This was my favorite Bo Carter song, mostly for its easy swing, but I probably wouldn’t have learned it if I had just been playing on my own. As it happened, though, the summer after my year in New York I was back in Cambridge, planning to head to Europe and be a ramblin’ guitar player, and my high school friend Rob Forbes had decided to go with me, and his mother happened to have a washboard — heaven knows why — so we became a duo.

We played four nights a week on the street in Harvard Square, in front of Woolworth’s, and I was damn lucky to have Rob because solo guitar players were and are a penny a dozen but washboard players were and are a novelty.

As leader of a duo, it behooved me to come up with some material that suited two voices, and this was one of the first songs I thought of — Carter did it alone, but there was an obvious place for call and response:

“Hey, Whiskey!”
“What you say, Gin?”

And then, both voices together: “Let’s both drink and get drunk again.”

The second verse even mentioned a washboard. So we did this one regularly as long as we were playing together.

As a commentary on how the world has changed, although we played on the street together four nights a week, five hours a night, from June through October, 1977, then went on to play for several months in Spain, I do not have a single picture of us. In fact, I can’t even find a picture of the Woolworth’s that used to be in Harvard Square — which was so much our musical home that when another guy tried to set up there once, the store manager came out and told him that they already had some regular musicians. (Which surprised the hell out of us — we thought we were barely being tolerated.) Anyway, here’s a photo of Rob from a few months later, when we’d headed down to Spain and he’d hitched up to Rotterdam in search of a job on a freighter. I don’t know the circumstances, but it was taken on December 28, before he gave up on seafaring and hitched back south to spend the rest of the winter playing with me in Torremolinos.

As my year of college drew to a close, Dave Van Ronk likewise declared himself done with me as a guitar student. We’d gone through all the more complicated pieces he taught, and he thought it was time for me to come up with my own stuff. Before conceding the point, I had one last request: that he teach me his arrangement for “Sweet Substitute.” He demurred, saying, “That’s not an arrangement; I just play the chords.”

“OK,” I said. “So what are the chords?”

So he showed me, and I swear it’s an arrangement — albeit one that flowed pretty naturally out of the chords, once he’d settled on the key of G and decided on which inversions to use. The opening of the chorus, in particular, has one of those small, brilliant moves that separate the great arrangers (Dave, for example) from the rest of us: a G chord on the third fret, with the E string left open to make it a G6, descending to an F# fingered exactly the same way, with the open E now providing the flat 7th.

The song was composed by Jelly Roll Morton at the very end of his career, with lyrics by Roy Carew, one of his later friends and supporters. As Dave used to explain, Morton was down on his luck at that point and, to make the situation more bitter, his “King Porter  Stomp” was the theme song of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, one of the most popular bands in the world — but he’d sold all the rights, and wasn’t getting a nickel as it played on radio and jukeboxes across the country. So he decided, goddammit, he’d write a hit song in the modern swing style, and the result was “Sweet Substitute,” which he recorded at his final sessions, and which promptly vanished without a trace… until some West Coast dixieland bands picked it up in the mid 1950s, and Dave recorded it in 1961.

Dave loved and admired Morton, and by the time I met him that story had acquired personal resonance, because he was acutely aware that most younger players and fans on the folk scene didn’t understand what he had contributed, or the skills he had that they lacked. He wasn’t bitter, exactly, and he didn’t put himself in Morton’s class — he rated himself as “first rate second-rate,” where people like Morton, Armstrong, and Ellington were straight-up first-rate — but he did feel a sense of camaraderie with other fine musicians who hadn’t been given their due.

In which context it’s worth repeating a story from Billy Taylor, a fine pianist who came of age in the 1940s and recalled going with a couple of other young Turks to see Morton at his last venue, the Jungle Inn in Washington, D.C. They were modern jazzmen, fans of Art Tatum and Lester Young, familiar with Bartok and Hindemith, and to the extent they were aware of Morton at all, they regarded him as corny and passé. Taylor wrote about that night many years later:

Jelly came on. He looked shockingly sick and feeble – old and a little mad. But he wore his old, southern-gentleman’s suit with dignity, and when he smiled the diamond in his tooth still glittered hard. He played a new piece of his called Sweet Substitute, and then he looked straight over at our booth. His eyes had a very personal kind of pride which I had never seen before…

Then Jelly spoke only to us: “You punks can’t play this.”

I forget the tune. What I do remember is a big, full, two-handed piano player – a ragtimer modified and relaxed by way of New Orleans, and very swinging… and as I listened, suddenly I knew. “Golly, he’s right. I can’t play what he’s playing. Just purely technically I can’t play two hands together and separately the way he does.” I looked over at the other confident young men who had come with me: I saw that they knew they couldn’t either. Ours was a very quiet booth for the next three hours.

The musical education I got from Dave Van Ronk was by no means limited to guitar lessons, or to his own work. By the third or fourth week, he shifted my lesson to the end of the day, and when it finished he would cook dinner, then we’d break out the whiskey, and along with discoursing knowledgeably and at length on an astonishing range of subjects, he would play records – and not only that, he would loan me records to take back to my room, and listen to over and over, and tape. They may have included some blues or folk records, but I don’t recall any. The ones I remember were by Groucho Marx, Jerry Colona, and Hoagy Carmichael. Colona was a passing fancy. Marx was wonderful, and I still know all the words to “Show Me a Rose” and “Omaha, Nebraska,” but there’s no point to anyone but Groucho performing that material.

Carmichael, though, was a revelation and has remained one of my favorite singers and a model I keep going back to after forty years of listening. He didn’t have a great voice in formal terms, but he made that a strength: he always sounded like he was talking directly to you, telling a story, while phrasing with a jazz musician’s rhythmic command and reshaping his melodic lines in surprising ways that never interfered with the lyric and always sounded completely relaxed.

For me, he epitomizes that much over-used term “singer-songwriter,” and his version of “Georgia on My Mind” is typical of what made me fall in love with his work. The lyric is ambiguous, perhaps about the state, perhaps about a girl (Carmichael’s sister was named Georgia),  and it expresses longing for a special someone as easily as a special place, her memory echoing “as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.” (On one recording, he addresses that particular line to “Georgia, my honey.”) On the record I borrowed from Dave, Carmichael sang this accompanied only by a piano trio, in his understated Indiana murmur, dry and wistful, lonesome and resigned, like he was reminiscing with a friend over a final glass of whiskey before calling it a night — maybe with Lauren Bacall, in that bar where she worked as his chanteuse in To Have and Have Not. (Other versions have full band backing, and they’re fine, but not what I hear in my head.)

I was lucky that was the way I got to know this song – I’d heard Billie Holiday’s version before, but as far as I can recall, no others. Sometime later that year I was sitting with Dave in Folk City and the Ray Charles version came on the sound system, and I asked him, “Who’s that singing?” He looked at me like I was a Martian – exactly the reaction I would have now if someone asked that question – and told me. And of course I’ve now heard Ray Charles’s version innumerable times. But if I’d heard him first, I wonder if I would ever have felt like I could sing this, because how can anybody attempt it with that version in their head? I’ve rarely performed it, for exactly that reason – I figure as soon as I sing the first notes people think of Ray, and compare me to him, and I know where that leaves me. But in my own head I hear Hoagy, and if I’ll never sound as relaxed as he did, it’s at least a reasonable aspiration.

Thanks to my father, I grew up on pop songs of the teens and 1920s, but I don’t know if I would have performed any in public if I hadn’t heard Mance Lipscomb. I was coming from a background of Woody Guthrie, followed by old blues, and although the Kweskin band had proved to me that a blues-related group might play goofy pop songs as novelties, my reference point for the more serious or sentimental pop of previous eras was  people like  Frank Sinatra, Al Martino, or whichever middle-aged warbler was currently warbling — which is to say, neither I nor anyone my age had the slightest interest in that stuff. Nor, I must admit, did I initially appreciate Lipscomb’s blues work — it was too subtle for me, and I didn’t get into it until considerably later.

Where the two intersected, though, I was entranced — for example, his live recording of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” or his Berkeley Blues Fest recording of “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” which provoked my father to come downstairs and sing along, then tell a shaggy dog ghost story about a disembodied head appearing out of a dank swamp, delivered in suitably spooky tones until the head breaks into “I ain’t got no body…”

In any case, I didn’t learn that song at the time, but did learn “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” more or less the way Mance played it. Dave Van Ronk, who had a strong sense of right and wrong in such matters, would have disapproved, because Mance didn’t play the right chords — and I understand Dave’s feelings, because if I pull this out when I’m playing with people who know old pop songs, they know it the way it was written, not the way Mance did it, and if they try to join in, the result is a musical train wreck.

On the other hand, there is a long tradition of vernacular musicians reshaping material to fit their own approaches, and Mance in particular had an unusual and lovely chord sense. When he did an old pop tune, he didn’t just flatten it out or try to sing it over three chords like some rural musicians of his generation; he came up with variations that were different from the written versions but often more interesting — for instance, in this arrangement, the chromatic ascent from D to E, and the move from the F to an F# bass, then a bass run in G. I recently listened back and found that I’ve further altered his version, adding a couple of chords he didn’t play, changing a couple he did, and substituting my own bass lines for his monotonic dance beat, but I still hear his version in my head and like it better than any other.

Once I’d learned this, it opened the door to working out my own arrangements of a lot of other old pop songs — though, city boy that I am, I got my hands on some fake books and learned the “right” chords.  And, honestly, that was a good thing, because Mance had a unique ability to make anything he touched sound pretty. He was kind of like Mississippi John Hurt that way, except he went in for fancier pop songs than anything Hurt recorded, in terms of the chords, and even wrote a few himself, like “So Different Blues,” which I cover in another post.

To finish up, my appreciation of Mance’s work has grown steadily over the years — he was a wonderfully imaginative guitarist and had an uncanny ability to synthesize versions of traditional or familiar songs, coming up with lyrics drawn from multiple sources and somehow always compiling a better selection of verses than anyone else had. I love listening to him sing blues, or old play-party songs, or anything else, and if someone asked me today to recommend a couple of tracks to give them a sense of his music, I would start with “Ain’t You Sorry,” or “So Different Blues,” or maybe his version of “Take Me Back”… and yet and still, even now, when I think of Mance it is the pop songs that first come to mind, with this one vying for top honors.

The year I was studying with Dave Van Ronk was also the first year of Saturday Night Live, back when it was a provocation rather than an institution. We wondered every week if it would get pulled off the air, and I don’t think that was just our imagination – and the musical choices were as weird and edgy as the comedy. Like, for example, Leon Redbone. I doubt that man would have had a career if he hadn’t happened to release his first album just when the most talked-about show on television was open to the oddity of a strange, deadpan character sitting onstage with a guitar and moaning old pop songs, so uncool that it was another kind of cool.

I didn’t catch his first appearance, when he sang “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” but saw his second, when he did “My Walking Stick,” an odd object from Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers — and I ran right out and bought his record. (I guess that was my year for running out and buying records of acts I saw on television, the other being Blondie.)

I don’t think I had ever heard “Ain’t Misbehavin’” before that, and I certainly hadn’t heard “Lazy Bones,” or “Lulu’s Back in Town,” or any of the other songs on that LP, which I recall as mostly having just him on guitar and vocals, and his trumpet imitation, and sometimes a tuba, and Milt Hinton on bass, and a few other sidemen including Joe Venuti on violin – whom I’d never heard of, but who was obviously great.

I actually saw that SNL appearance before getting to New York, and I heard Redbone around the same time at Passim Coffeehouse in Cambridge – I didn’t have the money to go inside, but sat in the narrow well outside the window, pressing my ear to the glass, and for some reason no one came out and chased me away.

So I was smitten and learned a bunch of the songs, though just to sing silently in my head, since I couldn’t figure out the chords. And when Dave started playing me records of pop singers from the 1930s, notably Bing Crosby and Fats Waller, I mentioned Leon Redbone’s record… and Dave growled: “He got the chords wrong to the bridge of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ – and with Joe Venuti in the studio! If he didn’t know the chords, why didn’t he ask Joe?”

A year or so later, when I got my hands on a fake book and learned the chords and worked up an arrangement, the first thing I did was play it for Dave, to make sure I had the chords right. He said, sure, they were fine – he was a jazz guy, and knew there were a variety of possible “right” chords, which didn’t mean there weren’t some wrong ones, like for instance what Redbone played in the bridge…*

So that’s the story of how I learned “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and my brief infatuation with Leon Redbone – by the time his next album came out I was listening to Waller, Crosby, Armstrong, the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, the Boswell Sisters, and I’d had my fling with him and it didn’t excite me anymore. But I have no idea how long it might have taken me to get into this kind of music without him, because he had good taste in songs and made them seem approachable for someone with basic ragtime-blues chops, and in his odd way, he was cool.

*For what it’s worth, I just went back and listened to Redbone’s recording of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and his chords sound fine to me.

Though my record-buying at Dayton’s focused on prewar blues, there were a handful of notable exceptions – most significantly, a trio of reissue albums on the Atlantic label featuring the Drifters, the Clovers, and – far and away most memorably – the Coasters. Aside from Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, I don’t think any other R&B hitmakers in the 1950s recorded a body of work I love as much as the Coasters’. Unlike Berry and Charles, though, the Coasters were a collaborative project, and it is not easy to define them or what made them unique.

On the one hand, there were the actor/singers who brought the songs to life. As with many groups of that period, they were not completely consistent from record to record, the personnel sometimes changing and occasional ringers taking the lead (not a common occurrence, but “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” featured Richard Berry, the composer of “Louie, Louie,” who appeared on no other group track and was recorded when they were still based in Los Angeles — whence “The Coasters,” for West Coast — and were called the Robins).

On the other hand, there were Jerry Leiber  and Mike Stoller, who wrote the songs and produced the records. Leiber and Stoller were expert, versatile hitmakers, and did a lot of other stuff as well, but the Coasters records are their definitive artistic statement, the perfect match of playwrights and actors, composers and musicians, producers and artists.

The story of the Coasters and Leiber and Stoller has been told elsewhere, and what I want to emphasize here is just how much I loved that first LP collection and how much it affected my understanding of musical performance, then and forever. It was funny, and smart, and soulful, and musically challenging, and danceable, and collaborative, and individual – it was pure entertainment that was also rigorous and edgy, enjoyable and admirable on any level you might choose.

I can sing all but a couple of songs on that record, as well as lots of other Coasters songs I heard later, but I don’t perform most of them because I can’t do them even well enough to amuse myself. This and its prequel, “Framed,” are exceptions because they are such neatly crafted story-songs, and don’t demand a group treatment the way “Youngblood,” or “Along Came Jones” do. They also appealed to me because at that point I was immersing myself in blues, and they solved a problem: Dave Van Ronk could sing “Hoochie Coochie Man” convincingly and I couldn’t, but I liked that musical framework, and this song provided a combination of the setting Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters created for that song with a lyric that didn’t demand the singer be believable as its protagonist – everyone understood that I was presenting the story of a prison break, not pretending I might lead one.

Actually… to be absolutely honest, that is a later rationalization: at the time I also sang “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and it took  a while for me to figure out why it didn’t work, while this one and “Framed” did. In which context, two relevant anecdotes:

The first is Leiber and Stoller’s recollection that the songs they wrote for Elvis were big hits and made them lots of money, but were lightweight fluff compared to what they’d done with the Coasters, their particular example being “Jailhouse Rock.” They apparently wrote all the songs for that movie soundtrack in one afternoon, and Leiber dismissed the title song as Hollywood silliness, saying: “We used to write things like ‘Riot in Cell Block Number Nine’.” What he meant was that they used to write songs that were funny but also felt real, and in an online biography of the Robins, Marv Goldberg quotes Terrell Leonard, one of the group members, recalling that Leiber and Stoller wrote the song with bass singer Bobby Nunn in mind, but he refused to sing it, apparently considering it low class. “We didn’t understand our heritage,” Terrell recalled. “These two white songwriters knew our culture better than we did. Bobby wouldn’t do it so they brought Richard Berry in.”

The second anecdote, to balance that one, is Van Ronk’s story of arriving late at a blues festival, with no idea who else was on the bill, rushing onstage, and ending his set with a shouting, macho version of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” then coming off and finding Muddy Waters had been sitting and listening to him. Dave was embarrassed, but Muddy, as always, was polite and helpful: “That was very nice, son,” he said, encouragingly. “But you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.”

Most of the early blues albums I bought during that year with Van Ronk were by male guitarists, with a few by male pianists. Aside from the complete Bessie Smith sets, the only album by a female blues singer I recall buying in that period was of Lil Green, and I’m pretty sure I bought it only because her accompanists included Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim, and because I’d heard one song of hers, “Knockin’ Myself Out,” on a compilation of songs about drugs.*

Green has not been much remembered or enthroned in the blues pantheon, but for a moment in 1939 she and Billie Holiday were hailed as co-leaders of a blues revival – the African American press had pretty much stopped writing about blues after Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and the other pioneering blues queens ceased to get hits in the late 1920s, and when Holiday hit with “Fine and Mellow” just as Green hit with “Why Don’t You Do Right?” it was treated as a significant new wave.

They were superficially similar singers, with lighter, thinner voices than their most famous predecessors, but otherwise were very different. Holiday favored hip, forward-looking musicians – most famously Lester Young – and changed jazz singing forever, while Green was in the mainstream Chicago style of the mid 1930s, complete with Slim and Broonzy backing her on piano and acoustic guitar. That made her work a good deal less distinctive, but also a good deal more approachable for me – especially since Broonzy’s guitar solo on her biggest hit was particularly simple. It was not a great solo, and I have completely forgotten it, but it was probably the first single-string lead I ever learned.

As for the song, I’ve continued to sing it off and on ever since. It was composed by Kansas Joe McCoy, Memphis Minnie’s ex-husband and the leader of the Harlem Hamfats (which I like to think of as “the Harlem Hamfats, a Chicago band led by a Mississippi guitarist named Kansas Joe”). He’d recorded another lyric to the same tune, called “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” and apparently rewrote it for Green. In any case, it was a well-written lyric to a distinctive minor-key 12-bar blues melody, and did well for her, then even better for Peggy Lee, who got a career-establishing hit with it as vocalist for Benny Goodman’s band.

I didn’t perform this much, but sang it for my own amusement or for friends late at night, until I did a tour of Japan with the folk-rock-avant garde singer-songwriter/ performance artist Mikami Kan. Between our first and second gigs he asked me why Americans never did any songs in minor keys, since Japanese people like that sound,  so I said we did, and sang him this one, and ended up doing it on every show for the rest of the tour, and fell in love with it all over again.

*I also learned “Knockin’ Myself Out,” which Green did wonderfully, and although I don’t remember all the verses, I still perfectly remember the way she phrased the tag line:

I’m gonna knock myself out, I’m gonna kill myself
I’m gonna knock myself out, gradually, by degrees.

That year I lived in New York was a very rich time for me musically — not in other ways, since I basically spent it in my room listening to records and playing guitar, when I wasn’t contemplating the next record buy at Dayton’s or schlepping over to Van Ronk’s place for a lesson, meal, and lecture… but there’s clearly a “before” and “after” in my musical life, with that year in the middle.

Which said, in retrospect I have somewhat mixed feelings about the way I was learning, and the way a lot of musicians of my generation and afterwards have approached the music of the early 20th century. For example, take Big Bill Broonzy’s “Long Tall Mama.” It was on a Yazoo collection of early Broonzy songs, and also in Woody Mann’s book, Six Black Blues Guitarists, and when I first got the book it was beyond my abilities, but by the end of that year I had a rough approximation of the accompaniment and two solos that Mann had transcribed, and a few years later I worked out the introduction, and it’s the one Broonzy guitar part that I still have more or less in playable shape — rusty, but serviceable.

The mixed feelings come in because, first of all, it’s not the song I would have picked out of Broonzy’s repertoire if I hadn’t had tablature handy for it, so I was following Yazoo’s and Mann’s tastes rather than my own. And second of all, as best I can tell Broonzy was just playing and singing a song he had recently composed and improvising guitar breaks in his usual C-position style, and if he’d recorded the same song a second time he would have played different breaks. It wasn’t a composition, per se, it was just the way he happened to play it that one time. And if Blind Willie McTell or Blind Blake, or  Eric Von  Schmidt or Dave Van Ronk had wanted to play the song, they would have worked out their own guitar parts — maybe close to Broonzy’s, maybe not — and sung it in their own styles.

By and large, all the generations of musicians before me who played this kind of music also heard the musicians who originated it, playing it live, and understood it as a living form that changed from minute to minute and day to day and person to person. They had some recordings, but typically not many, and records were in any case secondary to musicians, so they mostly used them as sources for songs, not like formal scores.

By the time I came along, all but a handful of the older players were gone and companies like Yazoo had done beautiful reissues of their early recordings. So to a great extent the exercise of learning acoustic blues had become learning what the old guys recorded back in the 1920s and ’30s on particular records, as closely as possible. When I was lucky enough to meet other people who played prewar blues, we’d show one another the secrets we’ve managed to figure out — how Mississippi John Hurt fingered a particular chord; how Blind Blake played that syncopated bass figure.

There’s a whole world of us, and by now we’ve been doing this for decades, and we teach at guitar camps, make instructional videos, and even record our careful transcriptions of guitar solos that people like Big Bill Broonzy happened to play once, improvising in front of a microphone, eighty or ninety years ago.

It’s a great exercise, and I’ve learned a lot by doing it, but I’ve also spent a lot of years trying to unlearn that process — trying to stop singing in a southern accent, to stop singing words I don’t understand, to stop trying to duplicate licks that will never really feel like they are my licks, even if I can execute them cleanly.

This isn’t about originality vs. imitation. I play plenty of songs that do feel like mine, though they were written by someone else, and play plenty of licks that do feel like my licks, though I know more or less where I learned them — and so did Big Bill Broonzy. But I was recently listening to Paul Geremia’s version of “Long Tall Mama,” off his second album, which is an attempt to recreate Broonzy’s recording, pretty much solo by solo, and he did it better than I ever could, but it’s still a lot less interesting than what he was playing a few years later, when he had assimilated the music and was generating solos in the moment, the way Broonzy did — even if they were solos in Broonzy’s style. And even back then, the singing sounds like Paul, not Broonzy, which to me makes it a lot more interesting than the guitar playing.

The thing is, I have the Broonzy record, and when I listen to someone try to recreate the solos, all I’m thinking about is how well or badly they are managing to sound like Broonzy. If they do it well I admire their expertise, but it’s still just an exercise and I’d still rather hear him do it.

All of which said, it’s a great exercise, and I love the experience of hearing some of Broonzy’s licks come out of my fingers, and if someone else wants to learn this, it may be helpful to see what my fingers are doing, since we don’t have any video of Broonzy playing these breaks… and I’m glad to have learned it, and will undoubtedly learn more licks off more records before my last go round… and, since I haven’t played this in a while, it feels good to get it more or less up to speed.

So here it is, with no apologies and no regrets… but if you like it and don’t already know it, listen to Broonzy’s version, too.

Incidentally, there’s a dig at Memphis Minnie in the last verse that some folks may miss — she’d established her recording career with a song called “Bumble Bee,” about a boyfriend with a particularly effective “stinger,” and Broonzy is suggesting that he’s got something more substantial to work with.

[Note: I’ve learned a lot more about this song since writing this post, and have a long section about it in my book Jelly Roll Blues.]

I picked this up from the Holy Modal Rounders, presumably in my late teens, since I’d had enough training from Dave Van Ronk to hear that it included a diminished chord. I don’t remember what appealed to me about it at the time, but when I got deeper into the history of American popular music, it was unavoidably significant. Depending on one’s definition, it was arguably the first nationally popular ragtime or “coon” song — an offensive term that became generic in the early 20th century, though the original lyrics of “The Bully Song” (as it was originally titled) used a more offensive term.

It was a huge hit in 1895 for a Scots-Canadian singer named May Irwin, who performed it in a stage play called The Widow Jones — which is also notable because a brief scene in which she kisses one of the other actors was filmed by Thomas Edison in 1897 and hence is one of the first filmed love scenes. Irwin followed with other songs about African American badmen, generally performed in exaggerated dialect — though, unlike most white singers who specialized in that sort of material, she did not wear blackface make-up — and was one of the few pop stars of the late 19th century to record some of her hits, including “The Bully Song.”

All of which said, the song seems to have predated Irwin’s involvement. W.C. Handy wrote that he heard it in the early 1890s and its success inspired him to try his own hand at writing “a ditty fit to go with twanging banjos and yellow shoes”:

Songs of this sort could be tremendous hits sometimes. On the levee at St. Louis I had heard Looking for the Bully sung by the roustabouts, which later was adopted and nationally popularized by May Irwin. I had watched the joy-spreaders rarin’ to go when it was played by the band…

The most assiduous researchers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century black popular music, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, have turned up an early mention of the song in the Leavenworth Herald from 1894, which also seems to be the first printed appearance of the word rag to mean a kind of music: “Kansas City girls can’t play anything on pianos except ‘rags’ and the worst ‘rags’ at that. ‘The Bully’ and ‘Forty Drops’ are their favorites.”

Like much other black music of that period, this song had mostly fallen out of favor with African American musicians and listeners by the time they began recording in large numbers in the 1920s — though some fragmentary verses were recorded by significant black performers, including Henry Thomas, Lead Belly, and the Memphis Jug Band — but remained popular white rural musicians. It was recorded by some two dozen “hilbilly,” “old time” and “country” players and groups (up to and including the Everly Brothers), whence the Holy Modal Rounders, whence me — and I learned it knowing none of this history, or even that the bully and his antagonistic narrator were originally supposed to be African Americans.

Final note: In the early 1980s I did a six-show weekend at Passim Coffeehouse opening for Norman Blake and the Rising Fawn String Ensemble. The dressing room in Passim was tiny, and they were the headliners, but I had to get my guitar in tune and my fingers warmed up, so despite the fact that Norman was sitting two feet away from me, I had to play something. I had been fooling around with this song, and didn’t remember that he had recorded it, so I started picking it as a warm-up exercise… and, without saying a word, he picked up his guitar and began backing me, quietly and perfectly, not taking over but just playing back-up and making me sound better, until I nodded to him for a solo, and he played something simple and pretty, then went back to playing rhythm. He had never met me, never heard of me, and it was the nicest thing he could possibly have done, and I’ll love him forever.

One of the records I bought during that year in New York forever changed my understanding of the world. Like much of what I was buying, it was a reissue of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s on the Yazoo label, but this one had a particularly strange cover and a title cribbed from a James Baldwin novel: Mr. Charlie’s Blues. Its concept was to collect recordings by white rural musicians who played similar material in a similar style to the many black musicians on Yazoo’s other LPs, presenting them as blues musicians rather than as hillbilly, country, or old-time musicians.

What was life-changing about that was not the idea of white musicians playing blues — obviously, I was in New York to study with Dave Van Ronk, so I was familiar with that concept. Nor was it that the musicians on the Yazoo LP were particularly adept or skilled white blues musicians — their skills and my appreciation for their work varied, as with the white blues revivalists in Cambridge and New York.

What was different about them was that, at least to my ears, they were not trying to sound black. Some of them were playing guitar parts clearly imitated from records by black players, and a lot of them would have called their style “n—er picking,” a standard term for fingerstyle guitar in the rural South that was later cleaned up to “Travis picking.” (A change that removes the derogatory racial term while shifting credit for the style from its African American originators to one of its most expert white practitioners — a familiar message from white America to black America: “Heads I win, tails you lose.”) But they were singing in their own voices, sounding like white rural southerners, and in general choosing material that fit their own lives and perspectives.

Take Dick Justice, my favorite artist on that collection: he had two songs, both of which I instantly added to my repertoire, and sounded completely natural singing them. I’ve recently learned a lot more about Justice, having assembled a chapter about him for the book that accompanies the American Epic film and recording project,  which includes lots of new information about him. (As well as some very nice photographs, which I’m currently not at liberty to reproduce here.)

Justice was a coal miner and something of a hell-raiser in his youth, in a community with a small clique of exceptional musicians, and apparently this song was very popular with them. His children don’t recall him singing it, but the son of Bill Williamson, whose father was a friend of Justice and recorded with the Williamson Brothers and Curry, recalls it as a favorite of his dad’s, saying: “He could get on the piano and play blues like crazy, you know. He used to do a song called ‘Cocaine’, but it had a verse in it about the furniture man, so he liked to the call it ‘The Furniture Man’. And he would just do it like a comedy skit, and just crack everybody up.” (For more on the comic implications of furniture men with particular relevance to this song, here is an interesting post from another blog site.)

“Cocaine” was the title of Justice’s record as well, and he’d learned the song off a record called “Cocaine Blues” by a black guitarist and singer from Virginia named Luke Jordan — which is why, when Dave Van Ronk recorded a completely different song called “Cocaine Blues” it was initially credited to Jordan… and why I and others have chosen to give it a title that differentiates it. Jordan is another wonderful artist, and his record is very similar to Justice’s, and if I’d heard it first I’d credit him as my source… but I didn’t…

And frankly it was a better lesson for me to hear Justice, because, as I began to write above, he didn’t try to sing with a “black” voice, and over the years I have tried to assimilate that lesson, and also to try not to sing with a “southern” voice. I don’t always succeed, by any means, because those voices have been in my head all my life — and there are some lyrics that don’t work in my accent, because the words don’t rhyme or scan — but I’m trying, because I was struck by something Martin Carthy told me when I asked why he didn’t sing a Scottish ballad in Scots dialect:

I won’t try and put on a Scottish accent or put on an Irish accent or put on a regional English accent, cause I think that’s nonsense, I think it’s silly actually. It makes the whole thing into a pantomime. It’s much more serious than that for me. And much more fun, as well. You’re actually being able to concentrate on the song, to concentrate on the job at hand, instead of wondering whether you’ve got the accent right. It’s like you’re playing a character, but that’s not how I see singing.

I had never thought of it quite that way, and I don’t think it necessarily applies to all songs and styles, but in general it made sense to me. I still like to sing some songs in character, and think they work well that way — acting is just as valid artistically as music or poetry, though in a different way — but in general I think it’s a good idea to try to sing like yourself, especially if you’re singing something like blues, where the whole point is direct communication. So as best I can I’ve been  trying to figure out how to do that — for better or worse, and for what it’s worth.