One thing you really hear in the earliest blues recordings — which you don’t much just a few years later — is the field holler from the slavery days through the sharecropping days. It’s a bit offensive that Hollywood has made so many movies about the Jews persevering through what are almost certainly mythical acts of oppression thousands of years ago, but so few movies about African Americans somehow surviving through our dark recent past. (And that’s not even to get into our modern outrages like the murder of Tamir Rice.)

Blind Lemon Jefferson was the youngest son of Texas sharecroppers in 1893. Given the date, his parents must certainly have been former slaves. He started playing the guitar in his early teens and before long was a street performer. From there he worked his way up to playing dives. According to his cousin, he would start performing at 8:00 in the evening and sing and play until 4:00 in the morning — just him and his guitar.

One great thing about Blind Lemon Jefferson is that he was well recorded. He recorded roughly 80 sides over the course of five years: 1925 through 1929. His records sold well, and he did all right financially — although certainly not to the level that he deserved. He died in late 1929 of myocarditis. He was just 36 years old.

It’s hard to know what song to pick. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s work is really quite varied. And the way I’m feeling right now, it would be appropriate to listen to, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” But I want to push against that and listen to something a bit more upbeat. So here is, “Match Box Blues.”

I’ve got to make this quick, but I’ll come back to it later this week. I first learned of Geeshie Wiley during a library performance by Eric & Suzy Thompson. At that performance, Suzy did her version of the Wiley tune, “Skinny Leg Blues.” But on an album, she did Geeshie Wiley’s best known tune, “Last Kind Word.” In fact, I use the introductory guitar part for the fade music of my videos.

Geeshie Wiley is more myth than woman. She seems to have been an itinerant musician, traveling around in the early 1930s with the other great female blues guitarist, Elvie Thomas. Thomas was about a generation older. She also seems to have kept Wiley in check. There are stories. For example, it is possible that Wiley killed her husband (probably in self defense).

In March of 1930, the two went into a recording studio in Wisconsin and recorded the two songs already mentioned along with two that Thomas sang: “Motherless Child Blues” and “Over to My House.” They returned a year later and recorded two more songs. I’ll discuss those when I get around to Thomas. I do tend to think that Thomas gets short shrift because there is less myth about her. We even have a picture of Elvie Thomas!

But to give you some idea of the legend of Geeshie Wiley, let’s listen to “Skinny Leg Blues.” I’m not absolutely sure what the lyrics of the song are. But as much as I can make out, it is one of the most violent songs I’ve ever heard. What’s so amazing is how calm she is about it. She lays it out: she’s little, but you should be afraid. If you see her coming, you shouldn’t run — that would be pointless. But you might want to pull down the shades so that you aren’t embarrassed when she cuts your throat. It’s an amazing song:

Another of the great icons of Mississippi delta blues is Tommy Johnson. I have a story that relates to him. I was sitting at a barber’s place. The guy that owned it was really into old blues and Robert Johnson was playing on his sound system. So I told my sister the standard story about how Robert Johnson supposedly met the Devil and exchanged his soul for his amazing guitar abilities. The barber interrupted me to say that it wasn’t Robert Johnson, but rather Tommy Johnson.

Now, I actually knew that the story was associated with Tommy Johnson as well. This was well after O Brother, Where Art Thou? But the truth is it wasn’t Tommy, Robert, or Santa Claus Johnson. It’s a legend. It didn’t happen to anyone. What’s more, the story has been applied far more to Robert Johnson than to Tommy — probably because Robert Johnson is so much better known. (It’s also true that Robert Johnson wrote Crossroad Blues and other things about the Devil.) I hate when people correct me over things that are meaningless and wrong.

But what is true is that one source of the story was started by Tommy Johnson’s brother, year’s after the guitarist’s death. Apparently, Johnson liked to tell the story to give himself a “dangerous” reputation — probably a common thing for itinerant musicians. But even that may have been based upon earlier legends. You can see the way these things get messed up given that they had the same last names. But Tommy Johnson is very different from Robert. For one thing, Tommy was a generation before Robert. Tommy Johnson was playing professionally when Robert was in diapers. None of this is to put down Robert Johnson, who was the greater guitarist and the one who I prefer.

But Tommy Johnson was hugely influential. In his way, he was as important as Charlie Patton, but as a vocalist more than a guitarist. His guitar playing is excellent, but it is secondary to his vocals, which are capable of incredible emotional range. Most of his recordings are just him and his guitar — which is enough. But I’m going to feature a 1928 recording of a wonderfully complex number, “Maggie Campbell Blues.” In addition to him on guitar and vocals, someone else seems to be playing a mandolin. I don’t think it is necessary to the song.

The song is based upon a traditional stanza, “It looks like Maggie, but she walks too slow.” But Tommy Johnson claimed that the song referred to him being at a bar and seeing his wife coming for him. That makes it sound like she’s mad, but the song itself is, if anything, about love.

Yesterday, I highlighted the father of Mississippi delta blues, Charlie Patton. In 1930, just four years before his death from a heart problem, he met and married Bertha Lee Pate. In their brief time together, she recorded a dozen songs with him. She lived into the 1970s, but after Patton’s death, she never again recorded, which is a damned shame, because she was a great blues singer.

In 1965, Sam Charters tracked her down in Chicago where she was working in a used clothing store. She was just living her life and part of that was living and loving a blues legend — and being one herself. In the interview, she told the touching story of Charlie Patton’s death:

One of the songs that she did with Patton, which she also wrote, was “Mind Reader Blues.” I love the sliding of her voice. Patton just finger picks the guitar; there is no need for any slide; she provides it all.

I have a great love of the music that is generally referred to Mississippi delta blues in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. But it is something of a distortion to call it that. There certainly was a lot of great music that came out of there. But there was very similar music that came out of Louisiana and Texas and even as far east as Georgia. And the people who played it moved around a lot to support themselves.

I had wanted to focus the women of that time and place. But there isn’t much to speak of in that regard. Everyone knows Bessie Smith, of course. But she didn’t perform that kind of music. She was more like Billie Holiday, although she’s not even of the same time period. So I’m stuck with just two women: Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley and maybe Bertha Lee Pate. And even they barely make the cut in terms of time. I’m not even going to make it to Robert Johnson.

Let’s start the week with Charlie Patton who, as far as I can tell, was the closest thing that the Mississippi delta had to a star. My main interest in delta blues is the combination of the voice and the guitar. That’s why the slide guitar was so often critical. Patton was a master of it apparently at the very birth of the technique. I haven’t noticed anyone doing it better than he does on “Spoonful Blues.” I love Leo Kottke, but I’m sure he would agree that he doesn’t do a thing that Charlie Patton didn’t do a century earlier. As you will hear, Kottke isn’t alone. Just wait until we do Sun House tomorrow.

We end our week of Shel Silverstein with his song, “The Mermaid,” off his album, I’m So Good That I Don’t Have to Brag. There is something about the man that allowed him to see the absurdity of everything. I’d never really given a lot of thought to mermaids, but it is indeed true that they are half fish and it really doesn’t matter how lovely one half of her is, the other half really is a fish. Of course, as I discussed in Fake Science and Fake Reality on Television, more recent fabulist would have us believe that mermaids were half human and half dolphin. But that doesn’t help a whole lot.

The lyrics were published in Playboy, and I suppose it is intended to be salacious. I have a hard time seeing any of Silverstein’s work as being salacious because he always seems like nothing so much as a naughty five year boy. Maybe I give him a pass on that because I feel kind of the same way. But I think it is a major mistake to read much into his work. I was thinking of “The Father of a Boy Named Sue,” and I don’t think there’s much there. You can even see it as a comment on a man so screwed up that he set the record straight about naming his son Sue only to relate that it’s all worked out great for him because he gets to rape his son.

There is a distinctly dark core to everything that Shel Silverstein wrote. But the same thing could be said of the Brothers Grimm. Not that I’m saying we should share the work he created for Playboy with our toddlers. So here is “The Mermaid,” which you can make up your own mind about.

Shel Silverstein has a devilish wit. I think that’s why he is a children’s writer at the same time that he isn’t. He has a child’s sensibility with an adult’s knowledge and experiences. I believe I share this with him, without being on the same creative plane of existence. It is this kind of stuff that parents normally complain about regarding me. It is the parents’ job, after all, to socialize children. I see it as my job to remind them that they can be both good and devilish.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is filled with devilish stuff. There is also a version with a CD, which I used to have. There is something extra that we get when Silverstein reads his own poems. They always sound so much sharper than they do in my head. Poems like “For Sale” are horrible in their way, even as they are too extreme to be taken seriously. It’s the literary equivalent of Tom and Jerry. But I’m going to highlight another poem from that collection, “Crocodile’s Toothache,” even though I actually love dentists. As the animator, Aida Alemy, says, “No crocodile or dentist were harmed during the making of this animation.”

Shel Silverstein’s most famous song is probably “A Boy Named Sue.” It was a huge hit for Johnny Cash and it works well for him. But he makes the song too serious. You get the impression that it was the right thing to do to name the boy Sue. As a result, the denouement where the singer says that he will name his own son anything but Sue doesn’t work all that well.

Silverstein’s version of “A Boy Named Sue” off Boy Named Sue and His Other Country Songs fully embraces its silliness. And at the end, he goes crazy and shows that he wouldn’t just name his son something different, but that he still hates his father because it was terrible to have named him Sue. There might have been an upside to the name but it didn’t make up for the downside.

About a decade later, Silverstein wrote a followup, The Father of a Boy Named Sue off his album, Songs and Stories. Whereas “A Boy Named Sue” is a fun song, the followup is deeply disturbing. It claims that Sue lied in his song and that actually he’s a transvestite. After the fight, they reconcile and the father moves in with the son who takes care of him better than any daughter ever could. And the song ends with more than the implication of incest. Shockingly, when Johnny Cash covered the song, he kept the lyrics in, although he sings them so forthright that it doesn’t come off as creepy as it does when Shel Silverstein delivers when in a barely audible squeal.

Let’s go back to Shel Silverstein’s songs. As far as I know, he was not a drug user. But he wrote about drugs a lot. A good example of that is “I Got Stoned and I Missed It.” It’s a song that a lot of people have covered, most notably Dr Hook and Jim Stafford. The song sounds like a pro drug song, but the whole point of it is that the singer misses out on his whole life because he’s stoned all the time.

As is pretty much always the case, the music is super simple. The band might interject some passing chord, but it is just two chords: I and V. And truthfully, these are the kinds of songs that seem to be most joyous. Despite the lyrics, the song seems almost to be an advertisement for cannabis. Certainly the person who put this video together thought so.

Elizabeth mentioned that she knew about Shel Silverstein’s poetry, “And oh, that book about a jerk of a person.” I correctly deduced that she was referring to The Giving Tree. The truth is that the tree is not real. It is rather the platonic ideal of motherhood or Mother Nature or certain conceptions of God: something that gets pleasure only through giving. The boy is all of us: searching for fulfillment from outside things and experiences — all of them doomed to disappoint.

It makes me think of the nature of friendship. A friend is not someone who helps you move to a new place; a friend is someone who you help move to a new place. It is, of course, great when friendship is reciprocated. But the nature of it is what you are willing to do and the feelings that you have. And so the giving tree has a very great friend in the boy. The boy, on the other hand, is a sad figure — alone in the world, apparently without friends.

Of course, if I wanted to, I could provide an endless number of interpretations of the book. It has much to say about aging and the need to be useful. All of the interpretations are poignant and edifying. That’s what makes it so great. “And the tree was happy.” It is what we all aspire to. We don’t need apples or branches or trunk for that.

Today we listen to a prototypical Shel Silverstein song, “Show It at the Beach.” It is off his 1978 album, Songs and Stories. It has this usual folk formulation, which may have been one of the reasons he was popular among the listening audience; he isn’t too demanding in that way. And the focus is always his wonderful words.

“Show It at the Beach” is really modern in what it talks about. He’s making fun of the odd fact that you can’t be naked on the beach, but somehow it is fine to wave guns around in front of others. One especially interesting lines is, “You can show it in the most sophisticated magazine.” Silverstein was a longtime writer for Playboy. I wonder what he would think now that you can no longer even show it there!

It’s also funny at the beginning of this clip. In introducing him, Ray Sawyer says, “I’d be surprised if he hasn’t written at least one or two of your favorite songs.” And Silverstein interrupts, “I’d be surprised!”

Will mentioned that I might want to look into the history of the song “Beans Taste Fine.” He thinks it goes way back, but as far as I can tell, it is just a Shel Silverstein original, off his 1962 album, Inside Folk Songs. But since I didn’t have a theme for this week’s Morning Music posts, I figured that was an excellent idea. I could easily do a month of Shel Silverstein.

He first came to my attention as the guy who wrote one of the greatest musical satires ever: “The Cover of Rolling Stone.” And so I want to start there, even though I knew other of his songs (without knowing they were his) before that. And I’ll probably go back to some of his earlier work. I also probably won’t stick to his songs. His poetry and prose are equally good.

So we start with “The Cover of Rolling Stone” performed by Dr Hook & the Medicine Show off their album Sloppy Seconds. They did a lot of Shel Silverstein songs. Their first album had the hit “Sylvia’s Mother” and the following album had “Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie.” They are an interesting group, because it still isn’t clear whether they were a rock band or a parody of a rock band.

Certainly their association with Shel Silverstein makes that case stronger. I think he was on record as not being that fond of the art form. But if you assume that a rock band is actually meant as comedy, it is not hard to convince yourself that they are hilarious. Think of The Beatles, going from the bubblegum of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the utter pretentiousness of “Eleanor Rigby” just two years later.

Anyway, here is the song. I’m presenting the album cut, because I really like the production. Live versions of it are distinctly lacking.