{"id":5248,"date":"2024-06-16T12:17:30","date_gmt":"2024-06-16T16:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5248"},"modified":"2024-06-17T11:53:15","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T15:53:15","slug":"black-dog-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-dog-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues &#8211; Bayless Rose)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XUOyNSUIcX0?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;Black Dog Blues&#8221; is another song I learned off the reissue anthologies I picked up at Dayton&#8217;s Records during my year in New York in the mid-1970s. I first heard it on Yazoo&#8217;s <em>East Coast Blues 1926-1935<\/em>, played by Bayless Rose, then on Yazoo&#8217;s <em>Mr. Charlie&#8217;sBlues<\/em>, played by DickJustice. I didn&#8217;t learn their guitar parts &#8212; though Rose&#8217;s, in particular, is terrific &#8212; but it quickly became one of my standard ragtime-blues pieces, interchangeable with &#8220;Don&#8217;t Let Your Deal Go Down,&#8221; which has a lot of the same verses (at least in my versions).<\/p>\n<p>The original versions were titled &#8220;Black Dog Blues,&#8221; with a chorus lamenting that the singer&#8217;s lady called him an &#8220;Old Black Dog,&#8221; but Rose&#8217;s version alternated that chorus with one that began &#8220;Call me a dog when I&#8217;m gone,&#8221; and I stuck with that.<\/p>\n<p><em><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5251 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-LP.jpg?resize=299%2C333&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"333\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-LP.jpg?w=299&amp;ssl=1 299w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-LP.jpg?resize=269%2C300&amp;ssl=1 269w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 299px) 100vw, 299px\" \/><\/em>My choice to drop the racial identification brings to mind the racial confusion around Rose&#8217;s version, which was issued in Gennett Records&#8217; &#8220;Race&#8221; line, meaning he was marketed as a Black performer, although there is some doubt whether he was Black &#8212; or, more accurately, whether he was socially categorized as Black. (Forgive me for repeating that &#8220;Black&#8221; and &#8220;white&#8221; as US racial categories are social, not genetic:\u00a0 Someone who came to the US as a Portuguese, Greek, or Italian is considered &#8220;white,&#8221; even if their skin color and curly hair is a reminder of the centuries of connection between those areas and Africa; someone whose ancestry includes even one person who was brought to the US as an African slave is considered &#8220;Black,&#8221;\u00a0 no matter how large a proportion of their ancestry is European.)<\/p>\n<p>When the LPs were released, the Yazoo blues experts had not been able to find anything about Rose, but they noted that although marketed as Black he sounded white. More recently <em>(<\/em>in <em>78 Quarterly<\/em> #12, 2005), Chris King published an interview with Dick Justice&#8217;s daughter Mildred, in which she recalled her father learning &#8220;Black Dog Blues&#8221; from a railroad worker named Bailey Rose, who was &#8220;quite a bit older&#8230; had a drawl but not a bad one&#8230; [and] was always chewing tobacco.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>King asked if Rose was Black, and she\u00a0 said he was not, adding, &#8220;He was kind of foreign-looking though&#8230; You know, he was sort of short with dark, curly hair but with darker skin, sort of like an Arab, but he was no n&#8212;-r.&#8221; King also checked the original recording ledger, and found that next to Rose&#8217;s (unissued and lost) version of &#8220;Beale Street Blues,&#8221; someone had written, &#8220;Person not colored.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>King suggested Rose might have been Melungeon, an ethnic group native to the Appalachian region and first mentioned in print (at least, using that spelling) in 1889, when an ophthalmologist named Swan Burnett (husband of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of <em>The Secret Garden<\/em>) read a paper at the Anthropological Association of Washington\u00a0 in which he suggested their ancestry was a mix of European, African, and Native American, as indicated by the name, which he suggested was a corruption of the French <em>m\u00e9lange <\/em>&#8212; though he added that they resented that name and considered themselves Portuguese.<\/p>\n<p>However&#8230; King noted that all of this was speculation, and after I posted this post, a couple of very knowledgeable people chimed in to say that pretty much everything in his article was wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Gloria Goodwin Raheja, who has been researching Justice and the other Logan County guitarists for almost twenty years, writes that Justice learned the song directly from Rose and she has learned a lot more about Rose and that relationship, but is saving the full story for the book she is writing. Bayless Rose was not a common name, and there was a Black mine worker and laborer with that name in Lexington, Kentucky, who turns up in multiple official documents and a few newspaper stories. He was definitely considered Black, and Tony Russell has written to say King misunderstood the &#8220;person not colored&#8221; notation, and the Lexington Rose is probably him &#8212; which Raheja confirms. She writes:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;T<span class=\"x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs x1xmvt09 x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u\" dir=\"auto\" lang=\"en\">here were several men in the region named Bayless Rose, and sorting out the complete story of the musician and singer was one of the thorniest genealogical\/historical tasks I had to do in the course of the research for my book. I can confirm that he died in Lexington and moved quite a few times&#8211;apparently in pursuit of work&#8211;during the course of his life.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Which is all I know at this point, and I&#8217;m very much looking forward to Raheja&#8217;s book. Meanwhile&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>None of this has much to do with the song, which has been one of my favorite picking pieces, on- and off-stage,\u00a0 for almost fifty years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Black Dog Blues&#8221; is another song I learned off the reissue anthologies I picked up at Dayton&#8217;s Records during my year in New York in the mid-1970s. I first heard it on Yazoo&#8217;s East Coast Blues 1926-1935, played by Bayless Rose, then on Yazoo&#8217;s Mr. Charlie&#8217;sBlues, played by DickJustice. I didn&#8217;t learn their guitar parts &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-dog-blues\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues &#8211; Bayless Rose)<\/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-5248","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>Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues - Bayless Rose) - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My take on a song recorded in 1930 by Dick Justice and the otherwise unknown Bayless Rose, with some mention of Melungeons.\" \/>\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\/black-dog-blues\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues - Bayless Rose) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My take on a song recorded in 1930 by Dick Justice and the otherwise unknown Bayless Rose, with some mention of Melungeons.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-dog-blues\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-06-16T16:17:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-06-17T15:53:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-LP.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/black-dog-blues\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/black-dog-blues\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Elijah Wald\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/20e4f69f2f284ea0ff728a9d1b7720a9\"},\"headline\":\"Call Me a Dog (Black Dog Blues &#8211; 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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":4029,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/old-blue\/","url_meta":{"origin":5248,"position":3},"title":"Old Blue","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 6, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I heard this song all my life, but only started playing it when I recorded my CD, Street Corner Cowboys, in 2000. One of my sure-fire songs at that point was Dave Van Ronk's arrangement of \"Green Rocky Road,\" but it seemed silly to record that since everyone knew Dave's\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\/2015\/12\/cdcoverf-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1314,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wild-good-cocaine\/","url_meta":{"origin":5248,"position":4},"title":"Wild About My Good Cocaine (Dick Justice)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 18, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the records I bought during that year in New York forever changed my understanding of the world. Like much of what I was buying, it was a reissue of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s on the Yazoo label, but this one had a particularly strange cover and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Mr Charlie's Blues","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-298x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5136,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/alabama-bound\/","url_meta":{"origin":5248,"position":5},"title":"Alabama Bound (Jelly Roll Morton, and many others)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 30, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I've known \"Alabama Bound\" forever, but never worked it up as a performance piece, and am posting it now because I used it as the theme of chapter one of my new book, Jelly Roll Blues, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton's Library of Congress recordings, the world that nurtured\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\/Blind-Boones-Southern-Rag-Medley-No-2.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\/5248","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=5248"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5261,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5248\/revisions\/5261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}