{"id":5211,"date":"2024-06-08T10:20:21","date_gmt":"2024-06-08T14:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5211"},"modified":"2024-06-08T11:28:41","modified_gmt":"2024-06-08T15:28:41","slug":"cigarettes-and-coffee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cigarettes-and-coffee\/","title":{"rendered":"Cigarettes and Coffee Blues (Lefty Frizzell)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Cigarettes and Coffee Blues (Lefty Frizzell)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gUOyZIq-I7M?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 have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/small-town-river\/\">Bill Morrissey<\/a> to thank for turning me into a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/swinging-doors\/\">Merle Haggard<\/a> nut, and making me realize how close country\u00a0 music &#8212; especially the strain popularized as &#8220;honky tonk&#8221; &#8212; is to blues. Of course, to a large extent it came out of blues; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/any-old-time\/\">Jimmie Rodgers<\/a> was primarily a blues singer, with an obvious debt to Lemon Jefferson; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lovesick-blues\/\">Hank Williams<\/a> was primarily a blues singer, at least to my ears; and Merle Haggard was clearly a blues singer, to the point that he wrote a song called &#8220;White Man Singin&#8217; The Blues.&#8221; I&#8217;d add Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/honky-tonk-heroes\/\">Waylon Jennings<\/a>, and&#8230; you get the idea.<\/p>\n<p>And, reciprocally, a lot of Black singers were deeply influenced by white country music &#8212; not just all the ones who covered country hits, from Dinah Washington to Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, and Etta James, but blues singers like Howlin&#8217; Wolf and B.B. King, who both named Jimmie Rodgers as one of their main influences, and Muddy Waters, whose 1941 repertoire list included a half-dozen Gene Autry hits.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve sometimes tried to emphasize that overlap, for instance on my version of Hank Williams&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/you-win-again\/\">You Win Again<\/a>,&#8221; which I flavor with some Lightning Hopkins licks. But in a lot of cases, I have the original voice in my head and just want to do the best I can with a song that for one reason or another caught my ear and said, &#8220;Give me a try.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5213 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Leftys-Greatest-Hits.jpg?resize=300%2C308&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"308\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Leftys-Greatest-Hits.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Leftys-Greatest-Hits.jpg?resize=292%2C300&amp;ssl=1 292w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Which brings me to &#8220;Cigarettes and Coffee Blues,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t a blues in the classic sense, but qualifiesin honky-tonk terms. I got it off an album of Lefty Frizzell hits, which I&#8217;d bought because Merle listed him as a major influence. I liked the way he sang, but honestly never listened to him as much as I thought I should&#8230;\u00a0 and when I just went back and checked out his version of this one, it&#8217;s very different from what I remembered. I also hadn&#8217;t noticed (or hadn&#8217;t remembered) that it was composed by Marty Robbins. (I just checked out his version; I don&#8217;t think it holds a candle to Lefty&#8217;s.)<\/p>\n<p>This feels to me like a nice example of Nashville formula songwriting: I figure someone (presumably Robbins) thought, &#8220;There are all those songs about &#8216;My baby left me, so I&#8217;m getting drunk,&#8217; but not everybody gets drunk, so let&#8217;s try a twist on that, and have the guy sit up drinking coffee. Of course, that twist had already been tried, very successfully with &#8220;Black Coffee,&#8221; a terrific 1949 hit for Sarah Vaughan &#8212; though, as it happens, my favorite version is by Percy Mayfield &#8212; which also mentions smoking cigarettes, both directly and obliquely: &#8220;I&#8217;m moonin&#8217; all the mornin&#8217;, moanin&#8217; all the night,\/ And in between it&#8217;s nicotine, and not much heart to fight.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So maybe Robbins was just reworking a pop hit. In any case, it&#8217;s a nice song.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have Bill Morrissey to thank for turning me into a Merle Haggard nut, and making me realize how close country\u00a0 music &#8212; especially the strain popularized as &#8220;honky tonk&#8221; &#8212; is to blues. Of course, to a large extent it came out of blues; Jimmie Rodgers was primarily a blues singer, with an obvious &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/cigarettes-and-coffee\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Cigarettes and Coffee Blues (Lefty Frizzell)<\/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-5211","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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As I've mentioned, my Cambridge folk scene upbringing initially made me resistant to mainstream Nashville country music, Williams included, but by\u00a0 the early 1980s I was gradually coming to my senses\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\/04\/HankWilliams1952-286x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1753,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/columbus-stockade-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":5211,"position":1},"title":"Columbus Stockade (Woody and Cisco)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the pleasures of playing on the street with Rob was that I had a second voice on the choruses of my favorite Woody Guthrie - Cisco Houston duets. 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":3173,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/swinging-doors\/","url_meta":{"origin":5211,"position":2},"title":"Swinging Doors (Merle Haggard\/a honky-tonk gig)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 25, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"My first trip through the South was in the fall of 1985. I started hitchhiking from Chapel Hill, planning to hug the coast till I reached Mexico. That afternoon I saw my first roadkill armadillo while walking the last five miles into Southport, North Carolina. On the edge of town\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\/me-and-merle.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":641,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/going-down-the-road\/","url_meta":{"origin":5211,"position":3},"title":"Going Down the Road Feeling Bad (Samantha Bumgarner\/proto-blues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 23, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the oldest proto-blues songs, sung all across the South. 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":591,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/in-the-evening\/","url_meta":{"origin":5211,"position":4},"title":"In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of Leroy Carr's masterpieces, and one of the first blues songs I learned... oddly enough, from a Pete Seeger songbook.","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\/03\/Seeger-songbook.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3220,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pride-in-what-i-am\/","url_meta":{"origin":5211,"position":5},"title":"I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am (Merle Haggard)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This is another I learned for my trip south in 1985-86, though I particularly remember playing it after getting back to Cambridge, at one of my all-time favorite bar gigs. The venue was Jack's on Mass Ave., and I know I played this because one of the local folkies asked\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\/10\/Elijah-Wald-Jacks-poster.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\/5211","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=5211"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5246,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions\/5246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}