I love Lemon Jefferson’s singing and playing, and for a while immersed myself in his guitar style, but he was such a distinctive and quirky player that most of my efforts just sounded like half-assed imitations of what he happened to play on a given day. I’ve kept playing his “Black Horse Blues,” since it is a fully composed arrangement, and used his “Bad Luck Blues” arrangement for my version of “Keep It Clean” — but otherwise I’ve let well enough alone…
…except for this one, which is a special case, because I originally learned it as a Woody Guthrie song. He called it “New York Town,” and I had it on a Cisco Houston LP — as noted in earlier posts, Cisco was my first musical hero, and I played dozens of songs from his records. At some point I got the idea that Woody got this song from Lead Belly, which seems very possible, and then, probably quite a few years later, realized that all of them got it from Jefferson.
The point of that digression is that when I started messing around with Jefferson’s music, this one had that extra connection, and when I figured out I couldn’t do it like he did, I could fall back on what I’d picked up from Cisco and Woody. So that’s kind of what I’ve done. I think the lyric I sing is mostly Jefferson’s, and the guitar part is based on his, with some licks borrowed from Sam McGee’s “Railroad Blues,” and a bit of Mississippi John Hurt. And, honestly, aside from the final verse, I’m not aware of anything specific that came from my earlier heroes…
…except that having first learned it from Cisco, as a Woody Guthrie song, I was used to singing it as a cowboy/western song rather than as a blues, or maybe it makes more sense to say I sang it as a cowboy/western blues, since there were plenty of Black cowboys and Lead Belly sang Western ballads as well as blues, and Jefferson often marked time between verses with a kind of boom-chang strum that comes from the same place as Woody’s style, and Woody played lots of blues. Not to mention the verse about robbing trains like Jesse James, an outlaw hero they all sang about.
That’s a good example of how mixed up and multifarious the US folk tradition is, and the funny thing is that I learned this long before I was playing any blues, never thought of it as blues, and dropped it from my repertoire when I got into blues… and then I had that Jefferson period, which was fun and challenging but mostly left no trace on my repertoire… except to send me back to Cisco and Woody. Which is fine, and I snuck in a couple of Jefferson’s guitar licks, and the result feels like a nice summation of that journey.