{"id":28,"date":"2015-12-11T15:54:46","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T15:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=28"},"modified":"2017-02-21T13:59:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T18:59:34","slug":"casey-jones-kassie-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/casey-jones-kassie-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Casey Jones (Furry Lewis\/banjo to guitar)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7LxVdECY-yI\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When I was doing the book tour for <em>Escaping the Delta<\/em>, my book on Robert Johnson and the history of blues, I started playing this song regularly at the various events, and fell completely in love with it. It is Furry Lewis&#8217;s take on a song that has been recorded in dozens of versions, by dozens of people&#8211;Charlie Poole did a variant titled &#8220;Milwaukee Blues,&#8221; Waylon Jennings did it as &#8220;Waymore&#8217;s Blues,&#8221; a bunch of people have done it as &#8220;Jay Gould&#8217;s Daughter.&#8221; Aside from being a great piece of music, it&#8217;s a good example of the kinds of songs that were all over the South at the turn of the 19th-20th century and crystallized into blues, and of the way banjo styles affected blues guitar. I started thinking about those banjo slides when I learned Lead Belly&#8217;s arrangement of &#8220;Poor Howard,&#8221; which is very similar to the way Furry played this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was doing the book tour for Escaping the Delta, my book on Robert Johnson and the history of blues, I started playing this song regularly at the various events, and fell completely in love with it. It is Furry Lewis&#8217;s take on a song that has been recorded in dozens of versions, by &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/casey-jones-kassie-jones\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Casey Jones (Furry Lewis\/banjo to guitar)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Casey Jones (Furry Lewis\/banjo to guitar) - 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\/casey-jones-kassie-jones\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Casey Jones (Furry Lewis\/banjo to guitar) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When I was doing the book tour for Escaping the Delta, my book on Robert Johnson and the history of blues, I started playing this song regularly at the various events, and fell completely in love with it. 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I got it from Woody Guthrie, but everyone had a version of it.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Samantha Bumgarner","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Samantha-Bumgarner-189x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1143,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/spike-drivers-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":28,"position":2},"title":"Spike Driver&#8217;s Blues (John Hurt\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The first song Dave Van Ronk taught me was John Hurt's powerfully understated meditation on the John Henry legend.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"dave van ronk7","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/dave-van-ronk7.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":979,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/blues-in-the-bottle\/","url_meta":{"origin":28,"position":3},"title":"Blues In the Bottle (The Holy Modal Rounders)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another I got from the Holy Modal Rounders, though somewhat amended after listening to their source, Prince Albert Hunt, a Texas fiddler, guitarist, and legendary hell-raiser who recorded it in 1928. I still go back and forth between his first verse and theirs: Rounders: Blues in the bottle, blues\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"prince-albert-hunt","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/prince-albert-hunt.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5262,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/frankie-john-hurt\/","url_meta":{"origin":28,"position":4},"title":"Frankie (Mississippi John Hurt)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 22, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I generally stay away from open tunings, partly because I have enough trouble keeping a guitar in tune in one tuning... but a lot of my favorite guitarists liked them, and they have a deep history in southern Black culture. In previous posts I wrote and talked about the way\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\/2024\/06\/John-Hurt.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3962,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/morning-blues-uncle-dave-macon\/","url_meta":{"origin":28,"position":5},"title":"Morning Blues (Uncle Dave Macon)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 1, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"This was originally recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1926 and issued as \"I've Got the Mourning Blues.\" Folk revivalists have tended to correct that title to \"Morning Blues,\" and for familiarity's sake I've gone with that... but my guess is it should actually be \"Moaning Blues.\" That was a\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\/08\/Uncle-Dave-Macon-228x300.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\/28","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=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2610,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/2610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}