I’ve always loved “James Alley Blues.” When I wrote a chapter on the poetry of blues for my short history of blues,  I quoted it in full as an example of the kind of piece that, although perhaps assembled from various “floating” verses,  has “an internal logic that makes it easy to think of them as poems in the most formal, literary sense of the term.” Which is a fancy way of saying it’s one of the most beautiful lyrics I know, in any form.

It was recorded in 1927 by Richard “Rabbit” Brown, a relatively obscure singer from New Orleans, and is named for Jane Alley (locally known as Jane’s or James Alley), the street where Louis Armstrong spent his earliest years, in the area between the uptown red light district a few blocks upriver from Canal Street (not to be confused with the fancier downtown district remembered as “Storyville”) and the railroad depot at the New Basin.The title has led some writers to describe Brown as living and playing in that neighborhood, which may be right, but he was more often remembered for playing around the resorts on Lake Pontchartrain. Ralph Peer, who recorded six songs from him in 1927 recalled that he “sang to his guitar in the streets of New Orleans, and he rowed you out into Lake Pontchartrain for a fee, and sang to you as he rowed.”

Another New Orleans singer, Lemon Nash, apparently knew him, but added little to that biography — and Nash’s recollection that Brown was a lousy guitar player doesn’t square with the recordings, so I’m not sure how accurate his recollections are…. and that’s all we know.

As for Brown’s recordings, they are a mix of doleful ballads about local murders and the sinking of the Titanic, a couple of comic minstrel songs, and this blues. That suggests he was not primarily a blues singer, which makes it all the more striking that his single blues is one of the masterpieces of the genre.

My Songobiography is a collection of songs I remember, performed from memory, and doing it has changed my relationship to my repertoire by forcing me to work out my own variations and fill lyrical holes rather than going back to relearn details from my sources. One result is that I’m sounding more like myself; another is that my versions are not reliable guides to the originals. This guitar part is obviously based on Brown’s, but when I hear Dom Flemons play Brown’s version — which he does beautifully — I realize how much I’ve changed it. And…

…looking back at my old transcription of the lyric, I see that I’ve left out the verse that followed the one about buying groceries and paying rent:

I said if you don’t want me, why don’t you tell me so?
You know, if you don’t want me, why don’t you tell me so?
Because it ain’t like a man that ain’t got nowhere to go.

I love that verse and am surprised it slipped my mind, and I almost went back and re-recorded the video to include it… but it’s a pretty song either way.

Lemon Jefferson was an incredibly varied and idiosyncratic guitarist, and “That Crawling Baby Blues” is without doubt the most idiosyncratic guitar arrangement I’ve ever learned — or at least ever retained — with a lyric to match. As a result, I’ve never performed it in public, but always enjoyed playing and singing it for my own amusement.

I learned it about thirty years ago, when I went through an extended Lemon Jefferson phase, working out a bunch of his arrangements. I hadn’t done that before, because he’s such a powerful singer that I couldn’t see myself doing his songs, but then I got fascinated and couldn’t stop. I recorded my CD towards the end of that period, and included his “Black Horse Blues” — which is also pretty idiosyncratic, but in a different way — and “Bad Luck Blues,” and I’ve since made his “One Dime Blues” a staple of my repertoire, in part because it takes me back to my early love of Woody Guthrie…

…but Jefferson’s other arrangements somehow drifted out of my head. I’m not sure why this one stuck, or how closely it resembles what he recorded, but I love to play and sing it. A big part of the appeal is its oddity and the way the guitar part moves around the voice, sometimes accompanying, sometimes answering or contrasting, and sometimes just kind of going its own way.

Unlike virtually all other vernacular musicians, whose arrangements come out of what feels natural to them and form a kind of personal language that makes increasing sense as one learns to speak it, Jefferson had a bunch of different approaches that don’t fit neatly together, and then would come up with something like this, which is gloriously quirky. I tend to think that quirkiness was unique to him, but it may also have  been a regional characteristic — he was based around Dallas, Texas, and Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the blues musicians he heard around that area “would sing spasmodic blues: play for a while, pick a while and every now and then say a word.”

Morton disapproved, and it’s not a style that would easily adapt to a band framework — which is one reason it didn’t have a significant influence on later electric styles — but it’s a lot of fun to play and sing.

Incidentally, I never could figure out what he was singing in the first verse, so came up with something kind of like it that made some sense to me. And the fourth verse is a nice example of blues adapting lyrics from Victorian parlor poetry: Jefferson’s line is a paraphrase of “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” the repeated tag-line of an immensely popular poem from 1865 by the Scottish-American poet William Ross Wallace. That kind of material was very common in Black as well as white culture, in the days when poetic recitation was still a standard performance art, but I’m not aware of any other examples being adapted this directly for a blues lyric. Again, Jefferson was unique and brilliant

I’ve been playing Lemon Jefferson’s “Bad Luck Blues” for at least thirty years, and recorded it on my Street Corner Cowboys CD, but it wasn’t until maybe seven years ago that I figured out the opening lick. The clue was a bass note he doesn’t play — the dog that didn’t bark in the night — which tipped me off that he wasn’t just holding C chord, but was jumping it up a couple of frets.

It’s a cool trick, and I would have posted this much sooner, but delayed for a couple of reasons. One was that I used the basic arrangement for another post, “Keep It Clean,” and didn’t want to repeat it, but I was also dogged by a memory from the CD recording session.

I recorded the CD in a couple of days, in my parents’ living room, with three of my favorite musicians: Washtub Robbie Phillips on one-string bass, Matt Leavenworth on fiddle and mandolin, and Paul Geremia on harmonica. Geremia is one of my longtime heroes, and I was thrilled to have him there, and he seemed to enjoy the session and played some terrific harmonica on another Lemon Jefferson song, “Black Horse Blues…”

…and then I played this one for them, so they could work out their parts, and Paul said, “Why do you play it so square? You do all that African stuff — why not play it more like that?”

What could I say? He was Paul Geremia, and undoubtedly could play Jefferson’s version better than I will ever play it, and I would have done pretty much anything he suggested. Plus, it was the end of the session, we were all tired, and it made sense to shake things up a little. So I played a version of “Bad Luck Blues” that is a sort of half-assed rumba, and everyone found parts, and we recorded it, and I have no regrets…

…but I never played it that way again, and when I fool around with that version, it just doesn’t excite me. So I went back to the four-square Jefferson arrangement, and began playing it again, and instead of trying to get into the heartache of the lyrics, I double down on the humor of the spoken asides, which seem to be kind of kidding the seriousness.

And, on that subject, about my shirt: it’s one of my crazier cowboy shirts, with a kind of harlequin pattern set off by a southwestern pattern, complete with saguaro cacti, which fits Jefferson’s Texas connection… and you can’t really see it in the video, but I’ve worn both elbows ragged, which fits the opening and closing verse about not having “sufficient clothes.” (And, for the Dylan fans out there: he copped that phrase for a verse of “He Was a Friend of Mine,” singing “Never had no money, for sufficient clothes” — one of many Dylan borrowings from old-time blues singers.)

And, speaking of the lyrics… while I was preparing for the CD recording session, it struck me that I don’t say “I ain’t got,” except when I’m kidding around with accents. I’m a school-educated white guy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I say “I don’t have…” which has exactly the same number of syllables. So where Jefferson sang “I ain’t got sufficient clothes,” I started singing “I don’t have sufficient clothes,” and for a while it felt weird — which in itself should have been a sign, because it shouldn’t feel weirder to talk like myself than like a Black Texan in 1927… and that was the beginning of an ongoing project to try to lose the various fake accents I’d picked up from old records, and try to sing in my own voice, like Jefferson and the other people I admired sang in their own voices. That’s still a work in progress, but by now it feels normal to sing “don’t have” in this song, and would feel weird to sing “ain’t got.”

And, finally… after posting this, someone queried me on YouTube, asking why I sing a completely different melody than Jefferson sang. The answer, for better or worse, is that this project is about the songs I have in my head, and I hadn’t realized that over the years I had lost his melody and found another. I’ve just gone back and listened to his version, which is lovely and very different from what I remembered.

I can’t remember when or where I learned “After You’ve Gone,” but I’m pretty sure I played it when I worked the restaurants in Antwerp with Nick Boons (which I’ve written about in a previous post). We would have just played the chorus, and I picked up the verse more recently, probably from the redoubtable Martin Grosswendt. He sang it, but I just play it and sing the chorus.

One more thing about the verse — there is an F to Bb change in the third bar of the second half, and I was having trouble figuring out a comfortable way to play the melody over it… and then realized I could get it easily by using the Gary Davis D to G move I explained in my previous post about “You Got to Move” — Davis is like a school for how to play ragtime and tin pan alley tunes on guitar.

“After You’ve Gone” was published in 1918, part of a new wave of pop material written by Black songwriters — in this case the team of Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, who also wrote “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” and a hit about the first national blues craze, “Everybody’s Crazy ‘Bout the Doggone Blues (But I’m Happy).” Creamer later teamed up with the Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, and produced “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight).”

Layton meanwhile went to London, where he teamed up with Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone and became one of the most popular cabaret and recording teams in the UK, making dozens of records — including a couple that are additionally interesting for including the only recorded solos by Joseph Kekuku, the inventor of the Hawaiian steel guitar style. (Tip of the hat to Bernard MacMahon, who discovered those and presented them in the documentary series American Epic, for which I wrote the accompanying book.) Johnstone returned to the US in the 1920s, but Layton remained a favorite of London audiences until his death in the 1940s.

Like “Some of These Days,” a composition from eight years earlier, likewise by a Black songwriter and popularized by Sophie Tucker, “After You’ve Gone” is a classic kiss-off ballad, on the theme “you broke my heart and you’ll be sorry,” and I’m tempted to think it was written to capitalize on the earlier hit, but that’s just a guess. In any case, it’s a fun one to play and sing.

Reverend Gary Davis has always been at the top of my list of guitar heroes and influences, along with Mississippi John Hurt, Dave Van Ronk, Joseph Spence, and Jean-Bosco Mwenda. I’ve gone through a couple of periods of immersion in his playing, but don’t tend to perform my favorite arrangements, because he was a gospel singer and I’m an atheist, so most of his lyrics don’t work for me.

Up to now, I’ve gotten around that in various ways: posting a couple of his instrumentals, “Cincinnati Flow Rag” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl and Playing Guitar at the Same Time“; and a couple of his secular songs, “Candyman” and “Cocaine Blues” (though the latter really owes more to Dave Van Ronk);  and his terrific version of “Samson and Delilah,” which is a story rather than a testimony; and sneaking in a couple of his more explicitly religious songs as a gospel instrumental medley — but this one is a straightforward religious admonition…

…which, nonetheless, I love to play and sing, mostly because it’s showy and a lot of fun. My father never understood my musical tastes and choices — he was generally supportive of my ambition to be a professional singer and player, but his typical response to my shows was to suggest I should try to be more like Pete Seeger — but when he heard me play this at a gig, he came up afterwards and asked how I made the guitar talk. Honestly, that’s not the hard part of the arrangement, but it’s definitely one of the fun parts, and it felt good that he was impressed.

So there’s that, and then a couple of years ago I was thinking about Davis’s chording, which, as noted in a previous post, is a master class in economy of motion, and realized how he was playing the D to G shift that forms the basic background to the first line. (If you don’t play guitar, skip ahead; if you do, check this out.) His basic D shape, which he moved all over the neck, was a barre on the first three strings at the 2nd fret,with his thumb holding down the sixth string, his middle finger on the second string, 3rd fret, and his ring finger getting the fourth string, 4th fret… and he goes from that to the G by just sliding the whole thing up one fret and shifting his middle finger to the third string.

That’s such a beautiful move that it brought the song back into my repertoire — not for performances, but for my own pleasure. And since this project is about the music that lives in my head, here it is. Hope you have half as much fun watching it as I have playing it… and check out Davis’s original, which is a whole ‘nother thing. He was the best.

I’ve heard so many people do beautiful versions of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that I never felt a need to perform it myself. I’ve known it forever, and sometimes sang it for my own pleasure, but there is no way I was going to even approach the haunted power of Hank Williams’s original — kind of the same problem I have with some Townes Van Zandt songs.

I’ve heard great versions that didn’t have that degree of pain — in particular, I heard Little Richard sing it three times within two weeks, and every time was different and memorable: once, he played it by himself at the piano; once, he called over his guitarist to sit with him on the piano stool, and just sang it with the guitar; once he had the whole band shaping a soulful background. The band never knew how he would do it on a given night, and it was always fresh and brilliant.

Anyway, since this project is about the songs in my head, I’ve been thinking about posting a version of this one for years, but never came up with an arrangement that felt like it was anything but a pale imitation of Hank or other people. Then, this summer, I set myself the project of keeping my guitar in open G for two months and working on slide. It’s mostly been blues, but I was inspired by a piece I was writing about my friend Steve James, and he had some nice licks in which slide lines flowed into fingered notes, and I was fooling around with some of those and at some point found myself playing the first part of this arrangement.

That was the beginning, and then I began hearing little programmatic things I could do behind or around the lyrics. A lot of white rural music (and more Black rural music than is often acknowledged) was influenced by 19th century concert and “parlor” guitar playing, and if you go through the old guitar books, there are a lot of pieces that use programmatic effects: harmonics for church bells, bass rolls to imitate galloping horses, sliding notes with a notation saying “like a distant bugle…”

These days that sort of thing is considered corny, but as Ray Charles said about his ABC concept albums, “Corny? Hell, yes, but I’m a corny cat.” So I use the slide to play the whining train, the falling leaves, the falling star…

…and in some ways the result is more amusing than soulful, but it freed me up to sing the lyric more comfortably than I ever sang it when I was trying to summon existential pain — maybe because the pain was never genuine, but the amusement is. As Bob Dylan said, the problem with a lot of young blues singers is they’re trying to get into the blues, but the old guys were singing to get out of the blues.

I still know a lot of Hank Williams songs I’m not posting, but after figuring out how to do this, and a version of “You Win Again” that mixes influences from Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, I’m hoping the others will eventually come around.

I worked this one up when I wrote Riding with Strangers, because it was an obvious choice for someone who had written a book about Robert Johnson and now was doing a tour centered on hitchhiking. I didn’t do a lot of playing on that tour, but for five dates in Idaho I was traveling with Rosalie Sorrels, who with incredible generosity added her name and voice to my presentations, trading songs and doing the driving.

There’s a funny story about that: since I’d written a book about how much I enjoyed that form of travel, I figured I had to live the part, so I hitched from the first date, in Portland, Oregon, to the last one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rosalie lived way up in the mountains above Boise, down a dirt road, and I’d been wondering how I’d get past Boise and up to her place… which wasn’t made easier when a driver dropped me off on the highway west of town… and then a taxi pulled over.

The driver was a young woman, and it turned out that she was off work and just driving around because it was a beautiful day, and damned if she didn’t take me all the way up into the mountains and down the dirt road to Rosalie’s cabin. So I showed up in a taxi, and Rosalie came out, ready to tease me for chickening out and paying for the ride… and, long story short, the driver came in for a drink, we had a lovely evening, and Rosalie told that story at every stop on the tour.

I hadn’t performed “Cross Road Blues” before that, because so many other people played it, but worked up a version for that tour and tailored it to fit my own experience. I didn’t change much, in terms of the lyrics, but obviously my attitude and experiences as a white guy hitchhiking in the  twenty-first centuries were different from what inspired Robert Johnson to compose the song as a Black man in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta.

Before I get to that, though: Johnson’s song is about being stuck at a crossroads in rural Mississippi, trying to “flag a ride,” not about selling his soul to the Devil. Samuel Charters had another theory: that it was about a crisis of faith, with Johnson at life’s crossroads, calling on the Lord to save him — and it’s true that he starts with the verse about falling on his knees and praying, which supports Sam’s interpretation. But there is also a verse where he calls on his friend Willie Brown (a terrific guitarist, who I’ve covered in my post about “Future Blues“) and the one about wishing his girlfriend knew he was out there.

So I can see Sam’s interpretation, but I still hear it as a song about hitchhiking, and I sing the verse about falling on my knees after the one about flagging ride, remembering a couple of times when, despite being a lifelong atheist, I waited so long on a hot day, with no water and night falling, that I did get on my knees and pray. Those moments were brief and I was laughing at myself, even while I hoped the gesture might change my luck and certainly couldn’t hurt it.

Johnson’s situation was a lot less funny. That verse about the sun going down — if I got stuck on the road at night, the worst that could happen was I’d be cold and miserable for a few hours, but Mississippi was full of “sundown towns,” where Black people could be jailed if they were found after dark… if someone wasn’t mean or drunk enough to kill them.

So I sing a lot of the same words, but they have a very different feel. I’m also playing a different guitar part, because this is a project about memory, and even the parts I thought I remembered from his playing seem to have evolved into other licks.

So it’s still his song, but when I sing it I’m picturing my own experiences — which makes a lot more sense than trying to pretend, even for a minute, that I’m Robert Johnson.

(Though I generally try to reshape them to fit my own style and abilities, I’ve reworked a few other Johnson songs and written about them in previous posts: “Traveling Riverside Blues (Rolling and Tumbling),” “From Four Until Late,” and “Walking Blues.”)

To me, Son House will always be the defining Delta blues musician, and in some ways the defining blues musician, period. That is partly a statement about his talents and partly about when I heard him and how he affected me, personally.

Like most people who were around in the 1960s and not fortunate enough to hear him live, I was introduced to House by the album he recorded for Columbia Records in 1965. The odd thing about that record, for me, is that although House was an excellent lyricist and the songs were largely his own, the tracks that captured my imagination were an old gospel song, “Don’t You Mind People Grinning In Your Face,” which he sang a cappella, and this regional standard, which John Hurt and Furry Lewis recorded as “Pera Lee.”

This seemed to me to perfectly capture what made House’s slide playing unique — his uncanny control of pitch, dynamics, and nuance. When I was in Lahore, Pakistan, and my host, who had a home recording studio and a superlative collection of recorded ragas by masters of the North Indian classical style, commented that he didn’t understand why Western musicians had so little interest in tone, I played him House’s recording of “Pearline” (this was long before the internet, but I had a cassette with a bunch of my favorite blues recordings), and he was amazed.

There was much more to House than that. I didn’t understand until I saw him on videos — and I’m sure some people who saw him live will say the videos still don’t have it — but he is the only blues artist I have ever seen who truly seems possessed by the music, the way people are possessed by the spirit in African and African diaspora religious traditions. I don’t know how else to say that or to describe the transformation that seems to take place, and the spiritual depth of his greatest performances — and it is surely relevant that he was a preacher before he began playing guitar, and left the church for the music.

When historians trace the lineage of Delta blues, they tend to make Charlie Patton the trunk and source of the style, with a good deal of justification. Patton had a unique rhythmic power and complexity, and a couple of core tunes that were adopted by all the players who came in contact with him. (I’ve posted my take on Tommy Johnson’s “Bye and Bye,” a version of Patton’s “Pony Blues,” and House and Willie Brown’s “Future Blues” or “Jinx Blues,” another Patton standard.) But for a lot of us the defining Delta sound is the slide style adopted by Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and Patton didn’t play like that: that was Son House. I gather he said he picked up the rudiments from another guitarist, Rube Lacey, but none of Lacy’s recordings suggest he had anything like the subtlety, inventiveness, and power of House’s best work.

To me, no one did. Robert Johnson made some superb recordings in House’s style — I’ve posted about his “Walking Blues,” which is taken directly from House, who used the same guitar part for several songs, and also sang many of the same verses. In Escaping the Delta, I put forward the theory that this was Johnson’s original, root style; that he first went into the studio  planning to record some potential hits in the more recent, urban styles of Leroy Carr, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Casey Bill Weldon, but ran out of his prepared tunes, so on the last day recorded a bunch of songs from House — and that those recordings are his most fervent, ferocious performances, because House was a far more passionate model than the current hitmakers. House was also a stronger singer than Johnson; he was one of the greatest singers ever in the blues tradition, with a wildness in his voice that left its mark on Johnson and Muddy Waters, but which neither — to my ears — ever matched. (They had other strengths; I’m not saying House was better; but when they sound most like him, they fall short of what he could do.)

Anyway… I especially loved House’s recording of “Pearline,” but it never would have occurred to me to perform a version of it, because, again, what I love about it is his uncanny control of pitch, dynamics, nuance, which I have never heard equaled and can’t come close to myself (especially when it comes to pitch) — and his voice, and his depth and power. But this Songobiography project is about what has affected me, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve loved. I mostly try to rework pieces in my own way, to personalize them and come up with arrangements that show my strengths… but in this case, I’m just remembering and paying tribute.

I generally stay away from open tunings, partly because I have enough trouble keeping a guitar in tune in one tuning… but a lot of my favorite guitarists liked them, and they have a deep history in southern Black culture. In previous posts I wrote and talked about the way some early Black guitarists took banjo tunings and techniques and put them on guitar, demonstrating with Furry Lewis’s “Casey Jones” and Lead Belly’s “Poor Howard.” This is another example, from John Hurt, fitted with his lovely variant of the “Frankie and Albert” ballad.

I’ve already posted a more typical version of “Frankie and Johnny” — the white folk/pop variant of that ballad, and also written about the underlying story and its reinvention in my book, “Jelly Roll Blues.” Unlike other Black southern ballads from the same period (“Stackolee,” “Duncan and Brady,” “Delia,” “Louis Collins”) the Frankie and Albert ballads have virtually no overlap with the historical killing: Frankie Baker didn’t go out looking for Allen Britt, the man she shot, nor did she shoot him over another woman. He came home late one night, found her in a bed in the front room rather than the back room they normally shared, got angry and tried to cut her with a knife, and she shot him in self-defense.

Before I learned that story, I understood Hurt’s penultimate verse to end with a malapropism: I thought that when he sang “The judge said, ‘Miss Frankie, you’re gonna be justified’,” he meant she was going to be judged guilty, which is the usual ending in the Frankie ballads. Hurt may indeed have meant it that way, but in fact the judge did rule that she was justified. As she later recalled:

“I simply had protected myself.… You know, I was afraid of Albert. He beat me unmercifully a few nights before the big-blow-off. My eye was festered and sore from that lacin’ when I went before Judge Clark. He noticed it, too.…The judge even gave me back my gun. Don’t know what I did with it. Guess I pawned it or gave it away. Everybody carried a gun in those days.”

Hurt’s original recording of this piece, in 1928, is one of the technical oddities of that era: the song was too long to fit on one side of a 78 rpm disc, and rather than editing it to be shorter, the engineers slowed down the machine to get his full version — so the recording played back significantly faster than he performed it, and pitched two full tones higher.

As it happens, the higher key also felt more comfortable for my voice, so I’ve tended to play this song capoed on the fourth fret — but I’ve recently been traveling with a little guitar from the 1940s that is set up for slide and sounds much better open than capoed. That felt a little uncomfortable at first, in terms of the singing, but it struck me that Hurt didn’t have a significantly deeper voice than I have; he was just much more relaxed. So I’ve be trying to relax my voice and sing it where he sang it, and likewise to play his basic arrangement throughout, rather than trying to come up with interesting variations for the instrumental breaks — not to be more “authentic” or to imitate him more exactly, but because it sounds better this way.

I’m not going to say one can never improve on John Hurt, or come up with interesting variants of his arrangements. I’ve posted a lot of his songs here,* and on most of them I’ve added my own variations. But this one feels right to me the way it is, and the more I play it, the more convinced I am that this is the way I want to keep doing it.

*Previous John Hurt posts include: “Monday Morning Blues,” “Satisfied and Tickled Too,” “Coffee Blues,” “Candyman,” “Stagolee,” “Louis Collins,” “Ain’t No Telling (Pallet on the Floor),” “Got the Blues, Can’t Be Satisfied,” “Richlands Women,” “See See Rider,” “Spike Driver’s Blues,” “My Creole Belle,” and “Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me.”