kept repackaging that baby, and I got the Black Mountain Blues version). Of course, I became a big fan of Blackwell later on, and should have made the connection, but Dave always spoke so poorly of that album — he referred to it as “Archie Andrews Sings the Blues” — that I didn’t go back and listen. Which was stupid, because I liked it a lot when I was a kid and there were good reasons for liking it. Dave had not yet formed his mature style, on either guitar or voice, but  at his best he was already very effective on both, and had good taste in songs, and some of the performances hold up just fine.

Others hold up less well… but who am I to talk? I am forever grateful that I don’t have a recording of me doing this song at age fourteen, because I remember the ferocious, shouting passion I used to summon, and prefer to recall that feeling rather than hearing the undoubtedly ridiculous reality… and, forty years later, it’s still a lot of fun to do.

(Incidentally, the over-the-neck move I do in the last line is pure Josh White, and much of what I play elsewhere is impure Josh White. Dave and I shared an enduring debt to Josh, and affection for his playing and singing.)

Another from the brilliant Chuck Berry — I first heard it from Tom Rush, but quickly hunted up the original, and it started me on a  never-ending Berry binge. I eventually had every album he made between 1957 and 1964, which is testimony in itself, because the fifties was not a decade of great rock ‘n’ roll albums. Rock ‘n’ roll was teen music, which at that point meant singles, since teens were assumed not to have the money for LPs. Rock ‘n’ roll LPs were either hit anthologies or teen-idol pin-up souvenirs, destined to be mooned over by adoring fans, not listened to as serious collections of great tracks. (A few rockers also made LPs for the adult market, separate from their teen hits, but they were people like Connie Francis and Pat Boone.) Or they were simply attempts to cash in on transitory popularity, with a couple of hits and a lot of filler.

As a result, Chuck Berry’s first album, After School Session bids fair to being the first great rock ‘n’ roll auteur LP. Released in 1957, it included none of the hits that had already made him a breakaway star: “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” or “Rock and Roll Music.” Apparently Chess figured that putting the big hits on an album would cut into singles sales, so instead they pulled together a bunch of B-sides and singles that hadn’t hit big — in other words, filler… but at that point Chuck Berry was so prolific that his filler beat virtually anyone else’s best work, whether your standard is quality, variety, or just plain entertainment.

After School Session has blues instrumentals, country music, the pseudo-Caribbean novelty “Havana Moon,” and several of Berry’s greatest compositions: this one, “No Money Down,” and his “black is beautiful” masterpiece, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” with the unforgettable verse:

Milo Venus was a beautiful girl,
She had the world in the palm of her hand.
She lost both her arms in a wrestling match
Over a brown-eyed handsome man.

Who the hell else ever wrote like that? Or, in this one, check out the way he inverts “working hard” and places the “yet” in the first verse:

I’ve been running to and fro,
Hard-working at the mill,
Never fail, in the mail, yet
Come a rotten bill.

The rhythm of his lines is perfect, propulsive, and feels like natural speech, but when you look at them closely, he is constantly inverting and inserting words in unlikely places to get that effect — and it never feels strained or calculating, because his ideas and phrases are so fresh and surprising, and yet so simple and accurate. The litany of complaints in this one range from school to work to the army to marriage, to the phone company. Who ever composed a more compact and instantly relatable narrative than:

Pay phone, something wrong, dime gone, will mail…

He was simply the best.

This is another I learned thanks to my sister Debbie and Sha Na Na. When she was 12 and I was 14, or maybe a year before, we got together with a couple of grad students in Woods Hole, Bill and Paul, who were enough older that they knew the songs from the first time around, and held regular doo-wop sessions we called “rock concerts” on Gansette Beach at night, banging rocks as percussion and singing our various parts, just the four of us — then stripping off our clothes and swimming, our bodies outlined by glowing bio-luminescent creatures (the motion of your swimming sets them off, and it’s like you were surrounded by fireflies).

This was one of our favorites — the chorus is great for singing, and the trick ending never got old. One of the cleverest teenage romance songs of a period notable for clever teen songs, “Silhouettes” was written by Bob Crewe with Frank Slay, and recorded for their own XYZ label (though when it took off they quickly licensed it to Cameo), and great as that record is, it is probably most notable for launching Crewe’s career as a songwriter and producer.

Crewe and Slay had written a couple of previous songs for the Rays, including the bizarre “Moo Goo Gai Pan,” but “Silhouettes” was their breakthrough, and they went on to have hits with Billie and Lilly and Freddie Cannon…

…but Crewe really hit his stride in the 1960s, when he teamed up with Bob Gaudio and wrote a bunch of Top Ten hits for the Four Seasons, then “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” for Frankie Valli, produced Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and all in all, racked up a formidable resume that eventually included LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade.”

There’s lots more about Crewe online, plus a good capsule bio of the Rays and their lead singer, Harold Miller, but enough history… I had my fun singing this, now and many times in the past (and take a perverse pleasure in the fact that I forgot to close my closet before filming the video, underlining my essential kinship with the song’s hapless protagonist), but check out the Rays’ original:

By the time I was in seventh or eighth grade I was listening almost exclusively to folk and blues, but my sister Debbie had more social tastes. As a typical big brother I tended to disdain them, but then she started bringing her “gang” home after school and listening to Sha Na Na. My first reaction was to get snooty and annoyed: I was up in my room with my folk records and my acoustic guitar, and the pounding basslines were an intrusion on my precious little world. But at some point, somehow, I started to listen and got hooked.

Born in 1959, I’d missed that era of popular music. I started with the Beatles and the Monkees, and loved both, but knew nothing about what came before them, especially when it came to vocal groups. So that first Sha Na Na album was a revelation. The songs were fun, and meant for singing — the Pete Seeger sing-along tradition never produced anything as irresistibly catchy as “Remember Then” or “Sh-Boom.”  And the chords were pretty straightforward, either variations on 12-bar blues or a basic I-VIm-IV-V7. So I got to work, and can still remember twelve of the fourteen songs on that record, complete with the nonsense-word back-up vocals.

That was and is the great pleasure of doo-wop: when you know a song, you know multiple parts, and when you meet other people who know it, you can sing together — not just sing along in chorus, but split up and choose roles, one person singing lead, others doing the dit-dit-dits or rama-lama-ding-dongs (or, of course, sha-na-nas), and someone (often a couple of people, because it’s a coveted role) doing the bass interjections, like “Why’s everybody always picking on me?”

It’s been years since I fell into a circle of like-minded singers, but through the ’70s and ’80s it happened pretty frequently. I remember once in Cambridge Common — none of us knew each other, but there was one guy who did a perfect Lou Christie/Frankie Valli falsetto — and a magical night on a third-story porch in Vancouver, BC, where we sang till dawn and, as the sun came up, a couple of neighbors came out of the house across the yard, not to complain but to sit quietly and listen.

Getting back to the story, I wasn’t satisfied with Sha Na Na, and began tracking down all the original versions of the songs I liked. It was a perfect moment to do that, because there was a decent oldies station in town, WROR, and ads on TV for mail-order K-Tel anthologies and cheap packaged sets at Woolworth’s. So pretty soon I had “Book of Love” by the Monotones, and all the other songs by the Crests, the Rays, the Chords, the Five Satins, the Diamonds, the Earls, and that led me to enduringly great groups like the Drifters (both versions), the Clovers, and of course the Coasters — but that went way beyond doo-wop.

Obviously, this music was not designed for one guy to play with a guitar, so I’ve done my best but encourage any and all to check out the real thing. There are some fun videos online of Sha Na Na doing this and other songs, complete with camping and choreography, but to get right to the heart of the matter, here are the Monotones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIfuNPbBaaA&ebc

I liked Tom Rush’s voice and guitar playing, but even more than his musicianship I have to thank him for introducing me to a well-curated selection of classic rock ‘n’ roll songs. More than anyone else in the folk revival, Rush showcased a deep knowledge and genuine affection for early rock ‘n’ roll, performing not only hits like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” — which I first heard by him, in a live performance, before hearing either his or Bo’s recordings — but also relative obscurities like Buddy Holly’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You” and the Coasters’ “When She Wants Good Lovin’.”

In 1966, as a generation of folksingers was busily “going electric,” Rush joined the pack, but not by going the Dylan or Byrds (or Fariña, or name your poison) route, cutting what we’d now call “singer-songwriter” material with electric backing. Instead, he made an album that included a side of rock ‘n’ roll oldies, with Al Kooper producing and playing lead guitar. The songs were from an interesting mix of sources, played in a Rush’s relaxed, personal style, and in retrospect sound a lot less dated than all but a handful of the folk-rock emanations of his peers.

That remains my favorite of Tom’s records — it has Eric Von Schmidt’s “Joshua Gone Barbados” on the acoustic second side, which is great, but I rarely listened past that track, while playing side one over and over and learning several of the songs, including “Money, Honey.” I might even have to credit this with inspiring me to buy a Drifters’ greatest hits album a couple of years later — the first Drifters, with Clyde McPhatter singing lead, not the later group that recorded “Under the Boardwalk” and “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

The original Drifters were one of the great vocal groups, transcending anything I would call doo-wop. McPhatter had already established his reputation with the Dominoes, and is one of a handful of singers (along with Dinah Washington, Ray Charles, and Sam Cooke) who pioneered the secular adaptation of hard-edged gospel vocals that became known as “soul.” His hits with the Drifters included “Such a Night,” “Whatcha Gonna Do,” and their matchless version of “White Christmas,” as well as “Money, Honey,” and he went on to do some fine records on his own. Unfortunately, those later efforts never reached the peaks he had scaled with the Dominoes and Drifters, and he began a long slide into depression and died in 1972, all but forgotten except by hardcore vocal group fans.

For what it’s worth, this song was also recorded by a guy named Elvis, who did a pretty good version… but the Drifters’ is definitive.

Posting about Henry Worrell’s “Spanish Fandango” reminded me of my own introduction to open G tuning… Worrell and his followers in the 19th century tended to start their guitar instruction methods with “Spanish Fandango” because it was easy to make it sound pretty — you tuned into open G and played a simple melody, and even if you hit the wrong string it all harmonized, and for a beginner that was very encouraging.

My guitar teacher, Lee K. Riethmiller (sometimes known as Lee Kidd), practiced a similar strategy when he moved me along from Woody and Cisco to blues. I don’t remember exactly when he taught me “Drop Down Mama,” but it was pretty early and the version he taught me was dazzlingly simple: just tune into open G and play a series of descending barres on the 5th, 3rd, and 1st frets, then stick on the 5th and 7th for the C and D chords. I remember him telling me to use my ring finger rather than my index finger for the barre, I’m not sure why, but probably to get a muffled, thumpy sound. He also turned me on to the Tom Rush record that was his source for this song and the basic arrangement, and I liked Rush’s voice and went on to get his first two Elektra albums, which were sources for some of my favorite songs…

In any case, “Drop Down Mama” was my pride and joy for a couple of years, and I remember a couple of babysitters being very impressed — actually, it was a friend of a babysitter: the official babysitter was Joana Sanchez, a student of my mother’s, who moved in when my parents went off on a trip for a week, and her best friend, Ruth Saludes, was incredibly nice, and beautiful, and I had a huge crush on her. She asked me to play this song a bunch of times, sometimes when other people were around and sometimes just for her, and in retrospect I have to assume it was funny as hell to see this little kid flailing away at the guitar and singing a song that could not have been less suited to his age or experience. But she was very encouraging, and I thought I was really going to town.

Then one day some old family friends, the Mosconas, were visiting from Chicago, and their daughter Anne, who is a couple of years older than me, came up to my bedroom and asked me to show her what I had learned on guitar. So I played her this, and she said, “That doesn’t look hard,” and took the guitar out of my hands and played it right back at me. She didn’t even play guitar, but had got it instantly, though I tried to preserve my pride by claiming she didn’t have the “feel” right.

So that was that. I kept playing “Drop Down Mama” occasionally, when I happened to be in open G, but my puppy love affair with the tuning and the song was done. Years later, I heard the Sleepy John Estes version and realized how much Rush had reworked it — and I recently ran across a nice video of Tom talking about the pleasure of seeing people like Estes and playing his own version, which is notably more interesting than what Lee taught me around age twelve.