American music is a famously heterogeneous and polyglot tapestry, and these two pieces suggest how complicated and interesting it can be to sort out its intertwining strands. Lead Belly’s “Poor Howard” is typical of a world of African American music that was already very old at the dawn of recording, and predates anything that came to be called blues. Its structure is somewhat similar to songs like “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” but it’s a looser and presumably older form, and the guitar part (and tuning) is still directly shaped by banjo techniques. (I’ve explored this before in the video to Furry Lewis’s “Kassie Jones,” which is played very similarly.)

The banjo, as I hope most people know by now, came from Africa, though it was modified in the United States, and was common and popular throughout the South, to a great extent because banjos were easy to make. (A blog post by Bradley Laird, whose homemade banjos are pictured at right, suggests just how easy.) Most homemade banjos, like traditional African banjos and fiddles, have no frets, and numerous blues historians have suggested that the microtonal left-hand slides that were basic to fretless banjo playing influenced later slide guitar techniques — though there are endless battles about whether slide guitar existed before black southerners saw Hawaiian players, and plenty of evidence that Hawaiian and banjo techniques overlapped and intertwined in blues slide. (For anyone who wants to explore the Hawaiian guitar story, I recommend a terrific new book, Kīkā Kila, by John Troutman.)

An area that has been much less thoroughly explored is the influence of formal middle class parlor music on rural southern styles. There is a romantic notion, shared by many musicologists and historians (I have not been immune to it myself) that the rural South was a weird, isolated region that created unique folk arts with little influence from what was happening in cities or even in the houses of richer southerners.  But as Bill Malone suggests in one of my favorite books, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, rural southerners eagerly consumed whatever they could get from the cities, and guitars are exhibit A.

African American musicians were playing guitars by the early 19th century — some plantations apparently had formal dance orchestras made up of black musicians who could read music and were expected to play the latest European dance tunes, and one of the most prominent classical guitar instructors was a black player and composer, Justin Holland — and as soon as Sears Roebuck made relatively cheap guitars available by mail order, they became common throughout the southern countryside. It is not clear how many rural guitarists learned to read music or were influenced by the playing of nice young ladies and gentlemen who took formal lessons on the instrument, but the fact of that influence is clearly demonstrated by the ubiquitousness of “Spanish Fandango” among black and white players throughout the rural South.

The full story is laid out nicely in a blog post by Jas Obrecht, but the short version is that a guitarist named Henry Worrall published some very influential guitar instruction books, and his “Spanish Fandango” (from 1860, not 1840 — I’ve got it wrong in the video) was quickly picked up by other guitar instructors, because it was superbly easy to play — you just tuned your guitar to an open G chord, played simple arpeggios with your right hand while moving one finger of your left hand up and down the guitar neck, and you had something that sounded pretty. (In Europe in the 1970s, the comparable piece was a Spanish tune generically titled “Romance,” which was the theme of a French movie, Jeux Interdits, and routinely played by guitarists who could play no other instrumental pieces.)

Hence, everyone who took even a couple of guitar lessons tended to learn “Spanish Fandango,” and showed it to their friends, some of whom also learned it, and by the 1890s the term “Spanish” had become generic for that guitar tuning. (Another of Worrall’s beginner tunes, “Sebastopol,” gave its name to open D tuning.) Those names are sometimes glossed as “blues slang” or something of that sort, but when I started reading through turn-of-the-century magazines for guitar, mandolin, and banjo aficionados — The Cadenza was the most popular — I found both names used by thoroughly respectable middle class players.

Hence the situation I demonstrate in this video: two completely disparate musical strains leading to pieces that sound very different, but look very similar if you turn off the sound and just watch my left hand.

This was the second Jesse Fuller song I learned, after “San Francisco Bay Blues.” I’m not sure why — there were a lot of good songs on that album, and in retrospect it seems like several of them would have attracted my teenage fancies before this one did… and yet, there was something about this lyric. It is such a wonderful hodge-podge, traveling with Bernadine in his “flying machine” to the beach at Waikiki, and that charmingly odd locution, “We’ll all get together, spend a little while/ Walking down that little old church aisle” — which I recall singing as “orchard aisle” for several years before I figured out what he was saying.

As far as I can determine, this was Fuller’s own composition, and is an excellent example of why it is so silly that historians have classed him as a blues musician. He did play some blues, but he was a magnificently varied jack of all trades — and not just when it came to music: he had a shoeshine stand, and also carved bendable wooden snakes that he sold on the street. If I’ve got the dates straight, that was when he was living in Hollywood, a period when he notably struck up an acquaintance with the world’s most popular movie star, Douglas Fairbanks, and played a bit part in The Thief of Baghdad.

Then he moved up to Oakland, where he became a professional musician for the first time, in his fifties, having hit on the gimmick of building himself a foot-pedal-operated bass and becoming a one man band. He also raised chickens, and did carpentry, and refitted his car to carry all the instruments and also serve as a sleeping space. He called himself “The Lone Cat,” with good reason — when he became a nationally known figure, he toured by car, getting where he needed to go, sleeping in his own quarters, dependent on no one. I even heard a story, which I gather is apocryphal but shouldn’t be, that he wouldn’t tour Europe until the bookers arranged for him to travel by ship, and he drove on board, slept in his car all the way across, then drove off the boat in Europe and did the tour.

From the opening shout of “San Francisco Bay BLUES!” I was a Jesse Fuller fan. I didn’t learn many of his songs, because I couldn’t do with them what he did with them, but my favorites were always his pop and ragtime numbers, and I picked up a few over the years, starting with this one, which became my showpiece, complete with harmonica and kazoo breaks. I didn’t play either instrument like him, but came up with perky solos that always got a good reception — I did it at a talent show in high school, along with “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me,” and also at the talent show that finished off a long day of conferencing at an international Trotskyist youth conference in London — I had briefly joined the Workers League, the US affiliate of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, which had split from the Socialist Workers Party in a schism led, in part and not coincidentally, by Dave and Terri Van Ronk. That was one of the largest crowds I’ve ever played for, and “San Francisco Bay” brought down the house and made me think I could maybe actually do this for a living.

I stopped playing kazoo after a while, and don’t even play much harmonica anymore, but whenever I listen to Jesse Fuller I’m tempted to go the one man band route again, because he always sounds like he’s having so much fun.

As for “San Francisco Bay Blues,” it became a folk revival standard largely due to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who learned it from Fuller during a swing through the Bay Area and played it regularly — I’m pretty sure I learned the chords from the Young Folk Song Book, which even had tablature to Elliott’s strummed guitar intro. Like “Sweet Home Chicago” on the blues scene, it was popular in part because its title city had romantic associations for a lot of people — thanks in part to Kerouac and the beats, San Francisco was a fabled haunt of Bohemia, and became the main West Coast branch of the folk-blues revival. If anyone I knew, from my leftist uncle to my favorite musicians, went out to the West Coast, it was pretty much taken for granted that they’d go to Berkeley or San Francisco, so the song had an added romantic appeal beyond its cheery melody and the neat way Fuller’s words fit together.

Somewhere along the line, my family acquired Leonard Cohen’s first two albums — I don’t know if it was my father or mother who bought them, but I know no one listened to them, including, mostly, me. I recall once attempting the first album, and the relief I felt when I got to “So Long, Marianne,” because at least it had some energy.

However… my sister had the usual folk/girl tastes — which, as someone with typical folk purist/male/know-it-all tastes I regarded as such — so I heard Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez, and Judy Collins, and my sister also got the Judy Collins Songbook, and my voracity was even more compulsive than my prejudices, so I went through it and tried my hand at some songs I never would have attempted otherwise, including “Suzanne.”

And that worked out for the best, because when I was sixteen my mother shipped me off to France for two months, in the vain hope that it would improve my language skills, and the first three weeks were at a summer camp where I was the only non-French kid, and I somehow made it to the train in Paris, and was wandering down the corridor feeling very lost, and a young French camper with long curly hair spotted my guitar and pulled me into his compartment…

He spoke barely any English and I spoke barely any French, despite five years of it in school, but he had a guitar and began questioning me about what music I liked, and the first name that came up, or maybe the second, after Dylan, was something incomprehensible and polysyllabic that I finally figured out was Lay-oh-nard Coh-hhen, with the H painstakingly aspirated, like we do in English.

To make a long story short, I had no need to learn French in that summer camp, because I was an American guitar player and could sing Dylan songs, and blues, and “Suzanne,”  which was a huge hit in France, in French, for Graeme Allwright — and which would even have had romantic possibilities, if I had been just a tiny bit more daring. And when I went over to Europe a couple of years later to earn my living as a player, I continued to have this one handy for French fans.

By then I’d also seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a great movie in which Cohen’s songs and voice are perfect, and learned “Sisters of Mercy.” And Dave Van Ronk’s performance of “Bird on a Wire” temporarily turned that into one of my most doleful showpieces. But what the French wanted was “Suzanne.”

And the end of that story is that when my future wife heard my CD for the first time, before we really knew each other, and complimented me by saying I reminded her of Leonard Cohen — which I had heard before, and generally understood to mean I couldn’t carry a tune — I factored in the fact that she was French and took it as a compliment. Which said, one of the many, many things I love about her is that she has never asked me to play “Suzanne.”.

Once I got into Dylan, I fell hard, not only for his songwriting, but for his singing and guitar playing, and I’ve got to say that even his oft-disparaged harmonica style is pretty damn effective most of the time. In fact, I’m one of those odd people who tends to like him, in his early New York period, even more for the sound than for the writing — at least, I’d rather hear Dylan sing “Freight Train Blues” or “Pretty Peggy-O” than hear most other people sing Dylan songs.

Like all the other folkies I know, I’ve sung plenty of Dylan songs myself over the years, and still know at least a half dozen of them all the way through. In general, though, they are the earlier, simpler ones, like “Don’t Think Twice” and “Hollis Brown,” rather than the more abstract poetic ones like “It’s All Right Ma” — not because I prefer listening to the earlier ones (my favorite Dylan discs are Bringing It All Back Home  and  Highway 61), but because although I’m pretty good at learning and remembering lyrics, I never managed to memorized all the verses to more than a couple of the long, poetic epics.

Fortunately, there were also some shorter and less epic lyrics in that period, and this one captured my imagination the first time I heard it and has held on ever since. For one thing, the tune is lovely. For another, the first two verses are some of the cleanest writing he did in his first surrealist poet phase. I tend to agree with Van Ronk that Dylan was too brilliant for his time and place, with the result that people praised his mediocre lines as fervently as his great ones and he didn’t bother to edit or rewrite some lines that could have been improved by editing or rewriting. For example, in this one, “The cloak and dagger dangles/Madams light the candles…” Really? How does a cloak and dagger dangle, and what would that mean, and what does it have to do with the madams and candles, and–since it’s just word salad –why not find a better rhyme?

On the other hand, if I could have written those first two verses, or the best lines in the next two, I might have been so happy I would have ignored my clunkers as well…

That’s me being a critic, which is not my favorite role, especially when it comes to this song. My favorite role when it comes to this song is singing it — mostly to myself, because I usually figure the world doesn’t need another person singing Dylan, but if I’m going to put my favorite songs up here, this one needs to be be included.

Incidentally, I have always heard the final line about the raven as an homage to Edgar Allen Poe, whom I enjoy a lot more than Arthur Rimbaud — which may mean I’m an archaic philistine and all the above opinions can be profitably ignored.

If this wasn’t the first Dylan song I learned, it was close. I got into Dylan late — I’m probably one of the few kids of my generation who was a Woody Guthrie nut before I ever heard, or even heard of, Bob Dylan, and I clearly remember the first time I heard him, at least knowingly: It was in Woods Hole, and my father brought home Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and put it on, and we listened to “Rainy Day Women,” and I thought it was lousy. I said, “He’s a terrible singer!” My dad said, “But you like Woody Guthrie…” and I said, “Woody Guthrie’s a great singer! He doesn’t sound anything like Woody Guthrie.”

I was probably nine or ten years old, and soon changed my tune, and over the next few years I learned a lot of Dylan’s — and yes, before some smart-aleck chimes in, he did come up with some original tunes, though he also copped quite a few from hither and yon, including much of this one. He adapted “Don’t Think Twice” from a song compiled and reworked by Paul Clayton, called, “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone” — which it took me years to track down, but now is on YouTube. Dylan’s song is better, by a long shot, but the lineage is obvious, and  Dylan eventually paid Clayton something for it.

That story gets more complicated, because Clayton himself had adapted the song from earlier sources, mining a song called “Who Gon Bring You Chickens,” and Dylan’s transformation was shortly transformed yet again by Johnny Cash, into one of his biggest hits of the 1960s, “Understand Your Man” — and when that song hit the Top 40 in 1964, Dylan and Clayton were driving out to California together, apparently the best of friends.

Dylan is quoted in the liner notes to Freewheelin’ saying he approached this song differently from “most city singers” (presumably starting with Peter, Paul, and Mary): “A lot of people…make it sort of a love song — slow and easy-going. But it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better.” Indeed, it is one of his numerous bitter songs to ex- or soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends, a theme he apparently found particularly inspirational. I’ve tended to like my ex-girlfriends, and find the lyric kind of snarky if I think about it too much… but it’s so well written that mostly I just try to do it justice.

There’s one story I have to add out of courtesy to my old traveling partner Jasper Winn, a fine writer and musician, epic traveler, terrific horseman, and author of Paddle, about making the circuit of Ireland by kayak. We were hitchhiking from Paris to the North Cape of Norway in 1979, and somewhere around Copenhagen we got in an argument about the chords under the second line of this song: Jasper said it went G-Em-A-D7, while I said it went G-Em-C-D7, like the first line. We made a bet, to be settled by the Bob Dylan Song Book, which was where we’d both learned to play it, and found a copy somewhere, and of course I was wrong… and should have paid up promptly, in cash, but instead eventually gave Jasper an old backpack of mine, which really was not equivalent to what I owed, and my shame is deep and eternal.

In retrospect it’s pretty funny how much of my early exposure to old-time country music was through the Holy Modal Rounders — but the more I think about it, the more right it feels. I appreciate the expertise of the New Lost City Ramblers, and enjoyed the technical brilliance of the bluegrass bands, but the old-time performers I most enjoy on record are the wild, fun ones like Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole, and no one in the revival captured that flavor better than the Rounders, weirdness and all. (If Charlie Poole had turned up in Greenwich Village, you think he wouldn’t have sampled the full range of available drugs? He sure sampled everything that came his way in his short and gaudy life down south…)

The Rounders obviously got this one from Poole, and aside from some lyric changes they stayed pretty close to the version he cut with the North Carolina Ramblers. Poole’s records with the Ramblers are by far my favorite body of work in the early string band genre — he’s a great singer, their playing is always inventive and exciting, with great rhythmic drive, and the songs range from fiddle tunes to blues, pop, and whatever else caught their fancy. I first fell for Poole as a blues singer, and still think he was one of the greats in that category, but the more I listen to him, the more I appreciate the way he could make virtually any kind of material his own.

For example… “Moving Day,” which was a ragtime-era pop song by Andrew Sterling and Harry Von Tilzer, the latter an impressively prolific composer who first crossed my radar as the author of German-American novelty waltzes, notably “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows” and “Under the Anheuser Busch.” Sterling and Von Tilzer wrote “Moving Day” as a comical “coon song,” and the original version included a verse in which the protagonist tries to buy the landlord off with a chicken stew made from hens he has stolen from the same landlord… none of which turns up in the Poole version, or the Rounders’, or mine.

Incidentally, my buddy Del Rey recently filmed a charmingly ridiculous music video for her version of this song, in old silent movie style, playing all the characters and a daunting guitar arrangement. I stay at Del’s when I’m in Seattle, and am chilled to even briefly imagine her being evicted… so let’s hope life never replicates art.

Yet another I got from the Holy Modal Rounders, though somewhat amended after listening to their source, Prince Albert Hunt, a Texas fiddler, guitarist, and legendary hell-raiser who recorded it in 1928. I still go back and forth between his first verse and theirs:

Rounders:
Blues in the bottle, blues in the bottle,
Where do you think you’re at…
You went and kicked my dog, and now you drown my cat

Hunt:
Blues in the bottle, blues in the bottle
Stopper’s in my hand…
I’m goin’ back to Fort Worth, find me another man.
(except I alter that line to fit my cis-gender norm)

This was one of the first two songs I heard by the Rounders, along with “Euphoria,” on a Fantasy Records blues sampler. In retrospect, I’m kind of startled that they were included, since the rest of the company ranged from Dave Van Ronk and Tom Rush to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Witherspoon, with nary a fiddle or banjo in sight — it made more sense (or at least was differently weird) to find them marketed in similar company on a Prestige collection of “psychedelic hits”– but I’m glad in any case, because I’m not sure I would have heard them otherwise. They were always kind of a cult thing, and it wasn’t really my cult, except that I loved them, and still do.

Incidentally, I’m told that the first time anyone used the word “psychedelic” in a song was the Rounders’ in their version of “Hesitation Blues.” Which, if you haven’t heard it, is just a click away.

I had long been content to worship the Rounders from afar, and then, a few years ago, Peter Stampfel (voice, fiddle, banjo, and songwriter — the other guy, on guitar and voice, is Steve Weber) emailed me out of the blue to come in as a ringer and play guitar for his Ether Frolic Mob at the Jalopy in Brooklyn. I’ve never been so honored and pleased before or since, and insisted on going to New York a day early so we could rehearse –which, for me, was mostly just the opportunity to spend some time and play some music with one of my heroes. And we became friends, and he was one of the key sources for my recent Dylan book, and he’s one of the most brilliant and charming folks I’ve ever met, and he keeps making album after album… and long may he wave.

P.S. The guitar and setting for my accompanying video are thanks to the wonderful Del Rey, my host on a recent trip to Seattle, and a friend of hers who left that lovely Gibson with her for safe keeping. If you don’t know Del’s work, check her out — the master of boogie woogie guitar, and lots of other styles, the queen of the ukulele, and the star and soundtrack artist of a new silent comedy video of “Moving Day.”

My uncle Sascha was a lefty lawyer in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s — he was the lawyer in the field with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and also Huey Newton’s contact with the outside world from prison — but by the time I was old enough to be aware of his activities he had ceased practicing law, and figured in my personal life mostly as a cool uncle who gave me some of the records that have most influenced the course of my life. He had been close to Lenny Bruce, and made sure I knew Lenny’s oeuvre, and he had gone to college or law school with a couple of the top people at Fantasy Records, and one year gave me a promotional sampler of their new series of “two-fer” blues releases, compiled from the old Prestige catalog. He knew I was getting into blues, and that set had two cuts each by some of the greatest: Furry Lewis, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Rev. Gary Davis, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — but what changed my life was hearing Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, and the Holy Modal Rounders. They had two songs each, and I still can play all six. My notion of blues up till then was some Josh White 78s and my half-brother Dave’s records, which were people like Skip James and Booker White — all terrific, but much less accessible for a white kid from Cambridge who had started out with Pete, Woody, and Cisco.

Of all the artists on that set, I’m guessing it was the Rounders who first captured my imagination, because they were just so WEIRD. Especially “Euphoria,” which was unlike anything I’d ever heard — it sounded like Charlie Poole on methedrine, except at that point I’d never heard of methedrine, or of Charlie Poole. I was thirteen years old, which is kind of a perfect age to discover the Rounders, and I fell hard, quickly learning this and “Blues In the Bottle.” Then my uncle was kind enough to follow up with the Fantasy double-LP set comprising their two first albums, and I picked up several more songs off that.

I only got to see the Rounders — the original duo, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber — once, around 2000, and it was one of the most bizarre and fascinating shows I’ve ever attended. They had briefly reformed and were squabbling constantly between songs, but they were playing and singing great, and the (small) audience was riveted through a two hour show.

I wouldn’t bet on any future Rounders gigs, but Peter is busier than ever, playing constantly and releasing new albums at a dazzling rate. If you don’t know his work, I still recommend starting with the Rounders, but for two later masterpieces I’d suggest “Impossible Groove,” a track with the Bottle Caps on which he raps a Robert Service poem, and his immortal version of “Goldfinger” with clawhammer banjo and tuba. And if you can see him live, don’t think twice, just go.

Blues at Newport was one of my life-changing albums. I don’t remember how or why I bought it (or got my mom to buy it for me), but it was Dave Van Ronk’s version of “That’ll Never Happen No More” on that set, more than his version of “Cocaine” on a Fantasy sampler, that persuaded me to persuade my mom to go see him in concert. Neither recording had captured my imagination on first hearing, but when I saw the poster for the gig I recognized the name and went home and listened, and that was enough to send us to the concert that changed my life.

The tracks on that album that did capture my imagination immediately were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee doing “Key to the Highway,” and in particular John Hammond’s performance of “No Money Down.” I don’t think I was yet aware of Chuck Berry, and certainly hadn’t heard his version of that particular song — and when I did, it took a while for me to accept it, because my first reaction was that it was too perky and didn’t have the guts of Hammond’s. I’ve revised that opinion over the years, but there’s still more Hammond than Berry in the way I do this.

“No Money Down” is an interesting example of a self-penned follow-up or “answer song”: Berry had hit with “Maybellene,” in which his little Ford was “motorvating” over the hill and won a race with a Cadillac Coupe de Ville driven by the title lady. But rather than being true to his Ford (never mind the lady), in his follow-up he’s motorvating back into town and jumps at the opportunity to trade up.

Musically, this was one of the many offshoots of Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Written by Willie Dixon, that song started a wave of comically exaggerated blues songs using versions of Muddy’s trademark riff.  Ray Charles had “It Should’ve Been Me,” the Robins/Coasters had “Riot In Cell Block Number 9” and “Framed,” Ruth Brown had “I Can’t Hear a Word You Say,” and Chuck Berry had this one.

Incidentally, Hammond changed “Murphy bed” to “roll-away bed,” apparently to be more up-to-date, and I went back to the original because I thought it was charmingly archaic (my only experience of a Murphy bed being the site of Britt Eklund’s downfall in The Night they Raided Minsky’s) — but now that we’re in a new age of chic urban living, I find Murphy beds are advertised everywhere from Costco to Ikea.