As noted in the posts for “Swinging Doors” and “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” I’m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It’s one of his most autobiographical songs — pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year stretch in San Quentin, not “life without parole.”

In an indication of how things have changed, he tried to conceal that part of his life for the first years of his career — but this song was released in 1968, shortly after the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison LP, and between that album and Merle being hailed as the most soulful country singer and songwriter since Hank Williams, a stretch in prison became a kind of hallmark of country authenticity.

Merle tended to describe his criminal youth as a mix of unfocused rebellion and stupidity — in particular the event that led to that three-year stretch, which involved him and a buddy getting drunk and deciding to rob a local restaurant, breaking in through the back door at what they thought was three in the morning, but was actually around ten p.m. The owner recognized them and asked why they hadn’t just come around to the front. “If we’d had any sense at all, we would have just laughed and walked around to the front like it was some big joke,” he wrote in his memoir, Sing Me Back Home. Instead, “Like fools, we ran.”

He wrote this song about ten years later, and it was his fifth number one country hit, following “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” (about a man on death row),” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” You get the idea.

While researching this post, I learned that this was the theme song to a movie, Killers Three, which also marked Merle’s acting debut –though his appearance is limited to two or three lines and some bemused head-shaking. The movie includes a couple of other songs by him and his wife (briefly) and singing partner (long-term), Bonnie Owens, but this one is just played as an instrumental under the opening credits. The movie is a complicated tale of bootlegging, romance, and a nice boy gone wrong, produced, co-written, and co-starring Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame. It’s up on Youtube. I’m not recommending it.

As for the song, I was startled to read Merle explaining in an interview with Paul Zollo that his approach on the recording was “trying to land somewhere in between Peter, Paul & Mary and Johnny Cash.” It would never have occurred to me that he was going for the PP&M crowd, but of course Cash had broken into the mainstream with appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and on the TV folk show Hootenanny (and a ghastly movie called Hootenanny Hoot), so that made commercial sense. And when you listen to the record with that in mind, you can hear it. It starts with James Burton playing “folky guitar” in Haggard’s words — fingerpicking a repetitive riff on a Dobro — and Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell fill out the two-guys-and-a-gal vocal harmonies on the chorus.

I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was the electric guitar bend that comes in over Burton, which I thought was Burton, since I once heard him play it live, but turns out to have been Roy Nichols. Since the idea of the Songobiography is that I’m playing all these songs from memory, I didn’t check the record until I’d done my video, but I had that bend in my head, and the way it comes back to end the song, and kind of echo those bits, kinda sorta.

I never really learned either of these songs, but they’re both blues standards and I’ve been playing them together since the 1970s. It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that I had a guitar stolen in Morocco in the winter of 1978-79 and needed to buy a new one, and Jasper Winn was in Sevilla, Spain, and willing to help out, and it was Carnival week, when there were lots of people in the bars all the time, and I had some harmonicas, so Jasper played rhythm guitar and I played harmonica and sang, and by the end of the week I’d made enough money that I could buy a guitar.

To be absolutely frank and come clean after all these years, we switched a price tag so I could buy a somewhat better guitar than I could afford, but in my defense it was at the Corte Ingles, a huge department store, not at a regular music store.

Anyway… I hated having the guitar stolen — it was a 1950s Gibson B-25, the first really nice guitar I ever owned (in those days worth maybe $250) — but that week taught me how to make money as a busker. Before that, I’d been doing street pitches and making almost nothing; after that, I worked bars, cafes, and restaurants and lived very well for the next few years while traveling all over Europe and on to the Indian Subcontinent, Central America, and much of Africa.

I generally played guitar, but if I wanted to work the noisy bars I’d find someone who could play a basic 12-bar blues and play harmonica, which was louder and left me free to jump around and work the room. I’d typically do a slow blues (generally “Call It Stormy Monday,” a choice I actually feel guiltier about than switching the price tags, since it is so, so, so overdone…), then “Johnny B. Goode,” which always got a good reception, and then, if it looked like they wanted another, this medley.

I always liked Jimmy Reed’s recordings, because he sounded so relaxed, and I loved his weird harmonica playing. I never tried to play like him — honestly, I never worked on playing harmonica like anybody, except briefly on some Robert Lee McCoy licks, which I no longer remember, and I really should buckle down and study…

…like at least learn some basic tongue-blocking…

…but meanwhile, I’ve been playing this a lot recently, and it’s fun.

A good indication of how deeply Woody Guthrie affected my life is that I grew up the son of two college professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the first time I saw the Columbia River Gorge I was riding a flatcar on a freight train.

I’ve written about that trip in my posts for “Roll on, Columbia” and “Vigilante Man,” and the gorge was gorgeous, but as far as I remember I’ve still never seen the Grand Coulee Dam.

As for the song, I feel like I’ve known it forever. I don’t remember when I got the record I learned it from, but it would have been back when my mom was still required for that purpose, and fortunately was more than willing to feed myhabit. I just checked and found that  the LP I had was issued in 1967,   as the first of a cheaper line of Folkways records that had glossy covers and lacked the enclosed booklets that were standard in their main line of albums.

The song was one of the two dozen Woody wrote in 1941 on commission for the Department of the Interior, celebrating the Bonneville Power Administration, and apparently intended for the soundtrack of a documentary film. They included some of his best compositions: “Pastures of Plenty,” “Roll On, Columbia,” and “Talking Columbia,” with its great line, “Now, I don’t like dictators none, but I think the whole country oughta be run by ee-lectricity.”

Actually, looking at the list, some of the songs don’t have much to do with the Bonneville Power Administration. “Ramblin’ Round” is about the troubles of the Dust Bowl refugees, and “Hard Travelin’” is about all sorts of folks out on the road.

I’ve posted about a couple of those already, with more to come, but had passed over this one because, frankly, I’ve become skeptical about its message. The patriotism makes some sense in the context of World War II, but I grew up in the Vietnam era and was never much taken by lines like “there stands a towering fortress in the fight for Uncle Sam.” And that was before I read Cadillac Desert, which left me permanently disenamored with the big Western dam projects. And the defense of fortress USA has gotten uglier and uglier through most of my lifetime, and if I sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia for Woody’s patriotism, for the idea of a “simpler time,” I just have to reread my post for “Roll On, Columbia,” which recalls the generally omitted verse celebrating the genocide of northwestern Natives.

All of which said, I’m posting this because this is a memoir project as well as a celebration, and this song is part of my life. The fact that I’ve carried it in my head for more than fifty years is evidence it’s a well-written lyric, and it’s set to a great tune Woody borrowed from the “Wabash Cannonball.” So here it is, a historical artifact, both personal and general, which — if I don’t overthink it — is still a lot of fun to sing.

Oh, yes, and… while preparing this post I found that the Department of the Interior documentary including snatches of Woody’s Columbia River songs is now online, and is pretty interesting:

Bill wrote a lot of mill-town songs, and in an odd mental disconnect I always put “Run You Through the Mill” in that context, imagining him and the woman racing each other through one of the big brick mill buildings along the river in Newmarket, New Hampshire; maybe the same one he was thinking about when he wrote “Snow Outside the Mill,” “Night Shift,” or “Small Town on the River.”

Of course, the song has nothing to do with mills. It’s a bitter, drunken man’s meditation on a messed-up relationship, which he’s messing up further as he sings. At least, that’s what I hear, and by now I hear it as a prophecy of sorts, because Bill messed up a bunch of relationships in the process of drinking himself to death. But he also wasn’t this guy, who, under the cloak of misogyny and self-loathing, is a romantic fiction.

People who came to Bill late — which is to say, after he’d left the lousy bar gigs behind and was performing for sober, quiet audiences that liked the singer-songwriter stuff that passes for “folk music” on NPR  — may be perplexed if I say he admired and resented Tom Waits for having built the career he wanted, playing hip, jazz-flavored songs that conjured visions of Kerouac, Bukowski, and Slim Gaillard.

It was summertime and the city was burnin’
I was drinking beer with a sweaty woman
I was stealing lines off the radio
When over the box they played “Oop Bop Sh’Bam”
And that woman sighed like a flim-flam man
And I thanked Dizzy Gillespie that night for backing up my little show.

Back in those days, Bill wasn’t a heavy drinker — he was getting drunk pretty often, but would get tipsy on a couple of beers, so if it was already a problem, it wasn’t doing much physical damage. That came later, with age and disappointment and whiskey. It’s a complicated story, and I keep being tempted to write about him, if only as a way of dealing with my anger. I was first angry about his artistic choices — he called me over and over through the years, saying he was practicing clarinet or trumpet and the next record would have some solid jazz players… and then would cut another safe singer-songwriter album, which pleased his new fans but wasn’t the kind of music he admired or liked to listen to. I have to think that was part of the reason he was killing himself — which is what I’m really angry about — but there were lots of reasons…

…and if I’m honest, the fact that back in his twenties he was writing songs like this is part of the story: there’s an obvious pathology in the macho drunken loser bullshit that admirers of Kerouac and Bukowski so often embrace.

And, of course, Hemingway. As I was preparing to record this, I happened to pick up A Moveable Feast for the hundredth time, and there it is, in the first paragraph: “The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time…”

I don’t know if Bill was consciously riffing on that passage, but Hemingway was one of his touchstones. I remember him onstage, pausing after a song, lighting a cigarette, and beginning the routine: “He lit a cigarette – Period – Took a drag – Period – It was good – Period – He looked at the audience – Period – What a rowdy crew, he thought – Period – He took another drag – Period – Oh, my God – Exclamation point – I’ve become a character in a Hemingway novel – Period – Now, I have to go out and shoot a zebra….”

I loved that guy and learned a lot from him, and I’m angry at him, and I miss him.

I’ve been singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” for almost fifty years, back to my days busking in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard — and I can date it because Rob taught me the verse, which I don’t sing here, because I never came up with an interesting arrangement of the song, and just played it in G (that is, starting on E), which was dull and, in my hands, frenetic…

…so I shortly dropped it from my repertoire and only picked it up again when I began playing with my wife, Sandrine, on clarinet and we were doing “Lazy River,” and I noticed that until the last six bars it had roughly the same chords as “Sweet Georgia Brown,” if you layered two measures of the latter over each measure of the former. So I tweaked the lyric to cover those final measures, and fell in love with the combination.

I don’t remember when I started singing “Lazy River,” but it was probably when I was taking vocal lessons, which happened a few years after I recorded my LP, Songster Fingerpicker Shirtmaker, when I happened to listen to it again and was horrified at how bad I sounded.

As part of that process, I worked on singing some difficult melodies, and a lot of my favorite difficult melodies were composed by Hoagy Carmichael. “Stardust,” of course, and yes, I worked on singing that, but promise never to do it in public–and fortunately for everybody, I never even attempted “Skylark” or “Baltimore Oriole.” But I did try “Lazy River,” which felt more approachable, especially when I listened to Carmichael sing it. To be fair, anything sounds more approachable when Carmichael sings it; he had a gift for intricate melodies, and also for simplifying them when he sang them himself. But that’s a subject for another day.

For now, the rest of the story is that playing with a clarinetist forced me to experiment with the flat keys (F, Bb, Eb, Ab), which normally are considered unfriendly by guitarists. To my surprise, I found that F and Bb were actually very friendly, and nowadays when I play pop standards I tend to gravitate to those keys even if I’m playing solo. Eb is less accommodating, because there aren’t a lot of comfortable ways for a “cowboy chord” guy to play an Eb… but, as it happens, “Lazy River” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” rarely touch on the root chord, so it works just fine, and it’s a perfect key for my voice.

And that’s that, except maybe I should add that I found clever medleys to be an excellent substitute for genuine jazz chops.  I don’t remember whether this one preceded “Somebody Stole My Gal”/”All of Me” but it’s a similar attempt to come up with something that falls within my instrumental wheelhouse while adding a twist that might interest some better musicians.

This may be my favorite Jimmy Buffett lyric, though I haven’t tended to perform it (unlike “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” and “Margaritaville,” both of which have edged into my repertoire at times, and which I’ve covered in previous posts). I’ve mostly played it for myself, remembering old guys I knew in bars, often in beach towns, back to when I was the house musician for a while in a bar called Maggie’s Farm in Torremolinos — which calls for a digression, because I thought I’d written more about that, but apparently didn’t.

Maggie’s Farm was owned by a big American biker named Bernie, who worked as an underwater demolition guy on the North Sea oil rigs in the summer and bought it for his English girlfriend, Maggie. Bernie tended bar in the winter, along with his Spanish “partner,” whose name I remember as Carlos — the “partner” is in quotation marks because Spanish law said all properties had to be half-owned by Spaniards, but his ownership didn’t extend beyond the official paperwork.

Bernie hired me and my washboard player, Rob Forbes as a house band, playing every other night, four or five hours, no amplification… but we were young and strong and he treated us well — one time he went to the free port in Ceuta and brought back a huge bottle of Johnny Walker Black, which sat behind the bar and was only for people drinking on the house, which included us till it was gone. The regular house drink was a Dirty Mother, which consisted of equal parts milk, cointreau, kahlua, tequila, and vodka. It tasted like a milkshake, and young women who came in for the first time were often served a pint of it on the house.

It was a nice gig for a couple of months, but we were playing a quirky mix of old jug band songs, Woody Guthrie songs, and blues, and eventually the customers got sick of us. Bernie was very nice about it. He asked me outside, explained that the other singers he’d hired lived in Torremolinos, hung out with the customers on the beach, and were part of the scene, but we were living in Malaga and weren’t, we played weird music, people were complaining, and… “I’ve never fired anybody in my life, so would you be willing to quit?”

I said, “Bernie, you know how much I like playing here, and I don’t want to let you down, but we’ve been thinking of going to Sevilla, and if it’s not too big a problem, would it be ok if we moved on after this week?”

He said, “I hate to see you go, but I’ll try to work something out.” Then we went inside and had some more whiskey.

So anyway… I spent a fair amount of time knocking around places like that and this song reminds me of various old guys I knew, generally artists or writers of one kind or another, who drank and hung out with the kids, and usually had some young woman or women who took care of them. Jack Belden, who wrote China Shakes the World, was one of them, in Paris, but I mostly associate them with warm places near the ocean, maybe partly because of this song.

Buffett said this song was inspired by a legendary figure in Chicago, Eddie Balchowsky, who worked as a janitor at a club called the Quiet Knight, and painted, and played classical piano, and sang songs of the Spanish Civil War. I got to hang out with Eddie for a few days in Vancouver, when Utah Phillips brought him there to play at the Folk Festival. He had lost the lower part of his right arm fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in that war, but could play plenty of music with his left, and he had endless stories. Utah wrote a fine song about him, “Eddie’s Song” — “One hand on the keyboard, moonlight fills the room/ One hand on the Ebro, no regrets…” There’s a nice piece about him by a writer named Jeannette Cooperman, called “The Beloved Poet King,” and you can see examples of his artwork on a couple of LP covers, for Loudon Wainwright and the Siegel-Schwall Band. I can still picture him, pounding out fierce one-handed piano and singing “Viva la Quince Brigada,” with all of us joining in on the “rumbala, rumbala, rumbala!” (You can see and hear him singing “Freiheit” in a documentary on the Lincoln Brigade.)

So that’s a bunch of memories… but these days, I hear this song differently, because I’m in my mid-sixties and the world is going to hell, and I sometimes think it would be nice to just quit everything, grow a beard, find a beach town, somewhere warm, with some relatively quiet bars and young people around who might enjoy my stories and music, and just be this guy… and who knows, maybe in twenty years I’ll be there, and the kids won’t have heard Buffett’s non-hit album tracks, and I’ll claim I wrote this song about myself and say I want the final words on my tombstone: “Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way.”

I don’t remember hearing “Exactly Like You” before I started working with Howard Armstrong, which is strange, because it was a popular standard recorded by pretty much everybody, from Ruth Etting to Aretha Franklin. Be that as it may, I learned it from Howard and still play it the way he taught me, with his chords and at least a couple of his melodic variations — though I don’t include his interpolation, “why should I spend money on an X-rated show or two…”

I knew nothing about the background of this song until I started researching this post, and just learned that it came from the fertile pens of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, first appearing in the score of Lew Leslie’s International Revue in 1930, along with “Sunny Side of the Street.” Fields and McHugh were also responsible for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Don’t Blame Me (for Falling in Love With You” — sense a pattern here? — and hundreds of other songs, together and separately. Fields did words, McHugh did music — his non-Fields hits included “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer,” which I’ve posted about elsewhere, since it was a favorite of the Bahamian guitar master, Joseph Spence; she not only wrote innumerable lyrics, but also teamed up with her brother to supply the “book” for a bunch of Cole Porter shows and Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun.

I don’t have much else to say about this one. I played it regularly with Howard, didn’t think about it much after I stopped playing with him, then picked it up again when I started playing with my wife Sandrine on clarinet. I still prefer to play it with Sandrine, but she hates making videos, so I had to work up a solo version — which turned out to be useful, because I came up with the cute work-around at the beginning to get the high A note with the F bass without worrying about playing the full chord, then playing the open E string while dropping down to a regular F shape. Nice little song, nice little trick.

I learned “Besos y copas” from the soundtrack album to Chulas Fronteras, Les Blank’s documentary about norteño music, which I’m pretty sure I owned before seeing the film. It was performed by Chavela Ortiz, a fine singer and accordion player, who fronted the San Jose, California, group Brown Express and was married to Eduardo Hernandez of Los Tigres del Norte. She only made a few recordings before dying in a freak accident, bucked off a horse during a photo shoot, and that’s pretty much all I know about her, though I loved the way she did this one.

The lyric is classic ranchera, the lament of a man whose lover is leaving him:

Perdona si te haya molestado
La voz de un hombre honrado que juró no volver.
Besos y copas he pagado, ya todo ha terminado,
No hay nada que perder.

(Forgive me if you have been bothered by the voice of an honorable man who swore never to return. I have paid kisses and drinks, now it is all finished, there is nothing more to lose.)

Until I started researching this post, I had no idea it was written by Victor Cordero, one of the greatest corrido composers of the 20th century and the main influence on Paulino Vargas, Julian Garza, and many of the later masters I wrote about in Narcocorrido.

Cordero was born in 1914 and grew up during the years of the Mexican Revolution — he told a story of trying to run off and join Pancho Villa at age seven, confronting the legendary hero and asking for a horse and a gun before being found and dragged home by his aunt, and of Villa commending him, saying, “Don’t worry, ma’am, your son has such valor that he will surely become a great Mexican.” (Along with writing songs, Cordero produced a lushly entertaining autobiography for the Mexican Society of Authors and Composers, which I recommend to anyone who can read Spanish.)

Cordero’s corridos include the classics “Juan Charrasqueado,” “Gabino Barrera,” and “El ojo de vidrio,” as well as such later topical oddities as  a Corrido al Che Guevara and Corrido de Elvis Presley. He also wrote all kinds of other songs — his own list of genres included “ranchero, bolero, huapango, tropical, chotis, vals, polka, cumbia, paso doble, danzón, tango, pasillo, cha-cha-chá, jocoso, moruno, danza, go-gó y los estilos colombiano, francés, español, italiano y autóctono,” and  in the 1960s, when most composers of his generation were bemoaning the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, he was inspired by “el cuarteto más grande de todos los tiempos: Los Beatles,” and wrote a series of trendy rock ‘n’ roll songs… none of them particularly memorable, but proving he was a pro to the end.

Anyway… I’ve generally followed the rule of playing these songs as I remembered them, and not re-listening to refresh my memory, but in this case after I’d been practicing for a week or so, my wife, Sandrine, got it stuck in her head and I wanted her to hear Chavela’s version, so put it on and was struck by the way Chavela filled the spaces between each line with accordion fills, apparently improvised and extended as the mood suited her. So I started fooling around with a loosely similar approach, and although the result doesn’t sound anything like what she did, it’s a lot of fun to play.

As for what she did, here’s the clip from Chulas Fronteras. I strongly recommend checking out the rest of the film, which is full of great music, and I wish she had stuck around to do a lot more. (Incidentally, while looking for this clip, I found that the most popular version of this song online is by Jenni Rivera, another favorite performer of mine who died too young.)

I’ve been seeing reviews of a new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, and they reminded me of this comic ballad, which I hadn’t thought about in years, or maybe decades… so I tried to sing it, found I still knew all the words, and here it is.

I learned it from one of my favorite Pete Seeger records, 3 Saints, 4 Sinners and 6 Other People, which I just learned was a reissue of Story Songs, his first album for Columbia Records back in 1961. That was a big deal, because Columbia was the most major of major record labels and Seeger was not only blacklisted but under indictment for contempt of Congress and potentially facing ten years in jail. Apparently he was signed on John Hammond’s instigation, and that signing was one of the reasons Bob Dylan signed with Hammond soon afterwards. I learned most of the songs on that album, and have already posted about “Way Out There,” “Hobo’s Lullaby,” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” (I could have learned the latter songs elsewhere, but considering how early I had this album and how often I listened to it, it’s a definite maybe.)

As for Aimee McPherson, she was one of the most famous evangelical preachers of the early twentieth century, with a ministry in Los Angeles and a popular radio program. She was known for miraculous faith healing and for welcoming a racially integrated congregation, was altogether a pretty fascinating figure, and there’s lots more about her on the internet, as well as that new biography, for people who want to know more.

The song is a witty retelling of a story that did serious damage to McPherson’s career and continues to be disputed. The short version is that she went swimming at Ocean Park, disappeared, and for over a month everyone thought she must have drowned… but then she appeared in Agua Prieta, Sonora, with a story that she had been kidnapped and held prisoner, then escaped and walked almost twenty miles through the desert to find help. The press pounced on this story, alleging that she’d actually spent the month in a lovers’ tryst with her radio operator, Kenneth Ormiston, and she was investigated, along with her mother, facing charges of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. In the end, the case was dismissed and she wrote a memoir, went back to preaching, and remained a popular figure until her death in 1944, though many people remembered the story preserved in this ditty, which was followed by further allegations about her gaudy personal life.

The song has most of its details right — granting that they were scurrilous rumors, never proved in court — only tripping over Ormiston’s name, which it gives as Ray Armistad. Seeger wrote that he learned it from John Lomax, Jr., the eldest son of the pioneering folklorist, who learned it in California in the 1930s, “from a hobo, I think John said.” He didn’t know who originally composed it, and added, “if any reader knows… I hope they’ll let me know.” Apparently no one did.

And finally… for those tempted by the invitation in the final verse, the ever-reliable Wikipedia provides a photograph of the fabled cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea:

This is another classic from the Reverend Gary Davis, with some interpolations of lyrics from Shirley Caesar and the Caravans. I’m not a Christian, but I love both recordings, and would love to see more attention paid to Davis’s connections with other Carolina gospel singers. He was, of course, one of the greatest blues and ragtime guitarists — and this post is headed into some guitar nerd stuff — but he was also a terrific gospel singer in a deep local tradition. His repertoire included songs that were famously performed and recorded by the region’s greatest gospel quartets; another striking example is the song he called “Get Right Church,” which was a major hit for the Sensational Nightingales as “Morning Train” — and that group’s lead singer, Julius Cheeks, was from Davis’s home area and may even have been a distant relation.

The song itself is a bit of a mystery. Davis recorded it in 1960; the Caravans recorded it two years later, and their record credits it to James Herndon, who worked with them as an accompanist and composer — but although it surely is much older, I have so far found no trace of it before those recordings. If anyone knows more, please get in touch and let me know. (There’s an email contact link on my web page.)

This song was Caesar’s first hit as a young member of the Caravans, one of the greatest female quartets, issued as “I Won’t Be Back” on an album of the same title. In Anthony Heilbut’s brilliant survey of
the music’s golden age, The Gospel Sound, he referred to it by an alternate title, “Sweeping Through the City,” and wrote that it remained the most popular number in her live shows, quoting her saying, “The new numbers are selling but the stick is still sweeping.”

I learned Davis’s version in the 1990s, during a particularly deep period of immersion in his music — it was one of many, and I’ve already posted a bunch of pieces I worked up in that period, including “Samson and Delilah,” “You Got to Move,” a gospel guitar medley, “Cincinnati Flow Rag,” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl and Playing Guitar at the Same Time.” At that time, I got the rudiments, but I didn’t really understand his style until I spent a few months hanging out with Ernie Hawkins, who studied with Davis and knows his style more intimately than anyone on the planet.

Ernie pushed me to play with just the thumb and index finger of my right hand, showing me how to get Davis’s distinctive rolls, and pointing out the brilliant economy of his chording. I’ve gone into this subject before, and this piece uses the same basic chords I outlined in my post for “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl,” as well as the elegantly simple move from a partially barred D shape to an A7 shape (in this case, with the partial barre on the 7th fret, so the chords are G and D7, followed by a G7 played in Davis’s trademark C7 shape with the thumb coming around the neck to fret the 5th and 6th strings).

I got most of that from Ernie, and modified this a bit more in recent months, after noticing that Davis virtually always used his thumb to get the 6th string bass root of his G chord in first position, even when he was playing something simple like “Candyman.” My post on that one uses a regular first position G chord, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with the idea of using the thumb there, which leaves you free to reach way up the neck — which, unsurprisingly,  was a favorite move for Dave Van Ronk, another acolyte of the Reverend, who used it to fine effect in “St. Louis Tickle,” “Midnight Hour Blues,” and numerous other pieces. (Van Ronk used the thumb-bass G even more consistently in his many drop-D pieces, for example “Blood Red Moon.”)

I don’t have much more to add, except that I’ve undoubtedly revised the lyrics in all sorts of unintentional ways, and in keeping with an ongoing effort to sing in my own voice, intentionally switched from “I won’t be back no more” to “I won’t be back anymore.” Some people may think that’s silly, but that’s how I normally say the phrase and I’ve previously quoted Martin Carthy’s remark that if you believe in a lyric, you should sing it like you believe it, not like you’re “play-acting.” I don’t actually believe the Christian sentiment of this one, but it’s a moving and powerful image and I see no reason to undercut it by putting on a fake accent — especially a Southern Black accent that, when adopted by a norther white urbanite, has echoes of blackface mistrelsy. It isn’t just minstrelsy, of course; most of my favorite singers were from the South and I used to sing pretty much everything in that accent, just as many British rockers sing in American accents. Still, I’m trying to get closer to my own voice, and although I still hear some of that accent when I listen back, I’m working on it.