{"id":1364,"date":"2016-06-17T07:00:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1364"},"modified":"2017-02-25T13:37:26","modified_gmt":"2017-02-25T18:37:26","slug":"send-lectric-chair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/send-lectric-chair\/","title":{"rendered":"Send Me to the \u2019Lectric Chair (Bessie Smith)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lI76panLb3o\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Among the records I assembled during my year in New York, combing the second-hand bins at Dayton&#8217;s, were all five volumes of <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1366 size-full alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/bessie-smith-lp2.jpg?resize=291%2C578\" alt=\"bessie smith lp2\" width=\"291\" height=\"578\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/bessie-smith-lp2.jpg?w=291&amp;ssl=1 291w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/bessie-smith-lp2.jpg?resize=151%2C300&amp;ssl=1 151w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 291px) 100vw, 291px\" \/>Bessie Smith&#8217;s complete recordings, with their comprehensive notes by Chris Albertson. That set was an oddity of the LP era: the records were issued with the notion that they could be stacked and played in order, all ten of them, so volume one had Smith&#8217;s first and last recordings, and the subsequent albums narrowed to volume five, which was the only one to include four sides of music from a single period&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I listened to all those records at least once, but my guess is there were some sides I heard only that once. I knew how important Smith was, and in particular what a major influence she was for Dave Van Ronk, who had come to blues from trad jazz, so I wanted to immerse myself in her work. But, for one thing, I was a teenage boy with a guitar, and had come from Woody Guthrie rather than Louis Armstrong, so I was more inclined to the rural blues guitar guys. And, for another, the completeness of those records did not serve her well, particularly in the early period, where she tended to just be accompanied by piano and the songs tended to be straight twelve-bar blues, one merging into the next, all slow, majestic, and somber. Some had great lyrics, but after a while I just tuned out.<\/p>\n<p>So call me a lightweight, but my favorite Bessie Smith sides were the ones that mixed blues inflections with more vaudevillian or ragtime pop settings. Of course, Dave had already turned me on to &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/good-old-wagon\/\">You&#8217;ve Been a Good Old Wagon<\/a>,&#8221; and I loved &#8220;Ain&#8217;t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle,&#8221; and then there was this gory little confection. It was a great recording, with Fletcher Henderson on piano, Charlie Green on trombone, and Joe Smith on cornet &#8212; much as jazz fans love Louis Armstrong&#8217;s accompaniments, Bessie Smith herself apparently considered Joe Smith a more sensitive sideman, and she sounds terrific in this company.<\/p>\n<p>The composer credit on this song was to George Brooks, apparently a pseudonym for Henderson, but I&#8217;m dubious &#8212; the lyric is pretty ornate for someone who was not generally known as a lyricist, and <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1368\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bessie-Smith-253x300.jpg?resize=253%2C300\" alt=\"bessie smith\" width=\"253\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bessie-Smith.jpg?resize=253%2C300&amp;ssl=1 253w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bessie-Smith.jpg?w=255&amp;ssl=1 255w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 253px) 100vw, 253px\" \/>I&#8217;m guessing Henderson hired someone else to do those\u00a0 duties. Since another song at the same session was &#8220;Them&#8217;s Graveyard Words&#8221; and six months later Smith recorded another Brooks song called &#8220;Dyin&#8217; By the Hour,&#8221; it seems to have been a pretty doom-laden period for whatever lyricist was involved.<\/p>\n<p>I have been singing this now for forty years, and keep going back and forth on the gender pronouns. Dave tended to sing Smith&#8217;s songs from the point of view of a woman, as they were written, and Mississippi John Hurt did the same when he did songs learned from blues queens, so at first I did that. Then I switched and began singing it from a male point of view, because it&#8217;s in the first person and that suited me as a protagonist&#8230; and then I switched back, because I decided I&#8217;d rather not be the protagonist of this particular story and was happier presenting it as a story about a woman striking back against a man, regretful though she might be afterwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among the records I assembled during my year in New York, combing the second-hand bins at Dayton&#8217;s, were all five volumes of Bessie Smith&#8217;s complete recordings, with their comprehensive notes by Chris Albertson. That set was an oddity of the LP era: the records were issued with the notion that they could be stacked and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/send-lectric-chair\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Send Me to the \u2019Lectric Chair (Bessie Smith)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/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-1364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Send Me to the \u2019Lectric Chair (Bessie Smith) - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/send-lectric-chair\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Send Me to the \u2019Lectric Chair (Bessie Smith) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Among the records I assembled during my year in New York, combing the second-hand bins at Dayton&#8217;s, were all five volumes of Bessie Smith&#8217;s complete recordings, with their comprehensive notes by Chris Albertson. 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His model was one of Bessie Smith's greatest records, featuring Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fred Longshaw playing unobtrusive piano. Other guitarists faced with Smith's\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"dave van ronk5","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/dave-van-ronk5.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2245,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/down-and-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":1364,"position":1},"title":"Nobody Knows You When You&#8217;re Down and Out","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"January 7, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Most blues fans associate this song with Bessie Smith's version from 1929 and think it was written about the Depression, but it was originally popularized in the early 1920s by its composer, Jimmie Cox. Like most of the first round of commercial blues performers, Cox tends to be left out\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"jimmie-cox-and-magnolia-cox-from-lynn-abbott","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Jimmie-Cox-and-Magnolia-Cox-from-Lynn-Abbott.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2884,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/statesboro-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1364,"position":2},"title":"Statesboro Blues (Willie McTell)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 3, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm not sure exactly how I learned \"Statesboro Blues\" -- of course I listened to the original recording by Blind Willie McTell, and I know Woody Mann's tablature played a part, but I don't recall playing it much until I was touring in the early 1980s, and even then I\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\/2017\/05\/Willie-McTell2-300x277.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1031,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-mountain-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1364,"position":3},"title":"Black Mountain Blues (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I got this from Dave Van Ronk's first album -- once again, it was the kind of violent, bragging song that perfectly suited the tastes of a teenage boy who was getting into blues. Dave had learned it from Bessie Smith's recording, and had the bright idea of combining her\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Scrapper_Blackwell and Bessie Smith","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Scrapper_Blackwell-and-Bessie-Smith-197x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2899,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/fishing-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1364,"position":4},"title":"Fishing (Blues) (Chris Smith\/Sweetie May)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"A feminist ragtime cheating song from 1911, which is now known almost entirely in a highly abridged and non-feminist revision by the Texas hobo Henry Thomas -- an excellent example of how recordings have muddled our understanding of the past. Thomas turned it into a ditty about fishing that lost\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\/06\/Fishing-Fishing-Blues-sheet-music-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":585,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/freight-train\/","url_meta":{"origin":1364,"position":5},"title":"Freight Train (Elizabeth Cotten)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know where I learned \"Freight Train,\" because everybody played it -- but it's one of my favorite songs, and I only recently learned that I owe my favorite verse to Clara Smith.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"elizabeth cotten","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/elizabeth-cotten-300x197.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364","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=1364"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}