Bukka White performs his 1940 song “Aberdeen Mississippi Blues” shortly before his death in 1977. White was called the master of the National Steel Guitar, and here you see the flashy crossover move with his hands that never failed to impress his audiences.
Bukka White had an impeccable blues lineage, being a first cousin to B.B. King. Arne Brogger recalls a 1974 concert he organized featuring Bukka, B.B. King and Muddy Waters:
Bukka opened the show, Muddy played next and B.B. closed. The show started at 8:00 and B.B. finally came down from the stage at 1:00 a.m. There were 3,500 people there, and no one left. At the close of the show, B.B. called Bukka up on the stage to acknowledge him. Bukka grabbed the mike and began to talk. He reminded B.B. of the first guitar B.B. ever had — a red Stella given to him by Bukka. Bukka said B.B. was about 9 years old at the time. “You remember, B, you was so little next to that big red Stella…” There was absolute silence. B.B. was looking at the tops of his shoes. His eyes were filling. He looked for all the world like a 9-year-old boy standing on that stage. “Yeah… I sure do remember,” he finally said, and then he threw his arms around Bukka. The audience erupted.
Here’s an earlier film clip, with Bukka playing the same song in a much harder, more percussive style:
Though he’s put his hometown a long way behind him, B.B. King revisits Indianola, Miss., once a year for an annual homecoming. Now he owns a juke joint, the Club Ebony, where he played during his career climb, to add to his empire of eponymous music spots. The growth of blues tourism in the Delta region has spurred the appearance of so many upscale places calling themselves juke joints — Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero being the most famous — that Clarksdale now has its own Juke Joint Festival.
The video posted above is from Ralph Gleason’s jazz show, from the days when PBS was still called NET. Down here is a duet between King and T-Bone Walker from roughly the same period.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay
Now look here mama what am I to do
Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I’m goin’ back to my used to be
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home
If you’re looking for an example of how history becomes folklore, you could hardly do better than the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which began in April when the rain-swollen Mississippi River broke through a levee south of Cairo, Illinois. Over the next several weeks, well over a hundred other levee failures occurred, and by the time the flood subsided in August, seven states had seen significant chuncks of their territory indundated, sometimes by as much as 30 feet of water, killed 245 people and displaced thousands more.
The flood contributed heavily to the population shift of American blacks toward Chicago and other industrialized cities of the North. It was also the inspiration for the 1929 blues classic ”When the Levee Breaks,” released in 1929 by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. Two generations of teenagers have grown up with this song through the apocalyptic cover version on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, and it is the touchstone for not one but two recent Bob Dylan songs.
The video at the top of this post is chock-full of images that will give you a complete picture of exactly what it meant to have the levees give way in 1927. This next clip shows a more recent instance of what happens to people in the way of a storm:
Led Zeppelin’s version has slightly retooled lyrics, courtesy of singer Robert Plant:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They got no work to do,
If you’re going NORTH to Chicago.
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin’ about my baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago.. Going to Chicago.. Sorry but I can’t take you..
Going down.. going down now.. going down…
Depending on my mood, “When the Levee Breaks” vies with “What Is and What Should Never Be” as my favorite Zep song. The latter song is a fave because of its dynamic shifts: it starts out gently enough for a cocktail lounge jazz tune, then bursts into aggressive riffing, and so back and forth until the wild guitar break and the fadeout.
Zep’s take on Memphis Minnie might be likened to using a sharecropper’s shack as the foundation for a Gothic cathedral. There are no dynamics here: John Bonham’s drums (recorded in a stone stairwell for extra oomph) open like the footsteps of approaching giants, and the rest of the song is a surrealistic maelstrom of heavily distorted guitars, harmonica and vocals. The song itself is like a hurricane bearing down on the singer. The song, in a word, sounds scary.
Since all roads lead to Bob Dylan, even when they’re flooded — especially when they’re flooded — the Mississippi disaster flows through parts of his vast song catalogue. Dylan pays direct homage to Memphis Minnie in “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” one of the less objectionable tunes on the mediocre Modern Times album:
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
Everybody saying this is a day only The Lord could make
Well I worked on the levee Mama, both night and day
Well I worked on the levee Mama, both night and day
I got to the river and I threw my clothes away
I paid my time and now I’m as good as new
I paid my time and now I’m as good as new
They can’t take me back, not unless I want them to
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
Some of these people gonna strip you of all they can take
I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload
I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload
Riches and salvation can be waiting behind the next bend in the road
I picked you up from the gutter and this is the thanks I get
I picked you up from the gutter and this is the thanks I get
You say you want me to quit ya, I told you no, not just yet
I look in your eyes, I see nobody else but me
I look in your eyes, I see nobody other than me
I see all that I am and all I hope to be
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
Some of these people don’t know which road to take
When I’m with you I forget I was ever blue
When I’m with you I forget I was ever blue
Without you there’s no meaning in anything I do
Some people on the road carrying everything that they own
Some people on the road carrying everything that they own
Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones
Put on your cat clothes, Mama, put on your evening dress
Put on your cat clothes, Mama, put on your evening dress
A few more years of hard work then there’ll be a thousand years of happiness
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
I tried to get you to love me, but I won’t repeat that mistake
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
Plenty of cheap stuff out there still around to take
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I woke up this morning, butter and eggs in my bed
I ain’t got enough room to even raise my head
Come back, baby, say we never more will part
Come back, baby, say we never more will part
Don’t be a stranger without a brain or heart
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin’ the levee gonna break
Some people still sleepin’, some people are wide awake
Personally, I much prefer Dylan’s earlier paddle across this waterlogged terrain: “High Water Everywhere (For Charley Patton),” from Love and Theft, an album that improves with each listening and keeps building in the mrmory, even as Modern Times slips down the same memory hole occupied by Down in the Groove, Dylan and The Dead, Saved and all the other albums commemorating times when Dylan’s muse was on vacation.
High water risin’ - risin’ night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner lookin’ East and West
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
High water everywhere
High water risin’, the shacks are slidin’ down
Folks lose their possessions - folks are leaving town
Bertha Mason shook it - broke it
Then she hung it on a wall
Says, “You’re dancin’ with whom they tell you to
Or you don’t dance at all.”
It’s tough out there
High water everywhere
I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed
Got a hopped up Mustang Ford
Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard
I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind
I’m no pig without a wig
I hope you treat me kind
Things are breakin’ up out there
High water everywhere
High water risin’, six inches ‘bove my head
Coffins droppin’ in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin’ into Vicksburg, don’t know what I’m going to do
“Don’t reach out for me,” she said
“Can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?”
It’s rough out there
High water everywhere
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
“You can’t open your mind, boys
To every conceivable point of view.”
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff,
“I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don’t care.”
High Water everywhere
The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I’m preachin’ the Word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes
I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, “Take it off the shelf -
As great as you are a man,
You’ll never be greater than yourself.”
I told her I didn’t really care
High water everywhere
I’m getting’ up in the morning - I believe I’ll dust my broom
Keeping away from the women
I’m givin’ ‘em lots of room
Thunder rolling over Clarksdale, everything is looking blue
I just can’t be happy, love
Unless you’re happy too
It’s bad out there
High water everywhere
Dylan’s oft-demonstrated love of Americana and old music leave no doubt that he’s channeling Memphis Minnie (and the Mississippi Flood) in this song, even if it is dedicated to Charley Patton. This time the floodwaters stretch all the way from Mississippi to Desolation Row, leaving Big Joe Turner and Charles Darwin rubbing shoulders as they swim to safety.
In the course of my reading on the culture of Prohibition-era America, I’ve come across this little anonymously written ditty about the joys of home brewing:
Mother’s in the kitchen/ Washing out the jugs;/ Sister’s in the pantry/Bottling the suds;/ Father’s in the cellar/ Mixing up the hops;/Johnny’s on the front porch/Watching for the cops.
I first came across it in John Kobler’s great popular history of Prohibition, Ardent Spirits, and Paddy Whacked, Thomas English’s history of Irish-American gangs and gangsters. No Bobcat worth his or her salt will miss the echo of the opening lines of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which leads off Bringing It All Back Home and inspired the famous opening of the D.A. Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back, the original rock music video and still one of the very few word-image pairings that doesn’t get stale after only a few viewings.
Johnny’s in the basement/ Mixing up the medicine;/ I’m on the pavement/ Thinking ’bout the government.
Since Dylan has shown himself time and again to be a veritable walking juke box of Americana, there’s not a doubt in my mind that he was toying with that Prohibition rhyme when he wrote “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Certainly the drug-soaked mid-Sixties milieu would have had Prohibition in the back of anyone’s mind, and no less an authority than producer Don Was has said that it’s impossible to stump Dylan on an old tune. I may be out to lunch here, but I don’t think so. If any other Dylan work out there has mentioned this parallel, please send me the cite.
Meanwhile, it gives me an excuse to run not only the famous Pennebaker video, but this clip of the parody/ homage performed by the cast from I’m Not There:
Bob Dylan’s main guitarist and problem-solver on Bringing It All Back Home was Bruce Langhorne, an unheralded musician whose distinctive style was all the more remarkable for the fact that he was missing some fingers — the result of a childhood firecracker mishap. Langhorne had already been a session player for a few years — he and Dylan met in 1961 while playing backup on Carolyn Hester’s third record, and he played in the tentative band sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan — but Bringing It All Back Home made Langhorne the defining player of the folk-rock era. Though Dylan recruited the harder-edged guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Robbie Robertson for the next two installments of his world-beating triumvirate of albums, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, he reunited with Langhorne for the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which benefitted enormously from what Michael Gray calls Langhorne’s “customary, admirable mix of feeling and restraint.”
Despite having played on some of the best-known rock music ever recorded, Langhorne kept a low profile over the next few decades and remains known mainly to dedicated music lovers. His work cropped up in unexpected places. “Brother Bru-Bru” composed the soundtrack for Jonathan Demme’s 1980 film Melvin and Howard, and his work was featured in Peter Fonda’s 1971 anti-Western The Hired Hand, which is the source of the YouTube clip posted above.
In this interview, Langhorne talks about working with Dylan on Bringing It All Back Home:
I had been experimenting with just putting a pickup on my Martin for a while, before that. But not long. Because my playing, it was just amplified and sustained acoustic playing, really. And I played the same sort of lines that I would play with somebody like Odetta, who would provide the same sort of thing that Dylan provided, or Dylan and the band, which was like a really inevitable rhythmic structure. I mean, I always thought that the people that I most enjoyed playing with were the people who had like an unstoppable thread to their music. And it couldn’t be diverted easily. I mean, it was gonna be there, the root, the core was gonna be there. And my job was really, essentially, icing. I put icing on the cake. But in order for me to do my job, that basic thread had to be there. . . since I have fingers missing, some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me. Like, I couldn’t really play good flamenco. Classical was difficult for me, though I did play some classical. But since I couldn’t develop technique to the point where I could just play the entire repertoire of guitar music, I had to develop a technique based on my own aesthetics. Because I had to listen to everything and say, okay, this sounds okay with three voices. Because I had pretty good control of three voices on guitar. I could control four-note voicing, but it was only with extra physical effort. Because it would mean, since I played basically with three fingers, it would mean that I would have to play two notes with one finger on a six-string instrument, or I would have to strum. So I developed a style and a technique that was based partially on classical music, because I separated voice. I used each of my fingers to generate a line, a polyphonic line, or I would play, which is why I say I really needed someone who had a thread going to really do my job. Because then they could generate a couple of lines of polyphony, or a rhythmic structure. And then I could enhance that.
And I got to be a very good accompanist for that reason. Because I was really forced to listen. So I listened. And that’s very essential for an accompanist.
You can either go to the church of your choice/ Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital/ You’ll find God in the church of your choice/ You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.
Though Woody Guthrie had been transferred to Brooklyn State Hospital by the time Bob Dylan wrote “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” in the early 1960s, the folk icon’s decline had begun years earlier, and when the young Dylan came to the New York area to launch his career, Guthrie was under care in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey. Guthrie’s stay at Greystone and his visits from Bob Dylan are the subject of a TV segment (apparently unaired) from the same people who brought you Weird New Jersey, and you can watch it up above.
The clip plays up the spooky aspect og Greystone, but nobody who grew up or lived in northern New Jersey in the mid-20th century will have trouble seeing Greystone as a spectral presence. Back then, if somebody goofed around too much, we would invariably joke about calling the men in the white coats to have him taken to Greystone. Those were the days when involuntary commitment had not yet been ruled unconstitutional, and the possibility of getting carted off to the nearest loonie bin was a recurring theme in everything from Tennessee Williams plays to Miracle on 34th Street, not to mention the grade-B horror movies that were catnip to me. Classic movies like The Snake Pit were on afternoon television, and every now and then, a radio DJ would play the Napoleon XIV song “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!”
It probably says a great deal about the anxieties and insecurities of a more conformist age that so much popular culture was based on either the fear of being thought crazy, or the fear that one might pretend to be crazy and then become trapped in the deception, as in Brainstorm (1965) or Nightmare Alley (1947). Long before Thomas Szasz and other critics launched the anti-psychiatry movement, there was plenty of evidence of the ways in which the label “mental illness” could be applied to people who were socially or politically bothersome, along with those who were genuinely sick. For this reason, Allen Ginsberg name-checked Greystone’s “foetid halls” as one of “the madtowns of the East” in his 1956 poem “Howl,” lamenting that he had seen “the finest minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” The sediment of that anxiety could be stirred up by the mere mention of Greystone, and the fact that the looming stone towers of the hospital could have doubled for Hill House in The Haunting did nothing to dispel the feeling of menace and queasy fascination whenever I drove past the place.
Guthrie, of course, was there for a good reason: the hereditary disorder Huntington’s chorea had begun destroying him physically and mentally, but when Bob Dylan came to the area in 1961, Guthrie was still capable of spending weekends at the East Orange home of Ralph Gleason, who arranged Sunday gatherings of friends and musicians for Guthrie’s benefit. According to Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan: An Intimate Biography, the young Zimmerman spent most of his first meeting with Guthrie simply sitting on the floor next to the couch where Guthrie was lying, propped up on pillows.
One witness said that when Dylan finally did play something for Guthrie, the old lion liked what he heard.
Bob began visiting Woody at the hospital several times a week, and he showed up at the Gleasons practically every weekend over the next few weeks. By the second weekend Woody was asking for Bobby, and he would ask for him all the time: “Is the boy coming today? When is the boy coming back?” Something grew between them, between the dying originator of modern folk, and the boy who was imitating him, idolizing him, and who would soon surpass him. He would talk to Woody when there weren’t too many people around, patiently waiting for Woody to form the words that were so hard coming. Woody could not compete with crowds of people talking; he would get excited and stutter and ramble and be unable to pull together what he wanted to say. But Dylan would sit at his feet, in a corner, and they would talk. At one of those first Sundays, Bob played “Song for Woody” for him, privately, in the corner, and everyone in the room stopped to listen. And, someone remembers, Woody’s face broke into a broad smile of joy, and he said: “That’s good, Bob. That’s damned good.” Bob seems to have gone to Woody’s heart, and after everyone left, Woody told the Gleasons, “That boy’s got a voice. Maybe he won’t make it by his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it.”
Well, Guthrie may have gotten things a little backward, but even in the grip of illness, with his death only a few years off, he could still spot a talent.
Unfortunately, the thing that helped bring Jeff Healey to prominence — his cameo appearance in a retarded action movie called Road House — led me to write him off as a lightweight. His biggest success, the song “Angel Eyes,” didn’t lead me to think I was missing out on much, either: standard issue blues-rock, I thought, from a guy whose personal story (self-taught musician, blind from an early age, who worked out an unusual guitar style playing with the instrument on his lap) was more interesting than his music. Since his death last week at the age of 41, I’ve been playing clips like the one above and I see I underrated him pretty badly. Time to start catching up.
Lately I’ve had the third Steely Dan album, Pretzel Logic, in heavy rotation on the car stereo. It’s my favorite Steely Dan record, even though it doesn’t have my favorite Steely Dan songs: “My Old School,” “Black Friday” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” are elsewhere in the catalogue. But Pretzel Logic is the record that turned me into a jazzbo. Not only does the album feature a perfectly acceptable version of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” that sent me off to buy my first Duke collection, but there’s a song that name-checks Charlie Parker, and the piano riff that supports “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was copped from Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father.” For a teenager in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, Pretzel Logic was like a friendly clerk at a good record store offering tips on where to start some jazz exploration.
The title tune is a slow blues vamp supporting lyrics that bring to mind Bob Dylan in one of his playfully surrealistic modes:
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
‘Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he’s lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah
Maybe it’s the cover photo of a pretzel vendor on a snowy day, but Pretzel Logic plays in my mind as the most New Yawkish of the Steely Dan canon. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen subsequently tipped their sound toward Los Angeles and the cocktail lounge end of the jazz spectrum. I know there are lots of people who consider Aja the perfect Steely Dan record, but the first three albums — Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstacy and Pretzel Logic — are the ones I still play.
The last time I heard David Bromberg was back in my bright college days, when a few of my friends were quite taken with his “Bullfrog Blues,” the kind of endless shaggy-dog joke song that is amusing the first two times you hear it. After that . . . I dunno, but after the fourth go-round I began to wonder if “Bullfrog Blues” hadn’t been the sound Charles Whitman heard in his head while he was picking off pedestrians from the top of the Texas Tower. That wasn’t the only Bromberg song I heard, of course, but for all his impeccable musicianship and wide-ranging tastes, there was just something about Bromberg that made keeping up with his records a little less than a matter of life or death.
Are you still with me? Well, forget everything I just said. I went to Bromberg’s show at the Count Basie Theater on a windy, slushy Friday night, and I emerged from the concert ready to buy every single David Bromberg CD I could lay hands on. One of the highlights of a show filled with highlights was his solo performance of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and while the clip above isn’t from the Count Basie show, it’s very much in the spirit of the performance.
(And as long as I’m talking about this past weekend’s great show, let me sing the praises of the Count Basie Theater, a grand old space with superb acoustics. How nice that it’s named after a real musician instead of succumbing to the same corporate crapification that afflicts us with the Izod Arena, the Kaopectate Arts Center and the Centrum Silver Center. All right, I made up those last two names. They aren’t real. Not yet, anyway.)
The single biggest change in Bromberg’s sound is, quite simply, his voice. He’s finally got one. In the past, Bromberg vied with Leo Kottke for the title of Folk Musician Whose Singing Is Most Like To Make You Realize Bob Dylan’s Voice Isn’t All That Bad. Well, Dylan should have followed Bromberg’s example and taken some serious voice lessons. Not only can Bromberg sing, but his voice now has that chest-bursting fullness B.B. King can still deliver on nights when he’s in front of an audience that wants to hear some real music instead of just bask in the aura of An Authentic Blues Legend. On the second number of the evening, the jokey blues “I’ll Take You Back,” Bromberg was truly belting it out, and several times during the show he hit high notes that would have been a couple of stratospheres beyond his reach when he was about a third of his present age.
“Ecelctic” has always been the default setting for any attempt to describe Bromberg, and eclectic the show certainly was: a bit of bluegrass, a bit of Irish folk, a bit of country and a bit of N’awlins, all seasoning hefty servings of blues. All of it was played with elegant virtuosity and welcome flashes of wit, and by the time the show closed with Dr. John’s “Such a Night,” I could say that this had been a truly satisfying and engaging show.
To call J.J. Cale a master of understatement hardly begins to touch on the tightly reined-in quality of his music. Personally, I find a little of his stuff goes a very long way, but he’s built up a tremendous following over the decades, and his admirers include Eric Clapton, whose covers of Cale standards like “After Midnight” and “Cocaine” are among the highlights of his career. The two just won a Grammy for their collaboration, The Road to Escondido, so here’s a Cale performance that I think displays his low-key approach in its best light.
