Louisiana Blues

LOUISIANA BLUES (Country Blues song as sang by Coventry's Last Fair Deal C. 1970 and Muddy Waters))

Well I’m goin’ to Louisiana

Maybe behind the sun.

Well I’m goin’ to Louisiana

Maybe behind the sun.

I just found out, my trouble just began

 

Well I’m goin’ to New Orleans

Give me a mojo hand

Well I’m goin’ to New Orleans

Give me a mojo hand

I’m gonna teach all dem women

What they don’t understand.

 

Well if the river was whisky

And I was a divin’ duck

I said if the river was whisky

and I was a divin’ duck

I’d dive to the bottom,

and drink my way back up.

(The You Tube version here is strong on the Dobro guitar but the vocals)

Here's another version - If I find a better version in regard to the vocals - I'll put it on - or if Last Fair Deal put a version on You Tube I can link it! (Hint)

There are different version of this song See here (as with blues in general) with different singers incorporated good lines or verses into their own blues. Hence there are 'song families' with song related by linked verses or phrases.

In terms of the Poetry of the Blues  (read the article here)  I love that last verse.

In the Jazz Scene by Francis Newton (AKA Economic Historian Eric Hobsbawm)

Newton makes the following points about the poetry of the blues in the chapter Jazz and the Other Arts -

• The Poetry of the Blues is unique with the unique talent of its original practitioners for making poetry out of words of one syllable.
• The blues are unquestionably the finest body of living folk-poetry in the modern industrial world. They consist mainly of 5 stressed rhyming couplets with the first line repeated, which are combined, modified and augmented to taste.
• Like other folk-poetry they are concerned almost exclusively with straightforward statements, questions or appeals and not at all with literary ornamentation. Even their similes are used for precision and not evocation.

  Got the world in a jug,
  Got the stopper in my hand,
  I'm gonna hold it back
  Until you come under my command

  or

  Love is just like a faucet
  It turns on and off.
  Love is just like a faucet,
  It turns off and on.
  Sometimes when I think its on baby,
  It has turned off and gone.

• Their symbols and poetic props are either straightforward or standard formulae such as any minstrel uses as fill ins. The sun rises and goes down, the railroad, the house, the wind, the graveyard.

  Sun rises in the east
  And I declare it sets in the west.
  Sun rises in the east
  And I declare it sets in the west.
  Ain't it hard to tell which woman will treat you the best?

  There's three trains ready
  But none ain't goin' my way.
  There's three trains running
  But none are going my way
  But the sun's gonna shine in my backdoor some day.

• The blues are therefore not poetic because the singer wants to express himself in a poetic manner. He wants to
  

  The Story of the Blues

  Paul Oliver
  Bluesay what has to be said as best it can, as in the famous Make me a pallet on the floor.

• It's remarkable how complex and sophisticated an effect can be achieved by the slight variation of repeated lines in words, rhythm and context.

  (Since the consonants are very slurred in Southern US speech the rhymes are true rhymes - e.g. 'flo','do' 'know')

  The casual way in which the blues gets its effects, rather as pebbles are shaped by water, may be illustrated by a specific example - The Red River Blues.

  Which way, which way do that blood red river run?
  Which way, which way do that blood red river run?
  Run from my back door to the rising sun.

  I hate to see that rising sun go down
  I hate to see that rising sun go down
  It makes me feel I'm on my own last go roun'

  Which way, which way do that blood red river run?
  Which way, which way do that blood red river run?
  Run from my window to the rising sun.
• The blues is full of poetic bricks, to be put together by the singer as he chooses. Verses and particular standard lines which the minstrel can insert whenever they can't think of anything else or want to return to familiar ground.

• But behind the elementary, though remarkably effective poetic apparatus of the blues, there lies a view of life, which that apparatus is designed to express with he utmost direction and economy of means. It is this which gives the blues their remarkable power, even when they are little more than doggerel.

  I'm goin' away babe, just to wear you off my mind
  I'm goin' away babe, just to wear you off my mind,
  If I stay around here, I'll be troubled all the time.

  So help me honey, but I don't love you
  So help me honey, but I don't love you,
  Well I just don't like them funny ways you do.

  It's rainin' here, babe, stormin' on the sea
  Raining here, storming on the sea
  You mistreat a good man when you mistreat me.

  I'm sorry baby, Sorry to my heart
  Sorry baby, sorry to my heart
  We've been together so long now, now we've got to part.
  Joe Turner

• This view of life is adult, truthful, totally without illusion and humbug, which is why so much of such poetry sounds like the verse of Bretch, who in turn drew his inspiration from the directness of popular songs.
• Truth is what is in the blues. Truth is what blues singers cherish above all and the word recurs time after time again in their conversation when they grope for an explanation of what they are after and attempt to separate their own songs from those which are merely made to make money.

• No one beats about the bush in the blues. Neither about life, death, drink, money or even love. Self-pity and sentimentalism are not in the blues - instead there is the fundamental assumption that men and women must take it as it comes, or if they cannot stand they must die. They laugh and cry because they are human, but they know it cannot help them. In this world 'a good man is hard to find' and when he is found, he won't bring unmixed advantage.

  Now ashes to ashes,sweet papa, dust to dust
  I said ashes to ashes, dust to dust
  Now show me the man any women can trust.

• Like the worlds of the disorganised and beaten down labourers among whom this wonderful idiom grew up, the world of the blues is tragic and helpless, as Bessie Smith once put it: -

  You caint trust nobody, you might as well be alone

  Bessie Smith

• Like all folk poetry, the blues is intended to be sung and nobody who has heard Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey sing can read the words as other than a faint shadow of the real poetry of the blues. For it is the timbre of the voice, the passion and the marvellous flexibility and rhythmic suspension of the vocal line which turns lines like ' When I was nothin' but a child' or 'Now I'm growing old' into statements definitive of their kind as any of those found in the classic poets. But even a s a verbal skeleton the blues are a literary achievement of considerable importance.

Links -Mojo Morgan's Blues

Dobro Guitars John Alderson's Delta Resonator Guitars