I first learned this when I was immersing myself in the guitar style of Joseph Spence, preparatory to making an instructional video on his playing — but at the time I had no idea it was more than a charming little ditty with a bunch of sections and variations. On the album I had, it was titled “Don’t Let Nobody Burn Down Burma Road,” which is testimony to the fact that the producers couldn’t understand Spence’s Bahamian accent and didn’t have the internet handy to fill them in on the song’s history… which turns out to be interesting and to give the lyric a deeper meaning than they or I understood.

The first section is a verse that was already described as an “old song” when a Virginia newspaper printed it in 1868:

A bull-frog dressed in soldier’s clothes,
Went out one day to shoot some crows,
The crows smelt powder, and all flew away,
And the bull-frog had no sport that day.¹

The paper printed that verse as a satiric commentary on a senator who had offered the assistance of the state militia to help oust President Andrew Johnson, and it resurfaced from time to time over the following decades in similarly mocking contexts, especially when white soldiers or militias were sent against Black communities — the uniformed frogs firing ineffectually on the black crows… which brings us to the Bahamas.

The first recording of this lyric in the islands seems to be from 1935, when Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle recorded it on Cat Island from a man named Wilberforce Swain, and it was recorded in the 1950s as a popular record by Delbon Johnson — but Spence’s version is specifically connected to a major event in Bahamian history, the Burma Road riots.

The short version of that story is that in the summer of 1942, as the United States entered WWII, two major air bases were under construction in the Bahamas by a mix of imported workers from the US and local hands, and it turned out that the Bahamian workers were being paid only a third (or a half, or a quarter — the reports vary) of the hourly wage paid to the Americans.

The Bahamians protested, their protests were ignored, they finally marched to the government offices in Nassau, and on gaining no compromise, they rioted. At least two protestors were killed, many more were wounded, and over a hundred were arrested, some serving almost ten years in prison. The immediate result was a slight increase in pay and meals supplied by the employers. The longer-term result was the formation of the People’s Labour Party, and the riots are often cited as beginning the movement that led to Bahamian independence.

This brings us to Ronnie Butler, “the Godfather of Bahamian Music,” who recorded a song called “Burma Road” commemorating the riots, which included the old bullfrog and crows verse as one of its various sections. Another section went “Do wa Nanny, how you do?” I have no idea how that related to the theme, nor is it clear when Butler made the record — some sources say 1964, though the version I find online sounds somewhat later — or whether he or other singers were performing versions of the same medley years earlier, maybe even back to the immediate aftermath of the riots.

It’s also possible that Butler got the song from Spence: I assumed Spence was copying his record, since in the “Burma Road” section he sings “Don’t lick nobody” and his back-up singers respond “Burma Road,” as a sort of refrain, and Spence retained that pairing, though the phrases don’t follow logically in one voice — but when I talked about this in an interview for a Bahamian documentary on Spence, the interviewer said Butler was a big fan of Spence’s music and might have adapted his longer version from Spence’s, which, again, could easily be a survival of something sung back in the 1940s.

In any case, it’s a fun song to play, and a good story.

(As for Spence and his guitar style, I have already posted lots of pieces by and about him, including a Spence guitar medley, “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” “Happy Meeting in Glory,” “Brownskin Girl,” “Glory of Love,” and “Sloop John B.”)

I’ve got a lot of favorite songwriters, and Billy Joe Shaver is right up there. Like most people, I got into him through Waylon Jennings, and in particular Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes album.I’ve already done a post about that album’s title song, and this is another from the same disc. I fell in love with it, first for the lyrics and then for the odd chord progression, which no one but a guitar player would ever come up with, following one chord shape up the neck, then shifting to another key for the chorus.

The lyric is a nice example of Shaver’s gift for turning ordinary language into surprising lyrics. I particularly like the line “ain’t no comfort in the can” — he’s writing about being in jail in Matamoros, but  “comfort in a can” was an advertising slogan for Edgeworth pipe tobacco.

I did a long interview with Shaver, which I’ve posted on my website. He said the thing that characterized his writing was its simplicity:

“I know my limitations and I write within a realm that’s simple. It’s real hard to write simple and stay simple but, when you get it down, simplicity don’t need to be greased. Anybody can understand it, if you keep it within that range and write as much as you can with as few words as you can.”

I get what he means but, like Chuck Berry, he wrote a lot of lines that aren’t flowery or self-consciously poetic but couldn’t have been written by anyone else. “I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train, honey/ I wasn’t born no yesterday.” If you think that’s a common phrase, try running “born no yesterday” through Google. And he followed it with “I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education/ Ain’t no need in y’all treating me this way.” That’s from his autobiographical masterpiece, “I’ve Been to Georgia on a Fast Train,” which sketches his hardscrabble youth with brilliant economy — “I just thought I’d mention, my grandma’s old age pension/ Is the reason why I’m standing here today…”

I never learned that one, because it wasn’t my life story and his recording is, to me, so definitive that it would be ridiculous for anyone else to do it. His voice fits the story perfectly, backed by a hot honky-tonk band, and it’s one of my favorite records.

I saw Shaver a bunch of times, the first time with his son Eddy, who was a hard rock guitarist and backed his father with a couple of similarly hard rocking pals. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe:

It looks like some old drunk wandered up on stage to sing along with a young country-rock band. Billy Joe Shaver is rumpled and craggy, with a face like a beat-up barn door framed by stringy, shoulder-length gray hair. He stands stiffly at the mike in a sweat-soaked black t-shirt, making broad, clumsy gestures to punch home the words of his songs. His voice is strong, tagging favorite lines with a hard, Texas yodel, but sometimes he has to fight a little to find the pitch.

“I’m just an old chunk of coal,” he sings, and you believe him. “But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,” he adds, and the conviction is unmistakeable.

I’d forgotten the closer to that piece:

Meanwhile, rock star John Entwistle sits obliviously in the back room, chatting with his entourage. During the break, the Shavers are introduced to him, and the house photographer gathers everyone on the balcony for a group shot. Afterwards, father takes son aside for a whispered conference.

“Who’s John Entwistle?” Billy Joe asks Eddy.

“He’s the bass player for the Who,” Eddy whispers back.

“Oh,” says Billy Joe, nodding. “I guess that’s good.”

I saw him and Eddy again a couple of years later, doing an acoustic show, just the two of them, and it was magical. Then Eddy died of a heroin overdose and Billy Joe mostly stopped touring. I saw him once or twice more in Austin, sounding as craggy and heartfelt as ever. He often gets lumped together with Waylon and Willie Nelson, and he was good friends with both of them, but there was nobody like him.

I have no idea when or where I learned “Cold, Cold Heart” — it must have been sometime after the 1970s, because I didn’t grow up with classic country, aside from a couple of Johnny Cash records and the cheapo anthology where I learned “Lonesome 7-7203.” That changed in the 1980s, in a large part due to Bill Morrissey, who turned me on to Merle Haggard, George Jones, and the depth of classic country songwriting — which is to say, Hank Williams and his myriad followers.

I’ve already posted a few of Hank’s songs (“You Win Again,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Lovesick Blues“) and I know a bunch more (“Jambalaya” and “Hey, Good Lookin'” were staples of my Antwerp busking years), but they are so familiar and frequently done that I feel a bit ridiculous doing yet another version…

…and that’s particularly true of “Cold, Cold Heart,” which is not only one of the biggest country hits of all time, but was also the first huge pop hit for Tony Bennett, and an R&B hit for Dinah Washington, and really doesn’t need to be done again, ever, by anybody…

…or at least, that was how I always felt about it and why I never performed it…

…until a few weeks ago, when I started fooling around with it and actually paid attention to the lyrics. As it happens, that was also what persuaded Bennett — when Mitch Miller sent him Hank’s demo of the song, he initially rejected it because he didn’t like or want to sing country music, but Miller told him to forget it was a country song and listen to the lyrics, and he fell in love with it, recorded it, got a huge hit, and later recalled with pride that he had heard Hank would punch up his version whenever it was on a jukebox.

I vastly prefer Hank’s version to Bennett’s, or even Washington’s, and in any case it’s the one in my head. But I’m not sure why I learned it, because, as I said, it is so, so overdone…

…and that was that, until I started fooling around with it a few weeks ago and it suddenly hit me in a different way. Because, years ago, I had a relationship with a woman whom I loved, and she seemed to love me, but there was something in what Hank called her “lonesome past” — I don’t know exactly what had happened, but the result was that she couldn’t trust anyone who seemed to love her. I wouldn’t have said her heart was cold, at all, and that’s something I misunderstood about this song; I took it as a criticism of the woman, accusing her of being coldhearted. But that isn’t what it says. I don’t know how Hank meant it, but I now hear it as being about someone who was hurt badly in the past and can’t get over it, so feels as if something inside her was frozen, and when I hear that way, it feels painfully familiar. Which, of course, is what made Williams such a great songwriter; his songs hit people in deeply personal ways.

So, overdone or not, here’s my take on a classic — one of many, and I’m sure there will be many more, and that’s why it’s a classic.

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.