{"id":1433,"date":"2016-07-06T07:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2020-03-22T09:59:31","modified_gmt":"2020-03-22T13:59:31","slug":"kind-mama-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/kind-mama-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Kind Mama Blues (Blind Willie McTell)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sGTwu9KZ8ac\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>One of the few pre-war blues records I had before finding <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/crow-jane\/\">the trove at Dayton&#8217;s<\/a> in New York was an album on Biograph by Blind Willie McTell, which began a lifelong infatuation with his work. It was a somewhat troubled relationship, because he played twelve-string <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1434 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Willie-McTell-LP.jpg?resize=280%2C280\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" height=\"280\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Willie-McTell-LP.jpg?w=280&amp;ssl=1 280w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Willie-McTell-LP.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 280px) 100vw, 280px\" \/>guitar on most of his records, which meant I could never get his sound, and tuned it very low, which made it hard for me to pick up licks in those days before we had digital pitch-shifting.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, that meant I had to work out my own variations, inspired by McTell&#8217;s playing but not attempting to duplicate it, which is always a good exercise. And, in any case, what I loved most about McTell was not the guitar work but his singing. He combined the light ragtime phrasing of someone like Blind Blake with a depth and soulfulness Blake lacked, and never sang two verses quite the same. He also had a gift for coming up with interesting lyrics, and a variety of styles and approaches that few other &#8220;country blues&#8221; artists matched &#8212; the habit of reissuing pre-war blues recordings in multi-disc chronological sets makes most performers of that era sound repetitive, but I can cheerfully listen to McTell&#8217;s complete recordings back to back, from beginning to end.<\/p>\n<p>All of which said, I only learned a half-dozen or so of his songs &#8212; the first couple because they were in Woody Mann&#8217;s <em>Six Black Blues Guitarists<\/em> and the tablature provided a guide, and then this one, which just caught my ear for some reason. There&#8217;s always an element of happenstance in which songs work and which don&#8217;t, and when I started fooling around with this, it fell together in a way I liked. I&#8217;m pretty sure I came up with my basic arrangement during that year I spent studying with Dave Van Ronk &#8212; for whom I auditioned with McTell&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-rag\/\">Georgia Rag<\/a>&#8221; &#8212; or shortly afterwards, and only later added the cool riff with the off-beat rhythmic touches from Blind Blake&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/thatll-never-happen-no\/\">That&#8217;ll Never Happen No More<\/a>,&#8221; which I&#8217;d recently learned from an older street musician.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the few pre-war blues records I had before finding the trove at Dayton&#8217;s in New York was an album on Biograph by Blind Willie McTell, which began a lifelong infatuation with his work. It was a somewhat troubled relationship, because he played twelve-string guitar on most of his records, which meant I could &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/kind-mama-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Kind Mama Blues (Blind Willie McTell)<\/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-1433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Kind Mama Blues (Blind Willie McTell) - 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\/kind-mama-blues\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kind Mama Blues (Blind Willie McTell) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the few pre-war blues records I had before finding the trove at Dayton&#8217;s in New York was an album on Biograph by Blind Willie McTell, which began a lifelong infatuation with his work. 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This song is from a session he did for the embryonic Atlantic Records in 1949, well before it became a powerhouse jazz and R&B label. In a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"mctell lp cover","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/mctell-lp-cover.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1135,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":1433,"position":1},"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":2884,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/statesboro-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1433,"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":5024,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/ticket-agent-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1433,"position":3},"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":[]},{"id":4022,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-horse-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1433,"position":4},"title":"Black Horse Blues (Lemon Jefferson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 20, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I always appreciated Blind Lemon Jefferson's records, but didn't attempt to learn his guitar style until shortly before recording my CD, Street Corner Cowboys -- and then went through a crash course and ended up recording two of his songs, playing a bunch of others, and eventually teaching his style\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\/2019\/09\/lemon-jefferson-300x282.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4122,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/future-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1433,"position":5},"title":"Future Blues (Willie Brown\/Son House)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 17, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"This is one of the defining Delta blues guitar pieces, apparently originated by Charlie Patton, though I got it from Willie Brown and Son House. Brown's version is the one that was titled \"Future Blues,\" and I first came across it in Stefan Grossman's Delta Blues Guitar instruction book. That\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\/11\/Grossman-Delta-Blues-233x300.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\/1433","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=1433"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4277,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions\/4277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}