Month: January 2024

The songs were recorded between 1952 and 1960, but I didn’t see any evidence that this was a reissue. The first sentence of Little Walter’s Wikipedia article says he was a revolutionary like Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker, and Jimi Hendrix. Me, I was just going to say that every harmonica player since Little Walter sounds like him. The article also said he got into fights and even had some run-ins with the police. His picture on the cover of the record shows a scar on his forehead that looks as if the wound had been sewn up with monofilament fishing line.

I like his Key to the Highway. I’m fascinated (and stumped) by Mellow Down Easy. He says his baby jumps, shakes, wiggles, then mellows down easy before she blows her top. I have no idea how the kids on Bandstand would to that. The online lyrics providers didn’t listen very closely to Blue and Lonesome. I can clearly hear ‘I’m going to cast my trouble, yeah/down into the deep blue sea/let the whales and fishes have a fuss over me.’ Most of the sites have ‘I’m going to cast myself into the deep blue see [sic].’ That’s about the opposite meaning.

He had some hits after this collection: Mannish Boy, The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll, and Champaign and Reefer with the Rolling Stones. Despite those not having those later arrivals, this is great record.

When my roommate played it for me in 1969, he said the line in I’m Ready was ‘Hope some schoolboy wants a fight.’ He made a crack about the backlash against hippies. I have better speakers now, and I say it is ‘screwball.’ There weren’t any schoolboys in blues clubs in the 1950s to punch. The line before that is a favorite—‘I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite.’ I said that when I was slamming down bar gin, and no one ever stepped back. It’s the singer, not the song. In Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy said he had $700; that’s $8000 today. Can’t say I’ve tried that in a bar.

Muddy wasn’t the kind of guy who expected an exclusive relationship with a lover. In Honey Bee he says ‘I don’t mind you sailing/but please don’t sail too long.’ In Still a Fool, he says, ‘I been crazy, oh, all my life/well, I done fell in love/with another man’s wife.’ In I Just Want to Make Love to You, he says ‘I don’t want you to be true/I just want to make love to you.’ Also: ‘I don’t want you because I’m sad and blue,’ good to know before you get serious. In Standing Around Crying, he says ‘Oh baby, I ain’t gonna be riding you around in my automobile/you got so many men/that I’m afraid you may get me killed.’ Me, I’d have given Muddy Waters the Nobel in Literature.

McTell is notable for playing 12-string guitar in Piedmont fingerstyle. He never had a hit, but he played on the streets of Atlanta into the 1950s. Jack White’s Third Man Record has reissued four LPs of McTell’s work. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him. McTell played a lot of kinds of songs, but you can recognize them all. If you listen to one old bluesman, you can do a lot worse.

One side of this record is mostly religious songs/spirituals. You Got to Die is a version of Pascal’s Wager—you don’t know when you are going to die, so you should live according to Christian doctrine to make sure you are ready.

The other side is more about the pleasures of life. Broke Down Engine Blues contains ‘I went down to the praying ground/and dropped down on bended knees/I ain’t crying for no religion/Lordy, give me back my good girl please.’ He also says he loved his woman because she could really do the Georgia crawl. I couldn’t find it in my Dictionary of American Regional English, but I’m sure it’s sex.

Not a snappy title for a great record. As Doc Watson put it in one of his songs: Did you love John Hurt? Put me in the group voting yes. Hurt always had a beautiful sound from his guitar (people like to call it gentle) to go with his sweet voice, and his lyrics had plenty of sex and violence. What’s not to like. He did plenty of spirituals, too. His I Shall Not Be Moved is outstanding. My only complaint about the material he left us is that he wasn’t able to record much when he was young.

This record’s version of Oh Mary Don’t You Weep has one of my favorite phrases from a spiritual—Moses stood on the Red Sea shore/smote the water with a 2 X 4. That’s not how Charlton Heston did it in the movie. Wikipedia says the song predates the U.S. Civil War and that 2 X 4s became a thing about 1915, so some clever soul worked the joke into an old song.