I was so out of touch with popular culture in 1977 that when a young woman requested “Margaritaville” I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was busking in Harvard Square with my friend Rob Forbes playing washboard, and she was there with a much older man, who I assumed was her father. Rob dismissed that notion as typically naive, but as it turned out, it was her father, and somehow we ended up at her place a few days later, and she played us the Buffett record, and I think Rob may have dated her for a while. Her name was Heidi.

That was that, for the time being, since we went off to Europe at the end of the summer and Buffett hadn’t hit over there. I probably got my next taste in the mid-1980s, when I hitchhiked down the East Coast and along the Gulf Coast to Mexico — which meant I was mostly traveling through Buffett country, and disappointed a lot of people by not having a repertoire of his songs.

I may have learned this during that trip, or maybe when I got back home. In any case, I picked up two or three of his albums and liked them, and learned a half-dozen of his songs. I’ve already posted “The Peanut Butter Conspiracy,” and will definitely be posting “He Went to Paris,” and maybe “Miss You So Badly,” which I played for a while but am not sure I remember all the way through…

…and I’ve never performed “Margaritaville,” because it was so overdone, but when I got into Congolese guitar I found that this fell really nicely under my fingers; Buffett’s mix of Caribbean rhythms and country-western was exactly the sort of thing the Congolese acoustic players liked, and I’ve enjoyed picking this for more than forty years. The lyric is admittedly pretty silly, especially the pop-top/flip-flop verse, but in a relaxed, lazy, Buffett way, and it’s fun to sing. Apparently he wrote it in Austin, Texas, feeling homesick for Key West, and sounds like it.

Which brings me to Steve James, my buddy in Austin — later in Seattle, and now gone, but I stayed with him a bunch of times in Austin and almost blew up his house once by leaving one of the gas burners slightly on, which feels like the kind of thing the singer of this song would do. Steve always liked my pseudo-Congolese guitar arrangements — we first bonded over my version of “Iko Iko” — and was particularly amused by this one. He was always annoyed by folkies and blues fans who self-righteously avoided the Top Forty, and was charmed that I’d demonstrate the adaptability of what I’d learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda with a megahit Buffett song. (For some reason, I’ve found this style matched several major hits: previous posts with fingerpicked rumba accompaniment include “He’ll Have to Go” and “Under the Boardwalk.”) So, this one’s for Steve, and the shirt I’m wearing in the video was one of his; I’ve never worn guayaberas, but he liked them and I inherited this one, and it fits the song.

When Dylan hit the stage on Sunday evening at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, carrying an electric guitar and backed by Al Kooper and members of the Butterfield Blues Band, and crashed into “Maggie’s Farm,” he unleashed a wave of controversy, myths, and adulation that has only gained power in the succeeding decades. I wrote about all of this at length in Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, now the basis of a major Hollywood movie called A Complete Unknown, which recreates that moment with some added dramatic details. I’m not going to rehash all that history here, but it brought me back to the song.

As with a lot of the Dylan songs in my repertoire, I don’t remember when or where I learned this; surely in my teens, and although I might not have sung it for decades, it’s engraved indelibly in my memory. I don’t remember how I used to play it, and by now I’ve listened to the Newport version so many times that my take on it is influenced as much by Michael Bloomfield’s ferocious guitar playing as by Dylan’s voice — not that I’m attempting any semblance of Bloomfield’s virtuosity, but I would play this very differently if I hadn’t heard that version.

Due to that performance and its repercussions, this song is often positioned as Dylan’s rejection of the folk scene — that’s how it works in the movie, very effectively, and he was certainly declaring his independence from the people who had anointed him as their spokesman and prophet, and who expected him to keep writing songs for them to sing at their gatherings, and to take part in those gatherings…

…but if Dylan was breaking with the folk scene, he was by no means breaking with folk music, and if you dig a little deeper, this song was also a declaration of fidelity to the folk tradition. Specifically, it is an imaginative reworking of a song called “Down on Penny’s Farm,” recorded in 1929 by a group listed on the record label as The Bentley Boys, who remain largely obscure (though Tony Russell recently unearthed some background on them in his book Rural Rhythm). That song was about the miseries of working as a sharecropper, and made a perfect template for Dylan’s plaint:

Pete Seeger and the other Almanac Singers were presumably familiar with this song back to the 1930s, since they reworked that last line in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” and Seeger recorded it on his first solo album, Darling Corey. That album is often overlooked, but was massively influential; it was the first time a middle class, urban musician attempted to record rural music authentically, in the style of the original performers, to the point of recreating their banjo arrangements, rather than treating rural performances as raw material that needed to be smoothed out and gussied up for sophisticated urban listeners. It would be a few years before Pete’s half-brother Mike teamed up with Tom Paley and John Cohen to form the New Lost City Ramblers, the foundational group of the old-time music revival and the wave of artists Dave Van Ronk dubbed “neo-ethnics” — and Paley specifically cited Seeger’s album as inspiring him to painstakingly learn and recreate older guitar and banjo styles.

A couple of years after Seeger’s LP, Folkways Records released the Bentley Boys original recording on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which some later writers have cited as the roots of Dylan, the Band, and the whole “Americana” thing — but, much as I love the Anthology, that’s a misunderstanding of the world Dylan was living in. As he has pointed out, he was moving from couch to couch, and didn’t have anything like a record collection. He undoubtedly heard “Penny’s Farm” on Seeger’s album and the Anthology, but also from lots of friends and acquaintances at picking parties in Minneapolis, New York, Cambridge, and wherever else young folksingers gathered. Unlike rock fans and critics, who take pride in knowing who recorded the “original version” of a song, the whole point of folk songs, as understood by Dylan’s friends, mentors, and models, was that they were done by no particular person or band and had no original—they were floating in the ether and any recording just captured a moment when someone with a machine happened to preserve one of the infinite versions and performances of songs that continued to change and grow.

Shake it up, Bobby!
Twist and shout!

The early 1960s brought a spate of songs based on the chord pattern of “La Bamba,” which had hit big for Ritchie Valens in 1958. The Isley Brothers produced the most obvious reworking with “Twist and Shout,” which was shortly covered by the Beatles — and which I have occasionally played as a medley with “La Bamba” — but there were a bunch of more complex and extended songs that used other chord patterns for the verse, then fell back on the repeated,  Latin-flavored I-IV-V for the chorus, including the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud,” the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The latter was Dylan’s first major hit, and the title has an obvious double meaning: it fits the lyric and also his choice to go head to head with the Stones and the new generation of rock bands that shared his immersion in deep US roots styles. He’d been playing Muddy Waters songs since his first days in New York — his live tapes include a version of “Two Trains Running” and the Freewheelin’ sessions include his reworking of “Louisiana Blues” — so when the Stones hit the US playing covers of Waters and Howling Wolf, and the Animals hit playing songs copped from his first LP, it was natural for him to team up with Mike Bloomfield and bring it all back home. Columbia Records framed the title of his first electric album in exactly those terms, presenting him as the native answer to the British invasion, and although some deaf or unthinking critics called his electric music “folk rock,” it had none of the soft folkiness of the Byrds or Sonny and Cher; it was blues rock, as loud and tough as anything the Stones were doing — especially by 1965, when they were adapting their style to fit his lyrical innovations.

There’s a funny story about that, which Mick Jagger told in an interview: I’m quoting from memory, but the gist was that Dylan had apparently met Keith Richards in New York and said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.'”

The interviewer, taken aback, asked “What did he mean? Was it a put-down?”

Jagger responded, “Well, of course. He’s like that. It’s funny. And it’s true.”

Moving on to “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was obviously Dylan getting into their territory, and also a classic example of his lyrical put-down mode. The usual gloss is that it was one of the multiple nasty songs he wrote after breaking up with Joan Baez; “She Belongs to Me” was the most obvious, but my uncle, who knew everybody, insisted that “Desolation Row” was about her circle in Carmel, and when I spent a few days there and met Ephraim “Don” Doner, a brilliant ceramic artist and ping-pong hustler with voluminous gray hair, I instantly identified him as “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood…”

Be that as it may, a lot of this song’s lyrics feel like Dylan putting down the lonely princess who went to the finest schools, from the point of view of a genuine denizen of the lower depths. Which was, as his own uncles might have said, pretty chutzpadik, since he was a middle class kid who had only visited the lower depths as a Guthrie-dazzled romantic, much as I did a few years later, and was already a millionaire and in the process of becoming a rock star.

Which said, he was a new kind of rock star, and when he sang this at Newport it was the knock-out punch of the combination that began with “Maggie’s Farm” — he wasn’t going to be part of their club anymore, was going his own way, alone, refusing to lead a new generation of committed idealists and sneering, “How does it feel, to be on your own?”

To a lot of the people listening, it felt miserable, and some of them had the energy to boo him — and the booing just added to the power of his new persona, proving that rather than following a trend he was fearlessly going his own way.

In fact, he was doing both: he had wanted to be a rock star since high school and was jumping on the latest trend, but insisted on doing it his own way, and he’s been doing it his own way ever since. If you go to see the Rolling Stones today, they’re still recycling their greatest hits of the sixties, playing the riffs the fans want to hear, while Dylan keeps adopting new personas, making new music, and constantly changing his setlists and arrangements. If he’s no longer a complete unknown, he remains resolutely unpredictable and always interesting.

I learned “Like a Rolling Stone” in my early teens — maybe even pre-teens. I never performed it because the world didn’t need another version, but like a bunch of Dylan’s early songs it is inextricably part of my musical life. As I wrote about “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I don’t even know if I like it; it is so deeply ingrained in my memory that it just is.

Continuing the Dylanology, this is an early composition that I thought was utterly forgotten and was going to post this week as an obscure novelty… but to my astonishment I just saw A Complete Unknown and Timothée Chalamet plays a brief snatch of it. Anyway…

Like pretty much everyone who knows this, I learned it from Dave Van Ronk’s In the Tradition LP, recorded in 1963 with the Red Onion Jazz Band.In our book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave told the story of its composition:

One night we were sitting around in the Kettle of Fish, and by that time Bobby had already acquired quite a reputation as a songwriter, though only among the local crowd. A bunch of us were sitting at a table, and this guy came in and walked up to us, and he looks down at Bob and snarls, “So you’re the hot-shot songwriter, huh? All right . . .” And he reaches into his pocket and slaps a twenty dollar bill down on the table, and says, “I’ll bet you can’t write me a song called ‘If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You.’” That was an old joke title, one of those things like “When the Bed Breaks Down, I’ll Meet You in the Spring” or “Take Back Your Heart, I Ordered Liver.”

Bobby looked down at that twenty, and at that point in his career it must have seemed as big as a windowshade. So he looks the guy in the eye, and says, “Oh, yes I can.”

We agreed that the money would be deposited with Babe the bartender, and that the guy would come back around the same time the following night. Sure enough, the next evening the guy comes in again, and Bobby reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheaf of paper, and he has not only written a song to the title, it has six long verses. So what could I do? I had to record it.

Actually, it only has four verses, which are enough — when I’ve performed it live, I’ve tended to cut one, because it’s a long song, though of course Dylan would go on to write far longer ones. (I also cut a couple of verses when I do “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and honestly don’t think I ever learned that one all the way through, much less “Gates of Eden” or “It’s All Right Ma…” and that’s before we get to “Visions of Joanna,” which I’m not sure I’ve even listened to all the way through. Mea maxima goddamn culpa.)

Dylan performed this at his 1963 Town Hall Concert, introducing it as “a 1930 ragtime tune I just wrote last week.” It’s not one of his masterpieces, but he was obviously having fun — though the theme calls for the standard disclaimer that the sentiments expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the present performer.

(Incidentally, I just checked Youtube to see if anyone else had posted versions of this, and found that Paul Revere and the Raiders not only recorded it but released it as a single. They only sing two verses, though they could have managed a third if they hadn’t filled a bunch of space singing “la, da, da, da…,” ad infinitum. Yuck. As Dave would say, “The poor we have always with us.”)

I have a lot of favorite Bill Morrissey songs, and this is near the top of the list.

I was sitting at the dining room table on Appleton Road with Jeff McLaughlin one afternoon, when Bill came downstairs and sang this for us. He’d been working on it for a month, filling wastebaskets with discarded verses, and finally had something that satisfied him. We were blown away — though, to be fair, that was a pretty common reaction to Bill’s songs in that period. He wrote a lot of good ones later, but for me this was his golden era; “Small Town on the River” had set the standard, and he was writing short stories that rhymed and scanned, conjuring scenes that were intensely visual and characters who felt fully-conceived and completely alive.

The story was more or less autobiographical. As he wrote in the liner notes to his first album (he hadn’t wanted notes, but I insisted, and I’m glad to have them): “Barstow is a town in the Mojave Desert on Interstate 40. I was close to broke and trying to get from Los Angeles to New Hampshire. After two and a half days on the entrance ramp I gave up trying to hitchhike out of town and walked to the freight yard. The song starts a little after that.”

It really doesn’t need more of an introduction, but a couple of things might be worth mentioning. Like, when I first heard it, I thought he’d made up the lyric the drunken character named Parks sings as they sit around the fire, but Bill was recalling a real song from the 1940s, “Dear Okie,” originally recorded by a singer named Doye O’Dell, shortly covered by a bunch of other singers, including Spade Cooley, and revived in the 1960s folk scene by the New Lost City Ramblers and on the country scene by Hank Thompson.

I’ve sung this a lot of places over the years, though mostly for friends over late night bottles of whiskey rather than onstage. Most recently, I spent a few days in Kansas City, staying with Bob and Diana Suckiel, who were hosting a house concert for me. That’s a funny story, because they used to have a club called the Foolkiller, which I remember because I was booked there back in the mid-1980s and it is the only gig I ever had that drew literally no one. We waited around for a while, and then Bob or Diana said they knew some folks who were having a party, so we went over there and I spent the evening trading songs with a local family band that had just got back from playing a country fair. It’s a nice memory, odd as that may seem, and when I did the house concert, the parents from the family band showed up — neither they nor the Suckiels remembered my previous visit, but for me it brought the story full circle.

Anyway… the evening before the concert I was sitting around with Bob and Diana, drinking whiskey and recalling old friends and past times. They used to be regulars at the annual hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, and had lots of stories about that, and Bob worked for decades on the trains, so after a while I sang this for them. They’d never heard it, and Bob was impressed with the image Bill used in the chorus, “Don’t the freight yards sound like a drunk in a metal shop…”

I’ve already posted about my own experiences riding the freights in my posts for “Danville Girl,” “Roll On, Columbia,” and “Vigilante Man,” and have a fond memory of sitting by a fire in a freight yard somewhere between Wishram and Spokane with Joe, the old hobo I was riding with, and another old guy (both undoubtedly younger than I am now). I had a can of baked beans in my pack — my regular emergency ration, back to my first days traveling in Europe — and was going to just open it and eat it cold, but they shamed me into putting it at the side of the fire until it got hot. I had the typical middle class kid’s romanticism about living rough, while they had a sensible appreciation of the few comforts available. For example, I loved riding the freights, while they thought it was silly for a young guy like me, with a valid driver’s license, to be on the trains rather than going to the welfare office and getting money for a bus ticket.

I could chalk my affection for this song up to similar romanticism, which is why I tend to sing Bill’s New England songs, which feel closer to my own reality… except, really, I did ride the freights and have never lived in small-town New England. Anyway, I loved it from the first time he played it, and later noticed that the basic chord chord sequence is lifted (unconsciously, as it turned out) from Merle Haggard’s “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” which is another connection for me, since Bill was the person who turned me on to Haggard… and I just added the harmonica chorus to represent the Salvation Army Band, and here it is.

(For folks who don’t know Bill’s work, I have a bunch of other posts about him and his songs: “Texas Blues” — a later vignette from the same trip that produced “Barstow” — “Small Town on the River,” “My Baby and Me,” “Oil Money,” “King Jelly’s Good Morning Irene Song,” “Candlepin Swing,” “Soldier’s Pay,” and “Night Shift,” with others still to come. He was a good friend and a hell of a songwriter.)

Louis Jordan recorded a lot of great songs, but “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie” is clearly a standout. I’ve already paid tribute to Jordan in my post for “Jack, You’re Dead,” and he’s one of my longtime favorites, as well as one of the most fundamental artists of the R&B era. He was a model for so many people — I was recently re-listening to James Brown’s Show Time LP, which includes three Jordan numbers, all played with Jordan’s original arrangements, and was  pleased when the Brown biopic portrayed him starting out by performing “Caldonia.”

Chuck Berry was another devoted fan, and I would bet anything that he performed and studied “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie” — the writing is a perfect model for the sort of hip,  crowded wordplay that became one of his trademarks, as well as the highballing boogie, an obvious precursor of Berry’s flavor of rock ‘n’ roll.

As it happens, the song’s background fits Berry’s early career as a Black hillbilly singer, fusing country and western with blues and jazz. The writers were two New York country performers, Vaughan Horton (who also wrote “Mockingbird Hill” and “Sugar Foot Rag”) and Denver Darling, with a third credit to Milt Gabler, who was Jordan’s producer and may have been added for professional reasons.

I’ve known this song since the 1970s, but only remember performing it on one occasion. That was during my period of busking in Antwerp, which at that time had a socialist city government — a nostalgic memory; the city has since gone over to the neofascist Vlaams Blok. (This is a bit off; correction below.) One of the city councilors was a fan of mine, which may sound odd, since all I was doing was playing for tips on cafe terraces,but Antwerp was that way — when I played on a terrace where he happened to be sitting, he would sometimes invite me for a beer afterwards, including once when he was sitting with the mayor.

Another time, he invited me over and asked if I would be available to play for an event the Socialist Party was having. I said sure; he offered a decent fee, though I would happily have done it for nothing. I wasn’t getting a lot of stage time at that point, and it was a nice change from playing the terraces.

As I recall, it was a big dinner, with several hundred people under a tent, and there were also some bands, and I played a couple of songs to no response — it wasn’t a listening crowd, and I was just one guy with a guitar. Or maybe I just assumed that was what would happen; in any case, I asked a couple of the other musicians if they’d be willing to back me, and suggested this as a tune that wouldn’t require any rehearsal. If memory serves, the backing didn’t help me reach the audience, but at least I wasn’t alone onstage and it was nice to have a drummer and some other guys pushing me.

Beyond that, what’s to say? It’s a great lyric, with fourteen separate rhymes for track/Jack, as well as the internal station/transportation/destination/compensation/situation… I can picture the young Chuck Berry chewing over those lines and musing about how to update them from trains to roadsters.

As for the Vlaams Blok, I don’t think I’d yet heard of it by name, but when I was first busking in Antwerp in the late 1970s, people warned me about a couple of bars I shouldn’t try because an American wouldn’t be welcome — not for the reasons I was used to people disliking the US (Vietnam, racism, cultural imperialism), but because the clients were nostalgic for the period when Hitler had liberated them from Francophone domination, and harbored old grudges against the Allies. That was before African immigration had provided new fuel for the Flemish nationalist fires; these  days, I wonder if the same bars are welcoming Americans as fellow guardians of white supremacy. Not a pleasant thought, and strange to think it’s been almost fifty years since I was first playing there.

Correction: Joris Baetens writes from Antwerp, “There’s a small inaccuracy in your post : the Vlaams Blok isn’t actually governing our town. Although it doesn’t bring me joy that I must add that N-VA (Nieuw Vlaams Alliantie or New Flemish Alliance) have been in charge here, the last five years, and they have been re-elected recently. This is a party that’s ‘extremely conservative’ rather than overtly racist and fascist. They’re more of the crypto racist kind. Also very Femish separatist rightwing, but just a smidge more respectable than the overtly racist and fascist Vlaams Blok, who changed their name to Vlaams Belang, after being convicted for being racist. They still get a great amount of votes, sadly enough. And this fascist party, founded by former hitlerjugend members and neonazis, managed to get an influential Jewish entrepreneur, David Rosenberg, to join their list during the last elections here in Antwerp… Sad stuff all over the globe, also on our side of the pond!”

Yup, it was just a matter of time…

…because of course I know this one, or at least enough of it to perform as a request. There are a couple more verses, but I never learned them and no one has ever complained about me leaving them out, as far as I remember — it’s been a lot of years since I was playing this with any frequency, and I may have forgotten old complaints. I don’t think I ever performed it onstage until last month, when I was booked to do a Dylan-centered concert in the run-up to the movie based on my book, Dylan Goes Electric! 

The gig was at a Dylan-branded distillery in Louisville, and I performed some obscurities like “The Old Man,” “Freight Train Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and “If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You,” but also “Girl From the North Country,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Blowin’ In the Wind,” and this one, because I figured people would want to hear them, and also because it was fun to see if I still knew them, and still knew how to play straight harp after years of only playing cross. (Which, of course, I did — it’s the musical equivalent of riding a bicycle.)

I rarely performed this song in the old days, because it was so overdone. During my European busking years, I met a guy who made his entire living playing it in the London tube stations — he’d found that it was his best money-maker, and he wasn’t down in the tube for fun, so he just played “Mr. Tambourine Man” over and over, collected his tips, and treated it as a day job. (I’ve previously written about my friend Doug, who similarly made his living playing “The Boxer” over and over on the trains of the Paris Metro.)

Honestly, I don’t even know if I like this song; it’s so familiar, so much a part of my past, that I can’t think about it in those terms. Nor do I have any interest in working out a novel, interesting arrangement for it. This is how I always played and sang it — or, considering that I started singing it when I was eleven or twelve years old, how I thought I played and sang it — and playing it now feels like slipping into a worn, old, favorite, denim jacket.

The usual gloss on the lyric is that the “tambourine man” was Bruce Langhorne, who played electric guitar on Dylan’s recording of the song and all his electric tracks before Highway 61, and also was known for expertly playing various sizes of tambourines. I have no reason to doubt that, but apparently Dylan wrote it during a trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, so he would have been hearing other tambourine players, and it also is a prime example of how his writing changed as he started smoking more grass — Verlaine and Rimbaud may have played a part, but the psychedelia is front and center.

Incidentally, I only heard the Byrds’ hit version of this after hearing Dylan’s, and it sounds as maudlin and pretty as Peter, Paul and Mary’s versions of previous Dylan songs — which is to say, of no interest to me, whatsoever. They were folk-rock; what Dylan was playing on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or Highway 61 was as solidly rock as the Rolling Stones (who were likewise deeply rooted in rural blues, but never get called folk rock). He did this more gently, with just his acoustic guitar and Langhorne’s subtly phrased electric accompaniment, but I don’t hear it as folk or folk-rock; like Joni Mitchell’s work, it was a new kind of art song and, for better or worse, changed the world.

I don’t know where or when I first heard this song, but I didn’t start playing it till I heard Paul Geremia’s version. Paul is generally known for playing and singing blues in the tradition of people like Willie McTell and Lemon Jefferson, but he liked to fool around with other stuff (he’s where I picked up the Bahamian “Jones, Oh Jones“), including some early jazz songs, and he often did this one and “Nobody’s Sweetheart.” I don’t know if that’s also where I got the idea that this was by Jelly Roll Morton, but I certainly thought it was, and started playing it again recently at events celebrating the publication of Jelly Roll Blues. Then I went to do some background research for this post, and learned it was by King Oliver, with lyrics by Walter Melrose (or at least credited to Melrose).

Walter and Lester Melrose were Morton’s publishers, and I assume that connection influenced him to record this in 1926 with his Red Hot Peppers; in any case, that was by far the most influential recording of the song, and Morton’s only major vocal recording of the 1920s, an exuberant record that presumably inspired Paul.

As for my version, I’ve been fooling around with this for years in Bb, and it was ok but I never figured out anything interesting to do with it. Then I was doing the book tour and started playing it more often, and eventually came up with the idea of playing it in A, more like a blues, for the first chorus, before going into the upbeat ragtime style.

The lyric is one of many telephone-centric songs of the ragtime/jazz era: the most famous is probably “Hello, My Baby,” but there was also, “Hello Central, Give Me Heaven (for my mama’s there),” a bathetic Tin Pan Alley weeper recorded by the Carter Family, and “Hello Central, Give Me No Man’s Land” (from World War I), and the perky “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?” (pronounced “Hah-wah-yah, hah-wah-yah”), and, later on, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Hello Central (Please get me 209),” which inspired Chris Strachwitz to become a blues fan, collector, record producer, one of the most influential figures in the rise of what we now call “roots music,” and eventually a dear friend.

For folks who don’t know, that “Hello, Central” business is how people used to make telephone calls: you didn’t dial a number; you picked up the ear part, then jiggled the receiver, an operator answered, and you asked to be connected to a number, person, or place. There are still a few telephone systems that function that way, though cell phones are killing off the last of them. When I was doing the research for Narcocorrido and wanted to get in touch with Angel González, who composed the first huge drug corrido hit, “Contrabando y Traición,” I called the operator in Juarez and she connected me with the telephone office in Basuchil, Chihuaha; and the operator in Basuchil told me to call back in a half hour and sent a boy to get Angel and bring him there to get the call.

So, that’s the background to this lyric, and I just listened to Morton’s version and found that I’ve messed up one line — I sing, “I think of Doctor Jazz in my dreams,” and it should be “I’m paging Doctor Jazz…,” which is much better. I also changed the next line, but that was conscious: the original has “When I’m trouble bound and mixed, he’s the cat [or guy] that gets me fixed,” and I used to sing it that way, but prefer “mixed up” and “fixed up.”

Anyway, it’s a fun song, and right now I need a fun song and some musical physicianing. (And yes, there’s another layer of history in the sheet music cover, all too resonant in this moment: selling a song composed by one of the great Black bandleaders of the early twentieth century and popularized by the greatest Black jazz arranger of the 1920s, with a cover image of a white band and white dancers — because some people make great music, and other people tend to have more money.)

This is another one I’ve known forever, and don’t even remember learning. It’s kind of an anomaly in Dylan’s oeuvre, since  he tended to be better at break-up songs, and in particular nasty break-up songs (“Don’t Think Twice,” for example), than at love songs. I’ve already posted one noteworthy exception (“Love Minus Zero…, at least through its first verse”) and this is another: to my ears, the most straightforwardly romantic lyric he ever penned.

The standard story is that he wrote it for Echo Helstrom, his high school girlfriend, and I like to think that’s true and the affection and nostalgia are genuine.

He wrote a dedication in Helstrom’s high school yearbook that feels like a sharp teenager practicing his beat poetry:

20 below zero,
and running down the road in the rain
with yo´ ol´ man´s flashlight on my ass.
Now yo´ mother shines it in my face.

when we sat and talked in the L&B ´til two o´clock at night.
I was such a complete idiot, thinking back,
that the car was in the driveway all night.

Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none,
but I think I told you that before.
Well, Echo, I better make it.

Love to the most beautiful girl in school.
Bob

In her recollection, they got together around a shared love of R&B: she was sitting with a friend in the LB Cafe in Hibbing, drinking a soda; he came in with a friend, they got to talking, and she mentioned liking “Maybelline,” which she’d heard on a late night show beaming out of Shreveport, Louisiana — the same show young Bobby Zimmerman was listening to, and thought was his secret world.

“ ‘Maybelline,’ he screamed ‘Maybelline’ by Chuck Berry…? And on and on about Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, everybody that was popular at that time, about their music and how great it was, how he loved to play it himself and how someday he wanted more than anything else to be a rock and roll singer…”

In high school, Dylan led a rock ‘n’ roll band, mostly playing piano, and Helstrom said she was disappointed when she heard his first records. After he left Hibbing, they didn’t see each other for a few years, and then they met briefly in Minneapolis…

“He called me and asked if I wanted to go to a party. I said okay ’cause I hadn’t seen him for so long or anything. He’d changed a lot. He was skinny, whereas he’d always been sort of chubby. He had on bluejeans and a workshirt and was… dirty. I asked him about New York and the music he was playing, and whatever had happened to the hard blues stuff? He said, ‘Oh don’t worry it’s still there, but folk music is what’s really going to be big,’ and that’s how he was going to make it. I told him I didn’t like the sound of it as well as the other stuff, and he said ‘I know, but this is the coming thing.’”

I don’t know how accurate those recollections are — presumably they were colored by hindsight, and just what she said to one interviewer, on one day.  The first thing that struck me was the cynical careerism, and that may have been her point, but on second thought, I’m struck that he was still trying so hard to impress her, and to convince her that he was still a member of the secret club they’d shared in high school.

Helstrom was sure this song was about her, and seemed proud of that, as well, though it is certainly on the soft, folk side. To some extent, it feels to me like Dylan was doing an exercise, listening to old ballads and trying to write something in that tradition, without modernisms or irony. And it works. He starts by paraphrasing “Scarborough Fair,” just as many traditional ballad composers built on previous models, and carries it through to the end, beautifully. It doesn’t feel archaic; it feels heartfelt, and if he consciously set out to write a traditional love song, I still like to think it was about Echo, and expresses something simple and real.

Continuing a spate of Dylan memories, as I wait for the movie…

I learned this from Dylan’s first album, which only included two songs he had fully composed, but had a bunch of songs he had transmuted in various ways. The notes said he’d learned this from Roy Acuff’s record, but his version doesn’t sound much like Acuff’s or anyone else’s. The most obvious influence is Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and I should probably check with Jack and see if he ever did it.

Whether he did or not, Dylan’s yodel and  the idea of holding the final falsetto note for a ridiculously long time undoubtedly came from Jack, who used it in his version of “Mule Skinner Blues,” and could hold it even longer and morecleanly than Dylan. I don’t know if Dylan would yet have heard Jack live, but he had picked up a bunch of songs from Jack Takes the Floor — which included Jack’s first recording of the song — before leaving Minneapolis. Which said, the best recorded version, to my ears, is from the 1962 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where Jack holds a perfect high falsetto note while playing riff after riff, until the audience starts to applaud, at which point he finishes off with a high flourish and says, “I was jest waitin’ on you.”

Dylan got a lot of his early sound from Jack — the usual story is that he sounded like Woody Guthrie, but actually he sounded like Jack. (Admittedly, Guthrie said, “Jack sounds more like me than I do,” but Dylan didn’t just pick up Jack’s Guthrieisms; that’s also where he got “San Francisco Bay Blues,” “Candyman,” and “Cocaine Blues.”) I hadn’t yet heard Jack when I heard the Dylan album; I knew Guthrie’s music before Dylan’s, but got to Jack’s a bit later. So I thought of the yodel and everything else about Dylan’s first album as original to Dylan, and played it over and over, and in hindsight I’m surprised to realize that this is the only song I learned off it. Actually, I don’t think I even learned this one — I just absorbed it, and at some point realized I knew it.

Looking it up with the aid of the internet, I find this was originally titled “I’ve Got the Freight Train Blues,” composed by someone named John Lair, and first recorded by Red Foley, then Acuff, then a bunch of other people. I particularly recall Joe Val singing it when his band opened for Doc Watson at Sanders Theater sometime back in the 1970s. Everybody else sang it pretty much as written, but Dylan streamlined it, removing a repeated “Lordy, lordy, lordy” and some other fripperies, and I continue to think his changes were an improvement.

That said, the pleasure of Dylan’s version is its anarchic energy and I never thought of performing this onstage, although I’ve sung it for fun over the years , enjoying the feel of the yodel, even if it wasn’t as clean as his or Jack’s… but, as with “Blowin’ In the Wind,” I ended up playing it recently when I was hired to do a full set of Dylan songs, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, so I did it on another gig and decided to put it up here.

In closing, a mea culpa: I know I don’t hold that falsetto note as cleanly as Elliott or Dylan did. I was going to point out that they were significantly younger when they made their recordings, but I just listened to a recording of Jack doing “Mule Skinner” when he must have been roughly my age or even a bit older, and he sings the note more quietly than he used to, but it’s still absolutely solid and he holds it for over thirty seconds… so ok, I’m not in his league… but I already knew that.