I have never been much interested in “firsts,” but if I had to make a nomination for the first definitive rock ‘n’ roll record, I’d probably go with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” I know all the other contenders and arguments, but in hindsight most were great rhythm and blues records, while Berry’s hit pointed the way of later rock: the guitar-slinging singer-songwriter-auteur of a rollicking rebel vision of male youth roaring down an endless American highway.

More prosaically, it was the first major R&B hit (that is, hit by a Black artist) to “cross over” to the white teen pop charts and dominate them with no significant competition from white covers. There were plenty of white covers, including one by Marty Robbins that made some noise on the C&W charts, but unlike the Pat Boone covers of Little Richard and Fats Domino, they never got traction on the pop scene — and within a few records, Berry’s songs would be hitting quicker and higher on the pop charts than on the racially defined R&B charts.

Another way of saying this is that “Maybellene” was one of the first hits to be thought of specifically as a record rather than a song. The mid-1950s marked a shift from hits that became “standards” — that is, memorable songs, which were originally performed by numerous people and continue to be performed by all kinds of artists, often in varying genres — to “oldies,” records that are distinctive unto themselves. There are dozens of classic versions of “Stardust”; there is only one version of “Maybellene.” (There were plenty of earlier examples that were mainly records, like the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” and the Crows’ “Gee” — but both of those had serious competition from white covers. Berry’s sound was much harder to mimic, since it involved his distinctive voice, his distinctive guitar, and a terrific Chicago blues backing band.)

Which, for anyone who wants to sing and play the song, presents a problem. Berry is one of my all-time favorite songwriters, and I’ve already posted my versions of a bunch of his songs — “No Money Down,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Memphis,” “Nadine,” “Promised Land” — but I know lots more that I haven’t posted because I can’t think of anything even slightly interesting to do with them. I have nothing to add to “Johnny B Goode” or “No Particular Place to Go,” or “Rock and Roll Music,” or…

…until recently, I would have said, “Maybellene.” But, dammit, I wanted to play the song and finally decided to just start playing it regularly and try to find a way to relax into it rather than attempting to recreate the way Berry did it. I wasn’t out to remake or transform the song, just to do it naturally rather than imitatively. And the more I played it, the more I enjoyed it. So here it is.

“Early Morning Blues” was almost certainly the first Blind Blake guitar part I learned, and I learned it not from Blake’s recording, but from Woody Mann’s tablature (a source I’ve cited before)… which leads to a funny story…

…because over and over, decade after decade, I have decided to work on this till I can play it as fast and smooth as Blake, and I practice until I’m happy with it… and then go back and listen to Blake’s recording and find he’s playing much slower than I do. I remember playing it onstage at the Musik Doos in Antwerp, and Etienne, the owner, liked it and bought the Blind Blake record, and played it, and I was shocked at how slow it was…

…and just now, after filming it and checking that I was happy with the result, I thought I should listen to Blake’s version before posting, and once again was shocked at how slow it was.

To be clear, Blake could play faster and smoother than I will ever be able to play or have dreamed of playing, but he took his time on this one. Which said, I’m happy with my tempo — this isn’t an exercise in precise recreation, it’s an exercise in seeing how I remember the songs I learned over the course of my life, and this is how I remember this one…

…or more or less how I remember it… because something funny happened when I was filming:

I’ve always ended this by repeating the first verse: “Early this morning, my baby made me sore/ Said, ‘I’m going away to leave you, I won’t be back anymore.” (Actually, Blake sings “ain’t coming back no more,” but I’m trying to sing more like I talk.) Anyway… for some reason, when I was filming, I got to the final verse and ended the first line, “my baby made me mad.” You can see a moment of confusion on my face, because I was happy with how it was going and didn’t want to have to do another take, but “mad” wasn’t going to rhyme with “anymore.”

Fortunately, this is a standard twelve-bar blues, with two repeated lines before the rhyming third, which provides some time to think. That’s what makes blues such a relaxed style for improvising lyrics — a theme I explore in Jelly Roll Blues, because Morton was celebrated in his blues-singing days for improvising verses. And another great thing about blues is the tradition of repurposing folk homilies as song lyrics… so I did, and here it is.

By way of history: this was Blind Blake’s first recording, released in 1926 and backed with “West Coast Blues,” an instrumental that is every bit as smooth and fast as I remember it — I do my best at playing that way on my version of his “Southern Rag,” and don’t think I disgrace myself, but neither do I kid myself that I’ve mastered its subtleties or come close to matching his relaxed virtuosity.  He was a superb player, and one of the first great blues guitar stars, along with Lonnie Johnson and Lemon Jefferson — three very different players, and three of the best.

I learned “Keep Your Hands Off Her” very early, from an LP called Folk Blues Song Fest — I don’t remember when I got that record, but it was early enough that I was undoubtedly attracted more by the inclusion of Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston than the inclusion of Champion Jack Dupree or Arbee Stidham. It was also early enough that I learned a bunch of songs off it: this one, by Lead Belly, stuck with me, but for a while I also picked up “Fan It,” “Hush, Somebody Is Calling Me,” “Beautiful City,” and “Face in the Crowd” — it would be at least another decade before I saw the Andy Griffith movie in which Brownie McGhee played a small part and realized he must have written that last song in hopes of it being used as the title theme. (I hadn’t thought of that song in years, but just ran over it in my mind and still remember the whole thing; I guess I’ll have to put it up here at some point.)

I have a better sense of when I heard “Shake It and Break It,” because I didn’t turn on to Charlie Patton until I started buying the Yazoo reissues during my year of college in 1976-77, but I’m not sure when I learned it. Certainly, the spur for combining them was a workshop on playing in the key of F, conducted by Paul Geremia at the Augusta Heritage Center’s Blues Week in the early 1990s. I’d never thought about F as a good key for blues — but this isn’t really blues, it’s ragtime, and these songs start on a C chord, and for all I know, Patton and Lead Belly thought of them as being in the key of C, if they bothered to think about things like that. Honestly, I don’t know if they both played this in F; I’m relying on Paul and my memory.

Be that as it may, I played them both in F and that gave me my first taste of what a great key it is for ragtime/pop songs — and then I married a clarinet player and got into flat keys, and by now I play dozens of songs in F… and this was where that started.

I don’t remember when I combined these songs, but it’s been a few years, and after I started playing them together and saying I thought they were at some level versions of the same song, someone pointed out that Patton doesn’t actually play the chords I play… but they still feel to me like they fit together.

I also like to think that “Keep Your Hands Off Her” can be understood as a kind of “me too” song — though I admit that’s a bit of a stretch — as well as a “body positivity” song, with that wonderful line: “She’s a heavy-hipped woman with great big legs, walks like she’s walking on soft-boiled eggs.” And, of course, I now consider all the “jelly” references in “Shake It” as part of my Jelly Roll Blues research… but mostly this is just fun to play and sing.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to post “Duncan and Brady,” which I’ve known for at least forty years and recorded on my Street Corner Cowboys CD (which is now available on Bandcamp). I learned my version off Tom Rush and Dave Van Ronk, both of whom seem to have got it from Paul Clayton…

…and that was all I knew until I started working on the “Murder Ballad” chapter of my book, Jelly Roll Blues, at which point things got interesting. Like “Frankie and Johnny” (a.k.a. “Frankie and Albert”) and “Stackolee” (about which I’ve already posted versions learned from John Hurt and Furry Lewis), “Duncan and Brady” was inspired by a real murder in the Black sporting world of St. Louis in the 1890s.

The earliest of the three, it told about the shooting of an Irish immigrant policeman named James Brady by a Black man named William Henry Harrison Duncan in 1890, which made news from coast to coast and led to several years of high-profile trials, retrials, and appeals. The first surviving mention of the ballad–which is also the first printed mention of the Stack Lee ballad–appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1897 and described the key event succinctly:

Brady walked up to the bar,
Showed Duncan his shinin’ star,
Says to Duncan, “You’re under arrest;”
Duncan put a hole in Brady’s breast.

It was actually somewhat more complicated than that: Brady apparently joined another officer named Gaffney in harassing a group of Black men outside a popular saloon, Duncan went into the bar, Brady followed him, and at some point Duncan was hiding behind the bar, Brady was shot, perhaps by Duncan, and Duncan was arrested for Brady’s murder. There followed multiple trials, in which Duncan’s lawyer, Walter M. Farmer, the first Black graduate of Washington University Law School, argued his case in front of the state supreme court and brought an appeal to a justice of the US supreme court.

In the end Duncan was executed, despite an appeal to the governor signed by many prominent citizens. The St. Louis papers covered the story in surprising detail and with surprising sympathy–a final, long article following Duncan’s death described him as “one of the most popular colored men in St. Louis,” and continued:  “He was a sport, a jolly fellow, a swell dresser, a ladies’ favorite, but, above all, he was a magnificent singer. . . . They all say there never was a colored basso like him in town and few in the country who could outclass him.”

I go into the case in more detail in Jelly Roll Blues, and one of my back-burner projects is to do a full article on Duncan, Brady, and the later life of the ballad. For now, suffice it to say that there seem to have been several songs about the incident, one of them apparently penned by Duncan himself, another popular as a street chant against the police, and the third the one I sing here, which survived in multiple variants. W.C. Handy mentioned hearing a version when he first visited St. Louis in the 1890s, Lead Belly had a version,  and there were many others. I sing it roughly as I remember it from Tom Rush, with a couple of added lines I picked up while researching the book.

All of which said, my favorite version might be the one John Koerner performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 — which has nothing to do with the original story, but is a great example of Koerner koernerizing, with Tony Glover on harp, and I don’t understand why no one so far has digitized it and posted it… so I just did, and here it is.

This is a new one in my repertoire, worked up in the course of researching my book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories. I had heard other versions of the song from Lead Belly, who recorded it several times, and Mance Lipscomb, and the Kweskin Jug Band, who did Lead Belly’s version, and I thought of it as a folk-blues-ballad like Stackolee or Frankie and Johnny, or Lipscomb’s “Freddie.” If I’d had to guess, I would have said it came from Texas — the people who recorded it were from there, and Lead Belly told the Lomaxes that the murder happened in Dallas shortly before he got there in the second decade of the twentieth century.

In fact, it happened in New Orleans in 1894 and was widely covered in the local press. According to the stories, Speed was an “Octoroon” sex worker — the term literally meant 1/8 African, but in common parlance tended to mean a very light-skinned Black woman who could potentially pass for white; in the Blue Book guides to the New Orleans red light district, women were labeled with a W for White, C for Colored, O for Octoroon, and J for Jewish.

Her killer, Louis “Bull” Martin, was white and perhaps Latino (the Picayune suggested his last name was a shortening of Martinez), and worked as a bartender in Trauth’s saloon at the Dryades Street market. According to the Picayune, Speed was “an inmate of [madam] Lou Prout’s establishment at No. 40 Basin Street,” and the pair had been seeing each other for several months, but at some point Martin “discovered that besides himself she had formed an attachment for another party…. He became incensed with rage and frequently threatened to do her some bodily harm, but she only laughed at him.” Prout apparently got tired of their “bickering,” and asked Speed to move out, so she moved in with a woman named Pauline Jones, at 137 Customhouse Street (now Iberville).

That was the scene of the murder. The couple had been drinking heavily all evening, but appeared to be “on friendly terms” — they had ordered a couple of bottles of white wine and some oysters, and invited another of the “inmates” to join them. The party continued through the night, and around 8am Martin ordered a couple of cocktails, telling the waiter to make them “very strong.” There was no sign of trouble, but around 9:30 Jones heard a pistol shot  and “the shrieks of a female crying out, ‘Miss Pauline, come help me: I am shot!'” Speed was standing in the hallway, “with the upper portion of her garment ablaze and her hand clasped to her left breast.”

Speed died within minutes. Martin escaped, but turned himself in the following morning. He claimed she had shot herself, but was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Pardoned five years later, he was back in the news in 1911 after he married another sex worker, they opened a lunch stand, they broke up, she opened a rival lunch stand, he was heard to threaten that he would “do again what he did a long time ago,” and she got scared and shot him.

As for the song, it seems to have originated as a ragtime ballad, popular with pianists in the District. Rosalind “Rose” Johnson, a contemporary of Jelly Roll Morton’s, remembered it as a favorite in the Basin Street houses and played a version that was recorded twice in the 1950s by Edmond “Doc” Souchon, leader of the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band. My version has the two verses and chorus Souchon sang, plus additional verses from several Texas guitarists who recorded similar ragtime versions for the Library of Congress: Homer “Tricky Sam” Roberson, Finous “Flat Foot” Rockmore,” and Wallace “Staving Chain” Chains (my guitar approach is closest to Chains’s version).

All of those are more chordally intricate than the straightforward circle of fifths Lipscomb and Lead Belly played. The lyrics diverge in various ways from the newspaper stories, and Roberson, Lead Belly, and Lipscomb in particular added a bunch of “floating” verses from other ballads — which some Basin Street pianists may have done as well. In any case, this is my assemblage from that mix of sources, all of which are well worth checking out.

I’ve known “Alabama Bound” forever, but never worked it up as a performance piece, and am posting it now because I used it as the theme of chapter one of my new book, Jelly Roll Blues, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress recordings, the world that nurtured early blues, and the ways that world was censored, reimagined, and shaped for general consumption by early folklorists and music marketers.

This song was an obvious place to begin, for a couple of reasons. First, it was how Morton began the LOC recordings, which I use as a through-thread for the book. He started playing this tune while reminiscing about the blues singers he used to hear in the Gulf Coast honky-tonks of his youth, then described how he “happened to truck down to Mobile” with a pianist named Brocky Johnny:

At that time I was supposed to be a very good pool player, and I could slip upon a lot of people playing pool, because I played piano and they thought I devoted all my time to the piano. So we’d gotten Alabama bound — the frequent saying was, any place that you was going, why, you was supposed to be “bound” for that place. So in fact we was Alabama bound, and when I got there I wrote this tune called “Alabama Bound.”

There’s no reason to believe Morton was the originator of this song, but he sang and played a lovely version and a lot of later singers were inspired by it, including me. In the book, I use it as a hook to discuss Morton’s travels, and more broadly the way Black musicians and their songs were traveling in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Several older musicians recalled “Alabama Bound” as the earliest blues they heard, and it was the first song published with the word “blues” used in a way that suggested a musical category rather than a feeling: the original sheet music cover described it as a “Rag Time Two Step (Also Known as the Alabama Blues).”* It was credited to a white New Orleans composer named Robert Hoffman, and appeared in 1909, five years after Morton claimed to have composed it — and although the New Orleans provenance might seem to support his claim, it also appeared that year as one of the sections of “Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. Two,” published in Columbia, Missouri by the piano virtuoso Blind Boone.  As I discuss in the book, the Boone medleys are fascinating documents of Black music at the turn of the twentieth century, including tunes like “Pallet on the Floor” (which I’ve made the theme of a previous post and also a chapter in Jelly Roll Blues), and the pre-blues song variously recorded in later years as “Payday,” “Reuben,” and other titles.

As for my version, it’s a similar assemblage of vernacular scraps, with a couple of verses from Morton and others picked up here and there over the last fifty years. Dave Van Ronk was probably one source, which is appropriate, since he was the person who turned me on to Morton’s blues singing — I borrowed his ten-inch LP of New Orleans Memories and recorded it on cassette, and still play his versions of Morton’s versions of : “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” “Mamie’s Blues,” and “Sweet Substitute,” as well as my own versions of his versions of a couple of other songs that turned into chapter headings: “Winding Ball” and “Hesitation Blues…” and “Michigan Water…” and I’m beginning to realize that Morton via Van Ronk is kind of my foundation for playing and singing blues. One could do a lot worse.

As I wrote at the outset, I never worked up a performance version of this song, but I’m headed out on tour for the book and want to be able to play the key songs I cover, and this is how this one fell together. If I keep playing it, I’m sure it will evolve; meanwhile, I’m enjoying messing around with it.

*To get the history straight, another white New Orleanian published a song called “I Got the Blues” in 1908 that used the form we would now call a 12-bar blues — but that title suggests the writer was still using blues to mean sadness rather than a musical style.

“Ain’t We Crazy” is a compendium of old joke rhymes I picked up from a 1928 recording by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, the composer (or compiler, or at least official claimant) of the hobo classics  “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and likewise my source for another absurd novelty, “The Cowboy Fireman” (a.k.a. “The Trusty Lariat”).

There was a lot of nonsense verse like this circulating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — my father, born in 1906, used to recite a Yiddish dialect parody of “The Face on the Barroom Floor” called “Jake the Plumber,” which began similarly:

‘Tvas a balmy summer’s ivning, but zirro ‘tvas below,
De ren vas falling brightly, end de sun vas shining snow…

I’ve always enjoyed clever, complicated lyrics, and this one felt like a connection to a world of nimble folk rhymesters — vernacular Cole Porters — plus, at the time I was living with a woman who had childhood memories of her father reciting a version, and she enjoyed it. I don’t think I ever played it onstage, but I recorded it on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys (now available for download from Bandcamp), with the other musicians singing along on the chorus — notably Paul Geremia, one of the most tasteful blues players and singers on the planet, doing a nutty Jerry Lewis voice.

Before posting this, I did a search through newspapers from the hundred years before McClintock recorded it, and found many of the rhyming couplets, as well as plenty of similar silliness, but his record is the earliest evidence of all of them in one place and the “Ain’t We Crazy” chorus. So maybe he wrote this one as well.

And that’s all there is to be said about it… enjoy.

“Mississippi Blues” was recorded in 1942 by a terrific guitarist and singer named William Brown, along with “East St. Louis Blues,”  “Four O’Clock Flower Blues,” and, probably, “Ragged and Dirty, ” which I’ve written about in a previous post.

That’s all we know about him, and even that is not entirely reliable. The recordings were made by Alan Lomax, John Work, and Lewis Jones, and the first three songs named above were recorded at Sadie Beck’s plantation in Arkansas; “Ragged and Dirty” seems to have been recorded separately, in West Memphis, on a night Lomax wrote about in his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and he suggests that this was the same William Brown who sang the other three songs… but also suggests this was the Willie Brown who recorded “Future Blues” and played with Son House, though it clearly was not.

The name of this piece is likewise unhelpful; Lomax simply labeled it “Mississippi Blues,” which it was, more or less, even if he recorded it in Arkansas… but so were all the other blues he recorded in that region. And despite the title, it was anything but generic, as least in terms of the guitar part. It was very carefully composed, played virtually identically behind every verse, and with a high break that directly imitates boogie-woogie piano, with a walking bassline on the low strings and high triplets in the treble. The whole thing sounds like a guitar transcription of a blues piano accompaniment, and numerous people have tried to trace it to a specific piano blues recording — the most convincing nominee, to my ears, being Charlie Spand’s “Hard Times Blues,” though other people have suggested records by Walter Davis. By the late 1930s, a lot of young players were imitating records — Robert Johnson copied a guitar arrangement almost note for note from a record by Lonnie Johnson, and the guitar work on Brown’s “Ragged and Dirty” directly imitated Yank Rachell’s mandolin part from a Sleepy John Estes record, “Broken Hearted, Ragged And Dirty, Too.”

Anyway… it’s a beautiful arrangement, and was one of the more intricate pieces we all learned back when we all had the same few LPs and the same Stefan Grossman books. I played it for years before I thought about singing it, and don’t remember whether the melody I sing resembles Brown’s, though I think I stick fairly close to his lyrics for the first two verses. I didn’t remember his others, so the other two are favorites I picked up elsewhere.

I always liked the “blues jumped a rabbit” verse, though as a city boy I didn’t understand it until I’d been singing it for at least a decade or two. I pictured the blues, personified, jumping on a rabbit and riding it for miles, rather than the blues being something that scared a rabbit into running, like a hunting dog would do. As Willie Dixon, the Mississippi-born Chicago bassman, producer, singer, and songwriter extraordinaire, wrote in his memoir, I Am the Blues:

“The dog jumping the rabbit in the morning meant a great thing. Everybody knew if you jump a rabbit in one place, he’s going to make a circle and come right back across the same place. A lot of time, we didn’t have a shotgun but we had clubs waiting on him when he came back. I remember many days that if my old man hadn’t shot a squirrel or killed a rabbit that morning, we wouldn’t have had anything to eat.

“It didn’t mean nothing to people that lived in cities because they had plenty of meat and didn’t eat rabbit. The average individual can’t understand that because he wasn’t living in the past to know what was happening in the corn fields, cotton fields and on the plantation.”

Personally, I tend to side with the rabbit — my spirit animal — and am glad that in this verse, although it ends up crying, it may live to run again.

As I’ve explained in an earlier post, I first heard “Stagolee” from Woody Guthrie, then from Mississippi John Hurt, then Dave Van Ronk… and eventually from Dave’s source, Furry Lewis. This is the Lewis version, which turns out to be a reworking of a ballad from the same period about a different killing in St. Louis’s Black sporting world, by a man named Ollie or Olive Jackson.

Eric McHenry, who has published a terrific article on the historical “Stack Lee” Shelton and is in the process of writing a definitive book exploring the life, the legend, and the historical milieu, made this connection for me — at which point I realized I had heard the ballad of Ollie Jackson and should have made it myself… but such are the vagaries of research and memory. (McHenry has also written a good piece on the ballad of Louis Collins, yet another murder story from the 1890s, which I learned from Mississippi John Hurt in a version I’ve played and discussed in another post.)

The Ollie Jackson ballad was recorded by Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones from a singer named Will Starks in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1942, fourteen years after Furry Lewis recorded “Stackolee,” but a version of the song was published in 1924 in the column Robert Winslow Gordon edited for Adventure magazine — the original basis of the collection Gordon expanded as the first curator of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Along with the tag line, “When you lose your money, learn to lose,” Lewis took other details from the Jackson ballad: unlike Lee Shelton, who killed Billy Lyons over politics and a hat, Jackson killed a man over a card game, and the Starks ballad also includes the line about the sister falling on her knees and begging the killer to refrain.

That said, Lewis’s version is one of the masterpieces of early rural guitar, interspersing the verses with instrumental breaks using a shorter, sharper structure and dramatic bass runs. It was the piece that inspired Dave Van Ronk to take up fingerpicking — he heard it on the first anthology ever issued of folk recordings from commercial 78s, Listen to Our Story, compiled by Alan Lomax and originally released as a 78 album in 1947, then as a ten-inch LP in 1950 (thus predating the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music).

Dave originally thought the recording had two guitarists, but then saw Tom Paley playing it (or something similar) in Washington Square Park, badgered Paley to show him how it was done, went home and holed up with the Lewis recording, and eventually worked it out. It is was one of the first pieces he taught me when I started taking lessons with him, and he continued to play it throughout his career — though, as usual, he put together his own lyric, compiled from multiple sources.

For most of my life I’ve played the John Hurt guitar arrangement with a mix of verses from him, Woody Guthrie, and Van Ronk, but while I was researching my book on the lyrics and censorship of early blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Blues — which includes a section on the Stack Lee ballad, along with other murder ballads from the Black sporting world — Eric McHenry alerted me to the Ollie Jackson connection and I went back to the Lewis recording and realized I remembered not only his guitar part but all his verses… which don’t overlap any of Hurt’s, and are terrific. Then I realized that the instrumental breaks sounded a lot like Hurt’s version of “Nobody’s Dirty Business,” so I tagged a bit of that on at the end.

(I also changed one detail from Lewis’s version — he began the song, “I remember one September, one one Friday night…” but since I’ve been researching the historical Stack Lee, I switched in the actual date of Christmas.)

During the months I lived in New York City, briefly attending college as an excuse to take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk and spending all my spare money on Yazoo blues reissues, I developed a special taste for Carl Martin’s recordings. They were not spectacularly virtuosic, or deep, or funny, or, indeed spectacular in any way. In retrospect, it was sort of like my earlier passion for Cisco Houston — they were both good musicians, but I can’t explain why they caught my ears in a way other good musicians didn’t; they were each just what I was looking for in particular periods of my life.

Martin didn’t make many recordings as a solo guitarist/singer, and at one point I think I’d worked out versions of all of them. I played “Badly Mistreated Man” and “Farewell to You  Baby” — the latter long enough that I taught it to Les Sampou, who recorded a nice version… though by the time I heard her play it, my reaction was “That’s a good song; where’d you find it?” And I’ve already posted my version of his version of “Crow Jane.” But mostly it was a passing passion–not that I stopped liking his songs when I heard them, but they drifted out of my repertoire.

All of that was before I met Howard Armstrong, who worked with Martin for decades and played a couple of his songs — when Howard had a guitar in his hands (rather than a fiddle or mandolin), he typically played either Martin’s “Good Morning, Judge” or a gorgeous arrangement of “Stardust” that somehow never seems to have been recorded…

All of which is by way of introducing this song, which I picked up from a record by Willie McTell, but sing over a half-assed version of Martin’s guitar part for a song issued in 1935 as “Old Time Blues,” though I’m guessing that title was just slapped on by the record company as a description. It was a generic eight-bar blues, and so was McTell’s “Ticket Agent Blues” — I’m not actually sure how many of the verses I sing are from “Ticket Agent,” aside from the obvious one; I may have combined two or three McTell songs. I do know I left off a verse he used to sing: “Take my advice and let married women be/ Cause her husband will grab you, beat you raggeder’n a cedar tree.”

That’s about it: A generic eight-bar blues, picked up from Carl Martin and Willie McTell; nothing special, but fun to play.

(I also picked up a few of McTell’s guitar arrangements, some reasonably accurately, others in even more half-assed versions [less half-assed? quarter-assed?] than this Martin arrangement, and have previously posted my takes on his “Georgia Rag,” “Statesboro Blues,” “Kill It, Kid,” and “Kind Mama Blues.”)