{"id":5186,"date":"2024-05-04T09:20:58","date_gmt":"2024-05-04T13:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5186"},"modified":"2024-05-18T08:58:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-18T12:58:51","slug":"early-morning-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/early-morning-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Morning Blues (Blind Blake)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Early Morning Blues (Blind Blake)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1EzmaaAF0UQ?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>&#8220;Early Morning Blues&#8221; was almost certainly the first Blind Blake guitar part I learned, and I learned it not from Blake&#8217;s recording, but from Woody Mann&#8217;s tablature (a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-rag\/\">source I&#8217;ve cited before<\/a>)&#8230; which leads to a funny story&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;because over and over, decade after decade, I have decided to work on this till I can play it as fast and smooth as Blake, and I practice until I&#8217;m happy with it&#8230; and then go back and listen to Blake&#8217;s recording and find he&#8217;s playing much slower than I do. I remember playing it onstage at the Musik Doos in Antwerp, and Etienne, the owner, liked it and bought the Blind Blake record, and played it, and I was shocked at how slow it was&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and just now, after filming it and checking that I was happy with the result, I thought I should listen to Blake&#8217;s version before posting, and once again was shocked at how slow it was.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1576\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/blindblake.jpg?resize=232%2C296&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"232\" height=\"296\" \/>To be clear, Blake could play faster and smoother than I will ever be able to play or have dreamed of playing, but he took his time on this one. Which said, I&#8217;m happy with my tempo &#8212; this isn&#8217;t an exercise in precise recreation, it&#8217;s an exercise in seeing how I remember the songs I learned over the course of my life, and this is how I remember this one&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;or more or less how I remember it&#8230; because something funny happened when I was filming:<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always ended this by repeating the first verse: &#8220;Early this morning, my baby made me sore\/ Said, &#8216;I&#8217;m going away to leave you, I won&#8217;t be back anymore.&#8221; (Actually, Blake sings &#8220;ain&#8217;t coming back no more,&#8221; but I&#8217;m trying to sing more like I talk.) Anyway&#8230; for some reason, when I was filming, I got to the final verse and ended the first line, &#8220;my baby made me mad.&#8221; You can see a moment of confusion on my face, because I was happy with how it was going and didn&#8217;t want to have to do another take, but &#8220;mad&#8221; wasn&#8217;t going to rhyme with &#8220;anymore.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, this is a standard twelve-bar blues, with two repeated lines before the rhyming third, which provides some time to think. That&#8217;s what makes blues such a relaxed style for improvising lyrics &#8212; a theme I explore in <em>Jelly Roll Blues<\/em>, because Morton was celebrated in his blues-singing days for improvising verses. And another great thing about blues is the tradition of repurposing folk homilies as song lyrics&#8230; so I did, and here it is.<\/p>\n<p>By way of history: this was Blind Blake&#8217;s first recording, released in 1926 and backed with &#8220;West Coast Blues,&#8221; an instrumental that is every bit as smooth and fast as I remember it &#8212; I do my best at playing that way on my version of his &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/southern-rag\/\">Southern Rag<\/a>,&#8221; and don&#8217;t think I disgrace myself, but neither do I kid myself that I&#8217;ve mastered its subtleties or come close to matching his relaxed virtuosity.\u00a0 He was a superb player, and one of the first great blues guitar stars, along with Lonnie Johnson and Lemon Jefferson &#8212; three very different players, and three of the best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Early Morning Blues&#8221; was almost certainly the first Blind Blake guitar part I learned, and I learned it not from Blake&#8217;s recording, but from Woody Mann&#8217;s tablature (a source I&#8217;ve cited before)&#8230; which leads to a funny story&#8230; &#8230;because over and over, decade after decade, I have decided to work on this till I can &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/early-morning-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Early Morning Blues (Blind Blake)<\/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-5186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - 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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":33,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/from-four-until-late\/","url_meta":{"origin":5186,"position":4},"title":"From Four Until Late (Robert Johnson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"One of my pet subjects as a music historian is how little we know about what and how people played in the past, and how easy it is to get stories wrong--especially when we think we know what we're talking about. 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It was by far the trickiest arrangement I'd attempted up to that time, but I finally got it more or less to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Blind_Blake","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Blind_Blake.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\/5186","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=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5192,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions\/5192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}