Dave Van Ronk was my mentor in so many ways: as a model of musical taste, a guitar teacher, a friend, a guide to fine writers and serious historians… It is not an exaggeration to say I have no idea who I would be or what I would be doing if I had not turned up on his doorstep at age seventeen, eager to learn whatever he was willing to teach.

I arrived at a good moment, from my point of view, and, in a way, from his. It was a bad time in his life, a low point when he was feeling like the world had passed him by, and there I was, an eager young acolyte. I had the right background: I auditioned at my first lesson with Willie McTell’s “Georgia Rag,” and had grown up on Woody Guthrie, and had read a lot of the right books (Mark Twain, for example), and was young and ready to spend long nights eating his amazing meals, listening to him talk for hour upon hour, and drinking in his wisdom (and less than my share of his whiskey).

Often, late in those evenings, he would put on music he thought I should hear. It was almost never blues or folk: the favorites were Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, the Koutev Ensemble’s recording of Balkan songs, and various pop singers he valued: Hoagy Carmichael, Jo Stafford, and, especially, Bing Crosby.

I hadn’t expected that. Crosby, to me, was a name from a distant and generally uninteresting past. I’d grown up in a world of folk, blues, jazz, rock, some country, some classical… but absolutely not what I and everyone around me regarded as pop tripe. No one in my world considered Sinatra hip; he was the antithesis of hip, a dinosaur symbolizing the boring, stultifying, conservative junk that all the musicians I liked were rejecting.

I don’t recall Dave ever having a good word for Sinatra, but Crosby was another story. He was one of Dave’s favorite singers, a pioneering white jazz artist who had come up alongside Bix Beiderbeck, Frankie Trumbauer, and the Dorsey Brothers. Dave also liked a lot of Crosby’s later recordings–he’d grown up with Crosby’s radio program and had a relationship that went beyond the music–just as he loved Louis Armstrong’s later recordings. He recorded several Crosby favorites over the years, including “Swinging on a Star” (twice), “Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive,” and a bunch more on his two swing albums, but the album he played for me was a selection of early jazz  cuts, on the Biograph label, which I knew from albums of Willie McTell, Skip James, and Gary Davis — again, not the company in which I would have expected to find Crosby. So I borrowed it, recorded it on cassette, and later bought my own copy.

In hindsight, I don’t remember much of that record, but I loved “My Honey’s Loving Arms,” and still do. A large part of the attraction was that the “band” that backed Crosby through much of it and took the first “instrumental” break was the Mills Brothers, doing their vocal imitations of horns and bass. I’d never heard them, didn’t realize at first that they weren’t in fact playing instruments, and was entranced. Crosby worked with them brilliantly, matching their relaxed swing and floating over their harmonies. Then, for the second break, the real instruments came in, with Joe Venuti and the Dorsey’s. All in all,  it’s a wonderful record.

The song itself is pretty standard fare, at least in terms of the lyrics. The chords are nice, and I think it was one of the first songs I worked up in F, when I was beginning to realize what a great key that is for fingerstyle swing.

Finally, I just looked up what a “Morris chair” is, and it turns out to be exactly what I imagined: an early sort of cushioned reclining chair, ideal for cuddling, which is the pleasant theme of this song.

First, the Midwest tour continues, tomorrow (Saturday) in Urbana; Sunday in Bloomington, Indiana; Wednesday in Chicago; Friday in Louisville (the latter two are Dylan-oriented, in the Dylan distilleries, with whiskey flights included). Details at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html

On to the music:

This is by a Uruguayan songwriter and singer, Daniel Viglietti. I learned this from Victor Jara‘s recording, and didn’t hear Viglietti’s until much later, but he was another prominent figure in the Latin American nueva cancion (new song) movement.

It is a Spanish “This Land Is Your Land,” a song against private property, borders, and capitalism. Alambre is Spanish for “wire,” and by extension, “fence” — in US border slang, undocumented immigrants were at times called alambristas, people who had crossed the fence — and to desalambrar is to tear down the fences:

I ask those present if they have never thought
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.
I ask whether on earth you have never thought
That if the hands are ours, so is what they produce.

Tear down the fences, tear down the fences
The earth is ours, yours, and theirs
Of Pedro and Maria, of Juan and Jose.

If my song bothers anyone who does not want to hear it
I assure you that they are a gringo or an owner/boss of this country.
And I ask of those present, or I tell you, in answer,
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.

Jara changed one phrase to make the song more universal rather than specifically about Uruguay, and I’ve changed a few words through tricks of memory, but that’s the theme — and it is more important than ever.

I’ve got another blog, The Pursuit of Happiness, where I write about borders and nationalism, the poison of our times. We are living in a period when, due to global warming, wars, despotic governments, and other causes, many millions of people have to leave the places where they are living. There are many ways to deal with that situation, but the first thing to understand is that its principle threat is to those people, not to those of us living in the countries to which they might wish to go.

The second thing is that building stronger borders to keep them out is a form of mass murder, in some situations rising to the level of genocide. It is not just a sin of omission, it is a murderous aggression — and for those of us who are only here because our parents (my mother, for example) were able to flee other places, it is an obligation to do what we can to tear down those borders.

Throughout human history, people have moved when the places they lived became unlivable; virtually all of us are descended from people who spread around the world in earlier times. National borders are not new, but in most periods and places they were not intended to keep people from moving, nor were they regularly patrolled — and, to the extent they were patrolled, it was typically to control the flow of goods, not of people. Passports, in the modern sense, are barely a century old.

Obviously, it is a problem when too many people move to an area that cannot support more people. But the richest countries, the countries most harshly opposing immigration, are not keeping people out because we cannot support them. On the contrary, the point is to trap them in places that are less able to support them, where they produce the raw materials and cheap goods that make it possible for us to live much better than them, and to maintain that imbalance rather than sharing the wealth.

The United States, while frequently led by people who fulminate about the danger of immigration, has been conducting an experiment for years in what happens if you allow large, free movements of people. Millions of us have moved and are currently moving in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, and for all sorts of reasons. We have seen numerous large migrations over the last century or so, including the Great Migration of Blacks from the Southeast, of Southwestern farmers out of the Dust Bowl… and when we wanted to stem those flows, have passed laws and established rights that somewhat equalized and balanced the push and pull factors. I’m not pretending that has always been a pretty story, but with some ghastly exceptions — none of them involving people of majority-European heritage — we have not tried to prevent those migrations by erecting borders and forbidding movement.

Bottom line: freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights. And… I’ve written a lot more about this, but Woody Guthrie and Daniel Viglietti said it all more eloquently and simply.

First, a note that I’m starting my brief Midwest tour tomorrow, Saturday, May 2, in St. Louis, followed by Thursday in Kansas City, Saturday, May 9 in Urbana, Sunday in Bloomington IN, and finally two Dylan oriented shows, Wednesday the 13th in Chicago and Friday the 15th in Louisville. Please spread the word — full info at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html

And on to the music:

I don’t remember where, when, or how I picked up the first New Folks LP, but I listened to it a lot. It may even have been my introduction to bluegrass, thanks to the Greenbriar Boys. I’m guessing it’s what prompted me to buy their Ragged But Right album, which gave me several of my early showstoppers and has a special place in my personal pantheon.

That album was foundational for me because the Greenbriars put no limits on the material they could play. They recorded bluegrass standards, old-time country, modern singer-songwriter compositions (they were the first to record Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum”), old pop songs, new pop songs, some original instrumentals… I’ve already done posts on “Ragged, But Right” and “Roll On, John,” and I’ll be posting “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” pretty soon. (I should also check if I still remember “Different Drum.”)

Along with the Greenbriars, the New Folks LP was my introduction to Jackie Washington (a.k.a. Jack Landron, now a longtime friend) and Hedy West, who should be much better remembered. (It also had five tracks by David Gude, but I have to admit I rarely listened to them.) The Greenbriars had five tracks, all pretty basic bluegrass, including a dazzling version of Bill Monroe’s instrumental, “Rawhide,” which may have convinced me I’d never play mandolin.

I fell instantly in love with this one, both because it’s a fun song — I file it alongside “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” which, come to think of it, also had Ralph Rinzler playing mandolin on the version that caught my attention — and because I imagined the name being spelled Katie Klein and thought if it as one of the few (only?) bluegrass songs about a nice Jewish girl.

I just went back and listened to the Greenbriars’ version, and find that in the second verse they sing that if they were a little bird they’d build their nest “in some tall yonder tree” rather than in their “sweet Katy’s breast,” so I didn’t get that from them. I didn’t make it up; it’s in other versions of that verse, if not other versions of this song. (I just found it in a version of “Free Little Bird,” which is pretty similar.) As for the third verse, I think I made it up to go with the second, but if anyone recognizes it from elsewhere, that wouldn’t surprise me.

As I wrote in the liner notes to my lone LP, more than forty years ago, I’ve never been a huge bluegrass fan but I liked the Greenbriar Boys just fine. They had great taste in songs, John Herald was a terrific singer, Bob Yellin was one of the more interesting banjo players, and… I’m not actually making a case, just describing a personal reaction from back when I was thirteen or fourteen, and paying tribute to a trio that turned me on to a lot of fun material.

Before getting to the post, a quick heads-up that I’m doing a small tour of the Midwest, starting next Saturday, May 2, in St. Louis, then hitting Kansas City, Urbana, Bloomington IN, Chicago, and Louisville. There’s a full schedule on my website at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html, and please spread the word.

As for the post…

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes luckier than anyone deserves. Back in 1990, I hitchhiked from South Africa up through Zimbabwe and Zambia to Zaire (not yet renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where I studied guitar for several months with Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo — about which I’ve written in a half-dozen previous posts, listed below — then on to Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and finally Kenya.

In Nairobi, I was hoping to find some of the musicians who had played on some wonderful acoustic guitar records that I’d heard on reissues from John Storm Roberts‘s Original Music record label. Those records had been recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I had no idea how to go about finding any of the artists, or even if they were still alive. So, since I had no other ideas, I went into a music store — looking online, I see the main one was Melodica, and that might have been right, though none of the photos seem to be from that period and I can’t be sure.

Anyway, I went in and there was an older-looking white (or maybe, if it was Melodica, South Asian) man behind the counter, and I went up and explained that I was trying to find some of the musicians who had recorded acoustic guitar music back thirty years earlier.

The man looked at me like it was kind of a crazy question, and said, “Like who?”

I didn’t remember a lot of names, but I said, “Well… like Herbert Misango, who recorded ‘Wazee Wa Kisa.”

And the man said, “He’s over there,” pointing to a man standing behind another counter on the other side of the store. And he was.

Misango wasn’t playing anymore, but he was friendly and agreed to meet me that Saturday and took me to a small nightclub in a field behind an apartment complex where another of the older musicians, John Nzenze, was performing with a small group. I should have interviewed both of them; I should have had a camera with me and taken pictures. I should have done all sorts of things…

…but I didn’t. I just enjoyed meeting them and spending some time with them, and John Nzenze gave me a phone number for Fadhili William, who had recorded “Malaika,” and now was working in a gas station in New Jersey, and I eventually did interview him, back in the States, for the Boston Globe.

And, back in the States, I buckled down and learned “Wazee Wa Kisa.” It’s the only guitar part I’ve ever learned by writing it out. I couldn’t figure out the rhythmic intricacies, how the bass worked against the treble, so I made some six-line tablature paper and wrote out the bass part, then wrote out the treble over it, then sat down with what I’d written and kind of got it, and went back to the record, and eventually worked it out. I showed it to my friend Dominic Kakolobango, who has also done a nice recording of it, and he translated the lyric for me, and a few years later I came up with an English translation to sing after the original Swahili.

And that’s about it, except that my wife, Sandrine Sheon, worked with me for a while as a duo, playing clarinet, and for this one she would play a clave rhythm on a coke bottle, and I miss having her on it.

I learned this one from Mark Ross in Missoula, Montana. It was the first time I hitchhiked across country on the northern route, and I’d spent a couple of days in Spokane with Utah Phillips, and he suggested I stop off in Missoula and meet Mark. So I did, and spent a few days there, or maybe even a week. I liked Missoula and I liked Mark, and he taught me a bunch of songs, including this one. As I recall, he played it more like Merle Travis, and I’ve retained some of what he showed me and filled in the rest as best I could.

Mark also got me smoking Bull Durham roll-ups — not that I was ever much of a smoker, but for a brief period I affected that dreadful stuff. It was a romantic cowboy thing, and Mark was very much a romantic. That was before the folk scene was full of young men in hats and vests who looked like they’d stepped out of a  Depression-era photograph, and Mark was ahead of the curve. He’d come out west from New York and reinvented himself as a bard of the Montana mining region, complete with an IWW card.

The beautiful thing was that Missoula had completely adopted him as a local character; he’d make a circuit of the bars, and everyone greeted him and asked for his latest joke — he had a seemingly infinite supply of them — and he played in the local bars and at all sorts of other events, and had created a life there. It was an interesting place; I remember a couple of old cowboy saloons with interesting modern paintings, one of them a big, 19th-century style oil study of the pyramids in Giza, complete with Arabs and camels… except that in place of the pyramids it had three looming versions of the Cattleman’s Lodge, a big old local hotel that, as I recall, sold excellent hamburgers.

I came through a bunch of times over the next few years, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes driving through on tour — for some reason, when I began touring across country in the mid-1980s half my gigs were in Western Montana and the Idaho Panhandle. (Probably the reason was that not a lot of people toured through there, so they were more open to minor talents like me.) However I traveled, I’d stop off for a day or three with Mark, and it was always a pleasure. I remember once he was booked on a big local music festival with Hoyt Axton, Kris Kristofferson, and a bunch of Texas singer-songwriters. It was a great show, but apparently a financial disaster, and, as a local, Mark saw what was coming and was one of the few performers who managed to cash his check before they started bouncing.

I have lots more memories of Mark and Missoula, and Butte, where I played two memorable gigs at the Silver Dollar Saloon, and a bunch of smaller towns — Whitefish, Kalispell, Moscow, Bonner’s Ferry… there was one gig out in the middle of nowhere, where halfway through my second or third set a guy came riding into the bar on a motorcycle, parked it in front of the stage, and asked if I could play “You Are My Sunshine.” (I could, and did.)

That was another nice thing; when I played around there, I was doing bar gigs, three or four sets, and rather than demanding the Beatles/Buffett repertoire bar crowds tended to want on the East Coast, folks were perfectly happy to hear Blind Blake or Gary Davis, or Hank Williams, or Woody Guthrie, or unfamiliar new songs by my friend Bill Morrissey — and if I played something with a bit of swing, couples would get up and dance, even though it was solo acoustic guitar and vocals.

I don’t remember ever performing this one, but by the last set I wasn’t always in shape to remember much, so I may have. It’s a fun song, and although I tend to try to reshape lyrics to fit my own voice and time, I do it as a character piece, complete with the reference to “the cutest girl in the 48 states.” I later heard the original version by Tex Williams, a classic Western Swing hit with a tight horn section, but I continue to associate it with Mark and evenings sitting around drinking whiskey and smoking Bull Durhams in his cluttered apartment in Missoula. That was more than forty years ago, and he’s in Eugene, Oregon, now, still playing, and we talk on the phone every few months. Too many people I knew back then are gone, and I treasure the ones who are holding on.

This is another in the long list of Woody Guthrie songs I’ve known since my elementary school years, and stands out for me in part because Dave Van Ronk recorded it on his second Philo album, in a period when we were spending a lot of time together. I was surprised, because Dave hadn’t recorded any of Woody’s other songs, and I didn’t think of them as his kind of music.

Of course, he knew a bunch of those songs, because everybody did, but he also was of the generation and sect that had tended to shy away from Woody’s work, in part because it had been canonized by the previous generation of folk revivalists, and in part because he tended not to like “country” or other white southern “old-time” styles. He’d come up in the Civil Rights era, and although he liked the members of the New Lost City Ramblers as individuals, he associated much of their repertoire with a culture he considered retrograde and dangerous. As he once put it, “It’s the soundtrack of the lynch mobs, and I want nothing to do with it.”

Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong: some canonical old-time players performed under the sponsorship of the Ku Klux Klan, and many more were solid segregationists and, if around today, would be solid MAGA voters. Others, of course, were populists (the left-wing kind), or connected with various union or farmer organizations he thoroughly supported, and Guthrie was firmly on the left, so that wasn’t a specific problem, but it still wasn’t his kind of music — and, again, there was the problem of canonization. He thought Dylan was, on the whole, a better songwriter than Guthrie; that Joni Mitchell was, on the whole, a better songwriter than Dylan; and that Cole Porter was a better songwriter than any of them.

So I was surprised he recorded this one. Part of the explanation was that he was in a mood to pay tribute. He recorded this on the same album as Tom Paxton’s “Did You Hear John Hurt?” and followed it with Dylan’s “Song to Woody.”But he also just thought it was a damn good song.

This is another of the songs Woody wrote in 1941 on commission for the Department of the Interior, celebrating the Bonneville Power Administration, and appearing on the soundtrack of a documentary film promoting dam-building and rural electrification. I’ve posted some others (“Grand Coulee Dam,” “Roll On, Columbia“), but this one feels more timely, due to the current war on immigrants, or migrants, or just poor people — and that’s not just a MAGA problem; the Democrats and lots of other parties in lots of other countries are getting votes by framing migrants as a problem, rather than as people trying to escape and solve problems.

I’ve written a lot about that in my blog about immigration, borders, and related issues, and will keep writing about it, because it’s the central issue of our time, along with the climate changes that are making mass immigration increasingly vital for many millions of people.

For this post, I’ll just add that my chording for this song is consciously idiosyncratic; my basic idea was just to stay on the Dm chord, adding other notes where they seemed to fit. You might call that approach modal, but I see no need to get fancy about the terminology; my inspiration was a piece Pete Seeger wrote about the virtues of simplicity, in which he mentioned that he had finally got the point of playing “Old Joe Clark” with a single chord all the way through. I’m also headed that way with “Nottamun Town”/”Masters of War,” though, as with this one, I sometimes throw in an extra note or switch to another chord if it feels right. More and more, on songs like these, I’ve been thinking of the guitar as an accompanying instrument, following the voice, rather than as providing a solid foundation. And it’s not coincidental that in both of my examples, I’m working from a minor chord, while a lot of old-time players would have played major chords, though sometimes singing the minor third. And, in case that sounds technical… I know lots of people, including Dave Van Ronk, who could easily point out where someone was singing a minor third while playing the major, but I’m not one of them. I write music history, but I’m not that kind of musicologist, and the bottom line on this arrangement is that it’s what feels right to me these days.

Yet another I got from Joe Ely, penned by Butch Hancock. I’ve paid tribute to that pairing a few times already, in my posts for “West Texas Waltz,” “Row of Dominoes,” and “Wishing for You,” and don’t have more to say about them… Joe reshaped my ideas about what I liked and wanted to do musically, Butch supplied a bunch of the best songs in Joe’s repertoire, and I learned a bunch of them, though I only performed a couple onstage.

This is one of the ones I didn’t perform, because I kept hearing Joe’s band in my head and couldn’t figure out how to get that sound with one acoustic guitar… but a few weeks ago I gave it another shot and I’m pretty happy with it. The bassline is key, because it gives the song that rolling train feel, and it occurred to me that if I shifted to drop-D tuning, it would fall neatly under my fingers.

In the early years of my friendship with Peter Guralnick, I mentioned my passion for Joe — who he liked, though less passionately — and he told me that he’d tried to get Sleepy LaBeef to do this one, but Sleepy was a serious churchgoing Christian and couldn’t see himself singing the third verse. To me, that verse seems the opposite of blasphemous, but in any case I love this one for the train feeling rather than the philosophizing.

I was never a full-on train guy, but I read Bound for Glory as a kid and did one trip across the West on freights, and a couple of years later got kicked off a boxcar I hopped out of Minneapolis… some of which I’ve written about in my posts on “Danville Girl” and “Vigilante Man”. I haven’t hopped a freight in many years and don’t expect to try it again, but I still enjoy watching them roll past, and keep an eye out for cars that might be good to ride.

I have to start this post with a Dave Van Ronk story: As he told it, he was playing on a blues festival someplace and arrived late, not knowing who else was on the bill. He rushed onstage and did his show, ending with a romping, stomping, macho version of “Hoochie Coochie Man…” and walked off to find that Muddy Waters had been watching from the wings.

Dave was consumed with embarrassment, but recalled, “Muddy was very gentlemanly, as always. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That was nice, son… but you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.'”

I’ve never been entirely sure I believe that story, but I took it to heart. It’s the same point John Hammond made about how people miss the humor in Robert Johnson’s lyrics: like, “You can bury my body by the highway side/ So my old restless spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” A lot of blues lyrics are funny — not only funny, but also funny. Like NWA’s lyrics; a lot of people who thought “Fuck the Police” was scary were surprised when Ice Cube started writing comedies, but if you actually listen to it, that record was as funny as it was angry.

Willie Dixon wrote this one and gave it to Muddy, and it changed Muddy’s career. It was by far his biggest hit, but that wasn’t the only thing; it was fundamentally different from the deep Delta blues style that originally put him on the map in Chicago. For one thing, his early hits featured his ferociously amplified slide guitar, but he didn’t play on this one. For another thing, it was clever, and funny.

When it hit, the R&B audience picked up on that. Within a few years, there were lots of other songs that used the trademark “Hoochie Coochie Man” riff, and virtually all of them were funny: Ray Charles’s “It Wasn’t Me,” Ruth Brown’s “I Can’t Hear a Word You Say,” Johnny Guitar Watson’s “Gangster of Love…” and three that I’ve already posted about: Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” and The Coasters’ “Riot In Cell Block Number Nine” and “Framed.”

I’ve rarely performed this one, because frankly I felt ill-equipped and silly singing the big, scary, macho lyric… but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t have to pretend to be Muddy Waters, or even Dave Van Ronk. So I started fooling around with it, playing with the lyric rather than trying to puff myself up to fit it, and discovered that it was fun. Like it was supposed to be.

Not incidentally, Willie Dixon started out doing funny recitations — he recalled that as a teenager in Mississippi he printed up a dirty version of the “Signifying Monkey” toast to sell to his schoolmates, and when he moved to Chicago and went professional he bowdlerized it, added a chorus, and made a hit recording with the Big Three Trio that was covered by Cab Calloway and Count Basie as “The Jungle King.” And there were lots of others: “Wang Dang Doodle,” for example, which reworks an older toast, “The Dance of the Freaks.” (I get into some of this in my book Jelly Roll Blues.)

This is neither the first nor the last Butch Hancock song I learned off Joe Ely’s terrific string of records in the 1970s. (Actually, I just checked, and this is off his 1981 album, Down on the Drag, which was not quite up to that standard, but still had some killer tracks.) I’ve already posted “West Texas Waltz” and “Row of Dominoes” (the latter of which I also recorded on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys), as well as Ely’s own “Because of the Wind” and “Me and Billy the Kid,” and there are more to come, because I immersed myself in those albums, and credit them — and later Joe’s solo live shows — with transforming my ideas about what I wanted to be playing and how, and why.

I know that sounds over the top, but somehow Joe showed up exactly when I needed him. I’d come out of my year with Dave Van Ronk playing a huge repertoire of Van Ronk songs, and a lot of old blues guitar arrangements, and some half-assed swing… and yet, I had always loved rock ‘n’ roll, and a lot of my skills were better suited to country music, which I had never understood… and Joe showed up, rocking hard and playing a blend of all of that, plus some Latin rhythms, and making it all sound like solid bar-band music rather than an attempt at some kind of innovative fusion.

And that band. Lloyd Maines on steel, long before he nurtured the Dixie Chicks; Jesse Taylor on lead guitar, sometimes playing too much for my taste, but often right in the pocket; Gregg Wright on bass and Steve Keeton on drums; and Ponty Bone on accordion, adding some Mexican flavor — my guitar break on this one starts out directly mimicking his accordion break, which I hadn’t heard in probably twenty years until I just went back and listened to it, but is engraved in my brain.

And that songs. A lot of the best ones were by Butch, and prompted me to hunt up some of Butch’s albums — Van Ronk was a huge fan; he once suggested Butch was the only songwriter in the US who could have hit New York the way Dylan did — but to my tastes, Joe had picked the cream of the crop. And there were also some fine ones by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and by Joe himself.

This isn’t one of the masterpieces — I love the first verse and chorus, but the second doesn’t stand up — and I’ve never performed it onstage and don’t expect to, but it was one of my first attempts to fingerpick a Caribbean rhythm, and I’ve been playing it for my own pleasure for almost fifty years.

As noted in the posts for “Swinging Doors” and “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” I’m a big Merle Haggard fan, and this has always been one of my favorites. It’s one of his most autobiographical songs — pretty much straight-up life story except that he was just doing a three-year stretch in San Quentin, not “life without parole.”

In an indication of how things have changed, he tried to conceal that part of his life for the first years of his career — but this song was released in 1968, shortly after the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison LP, and between that album and Merle being hailed as the most soulful country singer and songwriter since Hank Williams, a stretch in prison became a kind of hallmark of country authenticity.

Merle tended to describe his criminal youth as a mix of unfocused rebellion and stupidity — in particular the event that led to that three-year stretch, which involved him and a buddy getting drunk and deciding to rob a local restaurant, breaking in through the back door at what they thought was three in the morning, but was actually around ten p.m. The owner recognized them and asked why they hadn’t just come around to the front. “If we’d had any sense at all, we would have just laughed and walked around to the front like it was some big joke,” he wrote in his memoir, Sing Me Back Home. Instead, “Like fools, we ran.”

He wrote this song about ten years later, and it was his fifth number one country hit, following “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home” (about a man on death row),” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” You get the idea.

While researching this post, I learned that this was the theme song to a movie, Killers Three, which also marked Merle’s acting debut –though his appearance is limited to two or three lines and some bemused head-shaking. The movie includes a couple of other songs by him and his wife (briefly) and singing partner (long-term), Bonnie Owens, but this one is just played as an instrumental under the opening credits. The movie is a complicated tale of bootlegging, romance, and a nice boy gone wrong, produced, co-written, and co-starring Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame. It’s up on Youtube. I’m not recommending it.

As for the song, I was startled to read Merle explaining in an interview with Paul Zollo that his approach on the recording was “trying to land somewhere in between Peter, Paul & Mary and Johnny Cash.” It would never have occurred to me that he was going for the PP&M crowd, but of course Cash had broken into the mainstream with appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and on the TV folk show Hootenanny (and a ghastly movie called Hootenanny Hoot), so that made commercial sense. And when you listen to the record with that in mind, you can hear it. It starts with James Burton playing “folky guitar” in Haggard’s words — fingerpicking a repetitive riff on a Dobro — and Bonnie Owens and Glen Campbell fill out the two-guys-and-a-gal vocal harmonies on the chorus.

I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was the electric guitar bend that comes in over Burton, which I thought was Burton, since I once heard him play it live, but turns out to have been Roy Nichols. Since the idea of the Songobiography is that I’m playing all these songs from memory, I didn’t check the record until I’d done my video, but I had that bend in my head, and the way it comes back to end the song, and kind of echo those bits, kinda sorta.