{"id":2117,"date":"2016-10-22T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=2117"},"modified":"2023-02-11T14:01:11","modified_gmt":"2023-02-11T19:01:11","slug":"lord-got-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lord-got-tomatoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord, Got Tomatoes (Blind Blake Higgs)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Lord Got Tomatoes\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6hu2MGWVINE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This song was first recorded by the Bahamian Blind Blake\u00a0 and his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypsos, but a couple of the verses were current when I was in elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-2149  alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Blind-Blake-Higgs-and-band.jpg?resize=346%2C265&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"346\" height=\"265\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Blind-Blake-Higgs-and-band.jpg?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Blind-Blake-Higgs-and-band.jpg?resize=300%2C230&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 346px) 100vw, 346px\" \/>Actually, to be strictly accurate, one of his verses (the sheep one) was current in my school, and another (the bear one) was current in my school but not on Blake&#8217;s recording, and I added it, because it fit.<\/p>\n<p>Dave Van Ronk often argued that the only true example of folk music in his repertoire was &#8220;Shaving Cream,&#8221; a mildly dirty ditty he&#8217;d learned as a kid in Brooklyn, because unlike all the songs he&#8217;d learned from recordings or his fellow folksingers, it had been learned informally through the oral tradition in his home community and was the sort of music people in that community (in particular, pre-teen boys) sang for their own pleasure and entertainment.<\/p>\n<p>When I&#8217;ve taught folk music classes, I regularly ask the students to sing or recite lyrics they&#8217;ve learned from friends and never heard on a recording or seen in print or video. Almost everybody has a few, and they tend to be mildly dirty &#8212; or sometimes not so mildly &#8212; in part because dirty lyrics are fun, and in part because the clean children&#8217;s rhymes get disseminated by other means.<\/p>\n<p>I first heard this song from a Seattle street musician named Baby Gramps. It was the summer of 1982, as best I can figure, and I&#8217;d hitchhiked west and was wending my way to Vancouver, Canada, including a week or so playing on the street in Seattle. I did ok, and met a surprising number of people I&#8217;d known elsewhere (including a woman I&#8217;d known in Pakistan and one from Cambridge who&#8217;d almost led me astray in my innocent youth), but <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-2119 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Baby-Gramps.jpg?resize=176%2C214&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"176\" height=\"214\" \/>nothing to the crowds Gramps gathered. He was a local phenomenon, and I recall several dozen people sitting on a patch of grass and listening as he sat on a chair and ran through a full set.<\/p>\n<p>That set included this song, and I loved it, so I went up afterwards and asked if he could give me the words. He grumbled, &#8220;No, I think of that as my song and don&#8217;t want other people doing it.&#8221; I replied that it sounded to me like a Blind Blake song &#8212; Gramps had kept the basic Bahamian rhythms, and it reminded me of the Blake songs I&#8217;d heard from Van Ronk (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/yas-yas-yas\/\">Yas, Yas, Yas<\/a>&#8220;) and Paul Geremia (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/jones-oh-jones\/\">Jones, Oh Jones<\/a>&#8220;). He grumbled, &#8220;Yeah, maybe that&#8217;s where I heard it&#8230;&#8221; but continued to demur.<\/p>\n<p>Which, in the long run, may have been a good thing, since it pushed me to hunt up the Blind Blake record. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1288  alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Blind-Blake-bahaman.jpg?resize=245%2C243&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"245\" height=\"243\" 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: 245px) 100vw, 245px\" \/>But at the time I thought he was being an asshole, and ever since have made a point of cheerfully passing on any song I know to anyone else who wants to learn it. Because, much as I may like having a great song associated with me, if I can&#8217;t make my version special that&#8217;s my own fault, and I didn&#8217;t write any of this stuff, so what possible right do I have to treat it as my personal property? Which said, Gramps is a good musician and did a nice version of this, and that&#8217;s where I first heard it, and it&#8217;s a charming\u00a0 ditty if ever there was one, and I found the Blake album easily enough&#8230; so all is well, and hats off to him, and thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This song was first recorded by the Bahamian Blind Blake\u00a0 and his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypsos, but a couple of the verses were current when I was in elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, to be strictly accurate, one of his verses (the sheep one) was current in my school, and another (the bear one) &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lord-got-tomatoes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Lord, Got Tomatoes (Blind Blake Higgs)<\/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-2117","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>Lord, Got Tomatoes (Blind Blake Higgs) - 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\/lord-got-tomatoes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lord, Got Tomatoes (Blind Blake Higgs) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This song was first recorded by the Bahamian Blind Blake\u00a0 and his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypsos, but a couple of the verses were current when I was in elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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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":1574,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/thatll-never-happen-no\/","url_meta":{"origin":2117,"position":1},"title":"That&#8217;ll Never Happen No More (Blind Blake\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This song changed my life, because when I saw a flier for a Dave Van Ronk concert at age 12, I went home and checked the two LPs I had with Van Ronk tracks, and one of them was Blues at Newport, and I put on this song, then played\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\/06\/blues-at-newport.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5186,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/early-morning-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":2117,"position":2},"title":"Early Morning Blues (Blind Blake)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 4, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Early Morning Blues\" was almost certainly the first Blind Blake guitar part I learned, and I learned it not from Blake's recording, but from Woody Mann's tablature (a source I've cited before)... which leads to a funny story... ...because over and over, decade after decade, I have decided to work\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\/06\/blindblake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1433,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/kind-mama-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":2117,"position":3},"title":"Kind Mama Blues (Blind Willie McTell)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 6, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the few pre-war blues records I had before finding the trove at Dayton'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\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\/Willie-McTell-LP.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1285,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/jones-oh-jones\/","url_meta":{"origin":2117,"position":4},"title":"Jones, Oh Jones (Bahamian Blind Blake\/Paul Geremia)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A uniquely bloodthirsty bit of minstrelsy, via the Bahamian Blind Blake and the matchless Paul Geremia, with elucidation of the \"wedding butcher\" fallacy.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"geremia hard life","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/geremia-hard-life.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3915,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/row-of-dominoes\/","url_meta":{"origin":2117,"position":5},"title":"Row of Dominoes (Butch Hancock)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another I learned from Joe Ely. Among the many debts I owe to Joe is that he introduced me to Butch Hancock's songwriting. 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