{"id":3696,"date":"2018-05-19T01:05:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T05:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=3696"},"modified":"2018-05-22T16:57:21","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T20:57:21","slug":"bye-bye-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bye-bye-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Bye and Bye Blues (Tommy Johnson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Bye and Bye Blues\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VTzESOKjdnA?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>The first trip I made after getting\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/africa-to-appalachia\/\">back from Africa<\/a> was to the Mississippi Delta, where by a series of unlikely coincidences I ended up as part of the band for the dedication of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/walking-blues\/\">Robert Johnson<\/a>&#8216;s grave marker. I&#8217;ve told that story in my book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/rjohnson.html\"><em>Escaping the Delta<\/em><\/a>, but the short version is that Washtub Robbie Phillips was invited by Skip Henderson, a New Jersey guitar dealer who had arranged the event at Mt. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3698 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Kenny-Robbie-EW-at-Robert-Johnson-memorial.jpg?resize=332%2C242\" alt=\"\" width=\"332\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Kenny-Robbie-EW-at-Robert-Johnson-memorial.jpg?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Kenny-Robbie-EW-at-Robert-Johnson-memorial.jpg?resize=300%2C219&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 332px) 100vw, 332px\" \/>Zion church near Morgan City, Mississippi; then Robbie won the Massachusetts lottery and said he could pay for gas if I drove; our friend Kenny Holladay decided to drive up from New Orleans to meet us; and the local musicians who had been invited didn&#8217;t show up. So Kenny sang &#8220;Terraplane Blues&#8221; at the dedication, with Robbie and me backing him, everyone enjoyed it, and we were invited back a few months later for the dedication of a Charlie Patton marker, sharing a stage with Pop Staples and John Fogerty&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;all of which meant I spent a fair amount of time driving around the Delta, and brought along a lot of classic Delta recordings to play while driving. Mostly I just listened and didn&#8217;t try to play that music myself, but Tommy Johnson&#8217;s songs kept tempting me. It was something about the way he played and the way his voice fitted with the guitar, a <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3406\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Tommy-Johnson-232x300.jpg?resize=183%2C237\" alt=\"\" width=\"183\" height=\"237\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Tommy-Johnson.jpg?resize=232%2C300&amp;ssl=1 232w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Tommy-Johnson.jpg?w=275&amp;ssl=1 275w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 183px) 100vw, 183px\" \/>lightness I didn&#8217;t hear in people like Patton. So when I got home I worked out a bunch of his arrangements, including his most popular chart, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/big-road-blues\/\">Big Road Blues<\/a>,&#8221; and this one, his reworking of Charlie Patton&#8217;s &#8220;Pony Blues,&#8221; which became a staple of my repertoire. The record label called it &#8220;Bye Bye Blues,&#8221; but that was a mistake &#8212; it&#8217;s a warning, not a farewell.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of warnings&#8230; Tommy Johnson recorded very few songs, and is not well-known beyond the hardcore pre-war blues scene, which has led to an odd mistake: in an interview with the blues scholar David Evans, Johnson&#8217;s brother Ledell said that Tommy told him a story about getting his musical skills from the Devil:<\/p>\n<p><em>You take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little \u2019fore midnight that night so you\u2019ll know you&#8217;ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself . . . A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he\u2019ll tune it. And then he\u2019ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That\u2019s the way I learned to play anything I want.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Anyone familiar with blues has heard versions of that story, but almost always connected not to Tommy but to the unrelated, younger <em>Robert<\/em> Johnson &#8212; to the point that when the Coen Brothers put a version of this legend in the mouth of a character named Tommy Johnson in their movie <em>O Brother, Where Art Thou<\/em>, the <em>New York Times<\/em> critic glossed it as a reference to Robert&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;which is neither here nor there, except as one more reason to check out Tommy Johnson&#8217;s music. Devil or not, he was a fine player, beautiful singer, and one of my all-time favorite artists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first trip I made after getting\u00a0 back from Africa was to the Mississippi Delta, where by a series of unlikely coincidences I ended up as part of the band for the dedication of Robert Johnson&#8216;s grave marker. I&#8217;ve told that story in my book, Escaping the Delta, but the short version is that Washtub &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bye-bye-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bye and Bye Blues (Tommy 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_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-3696","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>Bye and Bye Blues (Tommy Johnson) - 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All we have is the music, and it is startlingly distinctive, including two masterpieces of acoustic blues -- both inspired by recordings, with guitar parts 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\/2019\/04\/Sleepy-John-Estes-and-Yank-Rachell-300x200.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":803,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/sitting-top-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":3696,"position":1},"title":"Sitting on Top of the World (Doc Watson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Another I got from Doc Watson, long before I heard the Mississippi Sheiks' original recording. I love the Sheiks, but still do a variant of Doc's version.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Sheiks - Sitting on top of the World","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Sheiks-Sitting-on-top-of-the-World.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3405,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/big-road-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":3696,"position":2},"title":"Big Road Blues (Tommy Johnson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Spending the winter of 1987-8 fronting a blues band in Sevilla got my chops up like never before, and also got me back into pre-war blues (or country blues, fingerstyle blues -- the kind of blues that shaped my understanding of the guitar). I'd never stopped playing that music, but\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\/12\/Tommy-Johnson.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5275,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/roll-and-riverside\/","url_meta":{"origin":3696,"position":3},"title":"Roll and Tumble\/Traveling Riverside Blues","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 29, 2024","format":"video","excerpt":"I worked out a bunch of Robert Johnson songs and related pieces when I was writing Escaping the Delta, including Hambone Willie Newbern's \"Roll and Tumble,\" which Johnson used as a model for \"If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day\" and \"Traveling Riverside Blues.\" However, the only Johnson songs 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\/2024\/06\/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3645,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/southern-rag\/","url_meta":{"origin":3696,"position":4},"title":"Blind Blake&#8217;s Southern Rag","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 5, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Blind Blake was one of the greatest guitarists of the early blues era, distinguished not only by the speed and precision of his playing, but by the fact that he was known for instrumental showpieces. Blues was generally considered a singing style, so even Lonnie Johnson \u2014 the consummate virtuoso\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Blind Blake\"","block_context":{"text":"Blind Blake","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tag\/blind-blake\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Blind_Blake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3746,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hey-now-baby\/","url_meta":{"origin":3696,"position":5},"title":"Hey Now, Baby (Professor Longhair)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 2, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I first heard Professor Longhair on a terrific album of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival -- also the first place I heard Allen Toussaint and Earl King -- and it was love at first listen. So I began acquiring his albums, and the more I heard, the more\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\/04\/jazzfest-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\/3696","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=3696"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3793,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3696\/revisions\/3793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}