I’ve known “Alabama Bound” forever, but never worked it up as a performance piece, and am posting it now because I used it as the theme of chapter one of my new book, Jelly Roll Blues, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress recordings, the world that nurtured early blues, and the ways that world was censored, reimagined, and shaped for general consumption by early folklorists and music marketers.

This song was an obvious place to begin, for a couple of reasons. First, it was how Morton began the LOC recordings, which I use as a through-thread for the book. He started playing this tune while reminiscing about the blues singers he used to hear in the Gulf Coast honky-tonks of his youth, then described how he “happened to truck down to Mobile” with a pianist named Brocky Johnny:

At that time I was supposed to be a very good pool player, and I could slip upon a lot of people playing pool, because I played piano and they thought I devoted all my time to the piano. So we’d gotten Alabama bound — the frequent saying was, any place that you was going, why, you was supposed to be “bound” for that place. So in fact we was Alabama bound, and when I got there I wrote this tune called “Alabama Bound.”

There’s no reason to believe Morton was the originator of this song, but he sang and played a lovely version and a lot of later singers were inspired by it, including me. In the book, I use it as a hook to discuss Morton’s travels, and more broadly the way Black musicians and their songs were traveling in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Several older musicians recalled “Alabama Bound” as the earliest blues they heard, and it was the first song published with the word “blues” used in a way that suggested a musical category rather than a feeling: the original sheet music cover described it as a “Rag Time Two Step (Also Known as the Alabama Blues).”* It was credited to a white New Orleans composer named Robert Hoffman, and appeared in 1909, five years after Morton claimed to have composed it — and although the New Orleans provenance might seem to support his claim, it also appeared that year as one of the sections of “Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. Two,” published in Columbia, Missouri by the piano virtuoso Blind Boone.  As I discuss in the book, the Boone medleys are fascinating documents of Black music at the turn of the twentieth century, including tunes like “Pallet on the Floor” (which I’ve made the theme of a previous post and also a chapter in Jelly Roll Blues), and the pre-blues song variously recorded in later years as “Payday,” “Reuben,” and other titles.

As for my version, it’s a similar assemblage of vernacular scraps, with a couple of verses from Morton and others picked up here and there over the last fifty years. Dave Van Ronk was probably one source, which is appropriate, since he was the person who turned me on to Morton’s blues singing — I borrowed his ten-inch LP of New Orleans Memories and recorded it on cassette, and still play his versions of Morton’s versions of : “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “Mamie’s Blues,” and “Sweet Substitute,” as well as my own versions of his versions of a couple of other songs that turned into chapter headings: “Winding Ball” and “Hesitation Blues…” and “Michigan Water…” and I’m beginning to realize that Morton via Van Ronk is kind of my foundation for playing and singing blues. One could do a lot worse.

As I wrote at the outset, I never worked up a performance version of this song, but I’m headed out on tour for the book and want to be able to play the key songs I cover, and this is how this one fell together. If I keep playing it, I’m sure it will evolve; meanwhile, I’m enjoying messing around with it.

*To get the history straight, another white New Orleanian published a song called “I Got the Blues” in 1908 that used the form we would now call a 12-bar blues — but that title suggests the writer was still using blues to mean sadness rather than a musical style.

“Ain’t We Crazy” is a compendium of old joke rhymes I picked up from a 1928 recording by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, the composer (or compiler, or at least official claimant) of the hobo classics  “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and likewise my source for another absurd novelty, “The Cowboy Fireman” (a.k.a. “The Trusty Lariat”).

There was a lot of nonsense verse like this circulating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — my father, born in 1906, used to recite a Yiddish dialect parody of “The Face on the Barroom Floor” called “Jake the Plumber,” which began similarly:

‘Tvas a balmy summer’s ivning, but zirro ‘tvas below,
De ren vas falling brightly, end de sun vas shining snow…

I’ve always enjoyed clever, complicated lyrics, and this one felt like a connection to a world of nimble folk rhymesters — vernacular Cole Porters — plus, at the time I was living with a woman who had childhood memories of her father reciting a version, and she enjoyed it. I don’t think I ever played it onstage, but I recorded it on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys (now available for download from Bandcamp), with the other musicians singing along on the chorus — notably Paul Geremia, one of the most tasteful blues players and singers on the planet, doing a nutty Jerry Lewis voice.

Before posting this, I did a search through newspapers from the hundred years before McClintock recorded it, and found many of the rhyming couplets, as well as plenty of similar silliness, but his record is the earliest evidence of all of them in one place and the “Ain’t We Crazy” chorus. So maybe he wrote this one as well.

And that’s all there is to be said about it… enjoy.

“Mississippi Blues” was recorded in 1942 by a terrific guitarist and singer named William Brown, along with “East St. Louis Blues,”  “Four O’Clock Flower Blues,” and, probably, “Ragged and Dirty, ” which I’ve written about in a previous post.

That’s all we know about him, and even that is not entirely reliable. The recordings were made by Alan Lomax, John Work, and Lewis Jones, and the first three songs named above were recorded at Sadie Beck’s plantation in Arkansas; “Ragged and Dirty” seems to have been recorded separately, in West Memphis, on a night Lomax wrote about in his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and he suggests that this was the same William Brown who sang the other three songs… but also suggests this was the Willie Brown who recorded “Future Blues” and played with Son House, though it clearly was not.

The name of this piece is likewise unhelpful; Lomax simply labeled it “Mississippi Blues,” which it was, more or less, even if he recorded it in Arkansas… but so were all the other blues he recorded in that region. And despite the title, it was anything but generic, as least in terms of the guitar part. It was very carefully composed, played virtually identically behind every verse, and with a high break that directly imitates boogie-woogie piano, with a walking bassline on the low strings and high triplets in the treble. The whole thing sounds like a guitar transcription of a blues piano accompaniment, and numerous people have tried to trace it to a specific piano blues recording — the most convincing nominee, to my ears, being Charlie Spand’s “Hard Times Blues,” though other people have suggested records by Walter Davis. By the late 1930s, a lot of young players were imitating records — Robert Johnson copied a guitar arrangement almost note for note from a record by Lonnie Johnson, and the guitar work on Brown’s “Ragged and Dirty” directly imitated Yank Rachell’s mandolin part from a Sleepy John Estes record, “Broken Hearted, Ragged And Dirty, Too.”

Anyway… it’s a beautiful arrangement, and was one of the more intricate pieces we all learned back when we all had the same few LPs and the same Stefan Grossman books. I played it for years before I thought about singing it, and don’t remember whether the melody I sing resembles Brown’s, though I think I stick fairly close to his lyrics for the first two verses. I didn’t remember his others, so the other two are favorites I picked up elsewhere.

I always liked the “blues jumped a rabbit” verse, though as a city boy I didn’t understand it until I’d been singing it for at least a decade or two. I pictured the blues, personified, jumping on a rabbit and riding it for miles, rather than the blues being something that scared a rabbit into running, like a hunting dog would do. As Willie Dixon, the Mississippi-born Chicago bassman, producer, singer, and songwriter extraordinaire, wrote in his memoir, I Am the Blues:

“The dog jumping the rabbit in the morning meant a great thing. Everybody knew if you jump a rabbit in one place, he’s going to make a circle and come right back across the same place. A lot of time, we didn’t have a shotgun but we had clubs waiting on him when he came back. I remember many days that if my old man hadn’t shot a squirrel or killed a rabbit that morning, we wouldn’t have had anything to eat.

“It didn’t mean nothing to people that lived in cities because they had plenty of meat and didn’t eat rabbit. The average individual can’t understand that because he wasn’t living in the past to know what was happening in the corn fields, cotton fields and on the plantation.”

Personally, I tend to side with the rabbit — my spirit animal — and am glad that in this verse, although it ends up crying, it may live to run again.

As I’ve explained in an earlier post, I first heard “Stagolee” from Woody Guthrie, then from Mississippi John Hurt, then Dave Van Ronk… and eventually from Dave’s source, Furry Lewis. This is the Lewis version, which turns out to be a reworking of a ballad from the same period about a different killing in St. Louis’s Black sporting world, by a man named Ollie or Olive Jackson.

Eric McHenry, who has published a terrific article on the historical “Stack Lee” Shelton and is in the process of writing a definitive book exploring the life, the legend, and the historical milieu, made this connection for me — at which point I realized I had heard the ballad of Ollie Jackson and should have made it myself… but such are the vagaries of research and memory. (McHenry has also written a good piece on the ballad of Louis Collins, yet another murder story from the 1890s, which I learned from Mississippi John Hurt in a version I’ve played and discussed in another post.)

The Ollie Jackson ballad was recorded by Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones from a singer named Will Starks in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1942, fourteen years after Furry Lewis recorded “Stackolee,” but a version of the song was published in 1924 in the column Robert Winslow Gordon edited for Adventure magazine — the original basis of the collection Gordon expanded as the first curator of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Along with the tag line, “When you lose your money, learn to lose,” Lewis took other details from the Jackson ballad: unlike Lee Shelton, who killed Billy Lyons over politics and a hat, Jackson killed a man over a card game, and the Starks ballad also includes the line about the sister falling on her knees and begging the killer to refrain.

That said, Lewis’s version is one of the masterpieces of early rural guitar, interspersing the verses with instrumental breaks using a shorter, sharper structure and dramatic bass runs. It was the piece that inspired Dave Van Ronk to take up fingerpicking — he heard it on the first anthology ever issued of folk recordings from commercial 78s, Listen to Our Story, compiled by Alan Lomax and originally released as a 78 album in 1947, then as a ten-inch LP in 1950 (thus predating the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music).

Dave originally thought the recording had two guitarists, but then saw Tom Paley playing it (or something similar) in Washington Square Park, badgered Paley to show him how it was done, went home and holed up with the Lewis recording, and eventually worked it out. It is was one of the first pieces he taught me when I started taking lessons with him, and he continued to play it throughout his career — though, as usual, he put together his own lyric, compiled from multiple sources.

For most of my life I’ve played the John Hurt guitar arrangement with a mix of verses from him, Woody Guthrie, and Van Ronk, but while I was researching my book on the lyrics and censorship of early blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Blues — which includes a section on the Stack Lee ballad, along with other murder ballads from the Black sporting world — Eric McHenry alerted me to the Ollie Jackson connection and I went back to the Lewis recording and realized I remembered not only his guitar part but all his verses… which don’t overlap any of Hurt’s, and are terrific. Then I realized that the instrumental breaks sounded a lot like Hurt’s version of “Nobody’s Dirty Business,” so I tagged a bit of that on at the end.

(I also changed one detail from Lewis’s version — he began the song, “I remember one September, one one Friday night…” but since I’ve been researching the historical Stack Lee, I switched in the actual date of Christmas.)

During the months I lived in New York City, briefly attending college as an excuse to take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk and spending all my spare money on Yazoo blues reissues, I developed a special taste for Carl Martin’s recordings. They were not spectacularly virtuosic, or deep, or funny, or, indeed spectacular in any way. In retrospect, it was sort of like my earlier passion for Cisco Houston — they were both good musicians, but I can’t explain why they caught my ears in a way other good musicians didn’t; they were each just what I was looking for in particular periods of my life.

Martin didn’t make many recordings as a solo guitarist/singer, and at one point I think I’d worked out versions of all of them. I played “Badly Mistreated Man” and “Farewell to You  Baby” — the latter long enough that I taught it to Les Sampou, who recorded a nice version… though by the time I heard her play it, my reaction was “That’s a good song; where’d you find it?” And I’ve already posted my version of his version of “Crow Jane.” But mostly it was a passing passion–not that I stopped liking his songs when I heard them, but they drifted out of my repertoire.

All of that was before I met Howard Armstrong, who worked with Martin for decades and played a couple of his songs — when Howard had a guitar in his hands (rather than a fiddle or mandolin), he typically played either Martin’s “Good Morning, Judge” or a gorgeous arrangement of “Stardust” that somehow never seems to have been recorded…

All of which is by way of introducing this song, which I picked up from a record by Willie McTell, but sing over a half-assed version of Martin’s guitar part for a song issued in 1935 as “Old Time Blues,” though I’m guessing that title was just slapped on by the record company as a description. It was a generic eight-bar blues, and so was McTell’s “Ticket Agent Blues” — I’m not actually sure how many of the verses I sing are from “Ticket Agent,” aside from the obvious one; I may have combined two or three McTell songs. I do know I left off a verse he used to sing: “Take my advice and let married women be/ Cause her husband will grab you, beat you raggeder’n a cedar tree.”

That’s about it: A generic eight-bar blues, picked up from Carl Martin and Willie McTell; nothing special, but fun to play.

(I also picked up a few of McTell’s guitar arrangements, some reasonably accurately, others in even more half-assed versions [less half-assed? quarter-assed?] than this Martin arrangement, and have previously posted my takes on his “Georgia Rag,” “Statesboro Blues,” “Kill It, Kid,” and “Kind Mama Blues.”)

It seems crazy that I’ve got over three hundred songs in this project, and this is the first Hank Williams song I’ve posted. (I did “Lovesick Blues” a while ago, and of course heard it first from him, but he didn’t write it.)

I know a bunch of them — Peter Keane and I once traded Hank Williams songs at a party for well over an hour. (The other partygoers were at first impressed that we knew so many, then drifted away as they realized quite how many.) In my busking days, I used to play “Jambalaya” and “Hey, Good Looking” on cafe terraces in Europe, and when I was knocking around the US I often found that his more mournful classics were good for tips from late-night drunks — or daytime drunks, for that matter.

But I never worked them up for club shows, because they’ve been done so often and so well by so many other people. This one, for example, was a top ten country hit for Williams in 1952, for Jerry Lee Lewis in 1958, and for Charley Pride in 1980, while Fats Domino had a pop hit with it in 1962… and those are just the charting versions.

That said, one of the pleasures of this project has been figuring out how I’d want to perform songs I’ve known forever but never worked up for public performance. I’d been messing with this one, and then was teaching a course on the history of rock ‘n’ roll and saw a video of Jerry Lee Lewis in full flight, doing “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and “You Win Again…” and began wondering if I could do it as more of a straight blues.

This is the result: a Williams classic layered on a basic Lightning Hopkins boogie, and anyone who knows the Jerry Lee version will hear that it’s still in my mind. I’ve got at least a half-dozen of Jerry Lee’s country albums — he did two sets of country standards on Mercury that are particular favorites — and much as I love Hank Williams, his version of this one is definitive.

Paulino Vargas was  the defining master of the modern Mexican corrido and “La tumba del mojado” is one of his masterpieces. Though most famous for his outlaw corridos, he was a brilliantly versatile chronicler of Mexican life, and composed insightful and poetic songs about cross-border migration, government corruption, and other social issues. This song is the testament of a  Mexican  who has crossed to the United States without official documents, describing the difficulties of his situation, and is as relevant today as when he wrote it in the 1980s:

I couldn’t cross the line, the Rio Bravo was in my way.
They taught me harshly when I lived on the other side,
Dollars are pretty, but I am Mexican.

I didn’t have green card when I worked in Louisiana.
I lived in a basement, because I was espalda mojada [wet back].
I had to bow my head to collect my weekly pay.

Then the beautiful, tragic chorus:

The Mexicali Rose and the blood in the Rio Bravo
Are two different things, but in color they are siblings,
And the borderline is the wetback’s grave.

(Note: the Río Bravo “the fierce river,” is the Mexican name for what Anglos call the Rio Grande, and espalda mojada translates literally as “wetback,” but does not have the same pejorative connotation in Mexican Spanish that it has in English.)

I spent a year traveling around Mexico in the late 1990s, doing research for  Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, and met a lot of fascinating people, but Paulino was far and away the most intriguing and impressive. He had several careers, first with his partner Javier Núñez in Los Broncos de Reynosa, the most popular norteño duo of the 1960s, then as the most  influential composer in the reinvention of the corrido. He was deeply versed in older traditions, both the folkloric corridos of the countryside and the movie corridos that became popular radio hits in the 1940s, and he combined the classic form with a cinematic sense of action, new layers of poetic language, and a keen sense of social justice. He is probably best known for his journalistic songs of drug smugglers, especially “La banda del carro rojo,” a huge hit for los Tigres del Norte, and “El corrido de Lamberto Quintero,” a hit for the movie star Antonio Aguilar. Both were adapted into popular films, spawned numerous sequels, and along with “Contrabando y traición” (discussed in a previous post), started the wave of modern drug-smuggling ballads.

I was fascinated by Paulino’s sense of history. He had grown up in a mountain rancho between Durango and Mazatlan, and was deeply versed in the folklore of Mexico and the songs and legends of the revolution He had a photograph of Pancho Villa on his wall, and explained that Villa had bought some horses from his great-grandfather and the boy leaning against a tree in the background was his grandfather, who had gone along to mind them. (I have no idea how much of that is true; Paulino was creative in many ways.)

He linked the outlaws of the present with that history, and at times with broader issues of national and international politics, ranging from thrilling urban shoot-outs to songs like “Los super capos,” which took the narcocorrido theme to a higher level, accusing George Bush’s presidential administration of hypocritically profiting from the drug trade while claiming the right to decertify and punish Latin American countries for supplying US consumers’ insatiable demands. He wrote a powerful song about the unsolved killings of dozens of women in Ciudad Juarez, and in “La cronica de un cambio” questioned the new administration of Vicente Fox with witty and intricate wordplay. (I discuss “Los super capos” in my book and translate and discuss the latter songs on my Corrido Watch webpage.)

“La tumba del mojado” moves from the personal to the political, first giving the undocumented immigrant’s experience, then contrasting it with the way foreigners are treated on the Mexican side:

The tortilla curtain is an offense to the people.
Through Mexico travel French, Chinese, and Greeks,
And some Americans are bosses in the towns.

Along with admiring his writing, I loved spending time with Paulino. I visited him multiple times and was amazed at the range of his interests and the poetry and humor of his conversation. Rereading my chapter about him, I still chuckle over favorite comments: for example, when I asked if he was ever annoyed by other songwriters copying his style, he adopted the tone of a priest, saying: “Blessed be my imitators, for they shall inherit my faults.” He could go on like that for hours.

I worked up a guitar part for this song based on the accordion licks Jorge Hernández played on the Tigres’ recording, though I’ve only performed it in the context of a talk/concert that goes along with my blog on borders, migration, and nationalism. In some ways it feels strange to sing such a specifically Mexican story in my voice, but as the son of immigrants and refugees I feel a connection to its message… and what gorgeous songwriting.

I’ve been playing Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” for years, and always loved it, but I recently learned that it had a deeper level of meaning, related to a historic moment in the Civil Rights movement. Berry isn’t usually thought of as a political or protest songwriter, but that’s one of the many ways he has been underestimated. In 1956 he got a national R&B hit with a witty paean to Black beauty, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” and this song about a cross-country journey is apparently a celebration of the dying of Jim Crow transportation with a nod to the Freedom Riders.

In the first verse, Berry is traveling by Greyhound bus, and sings that on the way through the Carolinas they “stopped in Charlotte, but bypassed Rock Hill.” I had never heard of Rock Hill, and since it made no sense to me I used to sing “stopped in Charlotte for a quick cup of coffee…” but a couple of years ago I read an article by W.T Lhamon that gave the historical background: in 1961, the bus carrying an interracial group of Freedom Riders made it safely through Virginia and North Carolina, but when it stopped in Rock Hill, South Carolina, John Lewis, one of most effective civil rights warriors of the century, was beaten to the floor of the bus station by a white mob.

Berry recorded this song in 1964, after serving a year and a half in prison on a Mann Act charge — the trial and sentence had stopped him at the height of his professional career, but he emerged to find the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and their British compatriots enthroning him as a founding genius of rock ‘n’ roll. That was a somewhat mixed blessing, since it placed him in a pantheon of past greatness, though he was at his artistic peak.

That’s not to dis his earlier work–I’ve already paid tribute to several of his many masterpieces from the 1950s, “No Money Down,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” and “Memphis.” Berry was one of the most brilliant wordsmiths of the 20th century, on a par with Cole Porter in his ability to conjure perfect rhymes where none had previously existed — and  in a class by himself when it came to making normal speech flow in perfect meter and rhyme, with every word falling in perfect rhythm and witty bits of assonance, alliteration, and internal rhymes giving every line a unique verve and snap. Great as his early songs were, he hit a new level with this one and “Nadine,” and for effortless manipulation of language, there’s nothing that touches them.

It’s the little stuff, and it’s everywhere:
The t’s in “Right away I bought me a through train ticket.”
The internal rhymes: “that hound broke down and left us all stranded…”
The assonance and alliteration: “Sure as you’re born they bought me a silk suit, set of luggage in my hand.”

Until I did some research for this post, I also credited this song with giving the phrase “cool your jets” to the English language… but just checked and found that Berry actually sings “cool your wings.” Ah, well… I’m sticking with jets, and still like to think he sang it that way, even if not on the record.

Finally, I have a thing about songs that use the old telephone exchanges: I did “LOnesome 7-7203” a few hundred songs back, and here we’ve got TIdewater 4-1009. If you don’t know what a telephone exchange was, or why the second letter is capitalized, ask any American of sufficient age, and they’ll bore you with stories of their long-departed youth. My childhood phone number was UNiversity 8-7748, appropriate for a kid growing up a few blocks from Harvard Square.

Addenda: After I posted this, Andy Schwartz pointed out some further parallels between the song lyrics and that Freedom Ride:

“Night Shift” was probably the first song I ever heard Bill Morrissey sing, the first time I went to hear him at the Idler in Harvard Square. It was around 1981, and he typically used this semi-autobiographical picture of dead-end life in a fading northern mill town to open his first set. He would do it quietly, like he was picturing the situation, and when he finished there would generally be a hushed silence, then people would begin to applaud and he would grin and say, “I like to start off with something perky, to get everybody in a party mood.”

I’ve written about how I met Bill and the shock of seeing him perform for the first time in my post for “Small Town on the River,” which in those days was generally agreed to be his masterpiece — an opinion I haven’t changed, despite the decades of songwriting that followed. It was another Newmarket song, honed on what northern New England musicians called the Amy-Shanty circuit, because of the regularity with which barroom audiences would request “Amie,” by Pure Prairie League (the women’s choice), and Jonathan Edwards’s “Lay Around the Shanty” (the guys’) — I don’t know if Bill invented the term, but I heard other people use it as well, and it was accurate: I never got an “Amie” request, probably because I was insufficiently romantic-sounding, but every time I played a New Hampshire bar gig some guy requested “Shanty.”

I don’t know if Bill ever worked in a shoe mill, but he certainly drank with a lot of guys who did, and they turned up at his shows and drank harder when he sang songs like this. By the time I knew him, in the early 1980s, the Timberland factory was closed or closing, and apparently the buildings have since been turned into condos. It was a long time ago, and Bill was in his early thirties, ten years older than me. He looked a  lot younger — almost like a teenager — but his voice was craggy enough to convey the sense of life passing him by.

We met at the Idler, a terrific bar where he played regularly and I opened for Paul Geremia and John Koerner — we met when he came to one of those gigs, on Dave Van Ronk’s advice, and then I went to a bunch of his. The Idler closed in 1983 and Bill shifted from playing the Idler to playing Passim — from a bar full of folks who liked to drink and listen to blues, to the coffeehouse where Susan Vega and Nanci Griffith would soon be holding court. Those were significantly different scenes, and in Passim I’d sometimes hear hisses at the line in this song’s second verse about the wives who “run their families but make it look like they do what they are told.” Having grown up in a Cambridge feminist household, I had my own misgivings about that line, but one night I happened to be at one of Bill’s shows with a friend who’d grown up in a small town near the New Hampshire border and when he sang that line she whispered, “He really understands this stuff.” I assume Jack Kerouac would have agreed, and could have been one of the guys calling Bill names in French. It wasn’t a world I knew, but I think Bill felt more at home there than he ever would again.

(About the French part: people unfamiliar with northern New England may be surprised at how much of the older working class population is French, and it was not something I was consciously aware of as a kid, but when I think back, a lot of the North Cambridge kids I thought of as Irish — their families were Catholic and lived in the same neighborhoods — had names like Leger, Benoit, Martel, and Versoy.)

Anyway… now I’m more than twice as old as Bill was then, and he’s been gone for years, and I don’t know if many younger singers are even aware of his work — in particular the early work, when he was still very much a regional writer. I still do “Oil Money” pretty regularly and others from time to time. I’ve posted a bunch of them, with memories of those times: “Small Town on the River,” “Soldier’s Pay,” “Texas Blues,” and funny ones like “Candlepin Swing,” “King Jelly’s Good Morning Irene Song,” and “My Baby and Me.” I’ll get around to more of them eventually, including a couple that may no longer exist outside my memory. I miss him and still love a lot of his work, especially that early stuff from when he was a bar singer, writing for and about the folks who worked in those small New England towns.

Like pretty much everyone born in the 1950s, I can’t remember not knowing “Jamaica Farewell.” I never learned the words, but could sing all the verses — and still can, though I more often play it as an instrumental. By the time I got seriously interested in guitar, I was into folk and blues and thought of this as a kind of lightweight pop song. A lot of people in my generation were reacting against the pop-folk wave pioneered by people like the Weavers, which had reached its apex with Harry Belafonte’s “calypso” recordings, and tended to dismiss this song as “not real calypso,” and I probably would have continued to ignore it if I hadn’t started playing with Perry Lederman.

I’ve written about Perry in a previous post, so here I’ll just say that he was one of the most dedicated, tasteful, and virtuosic musicians I’ve ever heard, and a huge influence on my playing. I was fortunate to spend many hours playing with him over many years, and one of his quirks was that he tended to stick to a very small repertoire. He was deeply influenced by Indian classical music — he studied sarod for many years with Ali Akbar Khan — and his thing was digging deeply into a few familiar pieces, often playing a single tune for fifteen or twenty minutes. Most of his favorites were old-time, three-chord fingerpicking classics from artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten, but they included a couple of pop-folk hits: he often played Donovan’s “Colours” and when I got into Congolese guitar, he responded to my interest in African rhythms by suggesting we play “Jamaica Farewell.” I’ve been playing it ever since and still play one of Perry’s licks in it, though mostly I just improvise variations loosely based on the style I learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo.

I later went back and listened to a lot of Belafonte’s work — or rather, watched a lot of it. For me, the records don’t capture his magic — though “Matilda” in particular is irresistibly catchy — but I always enjoy watching him, and when I was writing my history of popular music (“How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll“), I was struck by the ways he reshaped and exemplified a range of new attitudes and approaches to popular music, and his central role in the cultural shifts of the 1950s and 1960s. I don’t think he has received anything like the attention he deserves from folk music historians in particular, and more broadly from cultural historians, not only in the US but around the world.

I had already filmed this video and was planning to post it when I got the news of his death, and have since been rewatching his old performances, along with many of his interviews and speeches. I mostly just play “Jamaica Farewell” as a pretty tune with a nice rhythm, and associate it with Perry, and with Masengo, who also played it. But by sad coincidence, this week it also feels like a bit of a tribute to Belafonte, and a reminder of how deeply his music and presence permeated the world in which I grew up.