Song of the Day: Big Joe was his Name!

September 20th, 2009 categories: Song of the Day

Song of the Day

"Baby Please Don’t Go" and "She Left Me a Mule" by Big Joe Williams

Big Joe Williams"An incredibly gifted out-of-the-box guitarist, excellent songwriter and rich voiced singer, Big Joe Williams was also a fighter, and one of the more idiosyncratic, temperamental characters to ever play the blues.

Born in Mississippi, it was Big Joe’s stint with an early minstrel show that led him to the big city. There in Chicago he met impresario Lester Melrose, which gave Big Joe his first recording contract in 1934.

According to Barry Lee Pearson, he saw Big Joe at one of Mike Bloomfield’s blues nights playing an electric nine-string guitar through a funky old amplifier with a pie plate nailed to it, and a beer can dangling against that. According to Pearson when Big Joe played all of that rattled except Big Joe himself. The sum effect of Big Joe’s eccentric rig was the most buzzing, sizzling African music Pearson claims to have ever heard.

Big Joe Williams was elected into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.

 Big Joe Williams (b. Oct 16, 1903, Crawford, MS, d. Dec. 17, 1982, Macon, MS) Big Joe Williams 9-string guitarI know what follows will be arcane to many, but it shows just how out there Big Joe was.

Wiiliams played guitar in the Delta Blues style, yet his is unique. Lets make that incredibly unique. He played rhythm and lead lines with picks on his thumb and index finger, while at the same time singing over what he played. Like his amp, he also heavily modified his guitar (image in close up). He added a crude electric pick-up to an acoustic guitar; the wires to it coiled about in a hodge-podge of an electronically improvised mess.

He also added three extra strings to the usual six (the first, second and forth strings were the pairs). He played in open "G" with a capo on his second fret (making his tunes in the key of "A"). Big Joe did this gradually throughout the 20′s, until he got it just right, so other guitar players could do what he did. Not just eccentric, and incredible at the same time, Big Joe was not about to be imitated.  

Listen to song of the day here"Baby, Please Don’t Go" (lyrics here) Big Joe WilliamsOriginally produced by Lester Melrose and recorded on October 31, 1935. Rerecorded in 1945."Baby, Please Don’t Go" is a standard and has been recorded countless different times in many different ways. We first heard it in Van Morrisons version (below) that was recorded in 1964. (It’s "B" side was "Gloria," which also became an instant rock standard as well.)

Bonus: How many ways can one… paint the sky?
Rock, Blues, Cajun, Psychedelic, Folk and Country. Well, we don’t have an opera, or polka version of it yet, not that we know of anyway, but here’s a great example of how one song spawns different interpretations… across genre. We particularly like the country version by Vince Gill, and the cajun version by Beau Jacque, which is not to say the others don’t move us (because they certainly did). We’re just more familiar with them.

"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Van Morrison and Them version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Muddy Waters version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Amboy Dukes version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Aerosmith version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Vince Gill version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Beau Jacque version
"Baby, Please Don’t Go":  Bob Dylan version
 

Listen to song of the day here"She Left Me a Mule" We couldn’t resist adding this one to our tribute to Big Joe. Obviously a song about love lost, we love "a mule to ride" as metaphor for being left high and dry. After the first verse though, singing about baby done gone, gives way to the hustle and plea of a back door man (one can only lament for so long). In the next verse Big Joe gets out of Mississippi for Chicago, where there are, presumedly, even more fish in the sea… or mules in and about town!

Bonus:
Big Joe’s mule to ride took hold, and it has appeared in various blues songs since (and the band name "Govt. Mule" too). Here’s one of our favorites.
"My Baby, She Left Me (She Left Me a Mule)": Buddy Guy version

Previous Songs 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

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