Song of the Day: Two Gems from the Piedmont Master

July 28th, 2009 categories: Song of the Day

Song of the Day

Blind Blake"Police Dog Blues" and "Diddy Wah Diddy" by Blind Blake

There are two great mysteries surrounding Blind Blake, one of the most important early bluesmen of the 1920′s and ’30′s era… that was not from the Mississippi Delta.

In 1932 Blake was at the absolute top of the Chicago blues scene, he was the undisputed music king about town, and then he just disappeared, vanished into thin air, so to speak, and was never heard of or seen again.This is one of the great early mysteries… in the all too often mysterious world of the blues. There was much speculation as to what happened to him of course. One rumor was  that he just walked away as the great depression brought the early race record industry to a sudden halt. There were death rumors too, ranging from accident to murder. But all were just that. Nobody knows what happened to the wondrous Blind Blake.

The other great mystery simply this, how in the hell did he learn to play like that? And here, we’re not kidding: Blind Blake was the finest early blues guitar player in the business. As we listen to his 1929 recording, "Police Dog Blues", his finger-picking technique is a cut above all else; it is truly astonishing, especially when we consider that this was done on instruments, and thick, rigid guitar strings that are far more challenging than anything we see today. (Stevie Ray Vaughan, though, purposefully had strings like that on Lenny. He told me that stings like the old guys used to play sounded better… and Stevie knew!)

One thing that astounds me about Blake’s "Police Dog Blues" is his use of harmonics. I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is the earliest I have ever heard a guitarist do that, and his general guitar tone throughout the piece is clear, crisp, and in a sense easier to distinguish and listen to than some of the Delta blues recordings at about the same time.

(more below)

Blind Blake (Arthur Phelps) (b. sometime in the 1890′s, d. is anybody’s guess)  At the same time that the Delta Big 4 were first recording, so was Blind Blake. In fact he recorded before Son House did, and it’s debateable if he actually recorded before Charlie Patton did as well.

Listen to song of the day here"Police Dog Blues" (Lyrics  here)  Blake was from the Piedmont, which had its own style of early country blues. Here’s how wikipedia describes it: "Piedmont fingerstyle or East Coast blues, it is primarily a guitar style, characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger, occasionally others. The result is comparable in sound to piano ragtime or later stride. The Piedmont style is differentiated from other styles (particularly the Mississippi Delta style) by its ragtime-based rhythms which lessened its impact on later electric band blues or rock ‘n’ roll, but it was directly influential on rockabilly and the folk revival scene. It was an extremely popular form of African-American dance music for many decades in the first half of the 20th century."

One thing I know for sure, Blind Blake had it down, that Piedmont thing, and you must listen to "how in the hell he plays like that" here. (Look at that guitar in the image above, and imagine ;”””””’ guitar sounding like what you hear here.)

A Bonus: Diddy Wah Diddy
Yep, this was Blind Blake’s song, and it had to have been recorded sometime between 1927 and 1932, thought it was likely recorded in 1929 at the same time that "Police Dog Blues" was. According to Steve James in the "All Music Guide to the Blues", both of these songs have such dense guitar variations that his record company called in "piano sounding."

"Diddy Wah Diddy" is Blake’s most well known song. Over the years its been covered countless times. Interpretations of such are varied, though the name of song is usually either "Diddy Wah Diddy", or Do Wah Diddy Diddy. As you will see, the lyrics vary significantly, but that "Diddy Wah Diddy" reference is always there, and that started with Piedmont bluesman Blind Blake.

"Diddy Wah Diddy", Blind Blake version
"Do Wah Diddy Diddy", Manfred Mann version
"Diddy Wah Diddy", Captain Beeheard and the Magic Band version

At present there are 75 or so different versions and interpretations by different artists of  Diddy Wah Diddy on iTunes alone, and they one by Captain Beefheart they didn’t have, it came from "Safe as Milk", his debut album recorded in 1967.

Previous Song of the Day here.

References: (click on ‘em, and click on the book to get one!)
Big Book of the Blues by Bob Santelli Chasin' the Devil's Music by Gayle Dean Wardlow Nancy Meyer
 Deep blues by Robert Palmer Rising Tide by Ed Komara  Peter Aschoff, PhD
Bob Santelli Gayle D. Wardlow Nancy Meyer Robert Palmer John
Barry		 Ed Komara  Peter Aschoff
About this and that:
I know and have worked with most of the folks here, with the exception of Robert Palmer and John Barry. At present Robert Santelli is the Executive Director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. It is Gayle Dean Wardlow who is particularly associated with research into the lives of Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. Our friend Nancy Meyer managed Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, among others, and has distinguished herself in artists royalty recovery for some 30 years. Deep Blues and Rising Tide are must reads to understand the world from which it all sprung. Ed Komara, also a good friend, was curator of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi for years, and now Music Librarian at SUNY Potsdam. Peter Aschoff, PhD was my dear friend, mentor, and blues historian, musicologist and cultural anthropologist for whom this work is dedicated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Song for a Day works:

We’ll do this as often as we can. Sometimes it’ll be nearly every day, sometimes a little longer than that. We’ll focus on something for awhile, like starting off with the beginning of it all, then we might jump into something totally different. Sometimes it’ll be educational, then tangential, as if in protest to it to what we’ve been doing, but always it will be fun.

There are two ways for you to get immediate access to this series: (1) subscribe to this blog at the top of the left sidebar, which will give you immediate email updates, or (2) click on "Song for a Day" under "Categories" in our right sidebar, which will automatically queue up "song for a day" posts only, starting from the most recent to the first.

(Note: The song link above works much easier and faster in Firefox. (Firefox opens a player immediately, whereas IE transfers the song into real player.) Download Firefox instantly  here… it won’t hurt anything, I promise!

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