Willie McTell was one of the few early blues artists who managed to record in every decade from the 1920s through the 1950s. This song is from a session he did for the embryonic Atlantic Records in 1949, well before it became a powerhouse jazz and R&B label. In a long  interview for Rolling Stone magazine, Atlantic’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun told the story:

I was walking along a main street in the black section of Atlanta – to me this is the most incredible story of my whole career – and there was a blind man who was sitting on the corner of the street with his back to the side of the building singing gospel songs, with a hat in front of him for people to drop money into. I stopped to listen to him because he was playing incredible slide guitar and singing so beautifully. I handed him some money so that the fellow could tell it was bills, not coins, and he said, “Oh, thank you – thanks.” So I said, “Have you ever heard of Blind Willie McTell?” And he said, “Man, I am Blind Willie McTell.” I said, “I can’t believe it. You are?” He said, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” And I said, “I would love to record you. I’m from a record company in New York.”

We went to the studio that same day, but he only wanted to play gospel songs. I said, “Oh, man, but we wanted some blues.” He said, “Well, I don’t sing blues anymore, I’ve found God.” I said, “But you make great blues music – this is not a bad thing – if you could just sing some blues.” “Well,” he said, “don’t put my name on it.” So I said, “OK, we’ll call you Barrelhouse Sammy.” So we made some blues records and they came out under that name until after he died, when we released them with his actual name. It would have been criminal not to let people know who he was.

One of the few pre-war blues records I had before finding the trove at Dayton’s in New York was an album on Biograph by Blind Willie McTell, which began a lifelong infatuation with his work. It was a somewhat troubled relationship, because he played twelve-string guitar on most of his records, which meant I could never get his sound, and tuned it very low, which made it hard for me to pick up licks in those days before we had digital pitch-shifting.

On the other hand, that meant I had to work out my own variations, inspired by McTell’s playing but not attempting to duplicate it, which is always a good exercise. And, in any case, what I loved most about McTell was not the guitar work but his singing. He combined the light ragtime phrasing of someone like Blind Blake with a depth and soulfulness Blake lacked, and never sang two verses quite the same. He also had a gift for coming up with interesting lyrics, and a variety of styles and approaches that few other “country blues” artists matched — the habit of reissuing pre-war blues recordings in multi-disc chronological sets makes most performers of that era sound repetitive, but I can cheerfully listen to McTell’s complete recordings back to back, from beginning to end.

All of which said, I only learned a half-dozen or so of his songs — the first couple because they were in Woody Mann’s Six Black Blues Guitarists and the tablature provided a guide, and then this one, which just caught my ear for some reason. There’s always an element of happenstance in which songs work and which don’t, and when I started fooling around with this, it fell together in a way I liked. I’m pretty sure I came up with my basic arrangement during that year I spent studying with Dave Van Ronk — for whom I auditioned with McTell’s “Georgia Rag” — or shortly afterwards, and only later added the cool riff with the off-beat rhythmic touches from Blind Blake’s “That’ll Never Happen No More,” which I’d recently learned from an older street musician.

This song changed my life, because when I saw a flier for a Dave Van Ronk concert at age 12, I went home and checked the two LPs I had with Van Ronk tracks, and one of them was Blues at Newport, and I put on this song, then played it for my mother, and we went to the concert, and that was that.

I don’t remember how or when I learned to play it myself — my guess is it was one Dave taught me during my year of lessons. In any case, it became a staple of my repertoire, and has remained a staple ever since. The one additional touch came that summer, when I was playing on the street in Harvard Square with Rob. I played this every night, and one night one of the other street musicians happened to be listening, and after I finished he came up and showed me the roll Blind Blake played in the instrumental bridge.

I remember the whole thing perfectly: he was wearing a brown leather jacket and a hat, and had a mustache, and he told me to just finger the left-hand chords the way I always did, and stood behind me and played the roll with his right hand, while I did the chords… and then I tried, and then he showed me again, and I got it.

Dave always credited this song to Blind Blake, and that’s certainly where he learned it, but he changed it around some and wrote the third verse himself — he did that quite a bit, writing new verses and rewriting old ones, without taking credit for the changes, which is one of the reasons so few people recognized his talents as a songwriter. I’ve made some minor changes as well, and picked up other bits here and there, but this is substantially Dave’s version, with the Blake guitar roll from that guy in Harvard Square.

It’s what used to be called a “patter” song, essentially an extended comic recitation with a sung chorus. Bert Williams, among others, made this kind of thing very popular in the early 20th century, and many of the most notable black performers of this kind of material were considered comedians rather than singers — even Speckled Red, of “Dirty Dozen” fame,  is credited on his early 78s as “comedian with piano.”

Most modern revivalists have tended to treat songs like this as historical artifacts, doing their best to sing the recorded verses accurately even if some of the lines make no sense to them or their audiences. However, Dave understood it as a comedy routine and rewrote it accordingly, looking for material that would get laughs from his audience, which was obviously kind of different from the folks Blake was singing for in 1927.

This was one of my regular numbers during that first summer of street singing. I learned it from Dave Van Ronk’s second album and, although he’d stopped singing it by the time I knew him, it was one of his big showstoppers back in 1961. His first wife, Terri Thal, recalls that it was also one of his regular teaching pieces when he gave guitar lessons: “For years, student after student would sit in our living room repeating that damned song over and over and over again. It still rings in my head.”

Dave’s source was undoubtedly Bob Gibson, who recorded it in 1957 on one of his most popular albums. (There’s a nice online clip of Gibson performing it in 1958, interesting among other things for how much he sounds like Pete Seeger, not only in his banjo and singing style, but in the spoken introduction.) Gibson was an incredibly influential figure on the folk scene of the 1950s, probably second only to Seeger. Dave tended to consider his approach too slick, cabaret-style, and distanced from authentic rural traditions — though he liked him a lot as a drinking buddy — but nonetheless picked up some of his material, including this, the Bahamian lullaby Joan Baez recorded as “All My Trials,” and probably some other songs I haven’t noticed.

As for Gibson’s source, it would have been Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, which was likewise a major influence on folk revival performers of that period, though it is rarely consulted today. (It was also the source of another of Dave’s standards, “Wandering.”) Sandburg took some of his material from the collections of folklorists like John Lomax (including “Dink’s Song,” which most people got from him), but also made a habit of turning parties and visits into song-swapping sessions as he traveled around the country. He apparently got “Tell Old Bill” from a painter named Nancy Barnhart in St. Louis, and published it in the first edition of the Songbag, in 1927, as “Dis Mornin’, Dis Evenin’, So Soon,” with the lyric in African American dialect, and the warning to Bill in the first verse given as “to let dem downtown coons alone.” (John and Alan Lomax published this version in American Ballads and Folk Songs, giving Sandburg as their source.)

Sam Hinton, another early, influential, and largely unremembered folk revivalist whom I’ve discussed in previous posts learned a different version from a black farmer in Texas, which he recorded for the Library of Congress in 1947, and Sandburg’s later editions included some verses from this version, which in turn led to Gibson’s version, and hence Dave’s. Which would be the story, except…

Yet another version of the song — though without the cohesive “old Bill” storyline — was recorded for the Library of Congress in 1925, two years before Sandburg’s first publication, and it is significant in all sorts of interesting ways. For one, it was one of the handful of songs recorded by Ben Harney, one of the first ragtime composers. For another, it is a version of Harney’s first hit and one of the first published ragtime compositions, from 1895, which was titled “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon But You’ve Done Broke Down…” a familiar title to Van Ronk fans although, aside from the title line, which presumably inspired the later Bessie Smith song that became a staple of Dave’s repertoire, this song has nothing to do with that one.

Nor, oddly enough, does the song Harney recorded for the LOC (which is well worth hearing) follow the same lyrical line as his published hit. On the cylinder, recorded by the pioneering folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon, Harney introduces it as “absolutely the first song published in ragtime; the first song ever written in ragtime… conceived by Ben Harney, in Louisville, Kentucky.” But what he sings sounds like a folk song compiled from a mix of unrelated, floating verses. Indeed, most of the verses are common to multiple other songs collected around the South, although, as Neil Rosenberg writes in his annotation to the LOC disc, “because Harney published his text in 1895 and performed it frequently for the next thirty years, it is quite possible that at least some of the texts recorded by folksong collectors during the early decades of this century reflect the popularity of Harney’s song.” Or, on the other hand, what Harney sang in 1925 might have changed from what he heard or wrote in 1895, picking up new verses hither and yon…

As they used to say: that’s the folk process.

When I was seventeen, in the summer of 1976, I spent a month or so staying with my half-brother Dave in Moraga, California, and heard Fats Waller for the first time. As a teenager, I was naturally entranced, and Dave helped me work out the chords to “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew,” and fairly soon thereafter I bought my first Fats Waller album, a two-LP set that included that, and “I Wish I Were Twins,” and “A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid.” Most of the songs were too complicated for me to work out by ear, but by the time I’d finished that year with Van Ronk, this one was within my range, and it became a staple of my street sets when Rob and I began working in Harvard Square. It did not occur to me that there was anything markedly racial about the professions of the protagonists — I just thought of their jobs as a pretext for the cutely romantic lyric, which Rob notably parodied by adding his own variation on the lyrical theme: “I will do your chafing, if you’ll be my dish.”

The original lyric was not far from that, and was penned by one of the great lyricists of the twenties and thirties, Andy Razaf — a frequent partner of Waller’s, though this particular melody was by Waller’s mentor and teacher, the dean of Harlem stride pianists, James P. Johnson. Razaf had a distinctly unusual background; to quote the first paragraph of his biography in the NY Public Library (which holds his collected papers):

Andy Razaf was born Andreamentania Paul Razafinkeriefo on December 16, 1895 in Washington D.C., months after his mother had fled Madagascar because the government there had been overthrown. His father Henri Razafkeriefo… was killed after the French captured the island, exiled his aunt, the Queen and abolished the nobility.

Razaf’s formal poetry sometimes suggested his elevated upbringing, but his song lyrics were most notable for their sharp, supple wit and clever wordplay. His numerous collaborations with Waller included “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Keeping Out of Mischief Now,” and “Blue Turning Gray Over You”; a show with Eubie Blake produced “Memories of You”; and he also wrote the lyrics to “In the Mood,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Christopher Columbus,” the naughty blues hit, “If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sitting On It,” and roughly a thousand other songs. At one point Dave Van Ronk suggested we might collaborate on an album of Andy Razaf’s lyrics, and when he got to know Billy Novick and Guy Van Duser, who were far better suited to that task than I was, I suggested he do it with them and he was briefly enthusiastic, but it never happened. (Another of his concept albums that never happened was songs about food, with “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House” as the title song.)

In any case, this was probably the first Razaf lyric I learned, and remains a favorite. And I wish Dave had done that album.

When I began delving into old-time pop material, I was particularly attracted by musicians who had found ways to play that stuff using normal folk-blues guitar techniques. I was blown away by Guy Van Duser, who was playing guitar like a cross between Chet Atkins and a swing pianist, but one lesson convinced me that we were not going to be a good match — we liked some of the same songs, but I was basically a folk-blues player and that wasn’t his bag at all.

By contrast, Judy Roderick’s version of”Miss Brown to You,” on an anthology of performances at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, was a perfect match. I loved the way she sang and the way she played, and by then I had the chops to figure out her arrangement — or at least to figure out my take on her arrangement. (I haven’t heard her version in years, and won’t vouch for my accuracy.) It’s a nice, easy-swinging, guitar-friendly chart, and though it probably has some wrong chords by jazz standards, it’s fun to play and sing over.

Roderick was a passion of mine for a while, almost totally on the basis of her three songs on that Newport album. She made two LPs, but I don’t think either gave a sense of how good she could be — Woman Blue felt kind of low-key to me and Ain’t Nothing But the Blues surrounded her with a dixieland band that interfered rather than supporting her. But two of the Newport tracks, “Miss Brown to You” and “Blues on My Ceiling,” were exceptional performances on every level, and Van Ronk confirmed my opinion when we happened to be talking about fine musicians who never got their due on the 1960s folk scene, and the first name he mentioned was Roderick’s.

Though the lyric was obviously written to be sung by a man, the first recording of “Miss Brown to You” was by Billie Holiday, as were all the other significant recordings of it before Roderick’s — but Roderick didn’t sing it like Holiday, and switched the gender, singing about Henry rather than Emily Brown: “Mister Brown to you.” I’m not going to say her version cuts Holiday’s, but it was way more accessible to me as a player, and for a while it became a staple of my repertoire.

Later on, when I was touring regularly through Montana, I found that Roderick was living near Missoula, singing with a group called the Big Sky Mudflaps, and tried to get in touch, but it never happened… and then she died, and I never got to meet her. I’ve met a number of people who knew or played with her over the years, though, and everyone seems to agree that her recordings didn’t do her justice. And so far no one has reissued those Newport tracks, or even digitized them and uploaded them to YouTube… sometimes history just isn’t fair.

For a year or so before I went to New York, I spent every Friday and Saturday evening at the Nameless Coffeehouse, a free-of-charge, multi-act folk music showcase in the Unitarian church on the corner of Church Street in Harvard Square. They even had free coffee, cider, and cookies, and I auditioned to play there but didn’t make the grade, so I worked my way into the inner circle by washing dishes in the kitchen when I wasn’t interested in the musician who happened to be playing.

There were plenty of musicians who did interest me: Amy Cohen (who introduced me to Dave Van Ronk) did Pentangle songs with her boyfriend Bob Harmon, who could play all the John Renbourn parts; Paul Cole, the one man band; Eliot Kenin doing comedy and music; Cathy Winter, a compelling singer of everything from Irish ballads to ragtime blues; and Guy Van Duser, whose first album came out as I was settling in New York, with a live Nameless performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

I played that record for Dave, who grumbled, “Do we really need another Chet Atkins?” His lady, Joanne, happening to wander through the room, murmured, “Do I detect a note of envy?”

As it turned out, I was in college with Guy’s brother-in-law, John Hu, and  he lent me a cassette Guy had made for him as a Christmas present, of Guy and Billy Novick jamming on Christmas carols. I played that for Dave as well, and this time he was impressed. “That’s first-rate second-rate jazz,” he said, approvingly, and when I looked nonplussed, added: “That’s where I put the Venuti-Lang duets, as well.” I would learn that this was one of Dave’s favorite categories, and meant as a compliment — the point being it wasn’t Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, but was very good for what it was.

Since my year with Dave had primed me to play more swing standards, Guy seemed like the obvious next stop, and when I got to Cambridge I set up a lesson with him. The first thing he said was, “Name any standard, name any key.” I called “Sweet Georgia Brown” in Eb, and he ripped off a bunch of improvised choruses. That was the goal: to be able to improvise fully-formed fingerstyle arrangements freely, in any key, on any tune, like a jazz pianist — and he’d made it.

Then he had me play for him, and I played Dave’s arrangement of “The Pearls,” and he asked if I’d heard Eric Schoenberg’s arrangement, which I hadn’t. Then he asked me to play Dave’s arrangement of “St. Louis Tickle,” which had been the first ragtime piece he’d learned, and he played a nice second part with me. Then he gave me a sheet of music notation with his arrangement of “Swanee,” as homework for next week.

I fought with that arrangement for a few days, then called Guy and told him I had hoped to come to him for pointers, not to learn his arrangements note for note, and he said, “Well, my students tend to end up sounding like me.” So we agreed it was not a good fit, and I went my way…

…but I did cop one lick from his record: he played the first measure of “Ain’t She Sweet” with an ascending chromatic figure starting on the one paralleling the descending figure in the melody, and I figured out how to do something similar in the key of C. As Dave would say, it ain’t so such much, but you take what you can get.

This medley became one of my hot-shot pieces for a while, and I recently heard a recording of myself playing it at the Nameless a half-dozen years later. It sounded pretty clunky, frankly, but boy could my fingers move a lot faster when I was 23.

It is an immutable rule of pop music that if you have a smash hit, you try to find something similar to catch the wave. So, when the Everly Brothers hit with “Wake Up, Little Susie,” it was inevitable that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant would try to write a follow-up. The first hit was about a boy and girl falling asleep at the movies and waking up to the realization that no one would believe them and their reputations were shot. So, where to go with that?

Their answer was a monument to adolescent male self-absorption and fecklessness, which reached the top forty in 1959 but had nothing like the success of its predecessor or its flip side, “Take a Message to Mary.” In a way, it’s a mirror-image of that song, which has a man singing to his lady love from a jail cell, where he is imprisoned for a stagecoach robbery and murder, except…

In this one it’s the girl who’s in jail, and the circumstances are a lot less romantic. Basically, the boy took her out on a date, it went very wrong, she has been abused and vilified, and he is worried that she may be upset with him and he may get in trouble.

I found this on an Everly Brothers double-LP retrospective in the Cambridge Public Library, and just like the Bryants and Everlys I picked it as a follow-up to “Wake Up, Little Susie,” but it never worked. Part of the reason may be that I got the chords completely wrong, flattening out one of the Bryants’ most interesting compositions, but honestly I think their fancy harmonies just added to the basic problem — which is that the song is supposed to be goofy and funny, but the story is nasty and upsetting, and told with enough specificity that it’s hard to overlook the nastiness.

I still like it, but it’s dark comedy: the story is just this side of date rape — hell, we don’t even know what happened after the boy left — but our narrator has that incredible teenage male ability to see nothing but his own needs and worries. Despite his constant efforts to seem sympathetic — that concern for “poor Jenny” — it’s all about him, and what may happen to him, and whether she’ll forgive him.

To me, that’s one of the fascinating things about the pop music of the late 1950s and early 1960s — after the teen market was discovered, and before the Beatles and the apotheosis of Motown. Producers who had grown up in a different world didn’t understand the teen market but desperately wanted to cash in, so they set hundreds of young songwriters and singers loose to experiment, and although most of the results were less than stellar, the naked attempt to express teen attitudes and feelings succeeded to a degree that is kind of amazing, though by no means always pretty.

And, on another level, there is a degree of innocence that makes me nostalgic, because I was a teenage boy when I learned this and pretty feckless myself, and it never occurred to me back then that anything genuinely dreadful might have happened to the girl — just like, when I sang “Wake Up, Little Susie,” it never occurred to me that they might not really have fallen asleep.

When I first heard the Everly Brothers, I didn’t know what to make of them. They didn’t sound exactly like doo-wop, or like country, or like rock ‘n’ roll. In retrospect, I see them in the long tradition of country brother duets, following the Delmore Brothers, the Monroe Brothers, the Louvin Brothers — but I’m still struck by the uniqueness of their sound. The Delmores and Monroes had plenty of blues and drive in their music, but there was something different about the Everlys. Part of it was certainly their guitar playing, with its terrific simplicity and rhythmic power. And part of it, for me at least, was the attitude: they weren’t singing about country concerns, they were singing about teen concerns, and they were clever and funny.

Most of the credit for the clever and funny part has to go to Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote all their early hits, including “Bye, Bye Love,” “All I Have to do Is Dream,” “Bird Dog,” “Poor Jenny” (not much of  a hit, but I’ll be putting it up tomorrow), and “Wake Up, Little Susie.” The Bryants are a pretty great story themselves — he was a classical violinist who played briefly in the Atlanta Philharmonic before switching to country music in the late 1930s, then in 1945 he was touring through Milwaukee, got on an elevator, fell in love with the elevator operator, Matilda Scaduto, whom he renamed Felice, and they moved into a mobile home and started writing songs. They had a tough time for a few years, but by the end of the decade they were getting some country hits, and in 1957 they took off when the Everlys cut a song that had been turned down by some thirty country artists, called “Bye, Bye Love.”

The Bryants recognized the brothers’ potential and began writing songs tailored to their tastes and image — Don Everly recalled, “Their stuff fit us like a glove, because it was designed to fit. Boudleaux would sit down and talk with us. A lot of his songs were written because he was getting inside our heads—trying to find out where we were going, what we wanted, what words were right.”

I don’t remember when or where I first heard this one — it may have been when I was getting into the rock ‘n’ roll oldies I’ve discussed in earlier posts, but probably came later, since I don’t remember singing it with my sister and our doo-wop pals. It’s a different kind of song, wittier and more rocking, and is probably my favorite Everly Brothers track. The trick, it seems to me, is that it is an utterly teenage experience, viewed from outside, with a degree of mockery — but the mockery also feels teenage. Like, the brothers are singing about something dumb they did, and how dumb they felt, and laughing ruefully at themselves, while also winking to their listeners about going to the movies and making out.

I sang this a lot on the street that summer after I’d been studying in New York, and there was something about it that felt liberating after all the ragtime and blues — it was high-energy fun, and I was a teenager, cutting loose and setting off on my own, and the spirit was upon me.

I spent the summer of 1977 playing for tips on the street, six hours a night, four nights a week, in front of Woolworth’s in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard. We’d play from about 8pm to 1am and make maybe thirty dollars, and then from 1am to 2am we’d make another thirty singing oldies for the people forced into the streets when the bars closed.

By that time we were typically the only musicians out there, since the hour from midnight to one was dead and all the others would go home. We didn’t make much money earlier because the competition was stiff — there were bluegrass bands, jugglers, acrobats, and people who played more popular music, or just played better than we did. In those days no one had an amplifier, so you could fit a lot of musicians in the Square without them overlapping and bothering each other, and it was still the golden age of young people hitchhiking around the country and busking, so there was always plenty of music.

Anyway, we figured out pretty soon that if we could amuse the well-oiled exiles from the bars we could make decent money in that post-closing hour when we had the Square to ourselves. A ragtime or blues song might persuade a few broadminded, good-time souls to stop for a moment and throw us a quarter, but the trick was to get a crowd that would stick around and throw paper money, and the way to do that was to get them involved…

The way we did that was to get them all singing “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl…” over which I’d swoop in with my most aching tenor, singing:

As I-I, walk through this world, nothing can stop, the Duke of Earl…”

Or start them singing “oooo-oo, wah-oo, oo…” over which I’d come in with:

Each time we have a quarrel, it almost breaks my heart
‘Cause I am so afraid, that we’ll have to part…

“Teenager in Love” was my big number, because I was eighteen and put real feeling into it, and it was utterly ridiculous. One memorable night a drunk was so moved that he pulled his Timex electronic watch off his wrist and threw it in the guitar case — which doesn’t sound like much now, but no one I knew had an electronic watch back then, and I wore it for years.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about this one — I don’t remember where I learned it, or whether I had the Dion and the Belmonts recording or just got it from Sha Na Na. I had no sense of Dion, he was just another name on oldies collections, and I would have been astounded if anyone had told me that in the early 1960s he’ made some  blues revival tracks like “Don’t Start Me Talking” — which is not really my fault, since they didn’t get released till the 1990s, but in later years he’s been an assiduous proponent of old-style blues and if we ever meet I guess I’ll have to apologize for the fact that I still think of him as the guy who sang “Teenager in Love.”

Oh, and one last thing: if you haven’t heard Bob Marley and the Wailers’ reworking of this song, you should click through immediately, because you have a treat in store.