{"id":1295,"date":"2016-06-05T07:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-06-05T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1295"},"modified":"2017-01-07T15:25:07","modified_gmt":"2017-01-07T20:25:07","slug":"yas-yas-yas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/yas-yas-yas\/","title":{"rendered":"Yas, Yas, Yas (Blind Blake Higgs)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b2SAtJXS5_k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Like most people in the 1960s and &#8217;70s, I first heard this on Dave Van Ronk&#8217;s second Folkways album and figured he&#8217;d picked it up somewhere in the blues world, but during my year of lessons with <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1288\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?resize=275%2C273\" 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\" \/>Dave he steered me to his actual source: the Bahamian Blind Blake and his band from the Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau. It is obviously related to a song recorded in the late 1920s by James &#8220;Stump&#8221; Johnson, Tampa Red, and others as &#8220;The Duck&#8217;s Yas Yas,&#8221; and that discographic primacy has led a lot of scholars to describe Blake&#8217;s song as a variant of Tampa Red&#8217;s. However, Blake&#8217;s lyric shares only the opening verse of the Red\/Johnson version, and since his repertoire is full of turn-of-the-century minstrel survivals like &#8220;My Name is Morgan, But It Ain&#8217;t J.P.&#8221; and &#8220;Watermelon Spoilin&#8217; on the Vine&#8221; (as well as the sole surviving version of a bloodthirsty minstrel masterpiece, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/jones-oh-jones\/\">Jones, Oh Jones<\/a>&#8220;), I would guess this is in fact an earlier version, from which Johnson, Tampa and others remembered only the first verse.<\/p>\n<p>There is strong internal evidence for that guess, since all Blake&#8217;s verses are neat comic creations tailored to the &#8220;Yas, Yas, Yas&#8221; theme and rhyme, while the Johnson\/Tampa version mostly consists of generic, unrelated verses after the opening. If that&#8217;s right, the latecomers seem to have vaguely remembered it, since a couple of those verses include phrases from the Blake verses &#8212; for example, a reference to the &#8220;gasoline station&#8221; from the John Dillinger verse.<\/p>\n<p>The relationship of early recordings, oral traditions, and printed compositions is complicated and &#8212; to some of us, at least &#8212; <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1297 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-second-folkways.jpg?resize=245%2C245\" alt=\"van ronk second folkways\" width=\"245\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-second-folkways.jpg?w=280&amp;ssl=1 280w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-second-folkways.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 245px) 100vw, 245px\" \/>fascinating. Much as I love a lot of old recordings, they are simply snapshots, frequently unrepresentative, from a huge pool of material people were singing in the early 20th century.\u00a0 Van Ronk still came up in a world where songs were often learned from other singers rather than from records, or from records he had only heard a couple of times and vaguely remembered. That was a disadvantage in a lot of ways, but also gave his generation a degree of freedom &#8212; they couldn&#8217;t remember how the &#8220;original&#8221; version went, exactly, so they had to do the best they could, and the result was sometimes better than the assiduous imitations that became more prevalent by my time, when we all had the old records on reissue LPs and could study them with infinite care.<\/p>\n<p>I could go on about this &#8212; and often do, at great length &#8212; but for now will just note that Blind Blake&#8217;s recordings from the Bahamas, though made in 1950, are worthy of a lot more study than they have received as a repository of African American songs that failed to be recorded on the mainland in earlier eras.<\/p>\n<p>(One final thought: John Dillinger was active in the early 1930s, so when I suggest that Stump Johnson&#8217;s gasoline verse in 1929 was a vaguely recalled survival of the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1296\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/dillinger.jpg?resize=88%2C145\" alt=\"dillinger\" width=\"88\" height=\"145\" \/>Dillinger verse, it&#8217;s an anachronism. My guess is that the verse itself is older and Dillinger replaced an earlier protagonist, but that&#8217;s just a guess &#8212; if other people want to credit Blake with writing a whole new set of verses and turning a relatively generic blues song into a cohesive comic creation, the evidence supports their guess at least as well as mine.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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<\/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-1295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - 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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":1952,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/diddy-wa-diddy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1295,"position":2},"title":"Diddy Wah Diddy (Blind Blake)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 30, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This was another song I'd taped for my European rambles, but it wasn't till near the end that I felt ready to work out Blind Blake's guitar part. It was by far the trickiest arrangement I'd attempted up to that time, but I finally got it more or less to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Blind_Blake","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Blind_Blake.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3692,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/one-way-gal\/","url_meta":{"origin":1295,"position":3},"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":[]},{"id":1135,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":1295,"position":4},"title":"Georgia Rag (with advice from Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 21, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"My largely accidental reworking of a great Blind Willie McTell piece, illustrating a long disquisition on my first lesson with Dave Van Ronk, and so forth.","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\/04\/six-black-blues-mann.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3645,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/southern-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":1295,"position":5},"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. 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