I learned “Besos y copas” from the soundtrack album to Chulas Fronteras, Les Blank’s documentary about norteño music, which I’m pretty sure I owned before seeing the film. It was performed by Chavela Ortiz, a fine singer and accordion player, who fronted the San Jose, California, group Brown Express and was married to Eduardo Hernandez of Los Tigres del Norte. She only made a few recordings before dying in a freak accident, bucked off a horse during a photo shoot, and that’s pretty much all I know about her, though I loved the way she did this one.

The lyric is classic ranchera, the lament of a man whose lover is leaving him:

Perdona si te haya molestado
La voz de un hombre honrado que juró no volver.
Besos y copas he pagado, ya todo ha terminado,
No hay nada que perder.

(Forgive me if you have been bothered by the voice of an honorable man who swore never to return. I have paid kisses and drinks, now it is all finished, there is nothing more to lose.)

Until I started researching this post, I had no idea it was written by Victor Cordero, one of the greatest corrido composers of the 20th century and the main influence on Paulino Vargas, Julian Garza, and many of the later masters I wrote about in Narcocorrido.

Cordero was born in 1914 and grew up during the years of the Mexican Revolution — he told a story of trying to run off and join Pancho Villa at age seven, confronting the legendary hero and asking for a horse and a gun before being found and dragged home by his aunt, and of Villa commending him, saying, “Don’t worry, ma’am, your son has such valor that he will surely become a great Mexican.” (Along with writing songs, Cordero produced a lushly entertaining autobiography for the Mexican Society of Authors and Composers, which I recommend to anyone who can read Spanish.)

Cordero’s corridos include the classics “Juan Charrasqueado,” “Gabino Barrera,” and “El ojo de vidrio,” as well as such later topical oddities as  a Corrido al Che Guevara and Corrido de Elvis Presley. He also wrote all kinds of other songs — his own list of genres included “ranchero, bolero, huapango, tropical, chotis, vals, polka, cumbia, paso doble, danzón, tango, pasillo, cha-cha-chá, jocoso, moruno, danza, go-gó y los estilos colombiano, francés, español, italiano y autóctono,” and  in the 1960s, when most composers of his generation were bemoaning the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, he was inspired by “el cuarteto más grande de todos los tiempos: Los Beatles,” and wrote a series of trendy rock ‘n’ roll songs… none of them particularly memorable, but proving he was a pro to the end.

Anyway… I’ve generally followed the rule of playing these songs as I remembered them, and not re-listening to refresh my memory, but in this case after I’d been practicing for a week or so, my wife, Sandrine, got it stuck in her head and I wanted her to hear Chavela’s version, so put it on and was struck by the way Chavela filled the spaces between each line with accordion fills, apparently improvised and extended as the mood suited her. So I started fooling around with a loosely similar approach, and although the result doesn’t sound anything like what she did, it’s a lot of fun to play.

As for what she did, here’s the clip from Chulas Fronteras. I strongly recommend checking out the rest of the film, which is full of great music, and I wish she had stuck around to do a lot more. (Incidentally, while looking for this clip, I found that the most popular version of this song online is by Jenni Rivera, another favorite performer of mine who died too young.)

I’ve been seeing reviews of a new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, and they reminded me of this comic ballad, which I hadn’t thought about in years, or maybe decades… so I tried to sing it, found I still knew all the words, and here it is.

I learned it from one of my favorite Pete Seeger records, 3 Saints, 4 Sinners and 6 Other People, which I just learned was a reissue of Story Songs, his first album for Columbia Records back in 1961. That was a big deal, because Columbia was the most major of major record labels and Seeger was not only blacklisted but under indictment for contempt of Congress and potentially facing ten years in jail. Apparently he was signed on John Hammond’s instigation, and that signing was one of the reasons Bob Dylan signed with Hammond soon afterwards. I learned most of the songs on that album, and have already posted about “Way Out There,” “Hobo’s Lullaby,” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” (I could have learned the latter songs elsewhere, but considering how early I had this album and how often I listened to it, it’s a definite maybe.)

As for Aimee McPherson, she was one of the most famous evangelical preachers of the early twentieth century, with a ministry in Los Angeles and a popular radio program. She was known for miraculous faith healing and for welcoming a racially integrated congregation, was altogether a pretty fascinating figure, and there’s lots more about her on the internet, as well as that new biography, for people who want to know more.

The song is a witty retelling of a story that did serious damage to McPherson’s career and continues to be disputed. The short version is that she went swimming at Ocean Park, disappeared, and for over a month everyone thought she must have drowned… but then she appeared in Agua Prieta, Sonora, with a story that she had been kidnapped and held prisoner, then escaped and walked almost twenty miles through the desert to find help. The press pounced on this story, alleging that she’d actually spent the month in a lovers’ tryst with her radio operator, Kenneth Ormiston, and she was investigated, along with her mother, facing charges of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. In the end, the case was dismissed and she wrote a memoir, went back to preaching, and remained a popular figure until her death in 1944, though many people remembered the story preserved in this ditty, which was followed by further allegations about her gaudy personal life.

The song has most of its details right — granting that they were scurrilous rumors, never proved in court — only tripping over Ormiston’s name, which it gives as Ray Armistad. Seeger wrote that he learned it from John Lomax, Jr., the eldest son of the pioneering folklorist, who learned it in California in the 1930s, “from a hobo, I think John said.” He didn’t know who originally composed it, and added, “if any reader knows… I hope they’ll let me know.” Apparently no one did.

And finally… for those tempted by the invitation in the final verse, the ever-reliable Wikipedia provides a photograph of the fabled cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea:

This is another classic from the Reverend Gary Davis, with some interpolations of lyrics from Shirley Caesar and the Caravans. I’m not a Christian, but I love both recordings, and would love to see more attention paid to Davis’s connections with other Carolina gospel singers. He was, of course, one of the greatest blues and ragtime guitarists — and this post is headed into some guitar nerd stuff — but he was also a terrific gospel singer in a deep local tradition. His repertoire included songs that were famously performed and recorded by the region’s greatest gospel quartets; another striking example is the song he called “Get Right Church,” which was a major hit for the Sensational Nightingales as “Morning Train” — and that group’s lead singer, Julius Cheeks, was from Davis’s home area and may even have been a distant relation.

The song itself is a bit of a mystery. Davis recorded it in 1960; the Caravans recorded it two years later, and their record credits it to James Herndon, who worked with them as an accompanist and composer — but although it surely is much older, I have so far found no trace of it before those recordings. If anyone knows more, please get in touch and let me know. (There’s an email contact link on my web page.)

This song was Caesar’s first hit as a young member of the Caravans, one of the greatest female quartets, issued as “I Won’t Be Back” on an album of the same title. In Anthony Heilbut’s brilliant survey of
the music’s golden age, The Gospel Sound, he referred to it by an alternate title, “Sweeping Through the City,” and wrote that it remained the most popular number in her live shows, quoting her saying, “The new numbers are selling but the stick is still sweeping.”

I learned Davis’s version in the 1990s, during a particularly deep period of immersion in his music — it was one of many, and I’ve already posted a bunch of pieces I worked up in that period, including “Samson and Delilah,” “You Got to Move,” a gospel guitar medley, “Cincinnati Flow Rag,” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl and Playing Guitar at the Same Time.” At that time, I got the rudiments, but I didn’t really understand his style until I spent a few months hanging out with Ernie Hawkins, who studied with Davis and knows his style more intimately than anyone on the planet.

Ernie pushed me to play with just the thumb and index finger of my right hand, showing me how to get Davis’s distinctive rolls, and pointing out the brilliant economy of his chording. I’ve gone into this subject before, and this piece uses the same basic chords I outlined in my post for “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl,” as well as the elegantly simple move from a partially barred D shape to an A7 shape (in this case, with the partial barre on the 7th fret, so the chords are G and D7, followed by a G7 played in Davis’s trademark C7 shape with the thumb coming around the neck to fret the 5th and 6th strings).

I got most of that from Ernie, and modified this a bit more in recent months, after noticing that Davis virtually always used his thumb to get the 6th string bass root of his G chord in first position, even when he was playing something simple like “Candyman.” My post on that one uses a regular first position G chord, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with the idea of using the thumb there, which leaves you free to reach way up the neck — which, unsurprisingly,  was a favorite move for Dave Van Ronk, another acolyte of the Reverend, who used it to fine effect in “St. Louis Tickle,” “Midnight Hour Blues,” and numerous other pieces. (Van Ronk used the thumb-bass G even more consistently in his many drop-D pieces, for example “Blood Red Moon.”)

I don’t have much more to add, except that I’ve undoubtedly revised the lyrics in all sorts of unintentional ways, and in keeping with an ongoing effort to sing in my own voice, intentionally switched from “I won’t be back no more” to “I won’t be back anymore.” Some people may think that’s silly, but that’s how I normally say the phrase and I’ve previously quoted Martin Carthy’s remark that if you believe in a lyric, you should sing it like you believe it, not like you’re “play-acting.” I don’t actually believe the Christian sentiment of this one, but it’s a moving and powerful image and I see no reason to undercut it by putting on a fake accent — especially a Southern Black accent that, when adopted by a norther white urbanite, has echoes of blackface mistrelsy. It isn’t just minstrelsy, of course; most of my favorite singers were from the South and I used to sing pretty much everything in that accent, just as many British rockers sing in American accents. Still, I’m trying to get closer to my own voice, and although I still hear some of that accent when I listen back, I’m working on it.

Once again, I don’t remember where I first heard this one or when I learned it — I would have said I first heard Guy Clark’s own version, from his brilliant debut album, Old No. 1, but I just checked and found that it had already been recorded before that by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita Coolidge, David Allan Coe, and Tom Rush, which means a lot of other people would have been singing it in clubs and I could have heard it almost anywhere.

It played a significant part in my life because I performed it during an interview on WERS, which had the best Boston Area folk music show in the 1980s, and Harry Lipson, who was producing lots of folk concerts including annual appearances by Guy Clark, was listening and liked my performance and invited me to appear on a two-day New England Folk Festival bill — I was the opening act on night one; the opener on night two was a local unknown named Tracy Chapman. All I remember about my set was that I took advantage of the unusually large audience to do my current favorite sing-along, “Duke of Earl.” I also remember a lot of flirting and socializing backstage, and got written up in the Boston Globe, and all in all it was a good weekend.

This song is pretty generally acknowledged to be Guy’s masterpiece, a slice of autobiography about his relationship with his grandmother’s boyfriend when he was a kid in Monahans, Texas, a small town on the Texas-Pacific railway line, with a lot of sand, some oil wells, and not much else. It’s the sort of place that, for someone like me, who grew up in the urban East, conjures up images of “some old western movie” — and apparently even Guy thought of it that way in hindsight.

Specifically, it recalls the opening scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my all-time favorite movies: three desperados barge into the dispatcher’s office of a little station out in the middle of nowhere, lock him in a closet, then spend ten long, marvelous minutes of screen time waiting for a train. One dozes in a chair, bothered by a fly; one stands outside the station, cracking his knuckles; one stands under the water tank, with drips of water falling on his hat. Finally the train arrives, stops for a moment, leaves again in a cloud of dust. As the dust swirls, we hear a lonesome harmonica; as it clears, we see Charles Bronson, standing on the other side of the tracks, playing. He asks where Frank is; the lead desperado says Frank didn’t come; Bronson notes that they only brought three horses; the leader smiles and says, “Looks like we’re shy one horse”; Bronson shakes his head and says, “You brought two too many,” and after another long pause they go for their guns…

I don’t know if Guy was thinking of that scene; there are plenty of Westerns with desperados and trains and waiting; but that’s the one I picture him imagining, thinking back to his childhood, before his family moved to the Gulf Coast, and he settled in Houston, and then L.A., and Nashville. And it’s a bit odd to me that he frames his childhood as a scene out of a classic Western. As an easterner, it’s natural for me to think of John Ford or Sergio Leone when I’m in that territory, but I’d think he’d think of it as home rather than a movie. (Harvard Yard has figured in a lot of movies, but they’re not what I think of when I recall Harvard Yard; it’s where I grew up.)

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about Clark. I loved that first album, and learned a half-dozen of his songs, but when I saw him onstage he seemed like a self-consciously literary figure, the “Southern writer” posing for his statue in a regional pantheon, which was not at all how I’d thought of his music, and made me have second thoughts about it and him. I still like a lot of his songs — I’ve done posts about “Anyhow, I Love You” and “Watermelon Dream,” and there will be a couple of others up here in the near future — but a lot of his work is tinged with a kind of distanced romanticism, like he was displaying his fine craftsmanship rather than communicating as one person to another. I recently watched Tamara Saviano’s terrific documentary about him, Without Getting Killed or Caught, and it reinforced that impression: to me, the movie is really more about his wife Susanna, a fine artist who did the painting of a shirt on his debut album cover and wrote a bunch of songs herself–including some that were major hits–and Guy comes off as a brilliant but somewhat stiff and guarded character, never entirely comfortable in his own skin and always measuring himself against other people and trying to establish his greatness.

Which said… I don’t hear any of that in this song. This is just a small, personal vignette, and the cinematic romanticism of the desperado image underlines the simplicity of the genuine memories, the genuine relationship, and the genuine tenderness.

Another country blues, in the sense of being a country hit that has obvious links to the blues tradition — like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “You Win Again” and hundreds of other examples. Like my version of “You Win Again,” this version is influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis’s recording, which may well be the first time I heard this one, though the voice in my head is a mix of Jerry Lee and John Lincoln Coughlin, better known as Preacher Jack… and I just realized that I haven’t yet written about Preacher Jack in this blog, which is a horrific oversight.

Back in the 1990s, I got my heart broken and Preacher Jack held me together for the next year. I’d known his first album and always wanted to see him, and just when I needed him, he got a weekly Thursday night residency at Frank’s Steak House on Mass Ave in North Cambridge. The first night I walked in, he was in the middle of a Little Richard medley, pounding the piano and shouting with all of Richard’s gospelized fervor, then segued directly into a sermon on the crucifixion of Christ that ended with him pinned to the wall, shouting, “With nails! Nails through his hands!” And then, in a gruff whisper: “You want to talk about pain?”

I was there every Thursday for the next year or more, and often in the years after that, and wrote about Jack for the Globe (I’ve posted that piece with some further recollections), and co-produced a CD reissue of his earlier albums,and wrote the liner notes for a new instrumental CD, and he was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual shaman. He was a brilliant musician and a raving wild man, who regularly explained to the listeners that he was “having your nervous breakdown for you,” and he was. I’m not going to repeat all the other stories from that profile — if you’re interested, click through to it; it’s a lot of fun — but can’t overstate how much he meant to me and what I owe to him. He wasn’t easy, but he was deep and powerful and constantly surprising.

As to this song, it was written by Ralph Mooney, who mostly was a steel guitarist rather than a songwriter and toured for many years with Waylon Jennings — I saw him with Waylon, and everything about that was great. He apparently wrote this in 1949, when he was in his early twenties and working in Las Vegas. He later recalled, “I was a heavy drinker…. Each night at the club where I played steel guitar, I would get so drunk that I almost had to crawl home. I never drank in the daytime. One day my wife and I were uptown shopping and I ran into a musician friend who invited me to have a drink and I did. That was all my wife could take… she left me and went home to her mama in Los Angeles. After she left on the bus, I sat down with my guitar and wrote, ‘Blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel, and a storm is brewing in this heart of mine.’ I wrote the whole song in a few minutes. I went back to Los Angeles to get my wife back a few days later. My wife and I have been married twenty-six years now, our daughter is twenty-three, our son is fourteen, and we have a grandson who is two years old.”

So that’s his happy ending, and after the Preacher healed me I met Sandrine and we eventually got married and went to hear Jack after our wedding rehearsal dinner, so that’s mine… and Jack is no longer on the planet and I don’t believe in an afterlife, but he sure did and I hope he was right and is looking down on us.

Added note: In the second verse, there’s that line, “Take all the treasured dreams I had for you and me…,” which doesn’t fit the ABAB rhyme scheme of the lyric, but would if it was “me and you…” and I’ve always wondered if Mooney wrote “me and you” originally and someone pointed out that it was bad grammar, and rather than coming up with another rhyming line he just changed it to fit school grammar rules and left it sticking out there like a sore thumb, as a wry fuck-you to the grammarians.

This is another I’ve known for ages, but only started doing regularly when Sandrine joined me on clarinet. It was published in 1919 by the brothers John and Ben “Reb” Spikes, but Jelly Roll Morton claimed they got it from him and he got the basic melody from another piano player, Kid North — who was a “player” in all sorts of ways and will be a character in my next book project, about a group of hustlers who moved between New Orleans, San Diego, and other points in the early twentieth century.

I got interested in North while writing Jelly Roll Blues, where I mentioned Morton’s recollection that this song was based on his version of a classic streetwalker’s lament:

“Someday Sweetheart” was a tune that a old racetrack man, friend of
mine — Kid North — he only could play one tune. And he told me that I could have the tune since he found that I was a writer of music... The title of the tune that he wanted to give to me, which a part of it was taken for “Someday Sweetheart,” the title was named “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More….”

[The Spikes brothers] wrote up the tune together and called it  “Someday Sweetheart…” At the time Reb and I was working for the mayor’s son in Oakland, in a cabaret there on the main street…. So the tune came out and was quite famous. In fact, I helped to make the tune famous myself.  Of course, my name doesn’t appear on the tune, and I’m not jealous about it. I hope the boys would write ten million other ones like that. 

Morton had a long relationship with the Spikes brothers; Reb recalled that they met in 1911, when the brothers were running the Pastime Theatre, an outdoor venue in Muskogee, Oklahoma: “Jelly Roll Morton drifted into town… [he] did a comedy act in black face . . . he didn’t hire on as a musician . . . the show’s band had a pianist. Before long, Jelly displayed his ability . . . soon took over the piano stool in that band.”

The Spikes are credited with writing lyrics to one of Morton’s most popular tunes, “Wolverine Blues,” and I see no reason to doubt Morton’s claim that he was involved in this one as well. He recorded it a couple of times, though just as an instrumental; the first vocal recording — actually, the first recording of any kind — was by Alberta Hunter in 1922, with somewhat different words.

So that’s the historical background — and for myself, I have no idea where I first heard it or when I learned it. I’m guessing I played it when I was working the Antwerp restaurants with Nick Boons, but that’s just a guess. I clearly had a taste for “someday you’ll be sorry” songs, since my relatively limited repertoire of standards from this period also includes the similarly themed “After You’ve Gone” and “Some of These Days.” I wasn’t the only one: Sophie Tucker did this as a follow-up to “Some of These Days” — and it’s probably not a coincidence that all three of those songs were by Black songwriters; there were lots of good white tunesmiths on that scene, but I find that the songs that have stuck with me were disproportionately by Black writers who were also performers on the Black vaudeville and nightclub circuits. I don’t know what it was that made their songs sound or feel different — maybe it wasn’t the songs themselves; maybe I tended to listen to Black musicians and they favored the Black composers. In any case, I recently noticed this and it seemed worth noting.

I first heard Tom Waits thanks to a grad student who stayed in my folks’ house on Cape Cod circa 1975-76 and left his records behind. They were mostly jazz, in my memory, though my sister remembers the Commodores and Wild Cherry,  and included Waits’s Small Change, which made sense, since it was essentially a jazz album, with Shelly Manne on drums and Lew Tabackin on sax.

I’d never heard of Waits, and was entranced by everything about him — the voice, the songs, the instrumentation, and the romantic embrace of urban low-life. I was 17 or 18, fresh off my first period with Dave Van Ronk and about to head out into the world as a rambling hobo guitar player; my original inspiration was Woody Guthrie, but I was playing more blues and classic jazz/pop songs, so Waits was just the right added spice.

Around the same time, I caught Waits on Fernwood Tonight, Martin Mull’s fake small-town TV talk show, and was further entranced… and when I made some cassettes to take with me on my rambling, I included a couple of Waits tracks — this one and “Drunk on the Moon,” and maybe “The Heart of Saturday Night” as well.

As I wrote in my post about “Drunk on the Moon,” I probably got some of the chords wrong and don’t necessarily remember all the lyrics right — I at least tried to learn that one, but just kind of absorbed this one. Which said, it has stuck with me for almost fifty years.

Several decades later, when I wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, I was trying to think of a well-known musical figure who might be willing to read and blurb it, and managed to get an email for Waits’s office, and they said he was interested, so I sent an advance copy… and, to my astonishment, a couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Waits. He wanted a better sense of who I was and what the book was about, and over the next few weeks I got several more calls — mostly it was about the book, but one was because his son was doing a school report on blues and wanted a copy of my Robert Johnson book… and finally he called me with a potential blurb, and I had the chutzpah to ask if he could rephrase part of it, and he did… and that’s the end of that story. I checked in with his office again when I wrote The Dozens, because I thought it might interest him, but got no response. Which is fine; I’m pleased with the little contact I had, grateful for his blurb, and even more grateful for all the music.

Incidentally, I loved the early albums, but nothing prepared me for Rain Dogs, which I am listening to as I write this, and consider his masterpiece. He’s done a lot of fine work since then as well. He’s a hell of a songwriter and musician, and one of the good guys.

Oh yeah, and… I once had a crush on a waitress in an after-hours restaurant in Davis Square called Kay and Chips, where I used to get steak tips and eggs at two in the morning after driving back from a monthly gig at the Press Room in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was dark and beautiful, and I never had the nerve to strike up a conversation, though I probably flirted a little while giving my order. I don’t recall whether I ever thought about this song while eating those late-night breakfasts, but it would have made sense, and when I sing the song now I think of her.

Addendum: I just found a story from the Somerville Times, which reminds me that by the time I was going there, the restaurant was called Dolly’s at Kay and Chips. I don’t think my waitress was Dolly; maybe no one was. They opened at 11pm and closed sometime in the early morning, and it was a nice scene.

A touch of early Tom Waits, and an apt follow-up to last week’s “Ace in the Hole,” with a similar blend of hipster slang and nostalgie de la boue. When I headed off to Europe at age 18, I had two or three Waits cuts on the handful of cassettes I brought with me. I wasn’t really equipped to learn them, since in those days I was easily confused by any song with more than a basic I-IV-V or circle of fifths chord pattern, but I have a keen memory of spending a late night in Paris working out the chords to “Drunk on the Moon” — not that I got them right, but it was a memorable attempt.

I lived in Paris off and on over several years, staying with a woman who had been a grad student of my mom’s — she let me sleep on a mattress in the living room of her small apartment on Rue du Père Corentin, near Porte d’Orléans,  and I did the cooking and read a bunch of her books, including medieval history, psychology, and other stuff I would not have read in another situation but am grateful to have explored. It was a relaxed, comfortable situation, and that apartment was a regular base as I moved between summers in northern Europe and winters in Spain, Italy, and North Africa.

I was indulging in romantic fantasies shared by a lot of rambling young folks in that period, inspired by legends of Woody Guthrie, Hemingway, and all sorts of other characters who lived hobo or boho lives and nourished themselves on whiskey and nostalgie de la boue. Waits was an obvious avatar, slouching drunkenly around the stage in a cloud of cigarette smoke, mumbling disjointed verses, or fingering slow jazz tunes on an upright piano, his lyrics limning the lives of small-time hustlers, hookers, diner waitresses, petty criminals, and other creatures of the urban night.

There was an off-hand, half-formed quality to a lot of his lyrics, as if he was improvising them as he went along, and I spent a few nights improvising my own songs into a cassette recorder, under his spell and fueled by a liberal infusion of alcohol. I remember one effort that began:

I know I’m drunk today, was drunk yesterday too,
I know it’s my own problem, got nothing to do with you.
It ain’t because you left me that I’m feeling this way,
Though I ain’t saying it wouldn’t have been different if you’d stayed…

I hadn’t yet been seriously involved with a woman, had no memories to fit that lyric, but hell, I was a rambling musician, drinking deeply and wandering the night-time streets of Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Budapest, Copenhagen… a romantic character in my own mind and playing the part convincingly for people who led more prosaic lives.

In keeping with the rest of this series, I’m playing this song as I remember it. I’m sure the chords aren’t exactly what Waits played, though they’re certainly closer than what I figured out in my teens, and the lyrics include some words and phrases I misheard and some that have evolved in my memory, as well as some I may have heard right, but wonder about, like the line I hear as “Come schemers and dancers, chary the light,” meaning, to me, seeking the comfort of darkness — the internet experts transcribe the last bit as “cherry delight,” which it surely isn’t, and prove they aren’t reliable by following with “I’ve hawked all my yesterdays,” which obviously should read “I’ve hocked all my yesterdays,” a perfect Waits phrase.

Anyway… I can still picture myself learning this late at night in that Paris apartment, a soft glow coming through the glass doors leading to the balcony, cross-legged on my mattress on the floor, my guitar in my lap, whispering along in an approximation of Waits’s midnight rasp so as not to bother my host, and pleasantly drunk on French wine and moonlight.

I first heard “Ace in the Hole” on Dave Van Ronk’s 1963 album with the Red Onion Jazz Band, In the Tradition. It was written around 1909 by a couple of obscure songwriters, James Dempsey and George Mitchell, and is a musical evocation of the New York borderline underworld limned by Damon Runyon in the stories that inspired Guys and Dolls. Dave was a devotee of this kind of New Yorkiana — his rock band, the Hudson Dusters, was named for a notorious street gang of the 1800s — so he naturally jumped on it.

I’m pretty sure Dave picked it up from Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, a San Francisco group that was one of the first and best white trad revival bands, who recorded it in the 1940s with the New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson — Watters’s outfit is not well remembered these days, but Dave was a dedicated “moldy fig” traditionalist in his teens, devoted to Bunk’s work, and developed an appreciation for the San Francisco bands during a shore visit in his brief period as a merchant seaman.

I’d heard Dave’s version and knew that provenance, but thought of it as an obscurity until I did some research for this post and found it was recorded by over a hundred groups and artists, starting with a bunch of minor white jazz bands in the 1920s, including one in Berlin, then various western and hillbilly swing bands, then Frankie Laine, Connie Francis, Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer, Judy Henske, and a lot of others, including a bizarre version from 1969 by the honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson, rewritten as a critique of hippies, protesters, and other good folks of that time, which could easily be revived by the Trump crowd today. (I’m not linking it, but it’s available online if you want to check it out.)

Dave’s original recording only had the one verse and one and a half choruses, with the rest of the space taken up by solos from the band, and he never played it solo until near the end of his life. Then he worked up a really nice guitar chart, wrote a second verse, and filled out the second chorus — as I’ve noted in my posts for “That’ll Never Happen No More” and “Somebody Else, Not Me,” he regularly wrote additional lyrics for songs he thought needed some help. I never learned his new verse, but use his extra lyric for the second chorus, though I’ve changed one line that didn’t seem to fit the theme, staying true to his memory by using the term clydes, meaning “squares,” which I learned from him.

Speaking of archaic hipster argot: a Missouri bankroll was a roll of one dollar bills (or sometimes paper cut to the same size) with a couple of high-denomination bills on the outside, flashed to create the illusion that the bearer was loaded. Tenderloin was a common term in the late 19th and early 20th century for prostitution districts, extrapolated from the original Tenderloin, the Manhattan prostitution district running from about 14th to 42th Streets between 6th and 8th Avenues, so named (according to a popular legend) when a new police captain was assigned to that district, which like all such districts was famous for bribery, and commented that he’d been eating chuck steak all his life and was looking forward to some tenderloin.

I started playing this when Sandrine and I were living in New Orleans in the early 2000s, staying with David and Roselyn, and jamming with them and whoever else dropped by in the evenings. They had a fake book with this in it, and no one else knew it until one night a trumpet player showed up who was from the Bay Area, so we played it and I’ve been messing with it ever since.

Like most people who weren’t hardcore fans, I first heard “Me and Paul” on the Wanted: The Outlaws compilation. That’s also where I first heard “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and became a lifelong Waylon Jennings fan — I enjoyed Willie, but only bought a couple of his albums, while I got a stack of Waylon’s… but albums aren’t the whole story, by a long shot.

I know a bunch of Willie’s songs — “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls” — and appreciate the odd ways he makes words fit together, and fits them into tunes, and the one time I saw him live in a relatively small club was one of my all-time favorite concerts. It was his usual group, with his sister Bobbie on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and Paul English on drums, and they played a long set, following a great opening set by Billy Joe Shaver, which also had Raphael and maybe English, and all that was great, so we called Willie back for an encore… and he played for another forty minutes. The other players looked exhausted, and you could see them exchanging looks as he’d finish one song and go into yet another, but he was having fun, taking long, imaginative guitar solos, totally into being up there playing music, looking like he’d happily keep going all night.

That’s the feeling I get from this song. It’s not about any of the things songs are usually about; it’s just about being out on the road playing music with friends, and not even celebratory about that, like “On the Road Again.” It’s just about taking the ride, ups and downs included, and looking back on both with wry enjoyment. Who ever wrote a better line than “After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound”? Perfectly formed, with alliteration, assonance, that internal rhyme… and smart, and odd, and personal.

Paul, in case anyone doesn’t know, was Paul English, Willie’s drummer for virtually his entire career, and bookkeeper, paymaster, and, in the early days, sometime enforcer. English actually drummed for the first time backing Willie on the radio, having never done it before, and never did anything fancy — he typically just played a single snare, and kept the beat, and that was it. He looked like Waylon, or, according to some reports, Waylon looked like him, adopting his outlaw black hat and clothing, and his Satanic beard and mustache.

The lyric is about their life on the road, all of it apparently based on real events, back when smoking dope and looking like hippies was a bigger deal and could get you in trouble, and a country music package show could still include Kitty Wells, and Willie and Paul were among the tiny handful of people who overlapped those worlds.

And finally I’d just note that looking like a hippie no long means what it used to, and a lot of people who look like Willie and Paul are backing Trump and all kinds of conservative bullshit, but Willie has been pretty consistently on the side of the underdogs, speaking up for immigrants, cutting a duet of the gay-friendly “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” (with a wonderful video), and generally standing up and out. He’s in his nineties and still on the road, still doing fine shows, still one of the good guys.