{"id":4543,"date":"2021-12-18T09:05:57","date_gmt":"2021-12-18T14:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=4543"},"modified":"2021-12-18T09:37:14","modified_gmt":"2021-12-18T14:37:14","slug":"one-dime-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/one-dime-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"One Dime Blues (Lemon Jefferson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"One Dime Blues (Lemon Jefferson)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bHoGSFxbag4?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>I love Lemon Jefferson&#8217;s singing and playing, and for a while immersed myself in his guitar style, but he was such a distinctive <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3901\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?resize=239%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"239\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?resize=239%2C300&amp;ssl=1 239w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?w=250&amp;ssl=1 250w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 239px) 100vw, 239px\" \/>and quirky player\u00a0 that most of my efforts just sounded like half-assed imitations of what he happened to play on a given day. I&#8217;ve kept playing his &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-horse-blues\/\">Black Horse Blues<\/a>,&#8221; since it is a fully composed arrangement, and used his &#8220;Bad Luck Blues&#8221; arrangement for my version of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/keep-it-clean\/\">Keep It Clean<\/a>&#8221; &#8212; but otherwise I&#8217;ve let well enough alone&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;except for this one, which is a special case, because I originally learned it as a Woody Guthrie song. He called it &#8220;New York Town,&#8221; and I had it on a Cisco Houston LP &#8212; as noted in earlier posts, Cisco was my first musical hero, and I played dozens of songs from his records. At some point I got the idea that Woody got this song from Lead Belly, which seems very possible, and then, probably quite a few years later, realized that all of them got it from Jefferson.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-753 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Cisco-aint-got-no-home.jpg?resize=270%2C270&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"270\" height=\"270\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Cisco-aint-got-no-home.jpg?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Cisco-aint-got-no-home.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Cisco-aint-got-no-home.jpg?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 270px) 100vw, 270px\" \/>The point of that digression is that when I started messing around with Jefferson&#8217;s music, this one had that extra connection, and when I figured out I couldn&#8217;t do it like he did, I could fall back on what I&#8217;d picked up from Cisco and Woody. So that&#8217;s kind of what I&#8217;ve done. I think the lyric I sing is mostly Jefferson&#8217;s, and the guitar part is based on his, with some licks borrowed from Sam McGee&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/railroad-blues\/\">Railroad Blues<\/a>,&#8221; and a bit of Mississippi John Hurt. And, honestly, aside from the final verse, I&#8217;m not aware of anything specific that came from my earlier heroes&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;except that having first learned it from Cisco, as a Woody Guthrie song, I\u00a0 was used to singing it as a cowboy\/western song rather than as a blues, or maybe it makes more sense to say I sang it as a cowboy\/western blues, since there were plenty of Black cowboys and Lead Belly sang Western ballads as well as blues, and Jefferson <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4082\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Woody-Guthrie.jpg?resize=175%2C181&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"175\" height=\"181\" \/>often marked time between verses with a kind of boom-chang strum that comes from the same place as Woody&#8217;s style, and Woody played lots of blues. Not to mention the verse about robbing trains like Jesse James, an outlaw hero they all sang about.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a good example of how mixed up and multifarious the US folk tradition is, and the funny thing is that I learned this long before I was playing any blues, never thought of it as blues, and dropped it from my repertoire when I got into blues&#8230; and then I had that Jefferson period, which was fun and challenging but mostly left no trace on my repertoire&#8230; except to send me back to Cisco and Woody. Which is fine, and I snuck in a couple of Jefferson&#8217;s guitar licks, and the result feels like a nice summation of that journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love Lemon Jefferson&#8217;s singing and playing, and for a while immersed myself in his guitar style, but he was such a distinctive and quirky player\u00a0 that most of my efforts just sounded like half-assed imitations of what he happened to play on a given day. I&#8217;ve kept playing his &#8220;Black Horse Blues,&#8221; since it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/one-dime-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">One Dime Blues (Lemon Jefferson)<\/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":false,"_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-4543","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>One Dime Blues (Lemon Jefferson) - 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I'd spent the previous couple of years learning blues and other stuff that lent itself to fingerstyle guitar,\u00a0 but 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\/2016\/07\/woody-and-cisco-300x270.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5344,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/crawling-baby\/","url_meta":{"origin":4543,"position":1},"title":"That Crawling Baby Blues (Lemon Jefferson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 21, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Lemon Jefferson was an incredibly varied and idiosyncratic guitarist, and \"That Crawling Baby Blues\" is without doubt the most idiosyncratic guitar arrangement I've ever learned -- or at least ever retained -- with a lyric to match. As a result, I've never performed it in public, but always enjoyed playing\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\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5350,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bad-luck-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":4543,"position":2},"title":"Bad Luck Blues (Lemon Jefferson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 14, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been playing Lemon Jefferson's \"Bad Luck Blues\" for at least thirty years, and recorded it on my Street Corner Cowboys CD, but it wasn't until maybe seven years ago that I figured out the opening lick. The clue was a bass note he doesn't play -- the dog 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\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3898,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/johnson-city-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":4543,"position":3},"title":"Johnson City Blues (Clarence Greene, Ida Cox)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 11, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Along with all the great African American blues artists who recorded in the 1920s, there were also some interesting Euro-American players who came up with distinctive styles. The most famous was Jimmie Rodgers, but the best guitarists tended to come from around the mountain communities of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia,\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\/07\/clarence-greene-300x291.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":4543,"position":4},"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":717,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/trouble-in-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":4543,"position":5},"title":"Trouble In Mind (Richard M. Jones)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Another song that was pretty much ubiquitous -- by the time I noticed, I had it on albums by Cisco Houston, Otis Spann, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Jones, St","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Jones-St-235x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543","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=4543"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4602,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions\/4602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}