Topic: Payday

[Roscoe]

Hi again. Thanks for all the kind words for my version of country rock. Here is my version of MJH's Payday. I think he might have played it in an open tuning but i just play it in the key of C standard tuning 1/2 step low.  Thanks. Roscoe

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Norfolk Slim]

Nice.  Rock solid alt bass.  I wonder if you could do a bit more with the vocal?  Sing 'off' the guitar part a bit more rather than strictly following it?

Your voice has a definite touch of Chris Smither particularly in the lower notes.  I'm very jealous....

[uncle bud]

Hi Roscoe,

Nice arrangement. It works in C, which was a surprise to me actually. Has a bit of the Praying on the Old Camp Ground kind of sound to it in this key. Nice singing too.

[markm]

Excellent.  Great recording, playing and singing.  You have a great voice. Very nice.

[Blue in VT]

Roscoe,

nice work...Pay day sounds great!  Can you give us some insight into what you ised to record this...it sounds really nice.

Cheers,

Chris

[Roscoe]

Thanks so much for all the positive feedback. As for singing off the melody, i never thought of that. i have always tried to sing in unison with the melody altho they never come out the same way twice anyway. my posts are off a cd i made at my pal eric schabackers studio. www.winterwoodstudios.com   i was playing a santa cruz fs tuned down a half step. he used a nauman on the vocal and two old rca ribbon mics on the guitar. it was all recorded live in one take. i just finished another cd with my pal jerry jones on harp. it was recorded live, kinda fast and loose but we had a lotta fun doing it.  i will try and post some off it soon.  Thanks again. Roscoe

[Slack]

Hi Roscoe -- finally got around to hearing this - really great!  Very much in the country blues tradition of taking a song, changing the position it is played out of and making it your own.  Thanks for posting.

[chipmonk doug]

I've always wanted to play that in standard.  Great.

Can you tell us the way you did the progressions?

[Easy Rider]

Sorry to say,"You've got it all WRONG!" 

NO!  It's not really THAT bad.  I just felt the urge to say that.  You do have the melody and the syncopation wrong, meaning a little off, in a couple of places, and you don't have all the words and all the right words.

This is one of my favorite songs.  I first heard and fell in love with it, sitting at MJH's feet, at the Gaslight Cafe, in NYC, in 1964, and I finally learned it, a couple of years ago, from a transcription, in one of Stefan Grossman's book/Lesson packages.  Hurt played it in Vestapol tuning.  He tuned to Open E, but I tune to Open D.  All of the melody is on the first and second strings, sliding up as far as the 9th fret, and you can play the whole song with one Left hand finger and no chords.  The bass alternates between the 6th and 4th strings.

This was good for me because, when I started learning the song, I had just cut off the tip of my Left Index finger, including half of the fingernail, preparing supper, on a Friday night, and my finger was encased in a huge, white, gauze bandage.  Stefan sent me this song, which is complete, with an intro and an instrumental break, and, for months, it was the only song I could practice.  Needless to say, I play it really well now.  I still play it, with my Left Index finger sticking straight up in the air, though, and I tell the story, when I play it.  The moral:  Go out to eat, on Friday night!

BTW:  When I divorced my ex-wife, I sang her this song, and I sing it to new girlfriends, as a cautionary tale.

LYRICS to PAYDAY:

Yeah, I did all I can do, and I can't get along with you
I'm gonna take you to your mama, pay day
Pay day, pay day

Well, the rabbit in a log, I ain't got no rabbit dog
And I hate to see that rabbit get away
Get away, get away

Baby, did all I can do, and I can't get along with you
I'm gonna take you to your mama, pay day

Just about a week ago,
I stole your eggs and ham.
I'm gonna keep my skillet greasy if I can
If I can, if I can

(spoken: You know what happened to me)
Well, the hounds is on my track, and the knapsack on my back
I'm gonna make it to my shanty 'fore day
'Fore day, 'fore day

Baby, I did all I could do, an' I ...
I'm gonna take you to your mama, pay day.

Well ..., and I ain't got no rabbit dog
Lord, I hate to see that rabbit get away
Get away

Baby, did all I can do, and I can't get along with you
I'm gonna take you to your mama, pay day.

[Roscoe]

in response to easy riders comment "youve got it all wrong" your right. when i got interested in this guitar style from listening to mjh, blind blake and big bill a long time ago it didnt take me long to figure out that i would never be as good as those guys so i just try to figure out an easy way to play em that works for my style.  thanks again for all the feedback. roscoe.

[uncle bud]

I wasn't sure what to make of Easy Rider's comment. Meant as a joke? Anyway, what you did was clearly an arrangement, not an attempt to duplicate anything, so terms like right or wrong don't seem to apply IMO. It could have been bad or good, I suppose. I thought it worked very nicely.

[Pan]

Hi Roscoe

I for one enjoyed your version of Payday very much. Relaxed feel and strong steady beat.

I personally think it's very important to be able to arrange a song to a different key, and maybe a different tuning altogether (and it's not that easy). After all, the guitar player should first and foremost provide an accompaniment to the vocalist, according to his or her abilities and range, and not vice versa. It's a bad musician who doesn't take this into consideration.

By creating your own arrangement, you also show that you truly love and understand the music, rather than simply recreating it mechanically. This is what makes an artist individual.

Keep up the good work

Pan

[Easy Rider]

Roscoe:

I'm not trying to put you down, when I say "You've got it all WRONG!".  I'm just trying to emphasize that,  in order to really understand the style of people like Mississippi John Hurt, you have to LISTEN to the original recordings and try to come as close as you can to playing just what and how they are playing.  You need to get inside their skins, so to speak.  Only then, when you can understand and approximate what they are doing, can you personalize your performance, to express your own feelings.

Mississippi John Hurt was such a sweet, gentle man!  When he performed, there was a marvelous twinkle in his eye, he smiled a lot, and he held his audience in the palm of his hand.  You couldn't help but love him.  You can feel that in his music.  When you sing "Payday" you want to look your girl straight in the eye and smile and twinkle a little.  After all, the song contains a longing for freedom and a (not so) vieled threat, doesn't it?

To say that you can never be as good as him is a cop out.  "Payday" is so easy, you can play it with only one finger!  Technically, his playing is only intermediate level, and the charts are readily available, from the Internet and sources like Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop.  Learning from the charts is a good way of finding out what he is actually doing and adding his licks to your repertoire, making them part of your own personal style.  Every key has its own voice, and every tuning too.  Playing the song in its original tuning and key will give you insight into the beautiful, ringing tone MJH was creating, and it is essential to your understanding of the song.

[a2tom]

I think there a lot of different things one might want to do with any song.  I have respect for doing what ER describes, but also for the great version posted by Roscoe.  I thought it was stellar, even if not exactly John Hurt.

tom

[uncle bud]

Not sure about singing veiled threats to my girlfriend, but another way to get inside a player is to take what he or she has done and go in a different direction with it. I most certainly tend towards replication (at least aspiring to) vs. the interpretation side of things, because that's where I'm at right now. Whether I'm learning Blind Lemon or Blind Willie McTell, two current obsessions, I tend to try and get it down the way they did it. But there are certainly songs where I've just gone in a different direction. Roscoe's done that with this version of Payday, and it works IMO.

I've actually been fooling around with Payday recently myself, sort of by accident as a result of working on some other stuff in Vestapol. I'm using more than one finger but have that option as I didn't lop off any fingertips recently (ouch EasyRider!). I'm playing it much as Hurt did, only worse of course.

The old thread we had on Ma Rainey's Don't Fish in My Sea, a challenge to come up with an arrangement, is a good example of taking it in a different direction. Not many people posted versions, but one Weenie did it like Blake, another like Lemon. Fun stuff.