“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.