Once I got into Dylan, I fell hard, not only for his songwriting, but for his singing and guitar playing, and I’ve got to say that even his oft-disparaged harmonica style is pretty damn effective most of the time. In fact, I’m one of those odd people who tends to like him, in his early New York period, even more for the sound than for the writing — at least, I’d rather hear Dylan sing “Freight Train Blues” or “Pretty Peggy-O” than hear most other people sing Dylan songs.

Like all the other folkies I know, I’ve sung plenty of Dylan songs myself over the years, and still know at least a half dozen of them all the way through. In general, though, they are the earlier, simpler ones, like “Don’t Think Twice” and “Hollis Brown,” rather than the more abstract poetic ones like “It’s All Right Ma” — not because I prefer listening to the earlier ones (my favorite Dylan discs are Bringing It All Back Home  and  Highway 61), but because although I’m pretty good at learning and remembering lyrics, I never managed to memorized all the verses to more than a couple of the long, poetic epics.

Fortunately, there were also some shorter and less epic lyrics in that period, and this one captured my imagination the first time I heard it and has held on ever since. For one thing, the tune is lovely. For another, the first two verses are some of the cleanest writing he did in his first surrealist poet phase. I tend to agree with Van Ronk that Dylan was too brilliant for his time and place, with the result that people praised his mediocre lines as fervently as his great ones and he didn’t bother to edit or rewrite some lines that could have been improved by editing or rewriting. For example, in this one, “The cloak and dagger dangles/Madams light the candles…” Really? How does a cloak and dagger dangle, and what would that mean, and what does it have to do with the madams and candles, and–since it’s just word salad –why not find a better rhyme?

On the other hand, if I could have written those first two verses, or the best lines in the next two, I might have been so happy I would have ignored my clunkers as well…

That’s me being a critic, which is not my favorite role, especially when it comes to this song. My favorite role when it comes to this song is singing it — mostly to myself, because I usually figure the world doesn’t need another person singing Dylan, but if I’m going to put my favorite songs up here, this one needs to be be included.

Incidentally, I have always heard the final line about the raven as an homage to Edgar Allen Poe, whom I enjoy a lot more than Arthur Rimbaud — which may mean I’m an archaic philistine and all the above opinions can be profitably ignored.

If this wasn’t the first Dylan song I learned, it was close. I got into Dylan late — I’m probably one of the few kids of my generation who was a Woody Guthrie nut before I ever heard, or even heard of, Bob Dylan, and I clearly remember the first time I heard him, at least knowingly: It was in Woods Hole, and my father brought home Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and put it on, and we listened to “Rainy Day Women,” and I thought it was lousy. I said, “He’s a terrible singer!” My dad said, “But you like Woody Guthrie…” and I said, “Woody Guthrie’s a great singer! He doesn’t sound anything like Woody Guthrie.”

I was probably nine or ten years old, and soon changed my tune, and over the next few years I learned a lot of Dylan’s — and yes, before some smart-aleck chimes in, he did come up with some original tunes, though he also copped quite a few from hither and yon, including much of this one. He adapted “Don’t Think Twice” from a song compiled and reworked by Paul Clayton, called, “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone” — which it took me years to track down, but now is on YouTube. Dylan’s song is better, by a long shot, but the lineage is obvious, and  Dylan eventually paid Clayton something for it.

That story gets more complicated, because Clayton himself had adapted the song from earlier sources, mining a song called “Who Gon Bring You Chickens,” and Dylan’s transformation was shortly transformed yet again by Johnny Cash, into one of his biggest hits of the 1960s, “Understand Your Man” — and when that song hit the Top 40 in 1964, Dylan and Clayton were driving out to California together, apparently the best of friends.

Dylan is quoted in the liner notes to Freewheelin’ saying he approached this song differently from “most city singers” (presumably starting with Peter, Paul, and Mary): “A lot of people…make it sort of a love song — slow and easy-going. But it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better.” Indeed, it is one of his numerous bitter songs to ex- or soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends, a theme he apparently found particularly inspirational. I’ve tended to like my ex-girlfriends, and find the lyric kind of snarky if I think about it too much… but it’s so well written that mostly I just try to do it justice.

There’s one story I have to add out of courtesy to my old traveling partner Jasper Winn, a fine writer and musician, epic traveler, terrific horseman, and author of Paddle, about making the circuit of Ireland by kayak. We were hitchhiking from Paris to the North Cape of Norway in 1979, and somewhere around Copenhagen we got in an argument about the chords under the second line of this song: Jasper said it went G-Em-A-D7, while I said it went G-Em-C-D7, like the first line. We made a bet, to be settled by the Bob Dylan Song Book, which was where we’d both learned to play it, and found a copy somewhere, and of course I was wrong… and should have paid up promptly, in cash, but instead eventually gave Jasper an old backpack of mine, which really was not equivalent to what I owed, and my shame is deep and eternal.

In retrospect it’s pretty funny how much of my early exposure to old-time country music was through the Holy Modal Rounders — but the more I think about it, the more right it feels. I appreciate the expertise of the New Lost City Ramblers, and enjoyed the technical brilliance of the bluegrass bands, but the old-time performers I most enjoy on record are the wild, fun ones like Uncle Dave Macon and Charlie Poole, and no one in the revival captured that flavor better than the Rounders, weirdness and all. (If Charlie Poole had turned up in Greenwich Village, you think he wouldn’t have sampled the full range of available drugs? He sure sampled everything that came his way in his short and gaudy life down south…)

The Rounders obviously got this one from Poole, and aside from some lyric changes they stayed pretty close to the version he cut with the North Carolina Ramblers. Poole’s records with the Ramblers are by far my favorite body of work in the early string band genre — he’s a great singer, their playing is always inventive and exciting, with great rhythmic drive, and the songs range from fiddle tunes to blues, pop, and whatever else caught their fancy. I first fell for Poole as a blues singer, and still think he was one of the greats in that category, but the more I listen to him, the more I appreciate the way he could make virtually any kind of material his own.

For example… “Moving Day,” which was a ragtime-era pop song by Andrew Sterling and Harry Von Tilzer, the latter an impressively prolific composer who first crossed my radar as the author of German-American novelty waltzes, notably “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows” and “Under the Anheuser Busch.” Sterling and Von Tilzer wrote “Moving Day” as a comical “coon song,” and the original version included a verse in which the protagonist tries to buy the landlord off with a chicken stew made from hens he has stolen from the same landlord… none of which turns up in the Poole version, or the Rounders’, or mine.

Incidentally, my buddy Del Rey recently filmed a charmingly ridiculous music video for her version of this song, in old silent movie style, playing all the characters and a daunting guitar arrangement. I stay at Del’s when I’m in Seattle, and am chilled to even briefly imagine her being evicted… so let’s hope life never replicates art.

Yet another I got from the Holy Modal Rounders, though somewhat amended after listening to their source, Prince Albert Hunt, a Texas fiddler, guitarist, and legendary hell-raiser who recorded it in 1928. I still go back and forth between his first verse and theirs:

Rounders:
Blues in the bottle, blues in the bottle,
Where do you think you’re at…
You went and kicked my dog, and now you drown my cat

Hunt:
Blues in the bottle, blues in the bottle
Stopper’s in my hand…
I’m goin’ back to Fort Worth, find me another man.
(except I alter that line to fit my cis-gender norm)

This was one of the first two songs I heard by the Rounders, along with “Euphoria,” on a Fantasy Records blues sampler. In retrospect, I’m kind of startled that they were included, since the rest of the company ranged from Dave Van Ronk and Tom Rush to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Witherspoon, with nary a fiddle or banjo in sight — it made more sense (or at least was differently weird) to find them marketed in similar company on a Prestige collection of “psychedelic hits”– but I’m glad in any case, because I’m not sure I would have heard them otherwise. They were always kind of a cult thing, and it wasn’t really my cult, except that I loved them, and still do.

Incidentally, I’m told that the first time anyone used the word “psychedelic” in a song was the Rounders’ in their version of “Hesitation Blues.” Which, if you haven’t heard it, is just a click away.

I had long been content to worship the Rounders from afar, and then, a few years ago, Peter Stampfel (voice, fiddle, banjo, and songwriter — the other guy, on guitar and voice, is Steve Weber) emailed me out of the blue to come in as a ringer and play guitar for his Ether Frolic Mob at the Jalopy in Brooklyn. I’ve never been so honored and pleased before or since, and insisted on going to New York a day early so we could rehearse –which, for me, was mostly just the opportunity to spend some time and play some music with one of my heroes. And we became friends, and he was one of the key sources for my recent Dylan book, and he’s one of the most brilliant and charming folks I’ve ever met, and he keeps making album after album… and long may he wave.

P.S. The guitar and setting for my accompanying video are thanks to the wonderful Del Rey, my host on a recent trip to Seattle, and a friend of hers who left that lovely Gibson with her for safe keeping. If you don’t know Del’s work, check her out — the master of boogie woogie guitar, and lots of other styles, the queen of the ukulele, and the star and soundtrack artist of a new silent comedy video of “Moving Day.”

My uncle Sascha was a lefty lawyer in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s — he was the lawyer in the field with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and also Huey Newton’s contact with the outside world from prison — but by the time I was old enough to be aware of his activities he had ceased practicing law, and figured in my personal life mostly as a cool uncle who gave me some of the records that have most influenced the course of my life. He had been close to Lenny Bruce, and made sure I knew Lenny’s oeuvre, and he had gone to college or law school with a couple of the top people at Fantasy Records, and one year gave me a promotional sampler of their new series of “two-fer” blues releases, compiled from the old Prestige catalog. He knew I was getting into blues, and that set had two cuts each by some of the greatest: Furry Lewis, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Rev. Gary Davis, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — but what changed my life was hearing Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, and the Holy Modal Rounders. They had two songs each, and I still can play all six. My notion of blues up till then was some Josh White 78s and my half-brother Dave’s records, which were people like Skip James and Booker White — all terrific, but much less accessible for a white kid from Cambridge who had started out with Pete, Woody, and Cisco.

Of all the artists on that set, I’m guessing it was the Rounders who first captured my imagination, because they were just so WEIRD. Especially “Euphoria,” which was unlike anything I’d ever heard — it sounded like Charlie Poole on methedrine, except at that point I’d never heard of methedrine, or of Charlie Poole. I was thirteen years old, which is kind of a perfect age to discover the Rounders, and I fell hard, quickly learning this and “Blues In the Bottle.” Then my uncle was kind enough to follow up with the Fantasy double-LP set comprising their two first albums, and I picked up several more songs off that.

I only got to see the Rounders — the original duo, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber — once, around 2000, and it was one of the most bizarre and fascinating shows I’ve ever attended. They had briefly reformed and were squabbling constantly between songs, but they were playing and singing great, and the (small) audience was riveted through a two hour show.

I wouldn’t bet on any future Rounders gigs, but Peter is busier than ever, playing constantly and releasing new albums at a dazzling rate. If you don’t know his work, I still recommend starting with the Rounders, but for two later masterpieces I’d suggest “Impossible Groove,” a track with the Bottle Caps on which he raps a Robert Service poem, and his immortal version of “Goldfinger” with clawhammer banjo and tuba. And if you can see him live, don’t think twice, just go.

Blues at Newport was one of my life-changing albums. I don’t remember how or why I bought it (or got my mom to buy it for me), but it was Dave Van Ronk’s version of “That’ll Never Happen No More” on that set, more than his version of “Cocaine” on a Fantasy sampler, that persuaded me to persuade my mom to go see him in concert. Neither recording had captured my imagination on first hearing, but when I saw the poster for the gig I recognized the name and went home and listened, and that was enough to send us to the concert that changed my life.

The tracks on that album that did capture my imagination immediately were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee doing “Key to the Highway,” and in particular John Hammond’s performance of “No Money Down.” I don’t think I was yet aware of Chuck Berry, and certainly hadn’t heard his version of that particular song — and when I did, it took a while for me to accept it, because my first reaction was that it was too perky and didn’t have the guts of Hammond’s. I’ve revised that opinion over the years, but there’s still more Hammond than Berry in the way I do this.

“No Money Down” is an interesting example of a self-penned follow-up or “answer song”: Berry had hit with “Maybellene,” in which his little Ford was “motorvating” over the hill and won a race with a Cadillac Coupe de Ville driven by the title lady. But rather than being true to his Ford (never mind the lady), in his follow-up he’s motorvating back into town and jumps at the opportunity to trade up.

Musically, this was one of the many offshoots of Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Written by Willie Dixon, that song started a wave of comically exaggerated blues songs using versions of Muddy’s trademark riff.  Ray Charles had “It Should’ve Been Me,” the Robins/Coasters had “Riot In Cell Block Number 9” and “Framed,” Ruth Brown had “I Can’t Hear a Word You Say,” and Chuck Berry had this one.

Incidentally, Hammond changed “Murphy bed” to “roll-away bed,” apparently to be more up-to-date, and I went back to the original because I thought it was charmingly archaic (my only experience of a Murphy bed being the site of Britt Eklund’s downfall in The Night they Raided Minsky’s) — but now that we’re in a new age of chic urban living, I find Murphy beds are advertised everywhere from Costco to Ikea.

There are a few things in my past I look back on with shame, and one is that I was such a wrongheaded pseudo-folk-purist that it took the Kweskin Jug Band’s version of “Memphis” to make me realize the song might be appropriate material for a serious young folksinger like myself. Admittedly I was only about twelve years old, but still…

I’m pretty sure I’d heard Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade by the time I heard the Kweskin version, and I know I always liked Berry’s version better that the Jug Band’s, which frankly was not one of their stronger performances. But I thought of  Berry as playing teen oldies music — better than the Monkees, but still closer to them than to someone like Skip James or Mississippi John Hurt, or Muddy Waters.

At that point I had no idea that Waters had been an early mentor to Berry, nor had I yet discovered the Rolling Stones, who had helped a lot of my folk-blues revival models make that connection. I was coming to all of this late, and kind of feeling my own way with a hodge-podge of various older friends’ records as guideposts. So on the one hand I was hearing Chuck Berry and enjoying him, and even saw him live when I was eleven or twelve, thanks to an older friend named Bill Clusin — Bill lived in my folks’ house in Woods Hole for a few winters, and it was his copy of Golden Decade that introduced me to the original version of this, and then he took me and my sister to see Berry at Cape Cod Coliseum, which was godawful loud, but great. But on the other hand, the first three Berry songs I learned had — not coincidentally — been recorded by young, white, revivalists: “Memphis” from the Kweskin aggregation, “No Money Down” from John Hammond, and “Too Much Monkey Business” from Tom Rush.

I did grow up, eventually, and we’ll get to “Nadine” and “Promised Land” in later posts. Meanwhile, however wrong my logic, I was at least learning Chuck Berry songs, and soon had the sense to begin accumulating his records as well.

There are some songs I learned back in my youth that make me wonder, in retrospect, what I was thinking when I sang them. I’m sure I knew “Beedle Um Bum” was a euphemism, and had some sense of what the song was about, but I’m also sure I missed some of its juicier implications. In any case, my main interest was having fun and playing the kazoo, for which I’m sure my parents cursed the Kweskin gang occasionally, since I played it with far more exuberance than expertise — and yes, there are more and less expert kazoo players, just as there are more and less expert scat singers… and I was well down on the list, though hard to beat for exuberance.

The Kweskin Jug Band was even harder to beat for exuberance, and is fondly remembered today by a lot of people, but even its fans are often unaware of quite how great and influential it was. I don’t think I fully appreciated it myself until I was in Memphis, talking with Jim Dickinson, who was a seriously heavyweight and knowledgeable musician with deep links to a lot of classic local blues artists (and father to Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars). When he learned I was from Cambridge, he immediately proceeded to wax rhapsodic about the Kweskin band, saying he’d had his own jug band in Memphis around the same time and couldn’t believe how great the Kweskin group sounded: “We’d learned directly from all the old guys, we knew Will Shade and Gus Cannon, and Furry Lewis, and we thought we really had that sound down, but they blew us away — we couldn’t figure out how a bunch of guys from Boston could sound like that!”

Part of it was that although the Kweskinites loved the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers and learned a lot by listening to them, they also listened to a lot of other groups from other places, and a lot of other styles of music, and fed everything they heard through their own musical tastes and skills, and really didn’t sound like any previous group. “Beedle Um Bum,” for example, was not a jug band song — it had been done by one of the various Chicago studio aggregations dubbed the Hokum Boys, in this case consisting of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, who were riding the crest of a wave of upbeat double-entendre numbers they had started a couple of months earlier under their own names with their huge hit, “It’s Tight Like That.” I’m assuming they wrote this one as well, which would mean its lyrical vivacity is due to the nimble pen of Thomas A. Dorsey, remembered as the Father of Gospel Music for composing “Precious Lord,” “I’m Gonna Live the Live I Sing About,” and “Peace in the Valley,” among many Christian favorites, and also for being an early mentor to Mahalia Jackson.

It seems only fair to note that the Kweskin group made a couple of changes to this lyric, including the reference to “southern eel,” but only a couple, and this was far from Dorsey’s raunchiest number. Dorsey lived to be 93 years old and although he did not sing any of this sort of material after he became established as a gospel composer, he was always happy to talk about his days playing piano for Ma Rainey and writing naughty hokum hits, and apparently had no regrets.

I don’t remember exactly when I got Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band’s Greatest Hits!, but I sure remember listening to it, over and over, and over. It was silly and rowdy and fun — or at least those were the songs I liked best, Jim’s goofy features rather than Geoff’s soulful blues (though I loved Geoff and Maria’s “Never Swat a Fly,” and of course Maria’s “I’m a Woman”). There were 24 songs on the two LPs, and at one time or another I played at least half of them.

I later realized that the Kweskinites were also the first performers I can clearly remember seeing in person. It must have been 1964, which would have made me five years old, at a children’s concert in what I remember as a large auditorium of some kind, and the only song I know they played was “The Animal Fair,” with Fritz Richmond doing the part of the elephant on his jug — except Jim tells me that I’ve remembered that wrong and the song was actually Leroy Carr’s “I Carried Water for the Elephant.” Anyway, it was a memorable experience, and jug bands have had a warm spot in my heart ever since.

“Rag, Mama” was one of the first songs I learned after getting their double album, which was appropriate, because it had been Jim’s solo showpiece before he put the jug band together. It was originally recorded by Blind Boy Fuller, and Jim had clearly picked up some of Fuller’s guitar style, but he changed the song a fair amount, adding a scat flourish and dropping Fuller’s repeated chorus, and much as I love Fuller’s work, all Jim’s changes were improvements. Of course, like much of the music of that period, it was sexist as hell, so I dropped it from my repertoire in the 1970s, but I still enjoy the opportunity to pull it out and give it a little run now and then.

One of the greatest records I discovered in the Cambridge Public Library was an album issued on the Riverside label in 1961 and titled American Street Songs. I’m guessing I pulled it out because side two was eight songs by the Reverend Gary Davis. They’d been recorded in 1956, when he was at the peak of his powers, and I still think they may be his greatest recordings. (His 78s from the 1930s have incredible guitar technique, but his voice is very hoarse, and if I had to choose I’d go with the ’50s tracks — though fortunately, I don’t have to choose.) It would be another few years before I could even think of attempting to play Davis’s music, and in any case I was never going to be a gospel singer… but side one had a dozen songs by a singer and guitarist I’d never heard of named Pink Anderson, and they were just my meat.

The Anderson tracks had been recorded in 1950 by Paul Clayton, which caught my eye because Clayton’s own LP of whaling and sailing songs had been one of the first albums I loved as a kid. Clayton was a folklorist and singer with very broad tastes, which made him the perfect person to supervise a Pink Anderson session, since Anderson’s repertoire was wonderfully varied and quirky. He had been a medicine show entertainer and made a few records in the 1920s which typically get filed as blues, but he sang everything that came his way, from country ballads to minstrel comedy, did showy guitar tricks, and told jokes — basically, he was an all-around entertainer, like a lot of the guys who have been typed as bluesmen because they happened to be black and southern and play guitars, and had some blues songs in their repertoires. (Blues scholars tend to describe people like Anderson as “songsters,” but that seems to me like unnecessary jargon — they were versatile singers and musicians, like Louis Armstrong or Gene Autry, or Maybelle Carter, or Pete Seeger, or Dave Van Ronk, or, for better or worse, me.)

I’d never heard “He’s In the Jailhouse Now” before that Pink Anderson record, and learned it immediately. Afterwards, of course, I heard it from lots of other people: Blind Blake, then Jim Jackson, the Memphis Jug Band, and eventually Jimmie Rodgers, who did a very popular version and is often credited as the composer, though at least a half-dozen black performers had recorded it before he did his version in 1928. It sounds like a professionally composed “coon song,” the standard term for ragtime-era songs in the blackface minstrel comedy tradition, of which Anderson had numerous examples in his repertoire, but as far as I know, no one has ever found sheet music predating the Rodgers version.

Incidentally, I’ve messed with the second verse, which was originally about an African American protester representing the “colored sentiment” during an election, and learning the hard way that he should “leave the white folks’ business alone.” I changed that to suit myself, but the original version provides important musical evidence of early voting rights efforts and the longstanding and well-justified cynicism with which a lot of people in the black community viewed efforts to win the right to vote for white politicians who were unlikely to have their interests in mind. As my lyrical changes indicate, I think both the effort and the cynicism are still appropriate, for black voters in particular, but also for everyone else who can’t afford to buy a candidate or an election.