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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.