Once again, I don’t remember where I first heard this one or when I learned it — I would have said I first heard Guy Clark’s own version, from his brilliant debut album, Old No. 1, but I just checked and found that it had already been recorded before that by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita Coolidge, David Allan Coe, and Tom Rush, which means a lot of other people would have been singing it in clubs and I could have heard it almost anywhere.

It played a significant part in my life because I performed it during an interview on WERS, which had the best Boston Area folk music show in the 1980s, and Harry Lipson, who was producing lots of folk concerts including annual appearances by Guy Clark, was listening and liked my performance and invited me to appear on a two-day New England Folk Festival bill — I was the opening act on night one; the opener on night two was a local unknown named Tracy Chapman. All I remember about my set was that I took advantage of the unusually large audience to do my current favorite sing-along, “Duke of Earl.” I also remember a lot of flirting and socializing backstage, and got written up in the Boston Globe, and all in all it was a good weekend.

This song is pretty generally acknowledged to be Guy’s masterpiece, a slice of autobiography about his relationship with his grandmother’s boyfriend when he was a kid in Monahans, Texas, a small town on the Texas-Pacific railway line, with a lot of sand, some oil wells, and not much else. It’s the sort of place that, for someone like me, who grew up in the urban East, conjures up images of “some old western movie” — and apparently even Guy thought of it that way in hindsight.

Specifically, it recalls the opening scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my all-time favorite movies: three desperados barge into the dispatcher’s office of a little station out in the middle of nowhere, lock him in a closet, then spend ten long, marvelous minutes of screen time waiting for a train. One dozes in a chair, bothered by a fly; one stands outside the station, cracking his knuckles; one stands under the water tank, with drips of water falling on his hat. Finally the train arrives, stops for a moment, leaves again in a cloud of dust. As the dust swirls, we hear a lonesome harmonica; as it clears, we see Charles Bronson, standing on the other side of the tracks, playing. He asks where Frank is; the lead desperado says Frank didn’t come; Bronson notes that they only brought three horses; the leader smiles and says, “Looks like we’re shy one horse”; Bronson shakes his head and says, “You brought two too many,” and after another long pause they go for their guns…

I don’t know if Guy was thinking of that scene; there are plenty of Westerns with desperados and trains and waiting; but that’s the one I picture him imagining, thinking back to his childhood, before his family moved to the Gulf Coast, and he settled in Houston, and then L.A., and Nashville. And it’s a bit odd to me that he frames his childhood as a scene out of a classic Western. As an easterner, it’s natural for me to think of John Ford or Sergio Leone when I’m in that territory, but I’d think he’d think of it as home rather than a movie. (Harvard Yard has figured in a lot of movies, but they’re not what I think of when I recall Harvard Yard; it’s where I grew up.)

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about Clark. I loved that first album, and learned a half-dozen of his songs, but when I saw him onstage he seemed like a self-consciously literary figure, the “Southern writer” posing for his statue in a regional pantheon, which was not at all how I’d thought of his music, and made me have second thoughts about it and him. I still like a lot of his songs — I’ve done posts about “Anyhow, I Love You” and “Watermelon Dream,” and there will be a couple of others up here in the near future — but a lot of his work is tinged with a kind of distanced romanticism, like he was displaying his fine craftsmanship rather than communicating as one person to another. I recently watched Tamara Saviano’s terrific documentary about him, Without Getting Killed or Caught, and it reinforced that impression: to me, the movie is really more about his wife Susanna, a fine artist who did the painting of a shirt on his debut album cover and wrote a bunch of songs herself–including some that were major hits–and Guy comes off as a brilliant but somewhat stiff and guarded character, never entirely comfortable in his own skin and always measuring himself against other people and trying to establish his greatness.

Which said… I don’t hear any of that in this song. This is just a small, personal vignette, and the cinematic romanticism of the desperado image underlines the simplicity of the genuine memories, the genuine relationship, and the genuine tenderness.

Another country blues, in the sense of being a country hit that has obvious links to the blues tradition — like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “You Win Again” and hundreds of other examples. Like my version of “You Win Again,” this version is influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis’s recording, which may well be the first time I heard this one, though the voice in my head is a mix of Jerry Lee and John Lincoln Coughlin, better known as Preacher Jack… and I just realized that I haven’t yet written about Preacher Jack in this blog, which is a horrific oversight.

Back in the 1990s, I got my heart broken and Preacher Jack held me together for the next year. I’d known his first album and always wanted to see him, and just when I needed him, he got a weekly Thursday night residency at Frank’s Steak House on Mass Ave in North Cambridge. The first night I walked in, he was in the middle of a Little Richard medley, pounding the piano and shouting with all of Richard’s gospelized fervor, then segued directly into a sermon on the crucifixion of Christ that ended with him pinned to the wall, shouting, “With nails! Nails through his hands!” And then, in a gruff whisper: “You want to talk about pain?”

I was there every Thursday for the next year or more, and often in the years after that, and wrote about Jack for the Globe (I’ve posted that piece with some further recollections), and co-produced a CD reissue of his earlier albums,and wrote the liner notes for a new instrumental CD, and he was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual shaman. He was a brilliant musician and a raving wild man, who regularly explained to the listeners that he was “having your nervous breakdown for you,” and he was. I’m not going to repeat all the other stories from that profile — if you’re interested, click through to it; it’s a lot of fun — but can’t overstate how much he meant to me and what I owe to him. He wasn’t easy, but he was deep and powerful and constantly surprising.

As to this song, it was written by Ralph Mooney, who mostly was a steel guitarist rather than a songwriter and toured for many years with Waylon Jennings — I saw him with Waylon, and everything about that was great. He apparently wrote this in 1949, when he was in his early twenties and working in Las Vegas. He later recalled, “I was a heavy drinker…. Each night at the club where I played steel guitar, I would get so drunk that I almost had to crawl home. I never drank in the daytime. One day my wife and I were uptown shopping and I ran into a musician friend who invited me to have a drink and I did. That was all my wife could take… she left me and went home to her mama in Los Angeles. After she left on the bus, I sat down with my guitar and wrote, ‘Blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel, and a storm is brewing in this heart of mine.’ I wrote the whole song in a few minutes. I went back to Los Angeles to get my wife back a few days later. My wife and I have been married twenty-six years now, our daughter is twenty-three, our son is fourteen, and we have a grandson who is two years old.”

So that’s his happy ending, and after the Preacher healed me I met Sandrine and we eventually got married and went to hear Jack after our wedding rehearsal dinner, so that’s mine… and Jack is no longer on the planet and I don’t believe in an afterlife, but he sure did and I hope he was right and is looking down on us.

Added note: In the second verse, there’s that line, “Take all the treasured dreams I had for you and me…,” which doesn’t fit the ABAB rhyme scheme of the lyric, but would if it was “me and you…” and I’ve always wondered if Mooney wrote “me and you” originally and someone pointed out that it was bad grammar, and rather than coming up with another rhyming line he just changed it to fit school grammar rules and left it sticking out there like a sore thumb, as a wry fuck-you to the grammarians.

This is another I’ve known for ages, but only started doing regularly when Sandrine joined me on clarinet. It was published in 1919 by the brothers John and Ben “Reb” Spikes, but Jelly Roll Morton claimed they got it from him and he got the basic melody from another piano player, Kid North — who was a “player” in all sorts of ways and will be a character in my next book project, about a group of hustlers who moved between New Orleans, San Diego, and other points in the early twentieth century.

I got interested in North while writing Jelly Roll Blues, where I mentioned Morton’s recollection that this song was based on his version of a classic streetwalker’s lament:

“Someday Sweetheart” was a tune that a old racetrack man, friend of
mine — Kid North — he only could play one tune. And he told me that I could have the tune since he found that I was a writer of music... The title of the tune that he wanted to give to me, which a part of it was taken for “Someday Sweetheart,” the title was named “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More….”

[The Spikes brothers] wrote up the tune together and called it  “Someday Sweetheart…” At the time Reb and I was working for the mayor’s son in Oakland, in a cabaret there on the main street…. So the tune came out and was quite famous. In fact, I helped to make the tune famous myself.  Of course, my name doesn’t appear on the tune, and I’m not jealous about it. I hope the boys would write ten million other ones like that. 

Morton had a long relationship with the Spikes brothers; Reb recalled that they met in 1911, when the brothers were running the Pastime Theatre, an outdoor venue in Muskogee, Oklahoma: “Jelly Roll Morton drifted into town… [he] did a comedy act in black face . . . he didn’t hire on as a musician . . . the show’s band had a pianist. Before long, Jelly displayed his ability . . . soon took over the piano stool in that band.”

The Spikes are credited with writing lyrics to one of Morton’s most popular tunes, “Wolverine Blues,” and I see no reason to doubt Morton’s claim that he was involved in this one as well. He recorded it a couple of times, though just as an instrumental; the first vocal recording — actually, the first recording of any kind — was by Alberta Hunter in 1922, with somewhat different words.

So that’s the historical background — and for myself, I have no idea where I first heard it or when I learned it. I’m guessing I played it when I was working the Antwerp restaurants with Nick Boons, but that’s just a guess. I clearly had a taste for “someday you’ll be sorry” songs, since my relatively limited repertoire of standards from this period also includes the similarly themed “After You’ve Gone” and “Some of These Days.” I wasn’t the only one: Sophie Tucker did this as a follow-up to “Some of These Days” — and it’s probably not a coincidence that all three of those songs were by Black songwriters; there were lots of good white tunesmiths on that scene, but I find that the songs that have stuck with me were disproportionately by Black writers who were also performers on the Black vaudeville and nightclub circuits. I don’t know what it was that made their songs sound or feel different — maybe it wasn’t the songs themselves; maybe I tended to listen to Black musicians and they favored the Black composers. In any case, I recently noticed this and it seemed worth noting.

I first heard Tom Waits thanks to a grad student who stayed in my folks’ house on Cape Cod circa 1975-76 and left his records behind. They were mostly jazz, in my memory, though my sister remembers the Commodores and Wild Cherry,  and included Waits’s Small Change, which made sense, since it was essentially a jazz album, with Shelly Manne on drums and Lew Tabackin on sax.

I’d never heard of Waits, and was entranced by everything about him — the voice, the songs, the instrumentation, and the romantic embrace of urban low-life. I was 17 or 18, fresh off my first period with Dave Van Ronk and about to head out into the world as a rambling hobo guitar player; my original inspiration was Woody Guthrie, but I was playing more blues and classic jazz/pop songs, so Waits was just the right added spice.

Around the same time, I caught Waits on Fernwood Tonight, Martin Mull’s fake small-town TV talk show, and was further entranced… and when I made some cassettes to take with me on my rambling, I included a couple of Waits tracks — this one and “Drunk on the Moon,” and maybe “The Heart of Saturday Night” as well.

As I wrote in my post about “Drunk on the Moon,” I probably got some of the chords wrong and don’t necessarily remember all the lyrics right — I at least tried to learn that one, but just kind of absorbed this one. Which said, it has stuck with me for almost fifty years.

Several decades later, when I wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, I was trying to think of a well-known musical figure who might be willing to read and blurb it, and managed to get an email for Waits’s office, and they said he was interested, so I sent an advance copy… and, to my astonishment, a couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Waits. He wanted a better sense of who I was and what the book was about, and over the next few weeks I got several more calls — mostly it was about the book, but one was because his son was doing a school report on blues and wanted a copy of my Robert Johnson book… and finally he called me with a potential blurb, and I had the chutzpah to ask if he could rephrase part of it, and he did… and that’s the end of that story. I checked in with his office again when I wrote The Dozens, because I thought it might interest him, but got no response. Which is fine; I’m pleased with the little contact I had, grateful for his blurb, and even more grateful for all the music.

Incidentally, I loved the early albums, but nothing prepared me for Rain Dogs, which I am listening to as I write this, and consider his masterpiece. He’s done a lot of fine work since then as well. He’s a hell of a songwriter and musician, and one of the good guys.

Oh yeah, and… I once had a crush on a waitress in an after-hours restaurant in Davis Square called Kay and Chips, where I used to get steak tips and eggs at two in the morning after driving back from a monthly gig at the Press Room in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was dark and beautiful, and I never had the nerve to strike up a conversation, though I probably flirted a little while giving my order. I don’t recall whether I ever thought about this song while eating those late-night breakfasts, but it would have made sense, and when I sing the song now I think of her.

Addendum: I just found a story from the Somerville Times, which reminds me that by the time I was going there, the restaurant was called Dolly’s at Kay and Chips. I don’t think my waitress was Dolly; maybe no one was. They opened at 11pm and closed sometime in the early morning, and it was a nice scene.

A touch of early Tom Waits, and an apt follow-up to last week’s “Ace in the Hole,” with a similar blend of hipster slang and nostalgie de la boue. When I headed off to Europe at age 18, I had two or three Waits cuts on the handful of cassettes I brought with me. I wasn’t really equipped to learn them, since in those days I was easily confused by any song with more than a basic I-IV-V or circle of fifths chord pattern, but I have a keen memory of spending a late night in Paris working out the chords to “Drunk on the Moon” — not that I got them right, but it was a memorable attempt.

I lived in Paris off and on over several years, staying with a woman who had been a grad student of my mom’s — she let me sleep on a mattress in the living room of her small apartment on Rue du Père Corentin, near Porte d’Orléans,  and I did the cooking and read a bunch of her books, including medieval history, psychology, and other stuff I would not have read in another situation but am grateful to have explored. It was a relaxed, comfortable situation, and that apartment was a regular base as I moved between summers in northern Europe and winters in Spain, Italy, and North Africa.

I was indulging in romantic fantasies shared by a lot of rambling young folks in that period, inspired by legends of Woody Guthrie, Hemingway, and all sorts of other characters who lived hobo or boho lives and nourished themselves on whiskey and nostalgie de la boue. Waits was an obvious avatar, slouching drunkenly around the stage in a cloud of cigarette smoke, mumbling disjointed verses, or fingering slow jazz tunes on an upright piano, his lyrics limning the lives of small-time hustlers, hookers, diner waitresses, petty criminals, and other creatures of the urban night.

There was an off-hand, half-formed quality to a lot of his lyrics, as if he was improvising them as he went along, and I spent a few nights improvising my own songs into a cassette recorder, under his spell and fueled by a liberal infusion of alcohol. I remember one effort that began:

I know I’m drunk today, was drunk yesterday too,
I know it’s my own problem, got nothing to do with you.
It ain’t because you left me that I’m feeling this way,
Though I ain’t saying it wouldn’t have been different if you’d stayed…

I hadn’t yet been seriously involved with a woman, had no memories to fit that lyric, but hell, I was a rambling musician, drinking deeply and wandering the night-time streets of Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Budapest, Copenhagen… a romantic character in my own mind and playing the part convincingly for people who led more prosaic lives.

In keeping with the rest of this series, I’m playing this song as I remember it. I’m sure the chords aren’t exactly what Waits played, though they’re certainly closer than what I figured out in my teens, and the lyrics include some words and phrases I misheard and some that have evolved in my memory, as well as some I may have heard right, but wonder about, like the line I hear as “Come schemers and dancers, chary the light,” meaning, to me, seeking the comfort of darkness — the internet experts transcribe the last bit as “cherry delight,” which it surely isn’t, and prove they aren’t reliable by following with “I’ve hawked all my yesterdays,” which obviously should read “I’ve hocked all my yesterdays,” a perfect Waits phrase.

Anyway… I can still picture myself learning this late at night in that Paris apartment, a soft glow coming through the glass doors leading to the balcony, cross-legged on my mattress on the floor, my guitar in my lap, whispering along in an approximation of Waits’s midnight rasp so as not to bother my host, and pleasantly drunk on French wine and moonlight.

I first heard “Ace in the Hole” on Dave Van Ronk’s 1963 album with the Red Onion Jazz Band, In the Tradition. It was written around 1909 by a couple of obscure songwriters, James Dempsey and George Mitchell, and is a musical evocation of the New York borderline underworld limned by Damon Runyon in the stories that inspired Guys and Dolls. Dave was a devotee of this kind of New Yorkiana — his rock band, the Hudson Dusters, was named for a notorious street gang of the 1800s — so he naturally jumped on it.

I’m pretty sure Dave picked it up from Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, a San Francisco group that was one of the first and best white trad revival bands, who recorded it in the 1940s with the New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson — Watters’s outfit is not well remembered these days, but Dave was a dedicated “moldy fig” traditionalist in his teens, devoted to Bunk’s work, and developed an appreciation for the San Francisco bands during a shore visit in his brief period as a merchant seaman.

I’d heard Dave’s version and knew that provenance, but thought of it as an obscurity until I did some research for this post and found it was recorded by over a hundred groups and artists, starting with a bunch of minor white jazz bands in the 1920s, including one in Berlin, then various western and hillbilly swing bands, then Frankie Laine, Connie Francis, Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer, Judy Henske, and a lot of others, including a bizarre version from 1969 by the honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson, rewritten as a critique of hippies, protesters, and other good folks of that time, which could easily be revived by the Trump crowd today. (I’m not linking it, but it’s available online if you want to check it out.)

Dave’s original recording only had the one verse and one and a half choruses, with the rest of the space taken up by solos from the band, and he never played it solo until near the end of his life. Then he worked up a really nice guitar chart, wrote a second verse, and filled out the second chorus — as I’ve noted in my posts for “That’ll Never Happen No More” and “Somebody Else, Not Me,” he regularly wrote additional lyrics for songs he thought needed some help. I never learned his new verse, but use his extra lyric for the second chorus, though I’ve changed one line that didn’t seem to fit the theme, staying true to his memory by using the term clydes, meaning “squares,” which I learned from him.

Speaking of archaic hipster argot: a Missouri bankroll was a roll of one dollar bills (or sometimes paper cut to the same size) with a couple of high-denomination bills on the outside, flashed to create the illusion that the bearer was loaded. Tenderloin was a common term in the late 19th and early 20th century for prostitution districts, extrapolated from the original Tenderloin, the Manhattan prostitution district running from about 14th to 42th Streets between 6th and 8th Avenues, so named (according to a popular legend) when a new police captain was assigned to that district, which like all such districts was famous for bribery, and commented that he’d been eating chuck steak all his life and was looking forward to some tenderloin.

I started playing this when Sandrine and I were living in New Orleans in the early 2000s, staying with David and Roselyn, and jamming with them and whoever else dropped by in the evenings. They had a fake book with this in it, and no one else knew it until one night a trumpet player showed up who was from the Bay Area, so we played it and I’ve been messing with it ever since.

Like most people who weren’t hardcore fans, I first heard “Me and Paul” on the Wanted: The Outlaws compilation. That’s also where I first heard “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and became a lifelong Waylon Jennings fan — I enjoyed Willie, but only bought a couple of his albums, while I got a stack of Waylon’s… but albums aren’t the whole story, by a long shot.

I know a bunch of Willie’s songs — “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls” — and appreciate the odd ways he makes words fit together, and fits them into tunes, and the one time I saw him live in a relatively small club was one of my all-time favorite concerts. It was his usual group, with his sister Bobbie on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and Paul English on drums, and they played a long set, following a great opening set by Billy Joe Shaver, which also had Raphael and maybe English, and all that was great, so we called Willie back for an encore… and he played for another forty minutes. The other players looked exhausted, and you could see them exchanging looks as he’d finish one song and go into yet another, but he was having fun, taking long, imaginative guitar solos, totally into being up there playing music, looking like he’d happily keep going all night.

That’s the feeling I get from this song. It’s not about any of the things songs are usually about; it’s just about being out on the road playing music with friends, and not even celebratory about that, like “On the Road Again.” It’s just about taking the ride, ups and downs included, and looking back on both with wry enjoyment. Who ever wrote a better line than “After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound”? Perfectly formed, with alliteration, assonance, that internal rhyme… and smart, and odd, and personal.

Paul, in case anyone doesn’t know, was Paul English, Willie’s drummer for virtually his entire career, and bookkeeper, paymaster, and, in the early days, sometime enforcer. English actually drummed for the first time backing Willie on the radio, having never done it before, and never did anything fancy — he typically just played a single snare, and kept the beat, and that was it. He looked like Waylon, or, according to some reports, Waylon looked like him, adopting his outlaw black hat and clothing, and his Satanic beard and mustache.

The lyric is about their life on the road, all of it apparently based on real events, back when smoking dope and looking like hippies was a bigger deal and could get you in trouble, and a country music package show could still include Kitty Wells, and Willie and Paul were among the tiny handful of people who overlapped those worlds.

And finally I’d just note that looking like a hippie no long means what it used to, and a lot of people who look like Willie and Paul are backing Trump and all kinds of conservative bullshit, but Willie has been pretty consistently on the side of the underdogs, speaking up for immigrants, cutting a duet of the gay-friendly “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” (with a wonderful video), and generally standing up and out. He’s in his nineties and still on the road, still doing fine shows, still one of the good guys.

“Ni el dinero ni nada” is a Mexican counterpart of “Down in the Boondocks” (last week’s post) and “Mansion on the Hill,” a song in the voice of a poor boy speaking to the rich girl he loves and cannot win.

Because I am as I am, without reason you disdain me
Because you live among people who say, “He is not on your level.”
You don’t let me sing at your window grill, as others sing,
Nor let me cry out that I love you with deep tenderness.

It was composed by the grand master of ranchera songwriting, José Alfredo Jiménez, who was also one of Mexico’s most loved and respected singers. There is no real Anglo equivalent; maybe Hank Williams, but it’s bigger than that: imagine Frank Sinatra had not only recorded a definitive portion of the American songbook, but composed a large proportion of the songs — by some counts over a thousand — and you’ve got something like the idea.

José Alfredo wrote many kinds of songs, about many subjects, but for many fans his specialty was songs about guys drinking to forget and celebrate the ups and downs of their lives — the most famous example  is “El Rey,” and if you were looking for a Mexican parallel to “One for My Baby and One for the Road,” an obvious nominee would be “El ultimo trago” (“the last swallow,” as in “have this bottle with me, and with the last swallow we’ll leave”);  instead of singing to the bartender about the woman who has left him, he is drinking a last drink with her, but a classic photo shows him alone at the bar, and that’s the image that lingers.

I learned “Ni el dinero ni nada” from the same Flaco Jiménez album that gave me “Gritenme piedras del campo” and “Tu nuevo cariñito” — it was my basic introduction to the great Mexican songbook, and a very good beginning. At that point I had never heard of José Alfredo, or Paulino Vargas, or even Los Tigres del Norte… it was back in the 1980s, before I’d spent any time traveling around Mexico, and I learned those songs before hitching down there in 1986, a story I’ve told in a previous post.

As for this song, here’s my rough translation of the other verses, giving the sense, if not the poetry:

Because I am as I am, I am losing your affection
Because I have made no money, they disparage me
I have no right to anything, because I am a vagabond
But I know that in the depth of your heart, you still adore me

I cannot think that your love for me will end
Neither money, nor anything, or anyone can separate us
Some memories can never be erased, and ours are like that
To be able to forget so many things, they would have to kill us.

If you are truly leaving, tell me in person
If you are thinking of sending me a letter, better not even to write it
Your goodbye, my heart, I demand looking you in the face
And if now there is no love in your eyes, I’ll go out of your life.

I must have heard Billy Joe Royal’s hit version of “Down in the Boondocks” in the 1970s, when I was often listening to my local oldies station, WROR — “the golden great 98” — but I don’t remember taking much notice of it, since I was mostly listening for when they played classic doo-wop, or  the Coasters, Chuck Berry… I was more into the ’50s stuff. Then in the 1980s, while I was wandering around Europe and had lots of time to experiment with guitar techniques while waiting for hitchhiking rides and walking down country roads, I began fooling around with this arrangement and found that although I’d never tried to learn it, I knew all the words — one sure sign of a well-written song.

Good as it is, I thought of it more as a guitar exercise than anything else — I’d worked out my Congolese-flavored version of “Iko Iko” and was trying to come up with other ways to play Caribbean and Latin-flavored rhythms, and I guess this was my attempt at a kind of half-assed reggae feel. Anyway, I never performed it but always enjoyed playing it, without knowing anything more about it.

So I only just found out that it was written by Joe South, a southern guitar and songwriting maverick who’s probably best known for his hit, “The Games People Play,” but also wrote this one and lots of others, and produced Royal’s record, and played guitar on a bunch of sessions, including the memorable tremolo intro on Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.”

Other than that, the song pretty much speaks for itself: it’s a classic poor-boy-in-love-with-rich-girl story, somewhat more optimistic than Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill,” and it’s fun to dig into the lyric… but I still mostly play it because it took a long time to get the guitar technique so it felt moderately comfortable, and I love the way the slapping/picking feels under my hands and haven’t found another song that fits as well with this style.

I have no idea where or when I learned this song, and research provides no clues, because it’s been done by everyone from Mamie Smith to Willie Nelson–including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cliff Bruner, and a duet version by Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin. So this post is all going to be background, starting with “jelly roll.” I cover the subject more thoroughly in my latest book, Jelly Roll Blues, which focuses on Jelly Roll Morton but ranges fairly widely, but for the moment…

Of course, the term  refers to a baked good made by spreading jelly on a sheet of sponge cake and rolling it up into a roll. The verse of this song (which I never learned and only recently heard) explains that it’s about a greedy little boy named Willie Green from New Orleans, who has received a nice jelly roll as a present from his mother and refuses to share it with the other kids, and the cover of the original sheet music, back in 1919, portrayed that scene.

Much as it pains me to suggest an alternate meaning, an early scholar of Black folk song named Guy Johnson wrote in 1927 that “jelly roll” was “by far the most common” sexual euphemism in blues lyrics, and “stands for the vagina, or for the female genitalia in general, and sometimes for sexual intercourse.” If, for a moment, we consider that interpretation, it suggests some ambiguity in little Willie’s gender identification… but the term was to some extent polymorphous and the lyric I sing includes the gender-balanced line (assuming I’m singing about a het [though not necessarily cis] couple), “your jelly sure is fine, but you ain’t getting none of mine…” which leads to a minor mystery, because I haven’t been able to find that line in any other version. (Steve Mann’s version is somewhat similar, and I love his guitar part, so maybe I adapted his lyric, but if someone knows a closer source, please let me know.)

As for the song itself, it was and is a very popular trad jazz number,  composed by Clarence and Spencer Williams, who both were Louisianans, but not related to each other.

Spencer was the elder, most likely born in 1886 in Alabama (likely Selma, though his parents also lived in Birmingham and Montgomery), though at times he claimed to have been born in New Orleans “as long ago as 1880.” He also claimed to have been a nephew of Lulu White, the most famous Black madame in the red light district remembered as Storyville, and to have lived as a teenager in her famous Mahogany Hall — which sounds like a colorful invention, but White  does seem to have been his aunt, or at least a near relation, and he does seem to have spent time with her in New Orleans. Be that as it may, he was in Chicago by 1908 and began publishing songs shortly thereafter — hundreds of them, eventually, with over a hundred different collaborators, including “Mahogany Hall Stomp,”  “Royal Garden Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,”  this one, and the similarly-themed “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” He also made some records, including naughty double-entendre duets with the guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Teddy Bunn, backed by James P. Johnson on piano — which may be more than you needed to know, but it’s a hell of a resume.

Clarence Williams was less prolific as a songwriter, but a good deal more prosperous, since he was also a successful publisher, made hundreds of records, managed a bunch of bands and produced a bunch of blues singers — one of his bands had Louis Armstrong on trumpet and one of the singers was Bessie Smith — and, all in all, was one of the most important figures on the New York jazz and blues scene. His compositional talents are a bit hard to judge, since he also put his name on a lot of tunes he bought or “borrowed” from other people, but he and Spencer seem to have been genuine collaborators and there’s no reason to doubt he had a hand in this one. He also made a nice recording of it — maybe my favorite — in 1934, with the versatile Roy Smeck on guitar.

To my eternal regret, I never met Smeck, though I easily could have; he was giving guitar lessons in New York when I was there studying with Dave Van Ronk. I do not regret a minute spent with Dave, but if I’d suggested taking some supplementary lessons from Smeck, Dave would have heartily encouraged me… ah, well. I did get to see him live once, and he was terrific: his finale was a version of “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” chording on a harmonica held in his mouth without a rack and playing the melody and variations on a ukulele, while moving it like a canoe paddle. Ars longa, and all that…