Topic: Barefoot Bill Lyrics

[Johnm]

Hi all,
Ed Bell's "My Crime Blues" is another prison blues, played this time out of E position in standard tuning.  The intro to the song, and only the intro, appears to show some of Clifford Gibson's influence, particularly in his playing in E, like the beautful "Keep Your Windows Pinned".  After the intro, Bell goes into his most frequently used accompaniment in E standard.
Once again, Bell's lyrics are superb, and his phrasing here is quite complex, sort of a modified stammering archetype simlar to William Harris's "Bullfrog Blues", or perhaps even more like Lemon's "Bad Luck Blues".  Bell's singing is very soulful and strong, too, as well as being highly ornamented.



   I got the blues for my baby, she got the blues for, I say, me
   Blues for my baby, she got the blues for me
   But I can't see my baby, and she can't see me

   I'm gonna be condemned, I'm, early tomorrow, I say, morn
   Gonna be condemned, early tomorrow morn
   But I am not guilty 'cause I ain't done nobody wrong

   My crime, my crime, I really can't under, I said, stand
   My crime, my crime, I really can't understand
   They got me 'scused (sic) of murder and I ain't never harmed a man

   Baby, please come down there, for my trial, I say, day,
   Will you please come down on my trial day
   So when I be condemned you can wipe my tears away

   There's no need to cry, ain't no need to weep and moan
   There's no need to cry, no need to weep and moan
   Just try to get somebody to go on my bond

   I think it's gwanna be weepin', I begin to, I said, moan,
   It's gwanna be weepin', I begin to moan
   Sayin', I'm a poor boy here, I sure ain't got no home

   The jury found me guilty, judge says, "Listen", I say, "here"
   Jury found me guilty, the judge said, "Listen here.
   It ain't no fine for you, get ready for the electric chair."

Edited 11/1 to pick up corrections from dingwall

All best,
Johnm
     

[Johnm]

Hi all,
Another song Ed Bell recorded as Barefoot Bill was "Barefoot Bill's Hard Luck Blues", and the song's lyrics are sort of a creation explanation for the origin of the pseudonym.  Once again, Ed Bell is working out of Spanish tuning, and the abundance of ideas he had in that tuning points out how unfortunate it was that he didn't continue recording, for his style had by no means set--he was still coming up with different ideas for most of the song he played in Spanish.  In the fourth verse, I believe he pronounces "here", "chere", something I have heard more in present day pronunciation than on old records.



   Baby, I been workin' all this blasted year
   Baby, I been workin', all this blasted year
   I want to go home, ain't got no shoes to wear

   But the times so hard, can't get no work to do
   Times so hard, can't get no work to do
   And my hard luck, mama, because I ain't got no shoes

   I'm gwanna set right down, hang my head and cry
   I'm gwanna set right down, hang my head and cry
   I feel just like I could lay right down and die

   Sugar, I will never be contented chere (sic)
   Sugar, I will never be contented chere
   I am stone barefooted, ain't got no shoes to wear

   My coat all busted, my pants all full of holes
   My coat done busted, my pants all full of holes
   Barefooted, hungry and raggedy, doggone my hard luck soul

All best,
Johnm

[Johnm]

Hi all,
Ed Bell recorded "Squabblin' Blues" as Barefoot Bill.  It is a superlative performance in E position in standard tuning, arguably Bell's best in that position.  The song follows the phrasing archetype of "My Crime" very closely, with a sort of self-interrupting phrasing in the first A line of each verse.  After the fourth verse, Bell goes into a sensational 18-bar break section, detailing the succesive route his body should take in the event of his demise if various relatives and acquaintances choose not to accept it.  Each of the 6 lines in the break follow this phrasing scheme:

   |    4 beats    |    4 beats    |    6 beats  |

The concluding measure of each line of the break adds a two-beat "breath catcher".  Bell's rendition of this section while keeping a complex accompaniment figure going behind it is about as good as anything that every happened in the way of E blues in the Country Blues.  The effect is enhanced by his moving immediately from the break into a solo where he starts out at the 17th (!) fret of the first string.   I will post in greater detail with regard to the phrasing aspects of this song in the "Vocal Phrasing:  The Long and the Short of It" thread.



   My baby done quit me, talk's all over, I say, town
   Baby done quit me, talk's all over town
   And I'm too good a man for to let that talk go 'round

   Take the shoes I bought her, bare foots on the, I say, ground
   Shoes I bought her, put her bare foots on the ground
   And these big Jack Frosts, said, it sure gwanna tear you down

   Now, mister, mister, please to spare my, I mean, life
   Mister, mister, please to spare my life
   I got four little chillen, I got one little bald-head wife

   Now, if I should die, state of Arkan, I said, sas
   'F I should die in the state of Arkansas
   I want you to send my body home to my mother-in-law

   Said if she don't want it, say, give it to my Ma,
   Said if my Ma don't want it, say, give it to my Pa,
   Said if my Pa don't want it, say, give it to Aunt Mary Lee,
   Said, an' if Aunt Mary don't want it, say, give it to my used-to-be,
   Said, if she don't want it, say, cast it in the sea
   Maybe these women in Greenville'll stop squabblin' over me

   SOLO!

   Sayin', I won't be worried with these blues no, I say, more
   Won't be worried, with these blues no more
   Said, it's train time now, said, I reckon I better go

All best,
Johnm

   

   

[waxwing]

Wow, another lyric about sending his body to his mother-in-law, as in Last Kind Word. Must have been a "stock blues phrase" with little or no meaning?-G- Ed really seems to dwell on it, tho', following up with the long list of alternate  recipients. So, why the MIL first? 'Cause she always wanted to see him dead and it's the nicest gift he could give her?

All for now.
John C.

[Johnm]

Hi John C.,
You make an interesting point re the mother-in-law and the appearance of the same in "Last Kind Words".  Everybody seems to interpret blues lyrics more or less literally as being true of the singer's personal condition.  This really became apparent in the "A World Unknown" thread.  For whatever reason, I find that I almost never assume that a blues lyric is in fact personal to the person singing it.  Maybe it's because I've known the blues lyrics sung by blues singers that I have known and heard personally are so seldom true of their own lives. 
In the case of "Squabblin' Blues" or "Last Kind Words", I wouldn't attach any particular significance to the choice of the mother-in-law.  I think it's an instance in which "mother-in-law", first of all, rhymes with the line ending prior to it, and just as importantly, has a punchy, rhythmic flow when sung in the line.  So I guess I see it more as a craft issue than a meaning issue.  Likewise, with the break section that follows the verse, the descending order of precedence with regard to where his body should be sent (Why Ma before Pa?) doesn't seem particularly significant to me.  It just seems more like a combination patter/groove section, and I don't mean to dismiss it in any way by calling it that.  I think it's brilliant.
In a way, this is a larger topic that only peripherally relates to Ed Bell's music, or has just surfaced in this context.  Maybe it should be a thread of its own--for listeners to/fans of blues, how literally do you take what the singers are singing to be true of their own lives?
All best,
Johnm

[CF]

Great job on these John, I got a number of Bell mp3s recently & your transcriptions are helping me to appreciate them that much more . . .
I think your idea for a lyric meaning thread is a good one. Maybe you could get the ball rolling? 

[waxwing]

Well, I don't really think the singer is neccessarily speaking personally, but I do think they may have given some thought to the "story" they are singing and the "character" who is singing it, at least in the more linear songs. That is, I don't think a singer would choose to sing a line purely becayse it rhymed with no thought what-so-ever to the meaning. I just think it could be a period joke, "Well, if I die doing [such-and-such] send my body to my mother-in-law, 'cause she sure wants to see me dead," that anyone hearing the first part would get.

I don't think blues singers sing only from their own experience, but I think many of them are very empathetic story tellers.

All for now.
John C.

[Stuart]

Maybe it should be a thread of its own--for listeners to/fans of blues, how literally do you take what the singers are singing to be true of their own lives?

And add a "Part B," namely, how literally do we take what the singers are singing to be true of our own lives. 

[uncle bud]

Off the top of my head, I remembered Henry Thomas using a similar lyric formula through several verses of Texas Worried Blues.

You can box me up and send me to my ma (x3)

If my ma don't want me, send me to my pa (x3)

If my pa don't want me, send me to my girl (x3)

If my girl don't want me, cast me in the sea (x3)

I'd guess this formula occurs elsewhere as well.

Stock phrases and lyric formulas aren't meaningless, and I don't recall anyone saying that. As JohnM points out, they can work brilliantly. But they aren't necessarily a personal expression intended to tell us something about the singer's own life either. Some blues lyrics are (I'm thinking Sleepy John Estes here, and I'm sure people could cite others, including a few Patton lyrics). But if it's a lyric that can be found in the songs of one singer from Texas, another from Mississippi and another from Alabama, why search for deep personal meaning? Here, it just seems to me it's Ed Bell putting his own spin on a formula and I wouldn't be inclined to read much into it.

[waxwing]

Right, falls somewhere between personal and meaningless, which might be... storytelling? Or not. A story can have meaning (who said "deep"? I'm just looking for a little "sense") without reflecting the storyteller's personal life.

All for now.
John C.

[Stuart]

Without descending into psychobabble, one thing that is recognized about stock phrases and lyric formulae is that they often speak to a shared universal experience (sorry 'bout the nomenclature--but you know what I mean) and serve to connect the singer with the listener / audience--immediately. They function almost like a shared vocabulary of human emotions. There are a lot of evocative images that are used as well. We could spill much ink overanalyzing the obvious, but maybe pointing to some our favorites might be more entertaining. I'll start with CP's "Heart like railroad steel." What else does he have to say?

[uncle bud]

Right, falls somewhere between personal and meaningless, which might be... storytelling? Or not. A story can have meaning (who said "deep"? I'm just looking for a little "sense") without reflecting the storyteller's personal life.

Well in your initial post -- which is what I was responding to and I guess should have quoted -- you seemed to be poking fun at the idea of stock phrases having little or no meaning and asking about the significance of the mother-in-law line for Ed Bell. So let's leave it at "personal meaning". By personal meaning, all I'm saying is I don't see these lines, being stock phrases, as Ed Bell commenting on any actual relationship with his mother-in-law or anyone else (and I'm not saying you do either, but you did ask). I think Stuart is quite right in saying that many blues formulas are more about universal conditions than they are personal expressions. And I think some are just formulas that are tossed in there. They have their own internal sense, structure, and meaning -- but beyond that may not actually be contributing much of a storytelling element. I think this particular Ed Bell verse is simply moving the song forward with an appealingly little bit of repetitive poetic structure that is formulaic, its significance being more in the rhythms of language and repeated imagery than its being about bad relationships with family members. Is he thinking about its meaning in a storytelling sense? Who knows. Maybe he just thought it was cool and worked rhythmically.

I've never actually assumed a blues song tells a story. Some do, some don't. I do agree that many blues are a kind of storytelling. I presume you're not speaking of a truly narrative style, like a blues ballad recounting the story of a John Henry or Stagger Lee, but more a song that focuses on a general theme with semi-narrative bits, like, as JohnM refers to in his new What Do You Hear thread, Patton's Tom Rushen Blues, or less biographically and more thematically, something like Lemon's Crawling Baby Blues. But it seems clear to me there are numerous examples of blues that don't have much of a storytelling element, other than being a loosely connected collection of verses about "woman trouble" or "finding my rider" or being down and out, or travelling the highway etc etc. Or even a collection of verses that aren't really connected much at all, nor delivered by one "voice" other than a singer. The meaning and significance in such songs are pretty much limited to the self-contained verses themselves, their cleverness or wit, their imagery, their rhythms, and in some cases their familiarity for their audience or the way that they play on that familiarity and deliver some unexpected twist or variation.

I'd say that the verses in Squabblin' Blues fall somewhere between the loosely connected and unconnected, and thematically the song couldn't be said to be about much more than "trouble", "women" and "having the blues". You have two verses about his "baby", one verse that echoes stock lines familiar from Stagger Lee songs, two verses that riff on a lyric formula about what to do with one's corpse if one dies, and a last verse about getting out of town (that uses familiar phrases like "worried blues" and "it's train time now"). One could try forcing an overall meaning onto these verses and interpreting the song as a coherent whole, but really there's not much storytelling there in my opinion. I don't think it makes it a lesser song at all -- I love Ed Bell's music. It's just not a song that uses that approach. Examples of songs that would fall into a similar style of using loosely connected or unconnected verses are numerous -- and I would say come more from the earlier period of prewar blues and "pre-blues" -- but that's a subject probably best left for another thread, either JohnM's new thread Blues Lyrics-What Do You Hear? or another new one. Either way it's bound to be a doozy!

[Rivers]

From one of the older merged posts:

I just thought of another use of "cold in hand", from Tommy Johnson's "Lonesome Home"--
  Did you ever dream lucky, wake up cold in hand?

Aha!  So Jackson, MS it is...  here's another:  Kid Bailey's "Rowdy Blues":

Did you ever dream lucky, woke up cold in hand?
I would call that man nothing but a monkey man

While we're collecting them there's another 'cold in hand' lyric, Bullfrog Blues by William Harris, 'Did you ever dream lucky, wake up cold in hand', repeated 3 times to make up one entire verse.

[uncle bud]

From one of the older merged posts:

I just thought of another use of "cold in hand", from Tommy Johnson's "Lonesome Home"--
  Did you ever dream lucky, wake up cold in hand?

Aha!  So Jackson, MS it is...  here's another:  Kid Bailey's "Rowdy Blues":

Did you ever dream lucky, woke up cold in hand?
I would call that man nothing but a monkey man

While we're collecting them there's another 'cold in hand' lyric, Bullfrog Blues by William Harris, 'Did you ever dream lucky, wake up cold in hand', repeated 3 times to make up one entire verse.

This may need its own thread. There another one in Bo Weavil Jackson's "Some Scream High Yellow":

Ah did you dream lucky, wake up cold in hand
Ah did you dream lucky, wake up cold in hand
Then you'll want to see some good gal, ah, ain't got no man

[uncle bud]

A minor point, going back to the transcription of "One More Time" (here, which I was just listening to - and a cool tune it is). In line 2.3, I am pretty sure he sings:

I just ought not to done it, and she would not 'VE BEEN gone

i.e. have been gone.

Some great lines in this song: I telephoned the undertaker, "Just come and bury me, please."