{"id":1285,"date":"2016-06-04T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-06-04T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2024-01-17T11:51:56","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T16:51:56","slug":"jones-oh-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/jones-oh-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Jones, Oh Jones (Bahamian Blind Blake\/Paul Geremia)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0z7vfKTMgaM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The first time I saw Paul Geremia perform, he was opening for Dave Van Ronk at Passim Coffeehouse. I was standing with Dave at the back of the room, and as Paul played a particularly gorgeous and intricate guitar break, Dave turned to me with a typically wry expression and murmured, &#8220;He doesn&#8217;t teach.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In my world of acoustic blues players, Geremia has always been the musician&#8217;s musician. Non-musicians sometimes got it and <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1287 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/geremia-hard-life.jpg?resize=275%2C275&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"geremia hard life\" width=\"275\" height=\"275\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/geremia-hard-life.jpg?w=275&amp;ssl=1 275w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/geremia-hard-life.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/>sometimes didn&#8217;t, but pretty much all the players acknowledge his unique gifts: not only his superb guitar playing, rack harmonica work, and singing, but the way he always made the songs seem personal and quirky. He is an assiduous student of the old masters, spent the requisite years painstakingly hovering over scratchy 78s, figuring out how Blind Lemon Jefferson or Blind Willie McTell played a particular lick, but no matter how loyally he tried to capture their styles, his own individual touch and sensibility remain instantly recognizable.<\/p>\n<p>That first time, I only recall two songs he played: his own &#8220;Kick It In the Country&#8221; (which he introduced, inaccurately, as a song about soccer) and &#8220;Jones, Oh Jones.&#8221; Both were on his then-current album, <em>Hard Life Rocking Chair<\/em>, and I was particularly struck by the latter, a catchy and bloodthirsty expansion of some familiar blues themes. When I expressed this preference to Dave, he said, <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1288 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?resize=275%2C273&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Blind Blake bahaman\" width=\"275\" height=\"273\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?w=275&amp;ssl=1 275w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/>&#8220;Oh, yeah, that&#8217;s from the Bahamian Blind Blake. He&#8217;s got a lot of great material: that&#8217;s where I got &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/yas-yas-yas\/\">Yas, Yas, Yas<\/a>.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I had never heard of this Blind Blake, who was born Blake Alphonso Higgs and was no relation to Arthur Blake, the superlative ragtime blues guitarist &#8212; but once I had the name, I easily found his records. He led the house band at the Royal Victoria hotel in Nassau, and thousands of tourists came home from island vacations with his albums, many of which eventually made it to the secondhand record bins. I snapped them up, eventually amassing a complete collection, and even bootlegged a CD of my favorite selections for a while, until the legal owners sent me a &#8220;cease and desist&#8221; letter. (I felt no moral compunction, since they had derailed a reissue project I attempted with Rounder &#8212; they refused any exclusivity, retaining the right to give other labels all the same tracks, which obviously would not fly with the Rounder folks.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway&#8230; Dave was right about Blake&#8217;s material: he had terrific taste in songs, including all sorts of old minstrel survivals that had somehow made it to the Bahamas. &#8220;Jones, Oh Jones&#8221; is in that category: it was demonstrably around in some form by the 1920s, because Bessie Smith copped a bunch of lines from it for her &#8220;Hateful Blues&#8221; and others were collected by folklorists. My guess is that <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1289  alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/bessie-hateful-blues.jpg?resize=228%2C185&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"228\" height=\"185\" \/>it dates from the first decade of the twentieth century, but so far no one has found sheet music or any other solid example before Blake recorded it circa 1950, and there&#8217;s no way to know how much it had changed over the years.<\/p>\n<p>As with a lot of Blake&#8217;s songs, the move to the Bahamas meant that some lyrics had been changed or simply misunderstood: that&#8217;s a common event in oral traditions, another example being the song &#8220;Delia&#8217;s Gone,&#8221; which was composed about a murder in Savannah and had the tag line, &#8220;He&#8217;s one more rounder gone.&#8221; In the Bahamas, they didn&#8217;t know the term &#8220;rounder,&#8221; so that became a call for drinks: &#8220;Delia&#8217;s gone, one more round.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As it happens, one of the more interesting misunderstandings in &#8220;Jones, Oh Jones&#8221; is equally prevalent here on the mainland &#8212; generations of blues scholars have transcribed Bessie Smith singing about taking her &#8220;wedding butcher&#8221; to chop up her lover, some glossing it as a butcher knife received as a wedding present (the original ad for the record shows it as a butcher&#8217;s cleaver). I figured that was a mishearing, and sang it for years as<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1290 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/wade-Butcher.jpg?resize=273%2C271&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"273\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/wade-Butcher.jpg?w=273&amp;ssl=1 273w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/wade-Butcher.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 273px) 100vw, 273px\" \/> &#8220;whetted butcher knife,&#8221; which made more sense &#8212; but a few years ago this became a hotly debated topic on a blues scholar list-serve and Yuval Taylor eventually solved the mystery: Wade &amp; Butcher was the most popular brand of straight razor, the weapon of choice for minstrel-show comedy.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, circling back to my opening paragraph, Dave was wrong: Geremia didn&#8217;t give guitar lessons, but every time I&#8217;ve seen him, I&#8217;ve learned something. There are a lot of ways to teach, and in all the ways that count, Paul is one of the most generous teachers I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A uniquely bloodthirsty bit of minstrelsy, via the Bahamian Blind Blake and the matchless Paul Geremia, with elucidation of the &#8220;wedding butcher&#8221; fallacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jones, Oh Jones (Bahamian Blind Blake\/Paul Geremia) - 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Actually, to be strictly accurate, one of his verses (the sheep one) was current in my school,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Blind-Blake-Higgs-and-band.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/yas-yas-yas\/","url_meta":{"origin":1285,"position":1},"title":"Yas, Yas, Yas (Blind Blake Higgs)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A comic song that came to me via Dave Van Ronk and the Bahamian Blind Blake, with some stray thoughts on oral traditions, recordings, and revivalists","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Blind Blake bahaman","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3645,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/southern-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":1285,"position":2},"title":"Blind Blake&#8217;s Southern Rag","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 5, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Blind Blake was one of the greatest guitarists of the early blues era, distinguished not only by the speed and precision of his playing, but by the fact that he was known for instrumental showpieces. Blues was generally considered a singing style, so even Lonnie Johnson \u2014 the consummate virtuoso\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Blind Blake\"","block_context":{"text":"Blind Blake","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tag\/blind-blake\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Blind_Blake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1960,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/traveling-man\/","url_meta":{"origin":1285,"position":3},"title":"Traveling Man (Pink Anderson\/blues comedians)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 6, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm pretty sure I first heard this done by Paul Geremia, who recorded it on his first LP, and got some version of the lyric from Sing Out! magazine. I'm guessing Paul got it from Pink Anderson, but that's just a guess, since it was recorded by numerous blues and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"pink anderson bluesville lp","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/pink-anderson-bluesville-lp.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1521,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/long-tall-mama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1285,"position":4},"title":"Long Tall Mama (Big Bill Broonzy)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"That year I lived in New York was a very rich time for me musically -- not in other ways, since I basically spent it in my room listening to records and playing guitar, when I wasn't contemplating the next record buy at Dayton's or schlepping over to Van Ronk's\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"broonzy yazoo lp","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/broonzy-yazoo-lp.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3692,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/one-way-gal\/","url_meta":{"origin":1285,"position":5},"title":"One Way Gal (William Moore)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 12, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Another song by William Moore, whom I first got excited about in the mid-seventies when I worked up a version of his \"Ragtime Millionaire.\" I kept that in my repertoire, but didn't pay much attention to the rest of his work till I got back from Africa. Then I began\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/William-Moore-photoshopped.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4907,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/4907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}