{"id":1380,"date":"2016-06-06T07:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2025-04-28T10:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T14:25:08","slug":"pick-poor-robin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pick-poor-robin\/","title":{"rendered":"Pick Poor Robin Clean (Larry Johnson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vVszioDRm-Q\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Before getting to the history and meaning of &#8220;Pick Poor Robin Clean,&#8221; a bit of personal background: in 1976-77 I was living in New York, devoting virtually all my record buying to prewar blues reissues, but the same collection that had filled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/crow-jane\/\">Dayton&#8217;s<\/a> with all the Yazoo reissues also included LPs on Yazoo&#8217;s sister label, Blue Goose, which featured modern recordings in prewar blues and ragtime styles. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1381 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Larry-Johnson.jpg?resize=278%2C280&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Larry Johnson\" width=\"278\" height=\"280\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Larry-Johnson.jpg?resize=298%2C300&amp;ssl=1 298w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Larry-Johnson.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Larry-Johnson.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 278px) 100vw, 278px\" \/>Following my generally archaeological inclinations, I didn&#8217;t get around to those until I&#8217;d laid in a stock of prewar stuff, and the first Blue Goose albums I bought were of<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pearline-son-house\/\"> Son House<\/a> and an elderly black guitarist named <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/know-means-lonesome\/\">Bill Williams<\/a>, but eventually I got around to the label&#8217;s one young black player, Larry Johnson, and what still stands as the greatest ragtime blues album recorded in the modern era &#8212; or ever, since before the modern era there were no albums &#8212; <em>Fast and Funky<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I know that sounds hyperbolic, but Johnson was such a great player &#8212; he had been a student and sometimes harmonica player for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cincinnati-flow-rag\/\">Reverend Gary Davis<\/a> &#8212; and a fine singer, and created songs that were clearly based on older models but completely in his own voice&#8230; and he just blew me away.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t learn much off that album, because I was so dazzled that I didn&#8217;t make the attempt, but for a while I played rough versions of his &#8220;Frisco Town&#8221; and &#8220;The Beat From Rampart Street,&#8221; and his version of &#8220;Pick Poor Robin Clean&#8221; became an enduring staple of my repertoire &#8212; I later heard older recordings of the song by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas and by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wild-good-cocaine\/\">Luke Jordan<\/a>, who I&#8217;m pretty sure <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1382 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/pickpoorrobinclean12-3-1927.jpg?resize=275%2C381&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"pickpoorrobinclean12-3-1927\" width=\"275\" height=\"381\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/pickpoorrobinclean12-3-1927.jpg?w=275&amp;ssl=1 275w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/pickpoorrobinclean12-3-1927.jpg?resize=217%2C300&amp;ssl=1 217w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/>was their source as well as Johnson&#8217;s, and I&#8217;ve added some lyrics from Jordan, but it&#8217;s still Johnson&#8217;s voice I hear in my head when I think of it.<\/p>\n<p>As for the song itself, there seems to be a good deal of confusion and disagreement about what it means. The original ad for Jordan&#8217;s version in the <em>Chicago Defender<\/em> suggests it&#8217;s about gambling, and he certainly refers to &#8220;gambling for Sadie,&#8221; but then there&#8217;s the recurring refrain about &#8220;I&#8217;ll be satisfied having your family&#8221; and the verse that is mistranscribed in that ad, which is an obvious example of the dozens, the Black tradition of verbal battling that often involved insults directed at mothers and other female relatives:<\/p>\n<p><em>If you have that gal of mine, <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1590 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/dozens-pbk-cover.jpg?resize=190%2C285&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"dozens pbk cover\" width=\"190\" height=\"285\" \/>I&#8217;m gonna have your ma<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Your sister, too; your auntie, three<\/em><br \/>\n<em>If your great-grandmammy do the shiveree, I&#8217;m gonna have her four&#8230;&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In my book about <em>The Dozens<\/em>, now titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/dozens.html\"><em>Talking &#8216;Bout Your Mama<\/em><\/a>, I note this theme and suggest that the reference to picking poor robin clean may be similar to the French &#8220;Alouette,&#8221; which uses the metaphor of picking feathers from a bird as a stand-in for disrobing a woman&#8230; but that&#8217;s just a guess.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, thanks again to Larry Johnson, whom I have seen off and on over the years, and who always blew me away with the brilliance, depth, and power of his music. I also had the pleasure of doing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/bluarch.html#ljohnson\">an interview with him in 1998<\/a>, and he was bitingly eloquent on a number of subjects, including the racial problems of the modern blues scene. I had not run across him in quite a while, and recently learned that he died in August 2016 &#8212; I wish I&#8217;d seen him more often, wish he&#8217;d recorded more, and wish he was better known; he was truly one of the greats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before getting to the history and meaning of &#8220;Pick Poor Robin Clean,&#8221; a bit of personal background: in 1976-77 I was living in New York, devoting virtually all my record buying to prewar blues reissues, but the same collection that had filled Dayton&#8217;s with all the Yazoo reissues also included LPs on Yazoo&#8217;s sister label, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pick-poor-robin\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Pick Poor Robin Clean (Larry Johnson)<\/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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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Gary Davis)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"January 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I always loved Gary Davis's guitar playing, but was into blues and ragtime a long time before I got into gospel music -- so for many years my favorite of his albums was The Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis.\u00a0 As far as I know, this is the only\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\/01\/Guitar-and-Banjo-of-Rev-Gary-Davis-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1468,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/riot-number-nine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":2},"title":"Riot in Cell Block Number Nine (The Coasters)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Though my record-buying at Dayton\u2019s focused on prewar blues, there were a handful of notable exceptions \u2013 most significantly, a trio of reissue albums on the Atlantic label featuring the Drifters, the Clovers, and \u2013 far and away most memorably \u2013 the Coasters. Aside from Chuck Berry and Ray Charles,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Coasters","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Coasters-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1267,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/ragtime-millionaire\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":3},"title":"Ragtime Millionaire (William Moore)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 29, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I spent 1976-7 in New York studying with Dave Van Ronk and listening to Yazoo pre-war blues reissues,\u00a0 but only got up the nerve to attempt a handful of the pieces I heard on the old records. Of the few I managed to work out, my favorite was \"Ragtime Millionaire,\"\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\/05\/yazoo-guitar-wizards-e1462841648853.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":814,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/stealin-stealin\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":4},"title":"Stealin&#8217;, Stealin&#8217; (Sam Charters&#8217; reissues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A canonical jug band song from the canonical Memphis Jug Band, learned from Sam Charters's canonical blues reissue LP, \"The Country Blues.\"","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"The Country Blues","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/The-Country-Blues.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5024,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/ticket-agent-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":5},"title":"Ticket Agent Blues (Willie McTell\/Carl Martin)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 9, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"During the months I lived in New York City, briefly attending college as an excuse to take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk and spending all my spare money on Yazoo blues reissues, I developed a special taste for Carl Martin's recordings. They were not spectacularly virtuosic, or deep, or\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\/2025\/03\/Willie-McTell-LP.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\/1380","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=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5717,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions\/5717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}