{"id":3082,"date":"2017-09-02T07:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-09-02T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=3082"},"modified":"2024-02-17T14:28:13","modified_gmt":"2024-02-17T19:28:13","slug":"cow-cow-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cow-cow-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Cow Cow Blues (Charles Davenport)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Cow Cow Blues\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Sn3Opv34Thc?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>Charles &#8220;Cow Cow&#8221; Davenport&#8217;s business card claimed he was &#8220;The Man that Gave America Boogie-<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-3083 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/cow-cow-card.jpg?resize=300%2C186&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"186\" \/>Woogie,&#8221; and as Dave Van Ronk used to say, there&#8217;s no point in argument. He had as good a claim as anyone, and better than most. In 1925, before any of the other great blues piano players got on record, he recorded a fine version of this piece with a vocal by Dora Carr, his longtime partner on the black vaudeville circuit. It wasn&#8217;t titled &#8220;boogie woogie,&#8221; but that&#8217;s what the style would be called after a fellow named Pine Top Smith hit three years later with a piece called &#8220;Pine Top&#8217;s Boogie Woogie,&#8221; and Davenport always claimed he helped Smith arrange and title that record. (The facts are murky, and Peter Silvester, who writes this up in <em>A Left Hand Like God<\/em>, remains agnostic while seeming to confirm that Davenport helped Smith get the record gig.)<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3086 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/cow-cow-davenport-1.jpg?resize=210%2C244&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"210\" height=\"244\" \/>Be that as it may, Davenport was a terrific pianist &#8212; check out his &#8220;State Street Jive&#8221; if you want to hear a truly amazing bassline &#8212; and a fine singer, but he will always be remembered for his namesake piece. It quickly became ubiquitous, and every blues and honky-tonk piano player had to work up a version. The Mississippi Delta player Louise Johnson did a nice one titled &#8220;On the Wall,&#8221; with comments by Son House, who apparently had stolen Johnson&#8217;s affections from Charlie Patton during the ride north to record, and there&#8217;s a classic reworking by Ray Charles as &#8220;Mess Around,&#8221; which was also memorably recorded by Professor Longhair.<\/p>\n<p>Along with pianists, it was picked up and reworked by players of other instruments &#8212; there&#8217;s a kind of sappy big band version by Bob Crosby (Bing&#8217;s brother), and two of my favorite versions are by the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-3084 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/Charlie-McCoy.jpg?resize=250%2C245&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"245\" \/>Mississippi mandolin player Charlie McCoy, one an instrumental titled &#8220;Jackson Stomp&#8221; and the other a vocal blues called &#8220;That Lonesome Train Took My Baby Away.&#8221; That was the first piece I ever worked out on mandolin, and I&#8217;m pretty sure my guitar version came out of it &#8212; though it may have happened the other way around. Either way, I worked it up in the early 1980s and was very happy with the arrangement, because it&#8217;s so simple. I came out of a ragtime blues tradition, and Dave Van Ronk had taken me further down the piano ragtime road with some diversions into swing, but this is just some simple riffs in E, inspired by piano but falling naturally on the guitar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles &#8220;Cow Cow&#8221; Davenport&#8217;s business card claimed he was &#8220;The Man that Gave America Boogie-Woogie,&#8221; and as Dave Van Ronk used to say, there&#8217;s no point in argument. He had as good a claim as anyone, and better than most. In 1925, before any of the other great blues piano players got on record, he &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cow-cow-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Cow Cow Blues (Charles Davenport)<\/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":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Cow Cow Blues (Charles Davenport) - 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\/cow-cow-blues\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cow Cow Blues (Charles Davenport) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Charles &#8220;Cow Cow&#8221; Davenport&#8217;s business card claimed he was &#8220;The Man that Gave America Boogie-Woogie,&#8221; and as Dave Van Ronk used to say, there&#8217;s no point in argument. He had as good a claim as anyone, and better than most. 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That's all we know about him, and even that is not\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\/03\/william-brown-card-e1709791331734.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":979,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/blues-in-the-bottle\/","url_meta":{"origin":3082,"position":1},"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":1135,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":3082,"position":2},"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":3159,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/im-moving-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":3082,"position":3},"title":"I&#8217;m Moving On (Hank Snow\/Ray Charles)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 27, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"In the mid-1980s I was looking for songs in the wide area of overlap between blues and country, and Ray Charles' terrific version of this Hank Snow hit made it an obvious choice. In that period I was touring across country twice a year, with most of the gigs in\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\/09\/Ray-Charles-Movin-On-300x296.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5471,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/choo-choo-ch-boogie\/","url_meta":{"origin":3082,"position":4},"title":"Choo Choo Ch-Boogie (Louis Jordan)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 23, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Louis Jordan recorded a lot of great songs, but \"Choo Choo Ch-Boogie\" is clearly a standout. I've already paid tribute to Jordan in my post for \"Jack, You're Dead,\" and he's one of my longtime favorites, as well as one of the most fundamental artists of the R&B era. He\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\/11\/louis-jordan-e1730935077310.webp?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2245,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/down-and-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":3082,"position":5},"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":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082","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=3082"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4980,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions\/4980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}