(Joe Clayton)

Well, I searched the town—from door to door
Woman I love I can’t—find no more
I got to find my baby
I declare I wouldn’t lie.
Ain’t had no real good lovin’
since that gal said ‘Goodbye’. Continue Reading

(Mississippi John Hurt)
1966

Hey, Hey…Honey, right away.
Hey, Honey right away.
Right away. Honey, right away.
Hey, Honey right away. Continue Reading

(Stephen Foster/P.D./Arr. Scott Ainslie/Cattail)

As we pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears
Let us all taste the hungers of the poor.
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears:
Hard times, come again no more. Continue Reading

Son House

Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face, O Lord,
Just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find.
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face. Continue Reading

In this issue of BluesNotes, I’m going to be quoting from David Honeyboy Edwards’ remarkable memoir/biography The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing. It is the most vivid and revealing memoir, and contains some of the most beautiful language and expressions I’ve ever seen in print. Though he has passed away now, in this book Honeyboy comes alive again. Go buy a copy. Continue Reading

Hear a sample of the song “Come On In My Kitchen” which mentions the ‘nation sack.

Access the complete lyrics of this song.

BluesNotes, October 1, 2003

This issue of BluesNotes concerning “Nation Sacks” comes to me courtesy of Jennifer Bleck, a resonator player and one-time student of mine at one of the music camps around the country.

It has been my understanding from Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt, that the term is a contraction of ‘donation sack’, and sprung from the double drawstring purses common for holding coins in the late 1800’s, and used by tent show revival preachers for their collected donations. And that these ‘nation sacs became fashion items for prostitutes who collected their ‘donations’ from their nightly ministrations and would wear the sacks under their skirts for security, and would further jingle the coins to attract customers. Continue Reading

Southern Stereotypes,
the Holocaust and Public Health?

©2003, Scott Ainslie

Prompted by a recent article in the Times, the notes in this issue of BluesRoots pertain to a part of our history at which no one even hinted during my sixteen years of undergraduate study. It has been astonishing to discover. Good reading.

In a recent article “The New Yorker Who Changed the Diet of the South” by Howard Markel (NY Times of August 12, 2003); Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s efforts to uncover the dietary deficiencies that led to Pellagra are wonderfully recounted. Goldberger came out of slums of the Eastern European jewish neighborhoods of the East Village in New York City and by his audacity, curiosity and strength of will–when measured by the lives he changed—became one of the most significant public health workers the country has ever known, by prescribing brewer’s yeast as a dietary supplement for the South’s poor, black and white. As Markel writes, “It was not until 1937, eight years after Goldberger’s death, that biochemists at the University of Wisconsin identified the exact chemical root of the dietary deficiency that causes pellagra: Niacin.” Continue Reading

For years Blues scholars and musicians have been intrigued by one of Robert Johnson’s lyrics in his most covered tune, “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”. In the song, Johnson comes home to find his woman has been seeing someone else. The premise of the song is that he will “get up in the morning” and “dust” his broom–an expression meaning that he’s going to be hitting the road. And he goes all around the northern Delta region looking for an old girlfriend to take him in, someone who will treat him fairly and care for him: justice and love. Continue Reading

Hear a sample of Bukka White’s “Parchman Farm Blues” played on a Diddley Bow:

The jumping off place for this BluesNotes on Diddley Bows is taken from Gerhard Kubik’s wonderful book, Africa & the Blues (University Press of Mississippi, 1999).

Writing about one-stringed instruments, Kubik cites David Evans wonderful “African-American One-Stringed Instruments” (Evans, 1970) and goes on to note that,

“Like many other African traditions and culture traits, the idea of the monochord zither seems to have smoldered on through the nineteenth century in an underground existence, perpetuated especially by children, and in the rare cases in which the instrument was perhaps observed by outsiders, it was not consider even worthy of report. Only when systematic research of the southern cultures began in the 1930s, does it become documented through photographs, and it was not recorded until the 1950s.”

Continue Reading

Florida’s “Turpmtine” Camps

My travels this spring took me back to Florida, where I met friends of Stetson Kennedy who put me on his trail.

Kennedy is one of the pioneer Southern folklore collectors of the first half of the twentieth century. He was Director of the Federal Writer’s Project unit on folklore, oral history and social-ethnic studies for the Works Progress Administration between 1937 and 1942.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1916, as a teenager Kennedy began collecting Cracker and African-American folksay material while he was collecting “dollar down and dollar a week” accounts for his father, a furniture merchant. He left the University of Florida in 1937 to join the WPA. Kennedy’s first book, “Palmetto Country,” appeared in 1942 as a volume in the American Folkways Series edited by Erskine Caldwell.

Having myself been drawn into Florida folklife by Dwight DeVane’s field recordings of Emmett Murray (where I learned the title cut for my third CD, a turpentine camp song: “You Better Lie Down,”), I came home from Florida and ordered all Kennedy’s books and am working my way through them now. Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and published “The Klan Unmasked” in 1954. That’s number two on my list. He is a fellow who has walked the walk. Continue Reading