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