This may well have been the first old pop song I worked out for myself on guitar, and I played it regularly on the street in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard. Indeed, it was Rob who taught me the verse and helped me work out the chords to it, following the melody he recalled — I don’t know where he’d heard it, and in those days before the internet I had no idea how to find sheet music or a recording of the verse, since all the books I found in stores or in the library had only the chorus.

“Darktown Strutters’ Ball” was one of the biggest hits of the teens, published in 1917 and composed by Shelton Brooks, who had hit back in 1909 with “You Ain’t Talking to Me,” followed in 1911 by the wildly popular “Some of These Days,” then “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” and the dance craze hit “Walkin’ the Dog.” Brooks went on to have a fairly successful recording career in the 1920s, starting with “The Darktown Court Room,” but is little remembered today in that context because on records he was primarily a “monologuist” (what we’d now call a comedian) rather than a singer, and his monologues tended to be in exaggerated blackface minstrel dialect — an even more distant affectation than usual for an African American performer, since he was born and grew up in Ontario, Canada. Brooks was also popular as a stage comedian, known for his imitation of Bert Williams, who reputedly saw him perform and commented, “If I’m as funny as that, I got nothing to worry about.” You can get a taste of his style from the one surviving film clip of him in performance, made in 1939, in which he sings a variation on the Strutters’ Ball theme, “Hole in the Wall.”

According to some reports, “Darktown Strutters” was inspired by an annual ball in Chicago that was kind of a modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misrule, financed by wealthy society folk but with a guest list of pimps and prostitutes. On the other hand, Brooks told Ian Whitcomb that he wrote the song after hearing a story about an ordinary working stiff who got “an invitation to an affair to be given by the local pimps. A big ball. All a mistake and he should never have been asked.” As far as I can find, this event was not called the Darktown Strutters’ Ball, but I guess that seemed like a more marketable title than “Pimps and Hookers Ball.”

Howard Armstrong, with whom I played this song for several years in the 1990s, took it back to its roots by following the straight chorus with a truly filthy parody — though he did not tend to perform that version onstage. If you care to check it out, be warned: the language is as raw as can be, an apt reminder of all the folklore of the jazz and blues world that never got recorded due to prudery, and hence the mistaken impression that modern gangsta rappers use nastier language than their great-grandparents used in the 1920s.

I haven’t performed this song in decades because it feels weird — at best — to be a white guy singing about going to the “Darktown” ball… for a while I tried changing the lyric to “Uptown Strutters Ball,” but that felt differently weird, since it’s a well-known song and that’s the title phrase. The odd thing is that in all the years I sang this on the street and sometimes in clubs, no one ever suggested it might be in any way offensive to anybody, or that I might want to think about what I was singing… which just shows how white my audiences have tended to be and what an amazingly sheltered life white people tend to lead in this great land of ours.

I picked up “Sister Kate” from Dave Van Ronk’s album with the Red Onion Jazz Band, and started playing it regularly on the street with Rob Forbes, because his mother, Grace, came by pretty much every week and would sing lead on it. She was from a fine old New England family, with what was known as a “swamp Yankee” accent, and had apparently contemplated running off to be a chanteuse in her youth — I have no idea what she sounded like then, but by 1977 she had many years of cigarettes behind her, and her voice had a soulful rasp that worked perfectly with this one.

The song’s composer of record was Armand Piron, a New Orleans bandleader and violinist who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams, though his authorship has frequently been disputed, in particular by Louis Armstrong. Piron, who apparently copyrighted it in 1919 (though it wasn’t published till 1922), told Al Rose that Louis was kind of partly right, but…

…that’s not Louis’ tune or mine or Pete [Bocage]’s either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company…. The way Louis did it didn’t have anything to do with his sister Kate:

Gotta have ’em before it’s too late,
They shake like jelly on a plate.
Big ‘n’ juicy, soft an’ round
Sweetes’ ones I ever found.

That’s the way Louis sang it, his words… There’s just so many places you could do a number like that. Not in my band, you know.

Though Piron and his band cleaned up the lyric, they kept the sense intact, since the generally accepted derivation of “shimmy” fits Armstrong’s verse pretty well. The etymology isn’t solid, but most authorities derive it from chemise — “shimmy” seems to have been American slang for a lightweight women’s blouse as early as the 1840s — and the dance move was to “shake your shimmy” by vibrating the relevant area as rapidly as possible.

Once again, I’m reminded of the extent to which the history of American vernacular song has been forever obscured by the prudery of publishers, folklorists, and literate amateurs who for various reasons chose not to write down what people actually sang, back in the days when a lot of people were singing in situations that did not require drawing room prose. Armstrong apparently sang the song in honor of a local prostitute, and I find an internet source reporting his original title as “Up in Maddie’s Bunk.” I don’t know the evidence for that (if you do, please let me know), but it doesn’t seem unlikely and would have been very much in the mainstream of what was sung around “the District” in the formative years of jazz. Jelly Roll Morton provided some choice examples in his Library of Congress recordings, but the overwhelming majority of these lyrics survive only in expurgated versions, if at all, leaving us with only a few tantalizing hints and rumors of the originals. Which is, of course, better than nothing…

I heard this one, yet again, from Dave Van Ronk, who got it from Reverend Gary Davis,* but either of us could have learned it from any number of other sources. Indeed, this song became somewhat a bane of my existence in the 1970s, because whenever some musician or musicians who were roughly my age came by with mandolins, guitars, or something of that sort and asked if they could sit in (it happened rarely, but it happened), they were likely to ask if I knew “Hesitation Blues,” and then, inevitably, after maybe following up with “Winin’ Boy,” they’d want to play “Friend of the Devil…”

At that point I’d never heard Hot Tuna (who also got this song from Davis) and was only vaguely aware of the Grateful Dead, but for a lot of kids my age or a few years older, that was the only reference point for anything that sounded like what I played, and I got pretty tired of it — though when I eventually did an opening act gig with Jorma Kaukonen, he sounded great and was very nice to me.

Anyway…

I did a deep dive into the history of  “Hesitation Blues” for my book on the censorship of early Black blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Blues, and suggest that it  was the first twelve-bar blues to be known throughout the country, circulating in print and reworked in oral tradition, mostly in versions that were far too dirty to be printed or recorded. Robert Winslow Gordon and Hubert Canfield both collected multiple versions in the 1920s, and Jelly Roll Morton recalled one for Alan Lomax that he’d apparently heard in New Orleans around the turn of the century. Most versions seem to have included verses in the same basic pattern:

I ain’t no butcher, no butcher’s son,
But I can cut your meat until the butcher comes.

I ain’t no milkman, no milkman’s son,
But I can pull your titties till the milkman comes.

I ain’t no sergeant, no sergeant’s son,
But I can handle your privates till the sergeant comes…

…and so on, as well as such straightforwardly descriptive verses as, from Canfield’s collection:

A fist full of teats, and a mouth full of tongue,
Takes a long peckered daddy to make his baby come.**

As best I can tell, this was normally a group song, the point being to keep adding and improvising verses until everyone ran out of ideas or got bored. Like a lot of dirty blues that were popular in oral tradition, it was cleaned up and published when blues caught on in the teens, with competing sheet music versions appearing in 1915 by W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues,” and the white team of Scott Middleton and Billy Smythe. It seems to have first been recorded in 1919 by Al Bernard, a white singer who had a close relationship with Handy, and then by various singers, both black and white, through the twenties and beyond, surviving as a rural standard.

Between the published and oral/dirty versions, it seems to be one of the songs, like “Frankie and Johnny,” that was known everywhere from juke joints to college dorms in the days before Prohibition curtailed the tradition of men gathering to drink and sing in public places where women were not permitted (or where the only women were working), and hence tended to revel in this kind of thing. (This practice survived, of course, in some enduringly all-male environments, and many dirty songs in turn-of-the-twentieth-century folklore collections are still sung as “rugby songs” — though not, as far as I know, this one.) (One neat twist being that, with the appearance of female rugby players, such songs are now also sung in some all-female environments. For all I know, they always were, but no folklorists happened to be present.)

* As Dave Van Ronk explained, Reverend Davis refused to sing songs like this in later years, regarding them as sinful, but would sometimes get around that by playing the melody while speaking the verses. In a particularly extended recording, he goes on for over ten minutes, including plenty of “Ain’t no _____, no ______’s son” variations.

** Mark Ross recalls hearing Van Ronk sing a similarly explicit verse to “Hesitation” during a guest set at the Gaslight Cafe in the late 1960s:
Pussy ain’t nothing but meat on a bone,
You can fuck it, you can suck it, you can leave it alone.
And to demonstrate the continuity of the folk process, that same couplet took a victory lap in 1990 as a chant ending 2 Live Crew’s “Face Down, Ass Up.” (Which they followed with a gender twist, asking the “ladies” to chant along with “A dick ain’t nothing but…”

A bit of Newyorkiana from Dave Van Ronk’s second album and the nimble pen of his friend Lawrence Block. Now well known as a mystery/thriller/private eye writer, Block was then churning out naughty novels at a terrific pace under numerous pseudonyms, many of them set in the Greenwich Village Bohemian milieu he and Dave knew so well… for example the slender volume at right, written as Sheldon Lord, with its tempting tagline: “Anita was a virgin — till the hipsters got hold of her!”

Block first visited in the Village in 1956, and soon became a lifelong resident. He met Dave in Washington Square Park, where folk musicians congregated on Sunday afternoons, and, as he wrote in the introduction to The Mayor of MacDougal Street:

This was… before the folk music renaissance, and before the curious synthesis of drugs and politics made college kids a breed apart. The great majority of collegians were still gray-flannel members of the Silent Generation, ready to sign on for a corporate job with a good pension plan. Those of us who didn’t fit that mold, those of us who’d always sort of figured there was something wrong with us, sat around the fountain in Washington Square singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and feeling very proud of ourselves for being there.

One of the ways folk/bohemians amused themselves in those days was writing parodies of familiar songs — also a common pastime in the jazz world, where pretty much everyone knew dirty lyrics to pretty much every pop hit. Block and Van Ronk, along with Lee Hoffman and Roy Berkeley, wrote a bunch of anarchist/Trostkyist parodies of folk songs making fun of the Communist folk crowd, called The Bosses Songbook, and Block also composed this urban train wreck ballad.

The model was “Engine 143,” which had  been recorded by the Carter Family in 1927 and reissued on Harry Smith’s influential six-LP anthology, American Folk Music. You don’t have to know that to enjoy this song, but Block kept enough details from the original to make his lyric particularly amusing for the hardcore folk crowd, from the first line (“Along came the FFV, the swiftest on the line”) to the last (“And the very last words poor Georgie said was ‘Nearer My God, to Thee'”). The original song was a true story about a train wreck in 1890 and the death of the engineer, George Alley.

I recently ran into Larry at a tribute concert for Dave’s 80th birthday, and he was kind enough to provide a bit more background:

As a new New Yorker, I found the subway fascinating, and I’d heard “Engine 143,” which I believe David had called one of the few authentic pieces of scab folk music. I don’t know what suggested the parody to me, perhaps the thronged platform at the Times Square Station one evening…. I know I found decapitation amusing, though I’d be hard put to tell you why. Here’s a blog post I ran back in September, in which I say a little about the song and reference another song I heard David sing several times.

I learned this off Dave’s album, and one night on the street in Harvard Square, someone asked if I could sing a song about New York, and I sang them this. I don’t remember their reaction, but when I told Dave about it, he was horrified.

Growing up where I grew up, when I grew up, I had no understanding or appreciation for country and western music. That may seem strange to a lot of younger music fans, who think of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard as “Americana,” along with the Carter Family, and bluegrass, and blues, and Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty and Los Lobos and heaven knows what else. But in the 1960s and into the 1970s, a lot of folk and blues fans had minimal appreciation for anything coming out of Nashville.

In part, that was a matter of politics. Our news of the South was of the civil rights movement and, by and large, the country audience was not on our side. Obviously that was an oversimplification — there were white southerners who supported civil rights, and black southerners who liked country music, and people on the folk scene who were more broadminded, or less political: the Newport Folk Festival invited Cash in 1964, and shortly had Dave Dudley, Roy Acuff, and George Hamilton IV. But to take an example close to home, Dave Van Ronk drew a sharp distinction between black rural southern music and groups like Gid Tanner and the Skillet Likkers — I remember him growling, “That’s the soundtrack to the lynch mobs, and I want nothing to do with it.” (That wasn’t just Dave’s northern urban prejudice; there’s a notable photograph of Fiddlin’ John Carson and other participants at a 1925 Tennessee fiddlers convention sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan.)

Aside from politics, there were musical issues. For people who didn’t like electric instruments, there was the electric guitar and pedal steel, and by the time I was hearing country there were also string sections, and choirs, and basically it sounded to me like pop-schlock.

So I don’t remember how or why I ended up with an album called 18 King Size Country Hits — my guess is that it was in a cut-out bin at a price so low I couldn’t pass it up — nor do I remember listening to it more than once or twice, though in retrospect it has some great tracks, all from Cincinnati’s King record label. But a lot of people on the folk scene had one or two country songs that we learned as jokes, because we thought they were so bad they were funny (Van Ronk’s was “Hit Parade of Love”), and I found one on that album: Hawkshaw Hawkins singing “Lonesome 7-7203.”

Again, some younger folks may not understand that title, since it’s been a while since we had telephone exchanges. When I was growing up, the dial of a rotary telephone still started with the exchange, a word whose first two letters were part of the number: BEechwood 4-5789 (a hit for the Marvelettes), TIdewater 4-1009 (the number Chuck Berry asks to speak with in “Promised Land”), UNiversity 8-7748 (my parents’ number), or, in the case of Hawkshaw Hawkins’s number one country hit from 1963, the evocative LOnesome 7-7203.

So anyway, I learned that song and played it on the street, as a joke, singing in my most comically doleful tones. And then the MBTA started giving out permits for musicians to perform in particular subway stations on particular days during morning rush hour, and Rob and I snagged a few mornings at the Harvard Square station, and we were playing down there at maybe 6:30 a.m. on a workday, and a guy came by and asked if I could do any country music… so I sang this one, and he not only took it seriously, he appreciated me singing it for him, and gave us a dollar (which was a good tip in those days), and reminisced for a while about growing up on a farm down south and how much he missed that kind of music in Boston.

It was not exactly a revelation, but it was an important lesson for me. I had to learn that lesson a few more times before it really sank in and I developed a serious repertoire of country hits, and recognized the fact that a lot of the musicians I loved, like Woody Guthrie, were closer to country singers than to folk singers (whatever that means) in a lot of ways — one of which was that they learned the current hits because that was what regular working folks tended to want to hear: when Woody and Pete Seeger hitched out west in the late 1930s, Pete remembered Woody teaching him “It Makes No Difference Now,” the current jukebox favorite, so he’d have something to play in bars. And I won’t claim “Lonesome 7-7203” remained a very active part of my repertoire, but every once in a while I’d pull it out in a crowd of older country fans and they’d get nostalgic, remembering where they were and what they were doing back in 1963, when music was still good.

(To wrap this up, the song was written by Justin Tubb, son of Ernest, and was a huge posthumous hit for Hawkins, who died in the plane crash that also killed Cowboy Copas and Patsy Cline.)

One of the pleasures of playing on the street with Rob was that I had a second voice on the choruses of my favorite Woody Guthrie – Cisco Houston duets. I’d spent the previous couple of years learning blues and other stuff that lent itself to fingerstyle guitar,  but I never lost my taste for the Woody/Cisco sound, and it had even become a matter of principle for me. I felt like a lot of the blues revivalists I liked had started out with Woody, Cisco, and Pete Seeger, but abandoned that music when they got into blues, and I understood the temptation but didn’t want to give in to it.

For one thing, I really like Woody Guthrie’s music — his guitar playing, his harmonica playing, his singing, even his fiddling — and he had good taste in songs. In a slightly alternate reality, if he hadn’t succumbed to Huntington’s disease, it is easy to imagine him at Newport in the 1960s jamming with other folk revival discoveries from the Southwest like Mance Lipscomb, who had a similarly broad repertoire and similar experience playing a wide range of regional blues and dance tunes.

For another thing, this was the music I started on, and it continues to feel natural in ways some of the styles I picked up later never will. I’m not saying I’m better at it (honestly, I could never make a flatpick behave the way I wanted) or that it’s better suited to a kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I’ve been playing it since I was seven or eight years old, and it’s part of me.

For a third, people always liked it. I might think of it as less sophisticated, or less complex, or more hokey and folky than the blues and ragtime I was picking up from Van Ronk and afterwards, but whenever I played something like “Columbus Stockade,” there were a few people who reacted like, “OK, this I really like!” And not always the people I expected.

Plus, in a lot of moods, I’m one of those people myself. I like Jelly Roll Morton and Ornette Coleman, or Charley Poole and Merle Haggard, or Pablo Casals and Aretha Franklin for different reasons and in different moods, and I’m glad to be able to listen to all of them. So, as a matter of principle, I didn’t want the fact that I’d learned to play “Maple Leaf Rag” to mean I stopped playing “Columbus Stockade.”

Besides all of which, for most folk/roots musicians of roughly my generation this was a common language. Bill Morrissey and I used to sing these songs together and talked about doing some gigs with this repertoire, and I never asked Paul Geremia or Dave Van Ronk if they knew “Columbus Stockade,” but I’m sure they did, because we all did. Whatever our later musical journeys, this was where pretty much all of us started, and it remained a good foundation and a style we could all sing together.

Which brings me by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the beginning of this post, and the  pleasure of singing on the streets with a good partner, which I still get now and then, and which always makes me think of Woody and Cisco.

(If you haven’t read Jim Longhi’s book, Woody, Cisco, and Me, I recommend it enthusiastically and without reservation — to me, it is the ultimate evocation of those two men and what made them so special, including but by no means limited to the music.)

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.