Along with all the great African American blues artists who recorded in the 1920s, there were also some interesting Euro-American players who came up with distinctive styles. The most famous was Jimmie Rodgers, but the best guitarists tended to come from around the mountain communities of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and the Carolinas. I’ve already paid tribute to Dick Justice, who deserves to be a lot better known, and this song is from an even more obscure artist, Clarence Greene. Greene was born in North Carolina in 1884 and recorded a  scant dozen songs, including some on fiddle with Byrd Moore’s Hot Shots. This is by far the best known, and with good reason: his other recordings are in more standard white country styles, but this is a unique and brilliant guitar blues.

Greene’s playing is admirably quirky, and shows the clear influence of one of the greatest early blues recording stars, apparently learned first-hand. As his friend Walter Davis recalled:

“Me and Clarence Greene was in Johnson City, Tennessee, and there was an old colored fellow, blind man, that was playing down there on the street, and I thought he was the most wonderful guitar player that I had ever heard. He could really play the blues… Blind Lemon Jefferson. And he was really good… I stayed there two or three days, trying to pick up some of his chords and some of his tunes.”¹

Greene’s playing is very different from Jefferson’s, but made up of distinctly Jeffersonian components – the way someone might play if they spent two or three days watching Jefferson, then went home and came up with a guitar arrangement based on what they’d seen That’s very different from sitting down with a record, because Greene doesn’t sound like he’s imitating any particular Jefferson piece and some of the ideas he uses seem based more on how Jefferson’s hands moved than on how the results sounded. At least, that’s my take on this arrangement, based on admittedly limited evidence – but it makes sense.

As for the song, it’s a close adaptation of a 1923 recording by Ida Cox titled “Chattanooga Blues.”² Cox has been overshadowed by Bessie Smith in the history books, but was at least as influential among rural musicians and listeners. She couldn’t match Smith’s power and virtuosity, but had a more straightforwardly conversational style and terrific taste in material, much of which she seems to have written herself. She was also a very astute businesswoman and continued to tour with her own company of musicians, singers, and dancers through the 1930s, invested her profits in real estate, and retired comfortably to Knoxville, where she died in 1967.

As for my version: one of the things I love about both Jefferson and Greene is the way they casually add or subtract a couple of beats now and then to fit their singing, rather than keeping within standard European measures. I started playing this song before I got seriously into Jefferson’s music, and it was an education in freedom — it comes out a bit different every time, and that’s fun and relaxing.

Yet another I learned from Joe Ely. Among the many debts I owe to Joe is that he introduced me to Butch Hancock’s songwriting. Joe and Butch had teamed up way before I heard of either of them, in a band called the Flatlanders, which also included Jimmie Dale Gilmore — another songwriter I first learned about through Joe’s records. They were and are a terrific trio, but Joe was the first one to hit nationally and internationally, so most of us learned about the others from him.

If it hadn’t been for Joe, I would probably still have learned about Butch, because Dave Van Ronk heard him someplace in Texas — maybe the Kerrville festival — and was blown away. I recall Dave telling me he had tried to persuade Butch to come to New York and insisted he’d be the biggest thing to hit the local folk scene since Dylan… which is the kind of advice Butch probably was wise to ignore.

As best I can tell, Butch never cared to tour much anyway. The only times I’ve seen him are once with the Flatlanders at Newport and once when Dick Pleasants, a wonderful Boston folk radio programmer, got the chance to program a city-sponsored Fourth of July concert at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River. Dick brought in Odetta, Rosalie Sorrels, Riders in the Sky, and several other people — and brought Butch’s entire band up from Texas. As I recall, it was a ten-piece group, with back-up singers, a horn section, and a musical saw.

All of which said, I got this, along with “Me and Billy the Kid,” from Joe’s Live at Liberty Lunch album and recorded it on my cassette, Street Corner Cowboy in the early 1990s, and again almost ten years later on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys. (Note the subtly different titles.) The first version had Mark Earley playing lonesome prairie harmonica, and the second had Matt Leavenworth playing lonesome prairie fiddle, and I miss both of them… but I kept playing it on my own, because it’s such a great lyric.

To my way of thinking, Butch’s one major handicap was that he often overwrote — he’d come up with a great chorus and some great verses, but then he’d write more verses and pretty soon he’d have a six minute song that would have been a lot stronger if it were shorter. That’s not a rare disease for writers — I’m sure I’ve succumbed to it myself on occasion — but anyway, Joe seemed to act as a kind of brake: the songs of Butch’s he did were mostly shorter and a few of them were damn near perfect. This one, for example, is just four short verses and two choruses (actually, I just went back and listened, and Joe and Butch sing a different line on the first chorus — so apparently I did a bit more editing.

Anyway, this grabbed me from line one, and just kept getting better: “They say a fool never knows what he misses/ And a wise man never misses what he knows.” That’s damn good.

I got this from Bascom Lamar Lunsford, as did we all. Lunsford was a complicated and interesting man, a lawyer from North Carolina who was born in 1882 and grew up playing local fiddle and banjo songs. In 1928 he organized one of the first official folk festivals — by some accounts the first — in Asheville, which became a yearly event and among other things is notable as the place where a sixteen-year-old Pete Seeger first became interested in folk music and five-string banjos.

That would not have been Lunsford’s choice for a biographical credit, since he strongly objected both to northern city performers playing “mountain music” and to the association of folk music with leftist politics. I gather from his biography, Minstrel of the Appalachians (by Loyal Jones, who tries to put his views in the best possible light), that he was considered a difficult man back home as well, and it has often been noted that in all the decades he ran the Asheville festival he never presented a black performer (though Jones writes that he did present black musicians in other settings).

So the biography is messy… but he collected a lot of great music over the years, and in 1928 he recorded this song, which is wonderful.

I began playing this in the late 1980s as part of a project to adapt clawhammer banjo pieces to guitar (another example is “The Cuckoo“), and recorded it on the cassette I made in the early 1990s. Which said, I don’t recall playing it all that regularly until I read Robert Cantwell’s book about the folk revival, When We Were Good. There is some smart stuff in that book, but also some spectacular passages of academic prose, and the analysis of this song was so rich that I took to reading it from the stage:

[W]hy does Bascom wish to be a mole in the ground? Perhaps because he is a man not at home where destiny has placed him. He has been in the “Bend,” quite likely a prison, too long, “with the rough and rowdy men” of whom, I think it is fair to say, he is not one. And he has had a bad experience with railroad men, who “drink up your blook like wine.” Even Tempe, his woman, doesn’t love him in the way he deserves, wanting him only when he can supply the cash for the nine-dollar shawl she covets; that doesn’t prevent him, though, from loving her… To hear her sing, he would wish himself not only a contemptible mole but a vile “lizard in the spring.”

A lizard, a mole: Bascom is not the first man in love to feel his rodent-like unworthiness and reptilian cupidity… Nor is he the first to feel, under the influence of love, the roughness of his own sex, or whose heart has learned the arcane and curious language in which nature, in the form of mole and lizard, little miracles of creation and perhaps, in the metaphorical field of sexuality, covert genital symbols, both speaks to his condition and brings him into unconscious sympathy with his beloved.

Indeed.

What goes around comes around, sometimes in very nice ways. I don’t remember if it was a few months or a year, or even two, but in any case sometime after Dominic Kakolobango spent a week taping his favorite records out of my collection, I was in his apartment in Brussels listening to his taped selection of Mississippi John Hurt songs.

I had always named Hurt as one of my favorite singers and guitarists, and played a bunch of his songs, but like most people I thought of his playing as relatively simple and straightforward compared to the work of people like Willie McTell, Blind Blake, or Lemon Jefferson.

So there I was in Brussels, Dominic was at work, and I figured I’d learn a couple of songs I’d always liked. And, for the first time, instead of just playing rough approximations of what I heard, I decided to listen carefully and try to figure out exactly what Hurt was doing…

…which opened up a new world. Because if you actually pay attention to what he played, John Hurt was a superbly quirky guitarist. I’ve already posted about “Richlands Woman,” which I recall as the first song I worked out that day, with its wonderfully economical choice of bass notes. Then I moved on to “Satisfied and Tickled Too,” and found it was missing half a measure, or added half a measure, or was missing or added a beat, but in any case did it consistently in every verse.

That was an interesting experience, because I first tried to count the beats along with his recording, and work it out logically, but I kept getting confused… so I decided to just play along with him, over and over, learning the song like a toddler learns to talk.

It worked, and this became one of my favorite songs. Now I usually play it with my wife Sandrine on clarinet, and she learned the timing the same way – first tried to count it, then just surrendered and played along till it felt natural.

The song is related to a piece the Memphis Jug Band recorded as  “You May Leave, But This Will Bring You Back,” and may ultimately derive from a verse-and-chorus sheet music hit from 1898 by Ben Harney  (whom I’ve discussed in an earlier post) — though none of the three songs shares much more than the tag line. Hurt’s is my favorite by far, sung from the point of view of a woman who is confident that “it” will bring her lover back — “it” clearly being  her todalo.

There has been lots of speculation among blues scholars about the derivation of this word, producing a range of more or less unlikely folk etymologies, but the meaning is clear enough in context: “I pull my dress up to my knees/Give my todalo to whom I please.” And, once one knows that, it clarifies some other mysteries, like the title of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” a euphemistic mis-spelling, suggesting a cheery and childish goodbye rather than a local specialty in one of the fabled jazz towns of the Prohibition era.

I always liked Mance Lipscomb’s music, but as a kid I was first struck by his versions of old pop standards. He had a gentle, swinging style that worked perfectly with that material, and I  quickly learned his versions of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and “Alabama Jubilee.”

I paid less attention to his blues, which seemed to me less distinctive – though a couple worked their way into my repertoire: I picked up roughly his version of “Bout a Spoonful” from Dave Van Ronk, without knowing Lipscomb was the source, and a Belgian friend turned me on to “Ain’t You Sorry,” which gave me a new appreciation of his guitar work. But I never really understood how good he was until a year or two after I got back from Africa, when Dominic Kakolobango, whom I’d stayed with in Lubumbashi, came to visit the US.

When I met Dominic he was playing the classic Shaba acoustic style of Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo, some American country and western, and a lot of French chanson – he introduced me to the music of Georges Brassens, who has been a passion of mine ever since. In turn, I introduced him to acoustic blues, and when he came to visit we listened to a lot of records and he spent hours and days taping his favorites.

Dominic’s tastes ranged widely, but out of all my records, the artists who most caught his attention were Mississippi John Hurt and Mance Lipscomb. That made sense, of course – I’d always associated the Congolese acoustic style with the gentle swing of Hurt’s playing. But until Dominic became fascinated with Lipscomb’s recordings, I’d never put him in the same class with Hurt, who I sometimes name as my favorite musician ever. Dominic, by contrast, loved them equally and maybe even marginally favored Lipscomb, and since I trusted his taste, I listened along with him, and after he left I kept listening.

The more I listened, the more I was struck not only by the music but by Lipscomb’s incredibly deft lyrical sense. Much of his repertoire was made up of blues standards, and I had tended to think of them as lyrically generic, but when I paid attention it was obvious they were anything but. The older blues singers – even the greatest ones – came up playing for dances and on the street, where audiences were not typically sitting quietly or demanding a cohesive lyrical narrative, so although the poetry of individual blues verses is often brilliant and striking, full songs were generally compilations of fairly random verses, connected by emotional feel or just as one verse reminded a singer of another.

Lipscomb was an exception, because he mostly sang unified songs — they might vary from one day to the next, but they held together as cohesive lyrical compositions. The most distinctive included some murder ballads in blues form, such as “Ella Speed” and “Freddie,” which as far as I know were his own compositions. But even his more generic blues tended to flow from verse to verse in logical progressions, and the verses were strikingly well chosen and often phrased in novel and interesting ways.

All of which is to say I began to appreciate Lipscomb as one of the great blues songwriters – and that naturally took me to this song, which is one of his masterpieces. It is aptly named, at least from a chordal point of view — lyrical form is a fairly straightforward twelve-bar blues, but the chords are unlike anything I know in that form or any other.

As for the lyric, I gradually realized that this is another murder ballad, but so subtle that it’s easy to miss the denouement – indeed, it’s handled so subtly that some people will probably disagree with that description. In any case, it’s a great song and Lipscomb recorded it several times, somewhat varying the verses but keeping the theme intact. I’m not sure my version precisely matches any one of his, but it’s one of my all-time favorites.

Meanwhile, Dominic picked up Lipscomb’s version of an old ragtime-blues standard, “Take Me Back,” wrote some additional verses in Swahili, and that’s another of my all-time favorites, especially in this version, backed by a band back in the Republic of Congo:

I’ve always named the Reverend Gary Davis as one of my main influences on guitar and loved playing his instrumental showpieces (like “Cincinnati Flow Rag“), but although I learned a bunch of his superb gospel arrangements I rarely performed them because I couldn’t get behind the lyrics.  This was the great exception because it tells a Bible story rather than exhorting anyone to believe, and it’s a great lyric with a great accompaniment.

When I first learned this I sang Davis’s lyric, but then I heard the Staple Singers’ version, which extended the story to the moment when Samson pulls the building down. So I learned that, and it’s the one I play here…

… and that got me interested in whether there were even more verses. So I began doing some research, which led into a larger project on the African American tradition of rapping or singing Bible stories. That’s an ongoing effort, part of a still larger project to explore the deep roots of rap, which so far has produced my book on the dozens. Meanwhile I turned up quite a lot of additional information on “Samson and Delilah,” which seems to have been uniquely popular and spread across the South in multiple versions in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The first solid evidence of this song is three verses in “Wasn’t that a Witness for My Lord,” a sort of musical compendium of Bible stories, which included three verses about Samson, two of which are close to what Davis sang. Howard Odum published a version of this song in 1909 as part of an article on recent African American spirituals in The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, and it remained popular with jubilee quartets through the mid-20th century.

Over the next two decades several authors published excerpts from longer versions of the Samson and Delilah ballad, and in 1927 the first three recordings of it appeared within a few months of each other, by Blind Willie Johnson in Dallas,  Rev. T. T. Rose in Chicago, and Rev. T. E. Weems in Atlanta. All three were clearly based on the same source, though each performer had edited the lyric somewhat differently to fit a three-minute 78 rpm disc. I guessed the source must have been a published broadside (a printed song sheet with lyrics but no music), and eventually found a copy of that broadside in John Lomax’s papers at the University of Texas.

Interestingly, the version recorded in 1927 is quite different from what Davis and the Staples sang, and their lyric is closer to the verses collected by Odum twenty years earlier… which leads me to think it was already around, certainly in oral tradition and likely in print — but there has been virtually no research on African American religious broadsides, so I’m still kind of stumbling in the dark. (If anyone has suggestions of archives or libraries that have collected this sort of material, please pass them along.)

Meanwhile, here’s a compendium of verses from the versions I’ve found extant by the 1920s, suggesting how long and impressive some early performances may have been:

Delilah was a woman that was fine and fair.
Pleasant looking with coal black hair.
Delilah she gained old Samson’s mind,
When he first seen the woman of the Philistine.

Why he went to Timothy [Timnath] I cannot tell
But the daughter of Timothy she pleased him well.
He asked his father to go and see
Can you get that beautiful woman for me?

Sampson’s mother she said to him,
Can’t you find a wife among our kin;
She said, O Sampson, it grieves your mother’s mind
For you to go and marry to a Philistine.
(Chorus)
If I had my way,
O Lordy, Lordy,
If I had my way;
If I had my way,
I would tear this building down.

You’ve read about Samson, from his birth
He was the strongest man ever lived on earth
You read way back in that ancient times
Lord, he faced a thousand of the Philistines

Let me tell you what Samson done.
He broke at a lion, and the lion run.
Oh, Samson was the man that the lion attack
Lord, Samson jumped on that lion’s back

’Twas written that the lion killed a man with his paw,
But Sampson got his hand in the lion’s jaw.
Lord, he broke that lion, killed him dead
And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.

Sampson gave a feast and there came a debate,
He put forth a riddle to interpretate,
So many garments he said he would give
If they tell his riddle in seven days.

Sampson’s feast was almost through,
The known of the riddle was not yet in view.
They called his wife and instruct her what to do,
“Please ask your husband and he’ll tell it to you.”

She says, “What is the riddle, please tell it to me,
You said ‘Out of the eater came forth meat;’
What is your riddle, please tell it to me,
You said ‘Out of the strong came forth the sweet.’”
“I killed a lion, long after he was dead
The bees made honey in the lion’s head.”

Sampson burned down a field of corn,
They looked for Sampson but he was gone.
So many thousands they formed a plot,
It was not many days before he was caught.

They bound his hands, while walking along
He looked on the ground and saw an old jawbone
He just moved his arms, the rope popped like thread,
When he got through slaying three thousand was dead.

Sampson went to town and he stayed too late,
They wanted to kill him and they laid in wait.
Tell me, wasn’t Sampson awfully strong?
He pulled up the gate posts and he carried them along.

Oh, Samson’s hair went wandering about
Lord, the strength of Samson was never found out
Until his wife she sat upon his knees
Said, “Tell me, Samson, where your strength lies, please”

Lord, she looked so pretty, she talked so fair,
Samson said, “Woman, it’s in my hair.
You shave my head just as clean as your hand
Lord, my strength will become like a natural man.”

Sampson was a man very large in size,
They overpowered Samson and plucked out his eyes.
O Church, just listen to the tale,
They caught poor Sampson and put him in jail.

Church, let me tell you what the Philistines done,
They brought Sampson to the building to have some fun.
But now, O Church, ain’t you glad
To hear what Sampson said to the lad,

These was the words that Sampson said,
Show me a pillar for to lean my head.
We are told that the building was high from the ground,
Sampson braced against the pillar and it tumbled down.

I’ve already written about my introduction to Joe Ely and my affection for his work, and I’m happy to revisit the subject, because I owe him a lot. Beyond the great songs I learned off his records, and the records themselves, it was a whole attitude toward music. Along with Doug Sahm and Peter Guralnick, Joe was one of the people who taught me that genre categories are just a barrier to listening. If I listen rather than filing, what I like about Willie McTell may be the same thing I like about Buffy Sainte-Marie, what I like about Merle Haggard may also be what I like about Chuck Berry, what I like about Belle Stewart may be what I like about Pablo Casals playing the Bach cello suites.

Which said, since I mostly worked as an acoustic single I tended to limit myself to to the more countrified or singer-songwriter songs in Joe’s repertoire — until I got together with Robbie, Peter, and Mark as the Street Corner Cowboys and had an opportunity to play rock ‘n’ roll with an electric guitar in my hands and a solid bass kicking me. That was a chance to try a bunch of songs I’d always loved but never played solo, among them this smart reimagining of the western outlaw ballad.

I interviewed Joe several times, and in one of our conversations he explained that he got the idea for this one when he was driving home to Lubbock from California and happened to pass through the town of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid was killed:

They had a museum and we stopped in to look and it had nothing to do with Billy the Kid. It was old wagon wheels and spurs and stupid old western stuff and they had made this museum and there are two known photos and that is all they know about him, and all the legends and the stuff that Pat Garrett had written about. He couldn’t known him that well — I mean, he shot him, but he just heard stories too.

I got to thinking that he is one of those legends nobody knows much about, so I figured I could say anything I wanted to, and I just put myself as one of the guys that ran with him. Some of these movies make him out to be an outlaw hero type, and I wanted to put that completely down and say what a lowdown guy he was, and add some humor to it.

So from between Fort Sumner and Clovis, New Mexico, which is about 70 or 80 miles, I wrote the entire song. I wrote it down verse-wise, didn’t have a guitar, came back to Austin and put a few chords to it that seemed to work. It was one of those things that came without a whole lot of struggle — it pretty much just rolled out.

In the early 1980s there was a decent country radio station in the Boston area and I kept my radio tuned to it, with the result that I picked up on Rosanne Cash, Lacy J. Dalton, and John Anderson — also lots of other people, but those are the three that inspired me to buy their LPs and learn some current hits. Anderson became a brief but fierce passion, thanks to his hardcore country voice and some unusual songs.

The first Anderson album I bought was All the People Are Talking, which had a hot rocker called “Black Sheep” and a mournful ballad called “Mama, Look What Followed Me Home” that is my nominee for the most horrible C&W lyric ever written — which I know is quite a claim, but it’s truly dreadful, and I know it by heart and sing it in appropriate circumstances:

Mama, look what followed me home.
Ain’t she so pretty, and mama, she’s all alone.
I’d love her forever if she was my own.
Aw, Mama… Can I keep her?
Look what followed me home…

(I know you hope he was singing about a dog, but he wasn’t.)

So anyway, I then bought Anderson’s previous album, Wild & Blue, which had spawned three top ten singles: the title track, “Swingin’,” and “Goin’ Down Hill.” The first two were fairly generic and hugely popular, but this song is a quirky oddity built on a pop-ragtime chord progression with an onomatopoeic chromatic descent underpinning the protagonist’s downhill slide. It’s a fun tune to pick, and I particularly like to pull it out when I’m playing with people who are comfortable on ragtime and swing-era standards, because the music and lyric are so perfectly matched and I think more people should be doing it.

This is co-credited to Anderson and his touring bass player — which usually means the sideman did most of the writing, and I particularly want to believe that because the bassist was named Aries X. Lincoln, known to his friends as X. I just spent a pleasant half-hour researching him, and find he was born with the more prosaic name of Billy Lee Tubb, in San Antonio, and worked for a while as a guitarist for his uncle Ernest — yup, that one — as well as in a rockabilly trio with his brother Glenn and cousin Justin, later notable for writing “Waltz across Texas.” Then he went solo and cut some rocking singles as Ronny Wade, including an answer song to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me Annie,” called “Annie, Don’t Work.” None of them took off, so he signed on as a sideman to a long list of Nashville stars, changed his name to X Lincoln, cut a few more singles that went even less far, and spent the last twenty years of his life playing with Anderson. He apparently wrote some other songs along the way, but this is the only one I can find… which is a pity, because it’s damn good.

I first heard Harry “The Hipster” Gibson on a Stash records anthology of drug songs, performing “Who Put the Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine” — and my initial reaction was that it had to be a put-on because no one could have been singing something like that in 1947.

I was wrong, of course, but that got me interested, so when an

oldies label issued a full LP of his early work I snapped it up. Thus I discovered “Handsome Harry the Hipster,” “4-F Ferdinand, the Frantic Freak,” “Who’s Goin’ Steady With Who?” and this masterpiece, which soon became a highlight of my repertoire.

I’m pretty sure I started doing this solo, as a shout-along, which is like a sing-along but requires no singing — I just encourage the audience to shout along with the title line. I found it was easier to get compliance with shout-alongs, or at least with this one, and it always worked well in the bars. Then, when I hooked up with Robbie Phillips, Peter Keane, and Mark Earley as the Street Corner Cowboys, I found it worked as a band number, and when I recorded a cassette in the mid-1990s Mark played a nice harmonica break, which he replicated onstage at the release party at Passim Coffeehouse (in photo).

As for Harry the Hipster… a brief self-penned memoir tells his story. A blond Jewish piano prodigy from the Bronx, he started hanging out in Harlem, picked up the current jazz styles, and was promoted as a white teenage protege of Fats Waller, whom he had never met. Then, as he recalled, one night he was playing his usual gig and…

A big guy came over, put five dollars in the kitty and asked for “Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” I could almost play that tune, note for note, like the Waller recording. The big man laughed and asked how I learned to play that way. I went into the high jive about how I was Fats’ star pupil. The guy just about broke up, stuck out his hand and said, “Sonny, say hello to your old professor, Thomas Waller.”

Waller booked young Harry Raab as an extra at the Yacht Club on 52nd Street, the main drag for small-band jazz, and over the next few years he changed his name to Gibson and became a local institution. The Hipster played with everybody from Charlie Parker to Mae West, co-leased a nightclub with Lord Buckley, and in 1944 Musicraft Records — a classical label that had pioneered the idea of selling folk-blues albums to the New York intelligentsia with Leadbelly and Josh White releases — signed him as their first jazz artist. That was still a novel idea, since jazz was considered jukebox pop music and sold almost exclusively on singles.

As Gibson recalled, the Musicraft guys saw him at the Three Deuces playing a substitute set for Billie Holiday and asked if he could record the next morning. Ben Webster was the other act on the bill, so he asked Webster’s rhythm section — Sid Catlett on drums and John Simmons on bass — if they could make the gig. They said sure, and that was that. The only problem was that Musicraft wanted eight original compositions to fill a four-disc album, and he only had seven… so they rehearsed the seven, and then:

While the drummer and bassman went out to the all-night eatery, I came up with “Stop That Dancing Up There.” I had it finished by the time John and Sid came back from breakfast; it turned out to be the hit of the album.

Gibson had a long and varied career, albeit with some gaps due to substances and so forth, and was still working in the 1980s with a blues/rock combo, still writing, still doing his hipster schtick. Unfortunately I didn’t know that at the time… I would have loved to have caught his show, met him, heard more stories.

There are a few videos on Youtube from his first heyday, which convey some sense of his oddball appeal. They don’t include one I saw someplace that included a “stop chorus” of silly facial expressions, but this is a pretty fair taste:

This is my favorite Chuck Berry lyric, which is saying a lot. He was a phenomenal writer, with a gift for fitting words together so they scanned, rhymed, and still felt like normal human speech spiked with flashes of wry humor:

As I got on a city bus and found a vacant seat
I thought I saw my future bride walking down the street.
I yelled to the driver, “Hey, conductor, you mus’
Slow down, I think I see her — Please let me off the bus!”

Berry is usually classed as a pioneer of rock ‘n’ roll, which of course is true, as far as it goes. His most influential moment was the mid 1950s, when he recorded “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Memphis,” and a string of other hits, as well as lesser-known masterpieces like “Too Much Monkey Business” and “No Money Down.” But that was only part of the story: he kept developing as a writer over the next decade, and some of his greatest lyrics were penned in the early 1960s (maybe during his year and a half in prison on a racist Mann Act conviction): “Nadine,” “Promised Land,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and “You Never Can Tell.”

After that, he pretty much cruised as an oldies artist — his only number one hit came in 1972 with “My Ding-a-ling,” but that was a naughty novelty he’d been performing at live shows for years. There was another prison stint for income tax evasion and some unpleasant stories… but whatever the complexities of his personal life, his songs changed the world. It is impossible to imagine Bob Dylan writing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” without Berry’s example, and no one ever turned street language into poetry as naturally, at least until the classic era of rap.

I only saw Berry twice, at the Cape Cod Melody Tent circa 1970 and a quarter century later at the one-off Newport R&B Festival. That was an incredible line-up, two days of music with Dr. John’s band backing everybody on day one and Allen Toussaint’s band backing everybody on day two. Chuck played with Toussaint, and it was the weirdest and most memorable set of the weekend.

I won’t say it was good, exactly — but it was real music, not canned, not the hits, not just going through the motions… which was noteworthy, because Chuck was by then notorious for just playing the hits and going through the motions. As far as I could tell, that was his plan at Newport as well, but he came out and there was Allen Toussaint on piano — a giant in his own right — playing the piano parts off Chuck’s old records, note for note, like he’d assimilated every note in his youth and been waiting forty years for the chance to play them with the master… which I’m guessing is exactly right.

Chuck responded by getting into the instrumental breaks, trading licks with Toussaint, and they weren’t the rote licks off his records — his guitar was out of tune, and they were strange licks, and some folks thought the whole set was a disaster, and I’m not arguing, but… Berry and Toussaint were both giants and they were so obviously enjoying themselves that it felt like a privilege to be there.

This version of “Nadine” is sort of an accidental tribute to that afternoon, since I do it as a rumba in the style of Snooks Eaglin, who was Toussaint’s guitarist in the Flamingos, their first band, back in their teens. I’ve loved Eaglin’s playing since I was a kid, but ended up with this arrangement because I couldn’t play Berry’s straight-ahead 8-to-the-bar for three minutes without getting cramps in my right hand.