I learned “Keep Your Hands Off Her” very early, from an LP called Folk Blues Song Fest — I don’t remember when I got that record, but it was early enough that I was undoubtedly attracted more by the inclusion of Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston than the inclusion of Champion Jack Dupree or Arbee Stidham. It was also early enough that I learned a bunch of songs off it: this one, by Lead Belly, stuck with me, but for a while I also picked up “Fan It,” “Hush, Somebody Is Calling Me,” “Beautiful City,” and “Face in the Crowd” — it would be at least another decade before I saw the Andy Griffith movie in which Brownie McGhee played a small part and realized he must have written that last song in hopes of it being used as the title theme. (I hadn’t thought of that song in years, but just ran over it in my mind and still remember the whole thing; I guess I’ll have to put it up here at some point.)

I have a better sense of when I heard “Shake It and Break It,” because I didn’t turn on to Charlie Patton until I started buying the Yazoo reissues during my year of college in 1976-77, but I’m not sure when I learned it. Certainly, the spur for combining them was a workshop on playing in the key of F, conducted by Paul Geremia at the Augusta Heritage Center’s Blues Week in the early 1990s. I’d never thought about F as a good key for blues — but this isn’t really blues, it’s ragtime, and these songs start on a C chord, and for all I know, Patton and Lead Belly thought of them as being in the key of C, if they bothered to think about things like that. Honestly, I don’t know if they both played this in F; I’m relying on Paul and my memory.

Be that as it may, I played them both in F and that gave me my first taste of what a great key it is for ragtime/pop songs — and then I married a clarinet player and got into flat keys, and by now I play dozens of songs in F… and this was where that started.

I don’t remember when I combined these songs, but it’s been a few years, and after I started playing them together and saying I thought they were at some level versions of the same song, someone pointed out that Patton doesn’t actually play the chords I play… but they still feel to me like they fit together.

I also like to think that “Keep Your Hands Off Her” can be understood as a kind of “me too” song — though I admit that’s a bit of a stretch — as well as a “body positivity” song, with that wonderful line: “She’s a heavy-hipped woman with great big legs, walks like she’s walking on soft-boiled eggs.” And, of course, I now consider all the “jelly” references in “Shake It” as part of my Jelly Roll Blues research… but mostly this is just fun to play and sing.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to post “Duncan and Brady,” which I’ve known for at least forty years and recorded on my Street Corner Cowboys CD (which is now available on Bandcamp). I learned my version off Tom Rush and Dave Van Ronk, both of whom seem to have got it from Paul Clayton…

…and that was all I knew until I started working on the “Murder Ballad” chapter of my book, Jelly Roll Blues, at which point things got interesting. Like “Frankie and Johnny” (a.k.a. “Frankie and Albert”) and “Stackolee” (about which I’ve already posted versions learned from John Hurt and Furry Lewis), “Duncan and Brady” was inspired by a real murder in the Black sporting world of St. Louis in the 1890s.

The earliest of the three, it told about the shooting of an Irish immigrant policeman named James Brady by a Black man named William Henry Harrison Duncan in 1890, which made news from coast to coast and led to several years of high-profile trials, retrials, and appeals. The first surviving mention of the ballad–which is also the first printed mention of the Stack Lee ballad–appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1897 and described the key event succinctly:

Brady walked up to the bar,
Showed Duncan his shinin’ star,
Says to Duncan, “You’re under arrest;”
Duncan put a hole in Brady’s breast.

It was actually somewhat more complicated than that: Brady apparently joined another officer named Gaffney in harassing a group of Black men outside a popular saloon, Duncan went into the bar, Brady followed him, and at some point Duncan was hiding behind the bar, Brady was shot, perhaps by Duncan, and Duncan was arrested for Brady’s murder. There followed multiple trials, in which Duncan’s lawyer, Walter M. Farmer, the first Black graduate of Washington University Law School, argued his case in front of the state supreme court and brought an appeal to a justice of the US supreme court.

In the end Duncan was executed, despite an appeal to the governor signed by many prominent citizens. The St. Louis papers covered the story in surprising detail and with surprising sympathy–a final, long article following Duncan’s death described him as “one of the most popular colored men in St. Louis,” and continued:  “He was a sport, a jolly fellow, a swell dresser, a ladies’ favorite, but, above all, he was a magnificent singer. . . . They all say there never was a colored basso like him in town and few in the country who could outclass him.”

I go into the case in more detail in Jelly Roll Blues, and one of my back-burner projects is to do a full article on Duncan, Brady, and the later life of the ballad. For now, suffice it to say that there seem to have been several songs about the incident, one of them apparently penned by Duncan himself, another popular as a street chant against the police, and the third the one I sing here, which survived in multiple variants. W.C. Handy mentioned hearing a version when he first visited St. Louis in the 1890s, Lead Belly had a version,  and there were many others. I sing it roughly as I remember it from Tom Rush, with a couple of added lines I picked up while researching the book.

All of which said, my favorite version might be the one John Koerner performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 — which has nothing to do with the original story, but is a great example of Koerner koernerizing, with Tony Glover on harp, and I don’t understand why no one so far has digitized it and posted it… so I just did, and here it is.

This is a new one in my repertoire, worked up in the course of researching my book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories. I had heard other versions of the song from Lead Belly, who recorded it several times, and Mance Lipscomb, and the Kweskin Jug Band, who did Lead Belly’s version, and I thought of it as a folk-blues-ballad like Stackolee or Frankie and Johnny, or Lipscomb’s “Freddie.” If I’d had to guess, I would have said it came from Texas — the people who recorded it were from there, and Lead Belly told the Lomaxes that the murder happened in Dallas shortly before he got there in the second decade of the twentieth century.

In fact, it happened in New Orleans in 1894 and was widely covered in the local press. According to the stories, Speed was an “Octoroon” sex worker — the term literally meant 1/8 African, but in common parlance tended to mean a very light-skinned Black woman who could potentially pass for white; in the Blue Book guides to the New Orleans red light district, women were labeled with a W for White, C for Colored, O for Octoroon, and J for Jewish.

Her killer, Louis “Bull” Martin, was white and perhaps Latino (the Picayune suggested his last name was a shortening of Martinez), and worked as a bartender in Trauth’s saloon at the Dryades Street market. According to the Picayune, Speed was “an inmate of [madam] Lou Prout’s establishment at No. 40 Basin Street,” and the pair had been seeing each other for several months, but at some point Martin “discovered that besides himself she had formed an attachment for another party…. He became incensed with rage and frequently threatened to do her some bodily harm, but she only laughed at him.” Prout apparently got tired of their “bickering,” and asked Speed to move out, so she moved in with a woman named Pauline Jones, at 137 Customhouse Street (now Iberville).

That was the scene of the murder. The couple had been drinking heavily all evening, but appeared to be “on friendly terms” — they had ordered a couple of bottles of white wine and some oysters, and invited another of the “inmates” to join them. The party continued through the night, and around 8am Martin ordered a couple of cocktails, telling the waiter to make them “very strong.” There was no sign of trouble, but around 9:30 Jones heard a pistol shot  and “the shrieks of a female crying out, ‘Miss Pauline, come help me: I am shot!'” Speed was standing in the hallway, “with the upper portion of her garment ablaze and her hand clasped to her left breast.”

Speed died within minutes. Martin escaped, but turned himself in the following morning. He claimed she had shot herself, but was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Pardoned five years later, he was back in the news in 1911 after he married another sex worker, they opened a lunch stand, they broke up, she opened a rival lunch stand, he was heard to threaten that he would “do again what he did a long time ago,” and she got scared and shot him.

As for the song, it seems to have originated as a ragtime ballad, popular with pianists in the District. Rosalind “Rose” Johnson, a contemporary of Jelly Roll Morton’s, remembered it as a favorite in the Basin Street houses and played a version that was recorded twice in the 1950s by Edmond “Doc” Souchon, leader of the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band. My version has the two verses and chorus Souchon sang, plus additional verses from several Texas guitarists who recorded similar ragtime versions for the Library of Congress: Homer “Tricky Sam” Roberson, Finous “Flat Foot” Rockmore,” and Wallace “Staving Chain” Chains (my guitar approach is closest to Chains’s version).

All of those are more chordally intricate than the straightforward circle of fifths Lipscomb and Lead Belly played. The lyrics diverge in various ways from the newspaper stories, and Roberson, Lead Belly, and Lipscomb in particular added a bunch of “floating” verses from other ballads — which some Basin Street pianists may have done as well. In any case, this is my assemblage from that mix of sources, all of which are well worth checking out.

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.