This accompaniment in “dropped D” tuning, carefully arranged to seem simple and unobtrusive, has always seemed to me the Apollonian ideal of a Dave Van Ronk guitar arrangement.  He recorded it during his early peak of popularity, right after the Folksinger LP, on an album that featured him with a trad jazz band including some of his old friends from Brooklyn and Queens. Half the tracks had the full band, half just Dave with his guitar, and someone made the odd choice to mingle the cuts rather than having a solo side and a band side, with the result that I’ve very rarely listened to the record, because when I’m in the mood for the quiet, meditative solo stuff I don’t want to hear the rowdy band, and when I’m up for the band the solo cuts are too quiet… which is a pity, because that record has some of Dave’s greatest solo performances, including “Green Rocky Road,” “St. Louis Tickle,” and this song.

“Kansas City Blues” was one of the defining songs of the third blues boom — the first was a dance craze, set off by W.C. Handy’s hits in the early teens; the second a record craze for “blues queens,” set off by Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920; and the third took off with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s success and mostly featured male singers accompanying themselves on guitar or piano. One of the first major hits of that boom was recorded by a Memphis street singer named Jim Jackson and issued toward the end of 1927 as “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues.”

Born in 1884, Jackson was one of the oldest artists who recorded in that period and his repertoire is a window into what African American musicians were playing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from rural ditties like “Old Dog Blue” to minstrel comedy numbers like “I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop,” Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” and his hit about moving to Kansas City, which was so popular that he shortly followed it with “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues,” parts 3 and 4, then “I’m Gonna Move to Louisiana.” Other artists jumped on the bandwagon, the Memphis Jug Band and Lonnie Johnson recording their own “Kansas City Blues” and Charlie Patton asserting his individuality by singing “Going to Move to Alabama.”

I would guess that by 1928 there were very few blues singers who didn’t have some version of this song in their repertoires, and variants of it continued to circulate in the jazz world, which may well be where Dave first heard it — the liner notes to his album describe it as “one of the most popular race recordings of the twenties and … still a favorite of many today.” The funny thing being that when I came across it in the early 1970s I was a dedicated folk-blues listener, regarded it as a traditional “country blues,” and would have been baffled if anyone had suggested it was a pop hit.

I’m pretty sure the first recording I had of this was an instrumental version on The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis, but the first person I heard sing it was Dave Van Ronk. It could have been any number of other people — Ramblin’ Jack Elliott played it a lot, which is where Dylan picked it up — but it was one of Dave’s showpieces and also one of the first things he taught his students. Roy Book Binder tells a funny story that puts this in some perspective, related in Bill Ellis’s study of Davis. Roy had been given a matchbook with Reverend Davis’s phone number, and after working up his courage for a few weeks, called the Reverend on the phone:

I said, “I’d like to take guitar lessons.”
He said, “When do you want to come over?”
I said, “Maybe next week.”
He said, “I’m an old man, I’m home now.”
Book Binder went over to Davis’s house, and to show what he knew, played “Candyman,” to which Davis responded:
 “Good God-a-mighty, you sound like Dave Van Ronk!”

Apparently Davis had learned the song around 1905, in his hometown of Spartanburg, SC. Sometimes he said he’d learned it from local players, sometimes that he heard someone play it in a traveling medicine show, and Van Ronk recalled him saying he’d heard it from a rambling musician everyone just called “the gittar man.” The guitar part seems to have been ubiquitous throughout the South, though not always connected to this lyric, a notable example being Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Hot Dogs.”

Davis’s version was a good deal more rhythmically regular than Jefferson’s, or rather Davis’s versions, plural: he sometimes played it straight, sometimes as a two-step, and sometimes as a waltz. The way Dave learned it, the most distinctive thing is the backwards bass — normally, guitarists who keep an alternating bassline play it low-high, low-high, but in “Candyman” and “Cocaine” Dave reversed that, so the deep note falls on the offbeat. He said he learned it that way from Rev. Davis, but Andy Cohen convinced me at one point that actually Davis played the bass normally and it just sounds backwards… and then Ellis, who has written a deeply researched dissertation on Davis’s playing, further complicated matters by writing that Davis sometimes played it backwards and sometimes forwards — the tricky part being that it’s hard to tell which he’s doing until he gets to the F section at the end of a verse….

…all of which is pretty technical for non-guitarists, but if you want to have some vague sense of it, in my version I play the basses backwards through the C sections of most verses, but forwards through the “Big Leg Ida” verse.

As for the lyric, the term “candy man” meant a pimp, or at least a male paramour, also termed a “sweetback” or “sweetback man.” (I’ve addressed the parallel term “salty dog” in an earlier post, as well as Mississippi John Hurt’s more explicit take on “Candy Man.”) Van Ronk was misled by the references to gingerbread, peppermint sticks, and Santa Claus, and when Davis declined to sing the lyric because it was sacrilegious, he protested, “but that’s children’s song”… to which Davis responded, “Yeah, you get a lot of children with songs like that.” Until this moment, it never occurred to me that there is an obvious parallel to the similar confusion surrounding “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which I addressed in a post on that song’s nasty history a couple of months ago.

This was the first piece Dave Van Ronk taught me, and felt like deja vu, since it’s very similar to “Ninety-Nine Year Blues,” the first fingerpicking piece my earlier guitar teacher taught me. I suppose I expected something more ambitious, since I’d just played Willie McTell’s “Georgia Rag” to demonstrate my prowess (as described in my previous post). But Dave started all his students on “Spike Driver,” and I was there for my first lesson, so that’s what he gave me. He’d recorded it in 1961, on his second LP, but he didn’t suggest I should go back and listen to that — he was teaching it as a John Hurt piece, which he considered the obvious foundation for any study of American fingerstyle guitar.

That was partly because he loved and admired John Hurt, both as a musician and as a friend, and partly because Dave always thought in historical terms and considered Hurt’s playing exemplary of the vernacular African American guitar styles that predated blues and ragtime, and thus a necessary foundation for everything else. The next piece he taught me was Elizabeth Cotten’s “Wilson Rag,”  which is similarly foundational (if you don’t know it, here’s a link to her version), and to briefly digress, nothing would have irritated Dave more than hearing T Bone Burnett refer to his guitar style as “Travis picking,” which is what white country musicians started calling this kind of playing in the 1960s as a substitute for the term “n—er picking” — thus cleaning up their language while giving a white guitarist credit for what had been universally considered a black style.*

As for “Spike Driver Blues,” it was one of the two John Hurt pieces available to the general run of New York folkies in the 1950s (along with “Frankie”), because they were included on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. The lyric is Hurt’s stripped-down personalization of the John Henry legend, adapting a railroad work song to guitar and keeping its strong note of protest and pride:

Take this hammer and carry it to the captain
Tell him I’m gone…
This old hammer killed John Henry,
But it won’t kill me.

I’d heard the song on Hurt’s records, but never paid much attention to it because it was so simple, nor had I noticed Dave’s version, and even after Dave made me learn it I didn’t appreciate it — but years later, when I got more serious about studying Hurt’s music, I was struck by the power underlying its simplicity.

Dave sang some verses Hurt didn’t sing, borrowed from a variant of the same song recorded by the white banjo player Bascom Lamar Lunsford as “Swannanoa Tunnel.” Dave’s formative friends on the folk scene included folklorists like Roger Abrahams and Ken Goldstein, and he described this kind of lyric using academic folklore terminology, as a “jury text” — a sort of ur-version of a song, assembled by mixing and matching verses and phrases from various versions collected in the field. This is no longer considered respectable in folklore studies, where one is supposed to present the field versions as they were recorded from particular informants, but it remains a good method for singers who want to come up with their own version of a traditional song.

*I single out Burnett because he described Dave as doing “Travis picking” in numerous interviews connected to the movie Inside Llewyn Davis. I liked the movie, and liked the way Oscar Isaac played Dave’s songs, but Burnett’s terminology irritated me because Dave learned from people like John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, and Furry Lewis, just as Travis did, and as far as I know he was not influenced in the slightest by Travis, or that whole world of virtuosic white country pickers. Indeed, for political as well as musical reasons, he generally disliked that world, and the notion that Gary Davis was doing “Travis picking” would have rendered him apoplectic.

In 1976 I graduated high school and headed off to New York University — it was the only college I applied to, because it was the only college in Greenwich Village and I was only going to college to take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk, who lived in an apartment on Sheridan Square.

I showed up for my first lesson and Dave asked me to play something that would give him a sense of what I knew, and I played this song. I had learned it from my favorite blues guitar book, Woody Mann’s Six Black Blues Guitarists (later republished as Six Early Blues Guitarists), which was beautifully curated, with particularly accurate and clearly written transcriptions. That was where I learned Blind Blake’s “Early Morning Blues,” Scrapper Blackwell’s “Kokomo Blues,” Big Bill Broonzy’s “Long Tall Mama,” and Tampa Red’s “Boogie Woogie Dance,” but at age seventeen “Georgia Rag” was far and away my favorite.

So I played it for Dave, and he chuckled and said, “That was very nice — you played the wrong chord in the bridge, just like McTell did.” We hadn’t even started the lesson, and already he’d provided a revelation: that something Willie McTell played might be “wrong,” and by extension that it was OK to critique the old masters rather than simply accepting them as gospel. I didn’t have the nerve to ask what he meant, but a few months later when my chord sense had improved I figured it out: McTell (at least as transcribed by Woody Mann, whom I tend to trust) starts the bridge with an E chord, then goes to F, adds the sixth, moves that up a fret to play an F#6, then goes to C — and the F#6 is actually a half-assed substitute for a B.

Of course, there are all kinds of right and wrong, and I was used to McTell’s version and liked it and I’ve stuck with it. But that was a good introduction to the way Dave thought about old blues recordings, which was that they were often good, sometimes great, and occasionally works of genius, but that didn’t mean they were above criticism. Nor was anything else — he would listen to Lester Young or Louis Armstrong, and make a funny expression when they hit a “clam” (wrong note), and I won’t swear he was always right, but it was always worth considering. He was the same way with visual art or literature: “The trouble with Shakespeare is he wrote so beautifully that when he ran out of things to say, he kept writing.” Again, the lesson was not so much the specifics, but the idea that you could find fault with Shakespeare — and, more than that, that if you were serious about music, or art, or literature, it was your duty to examine it carefully and seriously, and figure out what worked and what didn’t, and why.

Getting back to “Georgia Rag” — I already had one Willie McTell LP before I left home, and this song was on it, but as far as I can tell I made no attempt to learn how he actually played and sang the song. Part of the reason was probably that he was playing a 12-string guitar tuned down to Ab, so there was no way I could get my guitar in the same pitch, but in any case I basically ignored his version and just learned what Mann had written, then came up with a way to sing the lyric over what I was playing, and called that Willie McTell’s “Georgia Rag.” Which is to say, the wrong chord Van Ronk noticed may be the only accurate thing in my version… but what the hell, I’ve been playing it this way for forty years.

And while we’re on the subject of revealing mistakes… McTell’s recording was a quicky attempt to capitalize on the success of Blind Blake’s “Wabash Rag,” and apparently Blake’s song was still in his head when he made the record, so at one point he slips up and sings “doing that rag, that Wa-Georgia rag.”

I came to Guy Clark relatively late, after I was already familiar with Townes Van Zandt and Joe Ely, and through Joe had discovered Butch Hancock and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. I’d probably heard a few of Guy’s recordings, maybe “Homegrown Tomatoes” on the radio, but I was more of a folk and blues (and rock, and jazz) fan than a country fan, and his major label records sounded like mainstream country to my uneducated ears. So the first time I recall focusing on him was a solo performance of this song on a two-LP set of Texas songwriters playing at the Kerrville Folk Festivals of the early 1970s, which came out on the Adelphi label in 1983.

I was blown away by the lyric’s blend of dry humor, sincerity, and tenderness, and the way the words fit so neatly into the curves of the melody, and I learned it immediately, and played it in some fairly rough bars, and it tended to quiet them down, which is the highest praise possible. And, of course, my girlfriend liked it, which, of course, was the point.

More important in the long term, it introduced me to Guy as a songwriter and singer, and I went out and bought Old No. 1… and what more need be said? Over the years I’ve learned at least half the songs on that record, and if they didn’t all stay in my repertoire that was mostly because I liked Guy’s versions so much that I preferred to listen to him than to sing them myself. But I ought to get around to “Rita Ballou” before this project is over, and “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,” and “Watermelon Dream,” which I almost recorded on my Streetcorner Cowboy CD.

I wrote most of these early posts following my own musical evolution, and this one would have come somewhat later in that story, but as I was in the midst of this project he died and I wanted to do something about that. And since I couldn’t do anything more useful, I posted this song as an expression of my appreciation and respect, and as a suggestion that people to go back and listen to him. He was a good one.

As a teenager I rarely found anyone my own age who had the slightest interest in the music I liked, but towards the end of high school I discovered that one of my classmates, Perian Flaherty, sang folk songs, and we went out a couple of times and sang on the street together — at least, I remember singing with her once on Palmer Street in Harvard Square, outside Passim Coffeehouse. Perian’s repertoire was mostly from Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, and at that point I didn’t know any Joni Mitchell, so Baez was where we overlapped.

I had never really been a Baez fan. There was something about her voice that didn’t work for me — except when I saw her live, which was always magical and made me a believer — but my parents had Joan Baez in Concert, pt. 2, and my sister was a fan and got her songbook, and one way and another I picked up quite a few things from her repertoire. This is the one I remember singing with Perian — she sang the verses, and I echoed her lines on the chorus: “And only say (and only say) that you’ll be mine (that you’ll be mine)…

I later heard it by the Monroe Brothers and the Stanley Brothers, whose music is more to my taste, and I would have said I now did the Stanleys’ version — but listening back I find I still pretty much sing Baez’s verses. I don’t recall singing this with anyone but Perian and that was almost forty years ago, but I still hear her voice and miss chiming in with her on the choruses.

I was born in 1959, so I missed the height of the “Great Folk Scare,” and by the time I was a teenager this music was very much out of fashion. I suppose, in retrospect, that may have been part of its appeal to me, but in any case I was living in my own musical world and felt completely out of sync with what was on the radio — in fact, I tended to have no idea what was on the radio, since my parents only listened to news and I didn’t have one of my own. So this may well be the only song I ever learned after hearing it on the radio.

It was a hit for Arlo Guthrie in 1972, and of course I was ready to be interested in Arlo because of Woody, and it was a good song. I never bought the record, but when Sing Out! published the lyrics and chords, I learned it.

I must have seen that it was composed by Steve Goodman, but the name meant nothing to me — which was true of pretty much everybody outside Chicago when this song hit. I saw him in concert in 1976-77, though, and he was magic. The only thing I remember distinctly was a Supremes medley, which shouldn’t have worked for one little guy on stage with an acoustic guitar, but did — and I’m pretty sure he also played the “Chicken Cordon Blues.” In any case, everything worked, and the songs were terrific and he was very funny.

The story of this song has been told a million times, but to recap: Steve wrote it after taking a trip with his wife to see her grandmother, riding the City of New Orleans, the day train running from Chicago to the title city. (The night train at that point was still the Panama Limited, immortalized by Booker White in the 1930s.) When he got back, a friend mentioned that Amtrak was planning to discontinue the train, so he wrote the song as an elegy — which may have contributed to the fact that a train of this name is still running today (though now it’s the night train). Steve described the lyric as pretty much straight reportage, a list of what he saw out the window, except for the third verse, which he had to make up since he was only going to southern Illinois: “I figured I couldn’t write a song about a train that went 900 miles through the center of the country and stop the song in Mattoon because I was getting off.”

Finally… for young folks who don’t understand that line about “The passengers will please refrain…” I offer Oscar Brand’s version of the widespread and impressively scatological lyric to “Humoresque,” which will clarify this historical lacuna.

I always enjoyed bluegrass, but rarely loved it — the precise and phenomenally fast banjo solos and impeccably close harmonies tend to sound too clean and mechanical for my taste, and it made perfect sense that so many of the bluegrass musicians I met seemed to be expert mechanics or technological wizards of non-musical kinds… But I loved the Greenbriar Boys’ Ragged But Right album. It was partly John Herald’s voice, and the way Ralph Rinzler and Bob Yellin played mandolin and banjo, and partly the exceptionally varied repertoire — bluegrass, and old-time country, but also ragtime and old-time pop tunes — but mostly it was the energy and humor. They were fine musicians, but also sounded like they were having a terrific time and weren’t worrying about getting everything perfect — the title summed it up, as well as being a great song that I later used as my regular opening number when I was playing bar gigs.

Along with the upbeat, ragtimey tracks that first caught my ear, that album had one of the loveliest mountain ballad-blues-type songs I’ve ever heard, called “Roll On, John.” It hadn’t been recorded anywhere else, as far as any of us knew, and although they credited it on the record, a lot of us paid minimal attention and remembered it as possibly original to them. But Ralph Rinzler, along with playing fine mandolin (and, in other situations, banjo and guitar), was a prolific folklorist and researcher — as scout for the Newport Folk Festival, he was instrumental in getting Doc Watson into the folk scene and reviving Bill Monroe’s career, a story told in an excellent interview/bio by Richard Gagné — and he had found this while burrowing in the archives.

It was recorded in 1946 by a singer and guitarist named Palmer Crisp, and seems to be the only song he ever recorded (though he also appears on a half-dozen recordings accompanying a fiddler named Sam Leslie). Even this one was captured more or less by accident, in a long series of sessions Margot Mayo (founder of the American Square Dance Group in New York, and hence of the whole idea of urban square dancing) conducted with his father, Rufus Crisp. A selection of these recordings was finally released by Folkways in 1972, including Palmer’s lone solo venture (mis-credited to Rufus on the Smithsonian/Folkways website), and is still available and well worth hearing. I wish I’d heard it back when I was learning this song, though I’ve got to say the Greenbriar Boys did a fine job.

Interestingly, in her liner notes Mayo points out exactly the thing that seemed strangest to me while singing this song, the way the melody lingers on words like “and,” “to,” and “that.” She writes, “In his singing Palmer holds certain words which are not ordinarily held or stressed in song or poetry. This is typical of genuine mountain folk singing.” Although I’ve been singing old-time music since I was a kid, this felt strange enough that I experimented with other ways to sing the lines — I’ve been on a personal mission to try to stop singing in a southern accent and to rephrase lyrics to fit my own speech, but in this case I decided I should leave it the way it was, and now I’m glad I did.

Josh White was one of my first musical heroes, and when I began to try to play blues, his songs figured prominently in that effort. That was one of the things that endeared me to Dave Van Ronk, who was heavily influenced by Josh’s work — though if memory serves, we didn’t actually get around to discussing Josh until we were already pretty close, since by the mid-1970s his work had generally fallen out of fashion. The 1960s generation of white urban blues fans tended to consider him too slick, and to prefer performers who sounded more rural, or who had had the grace to die back in the 1930s, or — perhaps most significantly — whom their parents hadn’t heard of.

Josh was slick, indeed. His guitar work was smooth and clean, with a vibrato unequaled by anyone this side of Lonnie Johnson; his voice was light and sexy; his diction was immaculate; and he was an expert urban cabaret performer, the model for Harry Belafonte among many others.

As I wrote in his biography, Society Blues, my parents used to have regular arguments about the first time they saw Josh. It was at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and my father always remembered him as an earthy, masculine performer, glistening with sweat as he sang rough blues and work songs. My mother, by contrast, remembered his elegant silk shirt, and the second shirt he changed into during the intermission. They agreed about the sweat, but my mother did not associate it with work songs — like most of Josh’s female admirers, she thought of him as suited to a more intimate environment.

Josh did sing a lot of traditional blues and work songs, but he also sang pop songs, and British ballads, and some unique nightclub confections composed for him by professional Manhattan tunesmiths. According to the liner notes of his 1955 Elektra LP, The Story of John Henry/Ballads, Blues, and Other Songs, the lyrics of “Where Were You Baby” were by someone named Frank Warren — a songwriter of that name is credited with a few other compositions, including one recorded by the Black folksingers Joe and Eddie — and the music was Josh’s own. The notes added, “It has been a favorite of his audiences in recent years; its clever wording is always good for a chuckle and Josh’s unique phrasing milks every line of its full meaning.” To me, it is the perfect encapsulation of the mix of solid blues skills with sexy charm and humor that made him a cabaret star and suited him so perfectly that it seems kind of silly for anyone else to do it…

…but what the hell. I’ve loved this song since I first heard it, and very few people know it (except a coterie of hardcore Don McLean fans), and it’s a great piece of work. It also played a vital part in my musical education, since it was the first song I ever learned that required a diminished chord. (Thankfully I had the Josh White Song Book, or I wouldn’t have known that, and God knows what I would have played instead.)

Like everyone else, I got this from Mississippi John Hurt, and for all any of us knew it was his composition. He sang it in that lovely, gentle voice, evoking a sort of charming “old South” nostalgia, and I thought of it as kind of a companion piece to “Goodnight, Irene.” It was also one of his most basic guitar arrangements, in the key of C, and particularly easy for those of us who already had “Freight Train.” So I learned it early and kept playing it, despite the fact that the lyrics didn’t go very far.

It was probably another twenty years before I heard the original, a ragtime composition published in 1900 by the Danish-born violinist Jens Bodewalt Lampe, and recorded in 1902 by a presumably ad hoc outfit billed as the Edison Concert Band. Lampe’s version had several sections, the second of which is what Hurt played, and Lasse Johansson, who has recorded a lovely guitar arrangement of the full rag, informs me that the original lyric was close to what Hurt sings:

My Creole belle, I love her well,
Around my heart she has cast a spell.
When stars do shine I call her mine,
My dusky baby, My Creole belle.

I always assumed the Creole belle of the title was African American, given Hurt, and ragtime, and this lyric confirms that assumption. But judging by the damsels adorning the cover of the sheet music for the instrumental version of the rag, at least some people thought of the titular belle as Creole in the original American sense of the term, which did not indicate race. In both French and Spanish, the word was used primarily for European-Americans born in the colonies, and only secondarily and by extension for African-Americans born on this side of the Atlantic.

That usage was continued in Louisiana, where Creole meant anyone of French heritage. After the Haitian revolution, thousands of French Creoles immigrated to Louisiana, many of them bringing their slaves and/or servants, who became a sort of in-between class in New Orleans, not white but also not black, and were racially designated as “Creoles of color” to distinguish them from white creoles. In recent decades, the term’s meaning has shifted yet again, being adopted by the African American Francophone population of rural south Louisiana, who were previously just known as black French. In linguistic terms, this shift is confusing, because the black French did not in general come from Haiti, but are descended from people bought as slaves by Francophone planters, and speak their own dialect, which is closer to Cajun French than to the Creole French of black New Orleans.

For a taste of the difference, compare the language of any Francophone zydeco song with a song like “Mo Pas Lemme Ca” (a unique orthography, but that’s what they wrote) on the wonderful Jazz a la Creole session featuring Danny Barker and Albert Nicholas, and sung in Creole French. A simple clue is the use of moi or mwa (or, in the LP orthography, mo) for the active first person singular, which is standard in Haitian Kreyol or New Orleans Creole, whereas a French, Cajun, or Black French speaker of non-Haitian heritage would use je.