‘Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me . . .’

It was ninety-three years ago today in Atlanta, on October 22, 1928 – according to the notes to the CD The Essential Jimmie Rodgers – that the Singing Brakeman recorded a song that I’d guess is one of his best-known: “Waiting For A Train.” The recording was released the following February as Bluebird 5163.

I imagine that my first exposure to the tune came with Boz Scaggs’ version, found on his 1969 self-titled album recorded in Muscle Shoals, a track highlighted by Duane Allman’s sweet work on dobro. (Also on the album, of course, is the epic “Loan Me A Dime,” which features Allman’s ferocious slide work.) I got the album in the spring of 1989, but I imagine I’d heard Scagg’s version of the tune long before, though I have no idea when.

Scaggs’ version is just one of more than eighty covers of the tune listed at Second Hand Songs. Three versions are listed from 1929, by Riley Puckett, by Ed (Jake) West, and by Carson Robison and Frank Luther, who recorded as the Jimson Brothers.

The most recent version of “Waiting For A Train” listed at the site was by Billy Bragg and Joe Henry. They recorded the song in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, the same room where Robert Johnson recorded twenty-three tracks during three sessions in November 1936. Bragg and Henry released their version in 2016 on the album Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad.

There was a surprise, though, waiting for me at Second Hand Songs. Listed with the versions of “Waiting For A Train” were thirteen versions of the song “Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me,” with the words credited to Mississippi John Hurt. The website says that Hurt first recorded the song in 1966, a take that was included on the posthumous 1972 album Last Sessions.

I’ve noted here before that Second Hand Songs is a good place to start but not always complete. That’s the case here, as in the digital stacks here I find a version of “Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me” that Hurt recorded in 1963 for the Library of Congress. That version was first released in 1982 on an album titled Avalon Blues: The Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 2 and has been released on several anthologies since (as has the 1966 version) as shown by the photo in the video below.

Whichever came first, it’s a surprise and a delight to hear the same melody as Rodgers’ “Waiting For A Train” used as the basis for an entirely different song (as was frequently the case in the folk and blues tradition).

One From 12-28

Well, as we edge closer and closer to the end of the year, we’re going to spend a few days listening to tunes recorded in late December over the years.

In New York City in December 1928, Mississippi John Hurt laid down a number of tracks for the Okeh label. (The question arises: How many tracks? Well, the 1996 CD in my stacks – subtitled The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings – has thirteen tracks. The YouTube page devoted to Hurt lists an album titled Spike Driver Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings released this year that includes nineteen tracks, which tells me that six tracks have come to light in recent years.) Okeh seems to have released six records from the sessions, but they didn’t do well on the market, and Hurt went back to farming in Mississippi. He was rediscovered in 1963 and went on to record several albums until his death in 1966.

Hurt’s often called a bluesman because he was rediscovered during the years when researchers, musicians, historians and just plain fans combed the southern states for artists who had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. But Hurt’s music, with its light-fingered picking and lilting voice, has little of the blues in it, despite the titles of many of his tunes.

That’s the case with the track below, “Got the Blues (Can’t Be Satisfied),” recorded on December 28, 1928, eighty-eight years ago today. And I wish I had a tale to hang on the track – or any of Hurt’s work – but all I can say is that anytime I hear his nimble guitar work and his mellow voice, my day is just a little bit better.

‘All My Days . . .’

As we continue to make our ways here through the Valley of Virus – the Texas Gal seemingly ascending from its depths toward the uplands of recovery and me evidently making my way into its unpleasantness – there’s not much energy here.

So I was going to play the easy card that I’ve dropped on the table several times recently: In today’s case, asking the RealPlayer to find tracks recorded on April 15 over the years. I had a hunch that among them would be the recordings of Mississippi John Hurt’s concert on April 15, 1965, at Oberlin College in Ohio. And I was right. The tracks from that concert came up in the list.

But the RealPlayer also told me those tracks are no longer in the folder where I stashed them. And that’s true. Evidently, as I was updating my collection of Hurt’s music the other day, I inadvertently deleted the Oberlin concert tracks. I will have to replace them, and I’m not sure where I originally found them, likely somewhere out on the ’Net some years ago. The local library might have the CD, or I may track it down on Amazon and add it to the physical stacks here.

In any case, it’s always a good day to hear Mississippi John Hurt, so I’ll shift to a track included on his Last Sessions album, recorded in February 1966 at the Manhattan Towers Hotel in New York City. It’s suitable accompaniment for a trip through any valley: “Trouble, I’ve Had It All My Days.

Date corrected after first posting.

‘Come On In My Kitchen . . .’

Come on into the kitchen here at the studios. You need an invitation? Okay, here’s one by a British blues musician named Paul Williams, from his 1973 album In Memory Of Robert Johnson:

Looking at the record jacket shown in the video, a blues fan sees an error. Robert Johnson did not die in a hotel room but rather in a house in Greenwood, Mississippi (at 109 Young Street, if the late Honeyboy Edwards’ commentary in the 1991 documentary The Search For Robert Johnson is accurate). But the mistake on that jacket simply illustrate how little was known about the man forty years ago when his music had already inspired a generation of blues artists through whatever 78s had survived nearly forty years and through two LPs released by Columbia.

Anyway, you’re in the kitchen. Over there, on the right, is the stove. In a 1929 recording, Blind Willie McTell warns Bethenea Harris that “This Is Not The Stove To Brown Your Bread” (with Alfoncy Harris adding guitar in the background). But the oven’s been in use, according to Spencer Wiggins, who wants to know “Who’s Been Warming My Oven” in a track recorded for Goldwax sometime around 1967 but not released at the time:

And over there, on the left, is the refrigerator. Alice Cooper sang in 1970’s “Refrigerator Heaven” about being frozen until a cure for cancer was found, but that’s happening in some lab, not in my kitchen. So we’ll turn a little bit and head for the counter, and that’s where we find Dolly Parton’s “Old Black Kettle” waiting for soup or stew or whatever we’ll have for dinner this evening, as it has been since she sang about it in 1973. And next to it we find breakfast: The “Second Cup Of Coffee” that Gordon Lightfoot’s been sipping since 1972 and some “Shortnin’ Bread” courtesy of Mississippi John Hurt, probably from 1966.

And then we’re out the door for the day.

Saturday Single No. 259

With the Texas Gal sleeping in and the catboys satisfied for the moment with a fresh supply of dry food, it’s time to take advantage of the Saturday morning quiet and wander down the random road in search of a Saturday Single:

First up is a live performance of “Southern Rain” by the Cowboy Junkies. The track comes from Waltz Across America, the live album the rootsy band released in 2000. Originally found on the 1992 release, Black Eyed Man, the song’s live version stretches a little longer than the studio version, but it retains the atmosphere of mysterious foreboding that makes the original track stand out. I won’t say the Junkies are one of my favorite bands, but I like their music a lot – I don’t think I’ve ever hit the “skip” button when their stuff has popped up at random – and “Southern Rain” is a good place to start this morning.

Next up is “The Day I Found Myself” by Honey Cone, one of those “Thank God you’re gone because I’m so much better without you” songs that pop up now and then. Honey Cone was a female R&B trio from Los Angeles that had ten records on or near the charts between mid-1969 and late 1972. Best remembered among those singles, I’m sure, is “Want Ads,” which went to No. 1 on both the pop and the R&B charts. “The Day I Found Myself” got to No. 23 on the pop chart and to No. 8 on the R&B chart.

If I read things correctly at All-Music Guide, the band Country Joe & The Fish went through major changes for several reasons in late 1968 and 1969, which meant, among other things, that the band that performed behind Joe McDonald at Woodstock was not the group that had recorded the group’s two brilliant 1967 albums: Electric Music for the Mind and Body and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die. Maybe I should have known that, but I didn’t. What got me rummaging through the band’s history was our third stop this morning: “For No Reason” from the spring 1969 album Here We Are Again. The track is a dirge for times lost:

He wants to find men
Who can love for no reason,
Who open their hearts
To life of all seasons
But they’ve all gone, it seems
Off in their limousines—
I want to live where men
Can believe their dreams.

Kind of a downer on a sunny Saturday morning.

And we stay on the mellow side, with the RealPlayer settling on “Rocking Chair” by Lesley Duncan from her 1975 album, Moonbathing. Duncan, whose name has popped up here before, was one of England’s top session vocalists. According to AMG, she “sang on recordings by Elton John, the Dave Clark Five, Pink Floyd, the Alan Parsons Project, Michael Chapman, and Joyce Everson and the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar.” She also wrote “Love Song,” which John recorded on Tumbleweed Connection (and which shows up as a live duet by the two on Moonbathing.) All of that always makes me expect more than I get from Duncan’s solo work; “Rocking Chair” is pleasant but not much more than that.

And then comes the roar of “Holier Than Thou” from Metallica’s self-titled 1991 album. Metallica? In whiteray’s garden? Well, yeah. I wanted “Enter Sandman” in the RealPlayer, and I got hold of and ripped the CD but forgot to delete the rest of the album. So we’ll just touch down there long enough to recognize the alien landscape and then move on to our Saturday morning destination.

And we land on “Spike Driver Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt, who – as I know I’ve mentioned before – recorded some tracks for the Okeh label in 1928 and then faded out of memory until the blues boom of the 1960s, when he was rediscovered farming and still playing his repertoire of folk and blues near his home town of Avalon, Mississippi. The version of “Spike Driver Blues” that popped up this morning was the one recorded in New York City in December 1928. But at YouTube, I found a live performance of the tune recorded for the television show Rainbow Quest, hosted by folk legend Pete Seeger in 1965 and 1966. The thirty-nine episodes of the show, says Wikipedia, were recorded “at WNJU-TV (Channel 47), a New York City-based UHF station with studios in Newark, New Jersey. The shows were broadcast by Channel 47, primarily a Spanish-language outlet, to a very limited audience because only televisions equipped with a UHF antenna and tuner could receive them, and reception was difficult in an age prior to cable.”

I’d never heard of Rainbow Quest until this morning. There are various episodes available on DVD here, and I may have to get some of those. But for this morning, there’s this video of Mississippi John Hurt performing “Spike Driver Blues,” and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

A Baker’s Dozen From 1963

Originally posted November 21, 2007

(When I wrote earlier this month about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and then about the fortunes this season of my favorite football teams, I inadvertently triggered a series of other posts on November in the Northland. Readers got autumnal takes from Jeff at AM, Then FM, from JB the DJ at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ and then from Perplexio at Pieces of Perplexio π. And now it’s my turn again to write about this chill month, but this time, I’m writing about a November day that, come tomorrow, will be forty-four years gone.)

Blank stares. That’s the thing I remember most about November 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was killed.

I was ten and in fifth grade that November, and for some reason, I’d had lunch at school that Friday. I usually walked the five blocks home for lunch, but Mom must have been away from home that day for some reason, a church women’s event or something like that. So I was in the classroom as lunchtime was ending and Mr. Lydeen came into the room with an odd look on his face.

He told us the news from Dallas, and we stared at him. I think some of the girls cried. And we spent the rest of the day milling around the room, gathering in small groups, the ten or so fifth-graders and ten or so sixth-graders of our combination classroom. We boys talked darkly of what should be done to the culprit, were he found. We were angry. And sad. And confused.

At recess, we bundled up and went out onto the asphalt and concrete playground, but all we did was huddle around Mr. Lydeen, our backs to the northwest wind. I don’t recall what we said, but I think we were all looking for reassurance, for explanation. Mr. Lydeen had neither for us; I remember seeing him stare across the playground and past the railroad tracks, looking at something beyond the reach of his gaze. The blank look on his face made me – and the other kids, too, I think – uneasy.

Mom was listening to the old brown radio on the kitchen counter when I got home from school that day – a rarity, as the radio was generally on only in the morning as we prepared for the day. And it stayed on through dinnertime, bringing us news bulletins from Dallas and Washington and long lists of weekend events cancelled or postponed. Not much was said at the table, as I recall, and I saw that same blank look on my parents’ faces that I had seen on Mr. Lydeen’s face that afternoon.

That evening, I sought solace in my box of comic books and MAD magazines. By chance, the first magazine I pulled out of the box had a parody of a musical film, one of MAD’s specialties. But the parody poked gentle fun at the president and his cabinet, and if it seemed wrong to laugh that evening – as it did – it seemed especially wrong to laugh at that. I threw the magazine back into the box and went in search of my dad, who was doing something at his workbench in the basement.

I watched him for a few minutes as he worked on something he had clamped in the vise, and then I just asked, “Why?”

He turned to me and shook his head and said he didn’t know. And I realized for the first time that the people I looked to for explanations – my parents and my teacher – were unable to understand and explain everything. That was a scary thought, and – being slightly precocious – I pondered its implications for a few days as we watched the unfolding events on television with the rest of the nation.

Sometime in the late 1990s, about five years before Dad died, I was up in St. Cloud for a weekend, and he and I were drinking beers on the back porch. For some reason, I asked him what he remembered of that day. He’d been at work at the college (not yet a university), and he remembered young women crying and young men talking intensely in small groups. And, he said, he remembered not being able to give them any answers at a time when they so needed them.

I nodded and sipped my beer. I thought of the cascade of events that followed John Kennedy’s death, the twelve or so years that we now call the Sixties: The civil rights movement and the concurrent violence, the long anguish in Vietnam, the deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, race riots and police riots, the National Guard and the police opening fire and killing students at Kent State and Jackson State. I thought about draft cards, protest marches and paranoia and about the distrust and anger between black and white, between young and old, between government and governed.

And I looked at my dad and said, “Yeah, John Kennedy’s death is when it all started.”

Dad was a veteran of World War II, part of the generation that came to adulthood during the Great Depression. His generation, after it won its war, came home and lived through a hard-earned era of prosperity that will likely never be matched anywhere in the world ever again, a time of Father Knows Best and the New York Yankees. From that perspective, my father looked back at November of 1963 and then he looked at me.

“No,” he said, “that’s when it all ended.”

A Baker’s Dozen from 1963
“Do Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)” by the Crystals, Philles single 112

“Green, Green” by the New Christy Minstrels, Columbia single 42805

“Avalon Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt from Avalon Blues: The Library of Congress Recordings

“So Glad I’m Living” by Muddy Waters, Chess session, Chicago, June 6

“Corinna, Corrina” by Bob Dylan from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

“When You Walk In The Room” by Jackie DeShannon, Liberty single 55645

“Rocky Road” by Peter, Paul & Mary from In The Wind

“Time Is On My Side” by Kai Winding & the Enchanters, Verve single 10307

“Cry Baby” by Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters, United Artists single 629

“Night Theme” by Al Hirt from Honey In The Horn

“I Woke Up This Mornin’ With My Mind Set On Freedom” by the SNCC Freedom Singers from We Shall Overcome

“Magic Star” by Margie Singleton, Mercury single 72079

“Judy’s Turn To Cry” by Leslie Gore, Mercury single 72143

A few notes on some of the songs:

The Crystals, of course, were one of the girl groups produced by Phil Spector. While “Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)” is not Spector’s masterpiece – I think that title goes to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” – it’s still a propulsive, fun and highly charged piece of music. And, as almost always with a Spector production, that’s Hal Blaine on the drums.

The original Christy Minstrels were a blackface group formed by Edwin Pearce Christy in Buffalo, New York, in 1843. The New Christy Minstrels, formed by Randy Sparks in 1961, was made up of generally clean-cut young people singing folk music – and new songs that sounded like folk – in a pleasant, slightly bland manner. They had three Top 40 hits in 1963 and 1964, with “Green, Green” being the most successful, reaching No. 14. Among the members of the group throughout the years have been Kim Carnes, Kenny Rogers and Barry McGuire of “Eve of Destruction” fame. (Wikipedia says the group was active as of March 2007, with Sparks and McGuire among those involved.)

Mississippi John Hurt was an anomaly during the blues revival of the early 1960s, when dozens of rural Southern performers who’d recorded tracks in the 1920s and 1930s were rediscovered and brought into studios and concert halls again. Hurt was not truly a blues artists; there are some elements of blues in his music, but he’d be better described as a folk artist – or songster, as the term was in the 1920s – with his gently syncopated songs drawn mostly from sources other than blues.  Several of the tunes on Avalon Blues were songs that Hurt had recorded during his first recording sessions, for the Okeh label in 1928.

The Searchers had a mild hit with “When You Walk In The Room,” reaching No. 35 in 1964, but the song came from the pen of Jackie DeShannon, a composer and performer who hit the Top 40 herself with “What The World Needs Now Is Love” in 1965 (No. 7) and with “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” in 1969 (No. 4). Her 1968 album Laurel Canyon is a classic of L.A.-based pop rock (with one of its attractions for me being a killer version of “The Weight.”)

This recording of “Time Is On My Side” by Kai Winding, a Danish trombonist and composer, turns out to be the original recording of the song, which was written for Winding by famed song-writer Jerry Ragovoy (writing as Norman Meade). The background vocals are provided by the Enchanters, who only turned out to be Cissy Houston, Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick. The song was later covered, of course, by numerous artists including New Orleans’ Irma Thomas and the Rolling Stones. “Time Is On My Side” didn’t reach the Top 40, but Winding did have a hit in 1963: His version of “More,” otherwise known as the theme to the film Mondo Cane, reached No. 8 on the charts in the late summer of that year.

“Cry Baby” was another Jerry Ragovoy composition, this one written with Bert Berns. Most likely better known today as the second track on Janis Joplin’s final album, Pearl, the song has been recorded by numerous other artists, including P.J. Proby, Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings and Natalie Cole. The version here by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters (again!) went to No. 4 in the autumn of 1963.

The SNCC Freedom Singers were part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the prime movers in the civil rights struggle in the American South during the 1960s. The founder of the Freedom Singers was Bernice Johnson, later Bernice Reagon, who went on to form the vocal group Sweet Honey In The Rock in the 1970s.. “I Woke Up This Mornin’ With My Mind Set On Freedom” comes from the group’s only album, released on the Mercury label in 1963.

Until I came across “Magic Star (Tel-Star)” by Margie Singleton in the last year or so, I never knew there were words to “Telstar,” the instrumental by the Tornadoes that went to No. 1 in 1962. Singleton’s record didn’t make the Billboard charts, but she hit the Top 56 at WQAM in Miami during the week of February 2, 1963, as this chart indicates. I’m assuming, without being sure, that this is the same Margie Singleton who recorded four country albums for four different labels, starting in 1965.

As always, bit rates will vary.

Some housekeeping
Those who downloaded Monday’s album know by now that the single version of “Midnight Wind” had several seconds cut off the end. I don’t know if I cut those seconds off myself while tinkering with the mp3 or whether I just didn’t pay enough attention after I found it. Either way, I apologize, and I’ll try to find a good version, although my source for the mp3 seems to have disappeared.

Edited slightly after archival posting.

Saturday Single No. 24

Originally posted August 4, 2007

I wandered through the collection last evening, half of my attention on the random tracks the RealPlayer was bringing up and half on a baseball game. None of the songs that popped up seemed to intrigue me. Some stuff by The Band wandered past, as did tracks from Big Mama Thornton, John Fred & His Playboy Band, Elvis, Mavis Staples and others.

Nothing grabbed me. And the Twins were losing to Cleveland.

Then the Texas Gal came into the room and asked how the selection was going. Not well, I told her. She came to the computer and told me to sort for songs from 1963, so I did. It’s actually a year that I haven’t done much with.

I scrolled down the list of 270 songs recorded, or at least released, in 1963, and the Texas Gal pointed to the name of Mississippi John Hurt and then to a single track. Amazingly, even though I have more than sixty of his recordings, this is the first time that the name of Mississippi John Hurt has appeared in this blog.

He’s often called a bluesman, having come to wide public attention during the blues boom during the 1960s, but that’s not quite right. He was more of a folk singer, or what would have been called a “songster” in the years before World War II. He sang some bluesy material, yes, but he also sang traditional folk songs as well as his own compositions, all backed by his complex and delicate guitar work. He is not what one thinks of when one hears the words “Mississippi bluesman.”

His music is definitely worth seeking out, whether you’re talking about the tracks he recorded for the Okeh label in the late 1920s or his recordings late in his life after he was “rediscovered” by blues enthusiasts in the 1960s. The most representative of those might be the 1963 recordings he did for the Library of Congress, now packaged by the Fuel label as D.C. Blues: Library of Congress Recordings. I have a fondness for the live recordings made during a 1964 performance at Oberlin College in Ohio that are now packaged by the Aim label as The Best of Mississippi John Hurt.

The track the Texas Gal selected for me comes from the Library of Congress recordings. She said she just liked the title, and that’s why Mississippi John Hurt’s “Nobody’s Dirty Business” is today’s Saturday Single.

Mississippi John Hurt – “Nobody’s Dirty Business” [1963]