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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup, it was just a matter of time…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love to the most beautiful girl in school.
Bob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are some songs I’ve known forever but never performed or posted because the world doesn’t need my version of, say… “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

But now there’s a major motion picture on the way, loosely based on my book, Dylan Goes Electric!, and I was recently booked to do a Dylan-centered concert at the Dylan-branded distillery venue in Louisville, and I ended up playing this and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” along with obscure items like “The Old Man,” “He Was a Friend of Mine,” “Freight Train Blues,” and “If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You…” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” and “Girl From the North Country…”

…and it was fun, because I’ve been singing those songs since I was a kid, and I used to play a lot of half-assed, dylanesque harmonica, which turns out to be like riding a bicycle, and the audience clearly enjoyed the familiar favorites, and I’m not going to make this a regular feature of my performances, but it’s a decent piece of writing and a significant political artifact…

…though I have mixed feelings about that last part. On the one hand, I agree with all the sentiments expressed in the lyric; on the other had, so does pretty much everybody, which accounts for its overwhelming success as a pop hit — covered not only by the New World Singers, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, but by Lena Horne, Eddy Arnold, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Marlene Dietrich, and dozens of other performers within a year of the PP&M version — and my mixed feelings.

As I wrote in the book, the appearance of Broadside magazine provided a forum for topical compositions and Dylan responded by writing a bunch of political songs, but he was also writing all sorts of other songs and never expected to be hailed as a “protest singer,” much less “the voice of a generation.” He rejected the “protest” label, over and over, and the halting introduction he gave to an early performance of the song was typical:

“This is here, this is just a—it’s a— It ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. I try to make ’em, uh, I mean, I, I’m just writing it as something sort o’—that’s something to be said, for somebody—by somebody.”

As I wrote:

Dylan had a gut sense that the world was a mess and admired the idealism of Guthrie and Seeger, but his politics were a matter of feelings and personal observation rather than study or theory. “He was a populist,” [Dave] Van Ronk said. “He was tuned in to what was going on—and much more than most of the Village crowd, he was tuned in not just to what was going on around the campuses, but also to what was going on around the roadhouses—but it was a case of sharing the same mood, not of having an organized political point of view.” Contrasting him with Phil Ochs, who had been a journalism major before taking up guitar, [Suze] Rotolo noted, “Dylan was perceptive. He felt. He didn’t read or clip the papers… It was all intuitive, on an emotional level.”

Dylan’s more activist peers were often frustrated by his lack of ideological commitment, but that was what gave songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” such universal appeal. Instead of hectoring, he was expressing pervasive fears and hopes.

Speaking of fears and hopes… I’m interested in what the movie will get right and wrong about the Dylan story and the world around him, and worried about how it will portray Suze Rotolo, who — unlike all the other real-life characters — has been given a pseudonym, suggesting she may have been replaced with a fictional girlfriend, rather than portrayed in her complex reality. I knew her, to the extent of spending a couple of long evenings with her at Dave’s place and running into her here and there over the years, and I don’t think she has ever gotten the credit she deserves for shaping Dylan and his work. The politics, in particular, were hers — she was a full-time volunteer with CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) — and she also worked on a production of songs by Bertolt Brecht, which made an obvious and lasting impact on Dylan’s writing. So I hope they don’t turn her into a Hollywood stock character, the nice, supportive “girl next door” he leaves for the thrilling Joan Baez.

Anyway… I’m expecting to get pulled into more Dylan-related events in the coming months, so figured I might as well post the remaining bits of my Dylan repertoire, and I’ll try to put my own twist on some of the songs, but this one feels to me like a period piece — whether representing the period it was written or my twelve-year-old memories — so I’m doing it like I always did it.

I’ve always loved “James Alley Blues.” When I wrote a chapter on the poetry of blues for my short history of blues,  I quoted it in full as an example of the kind of piece that, although perhaps assembled from various “floating” verses,  has “an internal logic that makes it easy to think of them as poems in the most formal, literary sense of the term.” Which is a fancy way of saying it’s one of the most beautiful lyrics I know, in any form.

It was recorded in 1927 by Richard “Rabbit” Brown, a relatively obscure singer from New Orleans, and is named for Jane Alley (locally known as Jane’s or James Alley), the street where Louis Armstrong spent his earliest years, in the area between the uptown red light district a few blocks upriver from Canal Street (not to be confused with the fancier downtown district remembered as “Storyville”) and the railroad depot at the New Basin.The title has led some writers to describe Brown as living and playing in that neighborhood, which may be right, but he was more often remembered for playing around the resorts on Lake Pontchartrain. Ralph Peer, who recorded six songs from him in 1927 recalled that he “sang to his guitar in the streets of New Orleans, and he rowed you out into Lake Pontchartrain for a fee, and sang to you as he rowed.”

Another New Orleans singer, Lemon Nash, apparently knew him, but added little to that biography — and Nash’s recollection that Brown was a lousy guitar player doesn’t square with the recordings, so I’m not sure how accurate his recollections are…. and that’s all we know.

As for Brown’s recordings, they are a mix of doleful ballads about local murders and the sinking of the Titanic, a couple of comic minstrel songs, and this blues. That suggests he was not primarily a blues singer, which makes it all the more striking that his single blues is one of the masterpieces of the genre.

My Songobiography is a collection of songs I remember, performed from memory, and doing it has changed my relationship to my repertoire by forcing me to work out my own variations and fill lyrical holes rather than going back to relearn details from my sources. One result is that I’m sounding more like myself; another is that my versions are not reliable guides to the originals. This guitar part is obviously based on Brown’s, but when I hear Dom Flemons play Brown’s version — which he does beautifully — I realize how much I’ve changed it. And…

…looking back at my old transcription of the lyric, I see that I’ve left out the verse that followed the one about buying groceries and paying rent:

I said if you don’t want me, why don’t you tell me so?
You know, if you don’t want me, why don’t you tell me so?
Because it ain’t like a man that ain’t got nowhere to go.

I love that verse and am surprised it slipped my mind, and I almost went back and re-recorded the video to include it… but it’s a pretty song either way.

Lemon Jefferson was an incredibly varied and idiosyncratic guitarist, and “That Crawling Baby Blues” is without doubt the most idiosyncratic guitar arrangement I’ve ever learned — or at least ever retained — with a lyric to match. As a result, I’ve never performed it in public, but always enjoyed playing and singing it for my own amusement.

I learned it about thirty years ago, when I went through an extended Lemon Jefferson phase, working out a bunch of his arrangements. I hadn’t done that before, because he’s such a powerful singer that I couldn’t see myself doing his songs, but then I got fascinated and couldn’t stop. I recorded my CD towards the end of that period, and included his “Black Horse Blues” — which is also pretty idiosyncratic, but in a different way — and “Bad Luck Blues,” and I’ve since made his “One Dime Blues” a staple of my repertoire, in part because it takes me back to my early love of Woody Guthrie…

…but Jefferson’s other arrangements somehow drifted out of my head. I’m not sure why this one stuck, or how closely it resembles what he recorded, but I love to play and sing it. A big part of the appeal is its oddity and the way the guitar part moves around the voice, sometimes accompanying, sometimes answering or contrasting, and sometimes just kind of going its own way.

Unlike virtually all other vernacular musicians, whose arrangements come out of what feels natural to them and form a kind of personal language that makes increasing sense as one learns to speak it, Jefferson had a bunch of different approaches that don’t fit neatly together, and then would come up with something like this, which is gloriously quirky. I tend to think that quirkiness was unique to him, but it may also have  been a regional characteristic — he was based around Dallas, Texas, and Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the blues musicians he heard around that area “would sing spasmodic blues: play for a while, pick a while and every now and then say a word.”

Morton disapproved, and it’s not a style that would easily adapt to a band framework — which is one reason it didn’t have a significant influence on later electric styles — but it’s a lot of fun to play and sing.

Incidentally, I never could figure out what he was singing in the first verse, so came up with something kind of like it that made some sense to me. And the fourth verse is a nice example of blues adapting lyrics from Victorian parlor poetry: Jefferson’s line is a paraphrase of “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” the repeated tag-line of an immensely popular poem from 1865 by the Scottish-American poet William Ross Wallace. That kind of material was very common in Black as well as white culture, in the days when poetic recitation was still a standard performance art, but I’m not aware of any other examples being adapted this directly for a blues lyric. Again, Jefferson was unique and brilliant

I’ve been playing Lemon Jefferson’s “Bad Luck Blues” for at least thirty years, and recorded it on my Street Corner Cowboys CD, but it wasn’t until maybe seven years ago that I figured out the opening lick. The clue was a bass note he doesn’t play — the dog that didn’t bark in the night — which tipped me off that he wasn’t just holding C chord, but was jumping it up a couple of frets.

It’s a cool trick, and I would have posted this much sooner, but delayed for a couple of reasons. One was that I used the basic arrangement for another post, “Keep It Clean,” and didn’t want to repeat it, but I was also dogged by a memory from the CD recording session.

I recorded the CD in a couple of days, in my parents’ living room, with three of my favorite musicians: Washtub Robbie Phillips on one-string bass, Matt Leavenworth on fiddle and mandolin, and Paul Geremia on harmonica. Geremia is one of my longtime heroes, and I was thrilled to have him there, and he seemed to enjoy the session and played some terrific harmonica on another Lemon Jefferson song, “Black Horse Blues…”

…and then I played this one for them, so they could work out their parts, and Paul said, “Why do you play it so square? You do all that African stuff — why not play it more like that?”

What could I say? He was Paul Geremia, and undoubtedly could play Jefferson’s version better than I will ever play it, and I would have done pretty much anything he suggested. Plus, it was the end of the session, we were all tired, and it made sense to shake things up a little. So I played a version of “Bad Luck Blues” that is a sort of half-assed rumba, and everyone found parts, and we recorded it, and I have no regrets…

…but I never played it that way again, and when I fool around with that version, it just doesn’t excite me. So I went back to the four-square Jefferson arrangement, and began playing it again, and instead of trying to get into the heartache of the lyrics, I double down on the humor of the spoken asides, which seem to be kind of kidding the seriousness.

And, on that subject, about my shirt: it’s one of my crazier cowboy shirts, with a kind of harlequin pattern set off by a southwestern pattern, complete with saguaro cacti, which fits Jefferson’s Texas connection… and you can’t really see it in the video, but I’ve worn both elbows ragged, which fits the opening and closing verse about not having “sufficient clothes.” (And, for the Dylan fans out there: he copped that phrase for a verse of “He Was a Friend of Mine,” singing “Never had no money, for sufficient clothes” — one of many Dylan borrowings from old-time blues singers.)

And, speaking of the lyrics… while I was preparing for the CD recording session, it struck me that I don’t say “I ain’t got,” except when I’m kidding around with accents. I’m a school-educated white guy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I say “I don’t have…” which has exactly the same number of syllables. So where Jefferson sang “I ain’t got sufficient clothes,” I started singing “I don’t have sufficient clothes,” and for a while it felt weird — which in itself should have been a sign, because it shouldn’t feel weirder to talk like myself than like a Black Texan in 1927… and that was the beginning of an ongoing project to try to lose the various fake accents I’d picked up from old records, and try to sing in my own voice, like Jefferson and the other people I admired sang in their own voices. That’s still a work in progress, but by now it feels normal to sing “don’t have” in this song, and would feel weird to sing “ain’t got.”

And, finally… after posting this, someone queried me on YouTube, asking why I sing a completely different melody than Jefferson sang. The answer, for better or worse, is that this project is about the songs I have in my head, and I hadn’t realized that over the years I had lost his melody and found another. I’ve just gone back and listened to his version, which is lovely and very different from what I remembered.