Another country blues, in the sense of being a country hit that has obvious links to the blues tradition — like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “You Win Again” and hundreds of other examples. Like my version of “You Win Again,” this version is influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis’s recording, which may well be the first time I heard this one, though the voice in my head is a mix of Jerry Lee and John Lincoln Coughlin, better known as Preacher Jack… and I just realized that I haven’t yet written about Preacher Jack in this blog, which is a horrific oversight.

Back in the 1990s, I got my heart broken and Preacher Jack held me together for the next year. I’d known his first album and always wanted to see him, and just when I needed him, he got a weekly Thursday night residency at Frank’s Steak House on Mass Ave in North Cambridge. The first night I walked in, he was in the middle of a Little Richard medley, pounding the piano and shouting with all of Richard’s gospelized fervor, then segued directly into a sermon on the crucifixion of Christ that ended with him pinned to the wall, shouting, “With nails! Nails through his hands!” And then, in a gruff whisper: “You want to talk about pain?”

I was there every Thursday for the next year or more, and often in the years after that, and wrote about Jack for the Globe (I’ve posted that piece with some further recollections), and co-produced a CD reissue of his earlier albums,and wrote the liner notes for a new instrumental CD, and he was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual shaman. He was a brilliant musician and a raving wild man, who regularly explained to the listeners that he was “having your nervous breakdown for you,” and he was. I’m not going to repeat all the other stories from that profile — if you’re interested, click through to it; it’s a lot of fun — but can’t overstate how much he meant to me and what I owe to him. He wasn’t easy, but he was deep and powerful and constantly surprising.

As to this song, it was written by Ralph Mooney, who mostly was a steel guitarist rather than a songwriter and toured for many years with Waylon Jennings — I saw him with Waylon, and everything about that was great. He apparently wrote this in 1949, when he was in his early twenties and working in Las Vegas. He later recalled, “I was a heavy drinker…. Each night at the club where I played steel guitar, I would get so drunk that I almost had to crawl home. I never drank in the daytime. One day my wife and I were uptown shopping and I ran into a musician friend who invited me to have a drink and I did. That was all my wife could take… she left me and went home to her mama in Los Angeles. After she left on the bus, I sat down with my guitar and wrote, ‘Blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel, and a storm is brewing in this heart of mine.’ I wrote the whole song in a few minutes. I went back to Los Angeles to get my wife back a few days later. My wife and I have been married twenty-six years now, our daughter is twenty-three, our son is fourteen, and we have a grandson who is two years old.”

So that’s his happy ending, and after the Preacher healed me I met Sandrine and we eventually got married and went to hear Jack after our wedding rehearsal dinner, so that’s mine… and Jack is no longer on the planet and I don’t believe in an afterlife, but he sure did and I hope he was right and is looking down on us.

Added note: In the second verse, there’s that line, “Take all the treasured dreams I had for you and me…,” which doesn’t fit the ABAB rhyme scheme of the lyric, but would if it was “me and you…” and I’ve always wondered if Mooney wrote “me and you” originally and someone pointed out that it was bad grammar, and rather than coming up with another rhyming line he just changed it to fit school grammar rules and left it sticking out there like a sore thumb, as a wry fuck-you to the grammarians.