Ernie Hawkins - Blues & Ragtime Guitar Of Rev. Gary Davis

Blues & Ragtime Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis Transcribed by Ernie Hawkins Historical notes by William L. Ellis The Reverend

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Blues & Ragtime Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis Transcribed by Ernie Hawkins Historical notes by William L. Ellis The Reverend Gary Davis by Alex Shoumatoff ...................... 3 Spoonful .................................................................................. 11 Cocaine Blues .......................................................................... 16 Delia ........................................................................................ 24 Baby, Let Me Lay It On You .................................................... 31 Candyman ................................................................................ 35 Hesitation Blues ...................................................................... 39 Penitentiary Blues .................................................................. 46 Florida Blues ........................................................................... 55 Can’t Be Satisfied .................................................................... 62 Slow Drag (Cincinnati Flow Rag) ......................................... 74 C Rag ........................................................................................ 87 Don’t Let My Baby Catch You Here ........................................ 94 Make Believe Stunt (Maple Leaf Rag) .................................... 98

The accompany CD to this book has Ernie Hawkins playing each arrangement slowly. You are strongly suggested to hear the original source recordings of Rev. Gary Davis as indicated under each song title.

CD Track Listing

Track 1. Spoonful Track 2. Cocaine Blues Track 3. Delia Track 4. Baby Let Me Lay It On You Track 5. Candy Man Track 6. Hesitation Blues Track 7. Penitentiary Blues Track 8. Florida Blues Track 9. Can’t Be Satisfied Track 10. Slow Drag Cincinnati Flow Rag 1st verse Track 11. Slow Drag Cincinnati Flow Rag 2nd verse Track 12. Slow Drag Cincinnati Flow Rag 3rd verse Track 13. Slow Drag Cin Flow Rag 4th verse & variations Track 14. C Rag verse Track 15. C Rag chorus Track 16. Don’t Let My Baby Catch You Here Track 17. Make Believe Stunt Maple Leaf Rag 1st section Track 18. Make Believe Stunt Maple Leaf Rag 2nd section

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The Reverend Gary Davis by Alex Shoumatoff © Alex Shoumatoff Used with Permission

It was the Reverend’s 73rd birthday: he was in fine spirits. Someone in England had sent him a box of small cigars and he’d been smoking on them steadily in spite of a bad cold. When we reached the standstill in front of the Midtown Tunnel, he suddenly broke out coughing, choking, wheezing. ”I swear, Brother Davis, you gonna cough yourself to death on them things,” said Reverend Davis’ wife, Annie. “You gonna cough yourself right into the coffin. You smoke them things just like a child eats candy.” “Aw hush,” the Reverend replied when he had pulled himself together. “I ain’t gonna die. I ain’t going nowhere. And if I did die, I’d be here just as often as I was when I was alive.” He returned the cigar to his mouth. “Know something, Reverend, you and I are exactly fifty years apart,” I observed as our white Galaxie finally gained the lip of the tunnel. “Is that so?” he asked in an incredulous falsetto. “Well you got a long time before they get your meat.” With that he reached into his pants pocket, took out his thumb and finger picks, and began groping up and down the pearl-inlaid neck of Miss Bozo. Suddenly, like beads of rain dripping from branches, music began to stream from his fingertips. It was a high-stepping, rambunctious rag, something that might have been played by an old-time jazz band chugging down the streets of New Orleans after the burial of a beloved trumpeter. The Reverend’s fingers sprang from fret to fret with assurance of sixty-five years of experience with the inexhaustible blues idiom. Occasionally his left hand would sneak way up the neck and twinge a few pleading, whining notes and follow with a sassy bass run as it wandered back down to the C chord. “That was the John D. Rockefeller rag,” he said when it was over. “He put the panic on in 1905. ‘Save up your money, don’t buy no coin, ’cause John D. Rockefeller put the panic on.’” He paused to take a long pull from his cigarillo. “I caught that one coming out of a city one time in South Carolina.” Back in the tunnel the ooze of a hundred idling engines was condensing on the grimy tiles. Still bottlenecked.

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You know,” he went on, “when I was your age I went to a party one time wearing a white suit and I was sitting there when all of a sudden a whole fight broke out. I went into the kitchen and stole a potato pie off the table and came over to the fireplace and clumb over the burning logs and hid up the chimney till they quit fighting. When I got out, good God, my suit was all black.” “Aw come on, Brother Davis,” Annie interrupted. “You still trying to tell people that story?” Back at home in Jamaica, Queens, in the cellar, out of Annie’s hearing, the Reverend sits before a noisy electric heater and begins to recall in a low, salacious voice the violent world of poor black sharecroppers in the Carolinas, where he lived till he was 40. His earliest memories are of a “red tin-top house with a honeysuckle vine climbing up the side of it,” nine miles out of Laurens, South Carolina, where he was born blind in 1897. When he was old enough, like every black who could stand on two feet in that part of the country, he went out to the fields and picked cotton and cane and bailed hay for the Man. He was the oldest of eight children, of whom six, including two sets of twins, died in childhood. His last brother was cut down by a woman with a butcher knife when he was 25. His father was killed by the police in Birmingham, Alabama, when Gary was ten: “He told a woman to stop coming to see him; she came around and he cut her throat. Then he ran around telling everybody, ‘I killed a woman. Come and get me.’ The sheriff and his deputies came and he shot one -but the sheriff got him.” But even before his father’s death his uncle had taken over his upbringing. “The first instrument I played was a mouth harp,” he says. “My uncle would go into town and buy him one. Then he’d buy me one. You could get a good one for 25 cents.” The young boy would sit all day in the barnyard calling to the pigs and the chickens on his harp, and under his uncle’s tutelage he became an accomplished country harpist, until he could blow the sounds of a whole coon hunt, the baying, panting, snarling, and whining of the pursuing hounds and the hissing of the treed coon. He always carries a couple of harps in his jacket but hadn’t played them since he had got the cold: playing with a cold is “too much whiskey for a dime. Make you as drunk as any shot of whiskey.” Discovering that the boy was “music inclined,” his uncle helped him make his first banjo out of a pie plate, and presented him with an $18 Washburn guitar on his eighth birthday. It was the most important day in his life, the day “the Lord put something in my hands so I could take care of myself.” He soon picked up the chords from the radio and from visiting neighborhood guitarists, and by the time he was 12 he was in demand for local fairs, hoedowns, hops, and camp meetings. When he was 19 he went off to a school for the blind in Greenville, South Carolina, where he learned braille and played on street corners in a string band with Sonny Terry, Blind Boy Fuller, and Big Red. He was making what he calls “good -looking blues”: “the kind that makes a woman say, ’O Lord, Mr. Davis, I can’t stand it.’” To hear him tell it, women were constantly succumbing to the spell of his blues, the insistent moan of his voice and his devilish good looks, evident in the old photographs in his bedroom. “I’ve had my portion of stuffing,” he says. “They wouldn’t let me alone, you understand? I grabbed one, one time after I backed off her you understand. She fainted. Fell out. I thought she was dead right there. I just shook her a little bit, she said, ‘Lord God, honey, if you do it that way to me again I’ll go to heaven.’” In his 20s, he wandered through the Carolinas from one city to the next, from street corner to fairground to dance hall to barroom, from one wild woman to another, with no one to trust and no dependable income, drowning in whiskey while people were shot and stabbed around him. He married, ran the woman out of his house when he found out she had been seeing a man he had thought was dead. He learned the blues the only way they can be learned, by living them. “Blues,” he says, “is for gut-bucket people who run around with only half their clothes on. A man just got off them and they don’t even wipe themselves.” In his early 30s he was disenchanted with the reckless profligacy of the blues life, and instead of dying on a floor somewhere or being gunned down in his prime like Blind Lemon Jefferson, he became a man of God. In 1933 he became an ordained minister in the Freewill Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, swore off the blues, “the Devil’s music,” as Annie calls them, and began his new life as a religious street singer. Many of the holy songs that “came” to him are about his conversion, like the following one, which he and Annie sing together, and she calls “a real halleluia song”:

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Now when I went out in this world of sin I had nobody to be my friend. Jesus came and taken me in. Glory Halleloo. I was out in darkness and I could not see, Jesus came and he rescued me. He cleansed me and gave me victory. Glory Halleloo. One day while Jesus was passing by He set my sinful soul on fire. He made me laugh and he made me cry. Glory Halleloo. He gave me a horn and told me to blow, Go in peace and sin no more. He led me away to the upper bright shore. Glory Halleloo. Now stand back Satan and get out of my way. I don’t want to hear not a word you say, For I’m on my way to the King’s highway. Glory Halleloo. Thank God I got over at last, Thank God I got over at last. My feet is planted in a narrow path. Glory Halleloo. Now I’m fire baptized and Holy Ghost filled. I’m out here to do my master’s will. I must keep going, I can’t keep still. Glory Halleloo. Oh glory how happy I am. Oh glory how happy I am. My soul is washed in the blood of the lamb. Glory Halleluia. The Reverend became one of the last of the blind religious street singers, a venerable profession that has been snuffed out by such advances of civilization as government pensions for the blind. His astounding finger picking soon attracted the notice of the race record industry, and in 1935 he was invited to record for the Perfect label in New York. After cutting two records which made him a near-legendary figure but paid him practically nothing, he settled in Harlem where he could be heard on the streets on almost any day of the week for the next 30 years. When I first met the Davises back on a freezing winter night in 1963, they were living in a three-room shack in the Bronx behind a row of condemned buildings on Park Avenue. The folklore center in Greenwich Village was in the custom of giving out the number of a blind old guitar teacher who needed the money, and Annie had answered and kept on calling me “child” as she explained how to get there: an exhilarating trip on the A train, the B train and the C train, a bus ride that began in front of a “flower florist” and a brisk walk through Spanish Bronx. Annie let me in, clapping her huge white palms together in delight at the sight of such youth. The temperature of the room was easily a hundred degrees hotter than it was outside and as hot as any cotton field back home. The heat was coming from an oil stove in the middle of the room around which two very large elderly ladies in dazzling Sunday hats were sitting, and it was so intense that it had warped the leaves of an Old Testament calendar that was tacked up on a wall covered with framed prayers, house blessings, and scriptural homilies. Annie said Brother Davis was at the barber shop but she had just made some sweet potato pudding that was still warm inside, so I sat down and underwent the scrutiny of the two ladies until the Reverend made his entrance. He was telling a joke that was making the shy, thirtieths churchgoing man who had taken him to the barbershop redden behind his ears. The two ladies suddenly changed into young giggling flirts. One of them went up to the Reverend, took off his stubby-brimmed hat, felt his new haircut and said, “My, my don’t he look nice.”

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“Here’s your new student, Brother Davis,” Annie said, coming out of the kitchen. “Where, where, I can’t see him,” the Reverend said, and boohooed like a train whistle until he felt my hand in his, grabbed it, started back in a W. C. Fields take, and said, “Great God Almighty, what’s this?” He felt the fingertips for calluses and said, “So you come to me to play the guitar?” Over in a corner of the room there was an armchair, a stool, and a row of banjos and guitars in cases. Mrs. Davis drew a curtain dividing us from the stove and the ladies and the Reverend took out Miss Gibson, the beautiful flowerembroidered Gibson J -200 he bought in 1943, slipped his fingers in the A minor position on the fifth fret and said to watch his fingers. The three-hour lesson, on a slow and easy Cab Calloway song called “Babe Why You Cryin’ ‘Cause I Leave You,” was interrupted three times by people on the phone asking for him. One was a hysterical woman screaming that her husband was standing over her with a gun and please Brother Davis help me, what am I gonna do? “Now you just calm down and pull yourself together,” he told her. “If your man is gonna kill you, you probably deserves it.” It was only in 1964, when the Reverend was invited to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, that he was recognized as one of the last of the first generation blues singers and one of the kings of old-time country finger picking. Although he had been playing for 59 years, had recorded in 1954 and 1956, and was well known to the New York folk underground, the only living he had been able to make was on street corners, in bars, at church functions, and from guitar students. The other outstanding early blues artists had all either died or given up their music long ago, and had to be tracked down and resurrected. But Gary Davis had kept playing because he was blind and it was all he could do, and when his moment finally came, at the age of 67, when a funky old man nobody had heard of was led out at Newport, his long, magic fingers and his strong voice, lacerated by years of singing over street noises, did not fail him. While Annie was getting ready for church the Reverend was telling the gentlemen in the living room how the Queen of England caught his show in London and how he “got a chance to kiss the King’s wife.” One of the gentlemen was Mose, the 20-year-old who was driving and running errands for the Davises when he wasn’t working at his latest job as a bill collector in Brooklyn. Mose, for his part, was rapping about the imminent confiscation of his GTO for unpaid back installments and how he wanted to be a cartoonist and learn the guitar and be a certified public accountant and ball a minister’s daughter he met last Sunday at a church supper in the Bronx.

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The drive to church in the dull slushy afternoon led through the endless vacant lots and side streets of Jamaica on Mose’s shortcut to the Van Wyck Expressway. Annie was feeling down: it was the flu season and many of the people she had asked to her program were sick and weren’t going to make it, after all that telephone work. It was especially a shame that both Elder Glover and Reverend Bonepart were laid up and Reverend Lloyd People was performing a baptism and the Holy Angels had to sing at another church and probably wouldn’t make it over at all. Yes, the snow was a real problem. Little children were playing on the dirty mounds of snow that had been pushed up on the curbs of Spanish Harlem and there was only a thin way for the Galaxie to snake through. Mose stopped in front of a gray wooden storefront on East 119th Street and went to park. It was a very small building in what seemed to be an unusually wide alley, but inside the cracked and stained ceiling extended far enough back that there was room for ten rows of wooden folding chairs, an aisle between them, a table with a collection plate, a large bouquet of red plastic roses, a lectern with a purple cloth draped over it, and off to the side a tiny room with a rusty sink. It was definitely a place of worship. The few guests who were going to make it had arrived. There were the Davis’ old friends from Corona, the Reverend Harold and the Reverend Claire Wright, neither of whom was very well. In order to supplement the meager earnings from their missionary work, they were in business putting out a small mail order weekly advertising bargains ballpoints available in Wichita for 29 cents. Then Pop Collins, a tall gray-haired gentleman who wore a three-piece suit and white spats, and carried an ivoryknobbed cane, another old friend from North Carolina. Then two Lower East Side follies with guitars who had set up a mike for their tape recorder on the lectern. The only one missing was the preacher, and in a few minutes he arrived, out of breath and apologizing for being late, a small beaming man with a businesslike black attaché case. He and Annie began talking and each time she said something he would rub his hands enthusiastically, brimming over with religion, and say, “O yes yes yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.” It became clear that this was the first church he had ever held. He passed around his calling card. It was time to start the service. The preacher opened his attaché case on the piano stool: All it contained was a tambourine. He began shaking it and slapping it and talking fast, gulping in lungs full of air and dispelling them with long incantations, as many as he could manage in one breath, stoning himself out from the lack of oxygen: “Hear us Gracious Lord, hear us sweet Jesus, hear us heavenly Father, come down to us heavenly Father come down to us right here O Lord,” gulp, gasp, for his first time he was really getting it on, everyone was joining in with amens and alrights and laughter and clapping louder, louder, faster, faster, the tambourine shook, the hand slapped impossible to follow so fast, the place was rocking, we were all together, brothers in God, in a righteous revival frenzy. When it ended, Annie got up and thanked everyone for being there and introduced everyone and called on Brother Collins to say a few words. He got up and just stood there for a while, his eyes shining with the goodness that was inside him. Then gazing up at the ceiling he began to talk in a steady, gentle voice, almost as if the words were written up there, about how all the troubles the world was in today were due to our being in rebellion with God, to people hating each other, to white and colored people not getting together with each other, and how he was so happy to see that some of our young white brethren are here with us today, and wouldn’t it be fine if we could start right here putting aside our differences and tell the world what we’re feeling. The preacher punctuated his speech with a few emphatic slaps of the tambourine, and Pop Collins stepped down, leaving the room ringing with exaltation. Reverend Davis gave the sermon. Standing at the lectern with Miss Bozo around his neck, he looked 30 years younger: his forehead was creased, sweat pouring out, his nostrils flared, upper lip curling-he looked like Victor Mature as Samson straining at the pillars of the temple. It was a musical sermon, of course: sometimes he was playing with his left hand alone, sliding up and down the neck while he snapped the fingers of his right hand or slapped them on the sound box. Moaning, shouting, squealing, at times his voice and Miss Bozo were indistinguishable, fire-baptized and Holy-Ghost-filled. Annie was clapping right hand into left, left into right, swaying back and forth with closed eyes. Occasionally she would shake and utter little screams as shivers of religion ran down her spine, and her eyes would pop open for a moment until she got into the sermon. This is what he was singing:

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You better know how to treat everybody For you got to go down. You got to go down. You better learn how to treat everybody. You got to go down. You got to go down. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, The life you’re living won’t do to trust. You better learn how to treat everybody For you got to go down. (Some of you people don’t realize it; taking the world by storm; don’t even know how to treat your family; doing all kinds of ways; living all kinds of lives; saying everything before your children?; treat your wife all kind of ways; treat your husband every kind of way; God says:) You better learn how to treat your husband. You got to go down. You got to go down. You better learn how to treat your husband . You got to go down. You got to go down. (‘Cause the mother to get careless; but God tells you how to raise a child; you got to place you say everything before the child; and do everything before; God says:) You better learn how to live ‘fore children. You got to go down. You got to go down. You better learn how to live ‘fore children. You got to go down. You got to go down. (And you’re traveling through the world; and don’t know how to treat your wife; and giving everybody else the thing that you ought to give your wife; God says: ) You better You got You better You got

learn to go learn to go

how to treat your companion. down. You got to go down. how to treat your companion. down. You got to go down.

(And you’re traveling through the world; some people think; just because a man is a drunkard; and will drink liquor sometime and cut up and raise sand; if they come and carry him to your house; you got to carry him in before the Lord; when God save him you can suggest saving your own self; God says:) You better learn how to treat that drunkard. You got to go down. You got to go down. You better learn how to treat that drunkard. You got to go down. You got to go down. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, The life you’re living won’t do to trust. You better learn how to treat that drunkard. You got to go down. You got to go down. One day a letter came from Annie: “greeting in the name of the Lord Alex it was a pleasure to have you spin the night feel free to visit us the same goes for Mary Lee she is so sweet you tell her for me I can’t forgt the good cheese cake she made for the party i had a Birth Day feb. 25 that always hope I might have something for B. Davis he is such a lonely person I can’t do too much for him he got in from Chicago march 16 Evy thing was O K i gave some of the Bread for him he lake it he said it Remind him of the kind of Bread his grandmama would make on the fith Sunday Eavng we will Be at 2843 Eaight Ave Don’t

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youall want to come time 3:30 p.m. that one Block from Rocking palice write me back at once OK I hope you got back all Right so long – Annie Davis It turned out the party was canceled because of his cold, but there were plenty of things to do - weeding the dandelions from the backyard, getting some slats at the lumber yard for his daughter Ruby’s bed and getting the Reverend’s ‘scription filled at the drugstore. It turned out there was a party anyway, because a couple from Brooklyn showed up with all their relatives to get married. A bishop was recruited from a choir rehearsal on Merrick Boulevard to fill out the marriage license. When everything was ready Annie raised the piano seat and took out a large book of Dutch fairy tales whose pages were superimposed with the braille New Testament and all the important services. The Reverend felt over and recited a passage from Peter about the gravity of marriage and then began to lecture the couple in his own words on the seriousness of the step they were about to take, how they were committing themselves to stand by each other through sickness and setback for the rest of their lives, and the vow they were taking was being witnessed in heaven that very moment, and something about Shadrach, Mishach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The bride, a huge Amazon in a black shawl, seemed little impressed and more than once showed signs of a mocking, bullying attitude toward her future husband, who was about a foot shorter than she was. When it came time for her to say “I do,” she said it so halfheartedly that the Reverend stopped the service right there and told her that it sure didn’t sound to him like she did. She stammered that she really did, honest to God, and having done his best, the Reverend pronounced them man and wife. Long after the wedding party had gone home and the rest of the house was asleep and the sound of voices and footsteps was no longer to be heard, the Reverend sat up in the living room. He often sat like this in his armchair, smoking his pipe and dropping quids into the red plastic bucket that is his spittoon, alone, late into the night, with all the lights off, just sitting there silently in his darkness until five or seven in the morning. At length the Reverend asked for Miss Bozo. He slouched back in his armchair and began strumming one of the quiet introspective songs about the life to come that have been coming to him lately, and slowly the music began to fill the darkness: Soon my work will all be done. Soon my work will all be done. Soon my work will all be done. I’m going home to live with my Lord. The chariot is waiting to carry me home. The chariot is waiting to carry me home. The chariot is waiting to carry me home To rest for ever more. The angel at the gate is waiting for me. The angel at the gate is waiting for me. The angel at the gate is waiting for me Ready to welcome me in. I have a mother she’s waiting over there. I have a mother she’s waiting over there. I have a mother she’s waiting over there On kingdom’s happy shore. By and by I’m going to see the king. By and by I’m going to see the king; By and by I’m going to see the king Who bled and died for me. Soon my work will all be done. Soon my work will all be done. Soon my work will all be done I’m going home to live with my Lord

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“You know,” he said several minutes later, “when you come to that line, ‘soon my work will all be done,’ that song reaches to a streak of gladness.” Next morning the doorbell rings and in breezes Joseph, the Davis’ nephew. Sporting Life himself, 28, glasses, high school jacket, pencil mustache. He used to live with them in the Bronx, he says, hasn’t seen much of them since he grew up and moved to Brooklyn and they moved to Queens. But this morning he didn’t have anything to do and hitched a ride with a friend who was making a truck delivery a few blocks away. He asks the Reverend how he’s been. The Reverend says he just had a birthday. “Is that right. So how old you now, Brother Davis?” “I’s 73 years old.” “Seventy-three. You getting on up in the age now, huh? Getting to be an old man.” The Reverend pretends to cry. “I can’t pat it like I used to.” “Well, I can still pat it. Well, sometimes that happens you know. When you get a little too old, you know.” “Old man was 95 years old and I was sitting down in the barbershop and the fellow sounds like a train come through the barbershop,” he imitates train’s boohoo and pants, sounding just like wheels clacking down the track. “I said what’s the matter with you old man? ‘It’s used to be I could have a good time, I can’t do nothing no more.’ (Woohoo hoo hoo).” “Well you can smell it. Nothing wrong with smelling it. That’s all you can do. Right?” “He comes a-crying ’cause he couldn’t do nowhere near just like he used to could do. Did you ever hear a fool crying about something he used to could do and couldn’t do no mo’. I ain’t crying. I’m going on 74 years old. I ain’t crying.”

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Spoonful (Source - Rev. Gary Davis at Newport) Ernie Hawkins: This is one of Rev. Davis’ most traditional sounding pieces—a typical Piedmont A blues. In the context of his wider repertoire, it is relatively simple and he often used it to teach beginners, using it to introduce them to his playing. It revolves around a second position G, or ‘long-A’ form A chord. The first finger of the left hand frets the four high strings, second fret, and the little finger frets the first string, fifth fret. By sliding from the first to the second fret of the second string, moving from the minor to the major III, and then playing the second fret, G string, the I, he plays the word “spoonful”. He plays this in different octaves: eighth to ninth frets first string (D form A) to the tenth fret second string, and by choking up on the third fret, low E string, the the open low E. Though I have heard him occasionally use the IV chord, the D or D7 in the second bar, in this song, he most always plays it with just with A and E chords, the I and the V. Starting out, in the A chord, notice that he often uses the standard blues ‘thumb drag’ from the open low E string to the open A, on the ‘+ one’ beat. When he gets to the E7 chord, he hammers on the first fret of the G string some of the time, and plays the open high E to the seventh on the third fret, second string. When he takes an instrumental break up the neck, he usually starts on the fifth fret, B and high E strings. The fifth fret of the B string is the V. From there to the seventh fret to the fifth fret first string, that is from the E to the F# to the A, He’s playing the V, the VI and the I. On the first string, he rolls from the fifth to the eight frets, that is from the I to the minor III. He then often jumps up to the D form A, ninth fret, for a ‘bugle call’ cornet run, sliding on the high E, from the eight to the ninth frets, the minor III to the major III and up to the twelfth fret. He sometimes jumps up the his signature C7 form E7 on the seventh fret, covering both bases on the seventh fret with his thumb. Bill Ellis: In the 1960s, one of the most commonly shared images, if not song types, among the pre- and post-WWII blues singers was that of the Spoonful. Howlin’ Wolf’s famed version, a 1960 hit courtesy of Willie Dixon’s song craft, quickly became a standard for electric blues and rock bands alike, while more down-home renditions were parlance of the folk circuit thanks to the fingerpicking pleasures of Spoonful (Reverend Gary Davis), Coffee Blues (Mississippi John Hurt) and ’Bout a Spoonful (Mance Lipscomb and Nathan Beauregard). The earliest recordings of the song type included All I Want Is a Spoonful by Papa Charlie Jackson (1925); Charley Patton’s A Spoonful Blues (1929); and Just a Spoonful by Charley Jordan (1930). One meaning for “spoonful” at that time was a euphemism for cocaine use. As Stephen Calt wrote in his blues dialect dictionary, Barrelhouse Words, a “spoonful” was “a dose of cocaine, placed on a spoon to facilitate snorting.” David “Honeyboy” Edwards left no doubt to that interpretation in his own later recording of Just a Spoonful: “I’d go to jail ’bout a spoonful…I’d kill my mama ’bout a spoonful…I’d kill that judge ’bout a spoonful.” But the term also carried an equally potent sexual connotation. In The Blues Tradition, the great Paul Oliver addressed the song’s ribald origins in the turn-of-the-century repertories of medicine show performers and songsters, quoting Mack McCormick, who called the song type, “one of the oldest and most venerated pieces of bawdy lore.” Indeed, Howlin’ Wolf left many a young roots music novice seeking exposure to the real blues dazed by the obscene gestures and props (including an over-sized spoon) that could accompany a live performance of his signature song. It’s easy to see how the two ideas might intertwine in blues verse, given the connections between sexual behavior and cocaine use. This further explains, of course, why Davis used a shared body of verse between his performances of Spoonful and Cocaine, including similar rhyming schemes and scenarios. Compare, for example, the following couplets: “Come in one night just about half past ten. Stuck my key in the door, and I declare I couldn’t get it in.” (Spoonful) “Come in one night just about half past ten. Went to stick my key in the door, and I couldn’t get it in.” (Cocaine) and “I come in one morning just about half past nine. She got the biggest chair in the house, tried her best to knock me blind.” (Spoonful) “Got up this morning about half past nine My gal got a chair and tried her best to knock me blind” (Cocaine). Yet even in his more suggestive moments, Davis the preacher was never far removed, and I would argue that on a song as naughtily fun as Spoonful, he still manages to give us a cautionary tale about addictions of all kinds and the strains they can put on family and household. One side note (this from Alex Shoumatoff): Guitar newbies who came to Davis expecting to learn Samson out the gate were kindly shown how to play Spoonful instead.

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Spoonful (1965, recorded in concert at the Newport Folk Festival) You know, I come in one morning to my gal’s house about half past four. She got a chair and knocked me right back out the door. She commence to raisin’ sand with me just about a spoonful. I never know such a [stirment(sic)] raised before in my life about a spoonful. I come in one morning just about half past nine. She got the biggest chair in the house, tried her best to knock me blind. She was raisin’ sand with me again just about a spoonful. Standin’ on her head saying, “If you want to get along with me, give me my spoonful!” Come in one night just about half past ten. Stuck my key in the door, and I declare I couldn’t get it in. She was on the inside standin’ on her head about a spoonful. She had the whole neighborhood stirred up just about a spoonful. Well, I come in one evening just to get my dinner. She got so bad on my hand until I, till I had to stick my sword in her. She was raisin’ so much sand with me just about a spoonful. Never know so much devilry before in my life about a spoonful. I come in one evening, just got my pay. Throwed my pocketbook in her lap, she throwed it back at me, said, “Go your way!” She didn’t want no money. She said, “I just want you to give me my spoonful. You ain’t gonna get along with me till you give me my spoonful!” Come in one evening to go downtown. She got a smoothin’ iron and knocked me down to the ground. Started raisin’ sand with me again about a spoonful. I never know nobody cut up so in my life just about a spoonful. I come in tired one night, hungry, and sleepy as I could be. She got a kettle of water and she tried to scald a fool out of me. Started that same thing again about a spoonful. “If you want to get along with me in this house, man, you better give me my spoonful!” (1970, recorded at John Gibbon’s wedding reception) I come in one night just about half past nine. My gal got the biggest poker and tried to do her best to knock me blind. I wanted to know what it was all about – “Didn’t give me my spoonful! If you want to get along with me, better come on and give me my spoonful!” I come in one evening just as hungry as I could be. My gal got a kettle of water and tried her best just to scald a fool out of me. Raisin’ sand with me all day long just about a spoonful. I never known so much sand raised before in my whole life just about a spoonful. I come in one evening, I thought I come in right. Good God a-mercy, when I come in, found out how I come in, boys, my gal just ready to fight. Raisin’ sand with me again about a spoonful. “If you wanna have some peace with me, come and do like a man ought to do, give me my spoonful!” I come in one evening just about half past two. She grabbed up a smoothin’ iron and tried her dogged best to knock me through. I never seen a woman like her before in my life, just a fool about a spoonful. She tried her best just to kill me in that house just about a spoonful.

12

Spoonful by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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2

Cocaine Blues (Source - Pure Religion and Bad Company) Ernie Hawkins: The earliest Cocaine Blues we have. Rev Davis told me that this is an example of ‘country picking.’ Unlike his usual complex style of playing, it remains in the first position, and uses a steady alternating base. This is an instance where Rev Davis takes up an earlier style of playing that on the surface seems not as sophisticated as his usual playing, that uses a common progression, and turns it into something really special. It’s in the key of C but never once uses a C base. Through the three chords, he alternates 6th and 4th strings for the base. When playing the C chord, he often hammers on the 4th string base, often on the 4th beat of the measure. This contributes to the song’s contemplative and hypnotic effect. The lines that snake around the very simple melody, running through the progression, reinforce this trance inducing quality. These bases and the basic 16-bar form, act as a platform that allows him to improvise these lines seemingly endlessly. There is a serious bittersweet tone to the guitar part. It seems to come from a deep place in the soul. The words can be funny witty, down and dirty, nasty and even serious. The first two bars begin the two-note melody (G, 3rd fret, 1st string down to E, 1st string open) and changes to a very scarce chord in blues, F major. This is easily done by keeping the first string, the high E, open. There are a lot of options for playing this F chord. You can hammer on the 3rd string, open to the 2nd fret, and you can hammer on or pull off on the 2nd string, first fret to the 3rd. These fall easily to hand, and enable you to improvise runs up to the open E string and back down. Starting on the 3rd beat of the 4th bar, the base walks up E F to G, the low base of the C chord. The G chord keeps the low G base and adds the minor 7th , the F note, for the high base, 3rd fret 4th string. The bases for the E chord stay on the 4th and 6th strings, often, as with the C, hammering on the 4th string base on the 4th beat of the measure. Bill Ellis: Like Candy Man, Davis learned Cocaine (a.k.a. Coco Blues) from the traveling carnival, tent, medicine and minstrel shows of his Carolina youth. Don Kent is a bit more specific, indicating in his liner notes to the Biograph LP, Lord I Wish I Could See: 1971 Vol. 2, that Davis first heard the song played by a female organist. Davis also indicated, however, that he gave the song his own musical arrangement. From what we know about the Reverend’s appropriation of other preexisting material, this is undoubtedly the case. Like most everything Davis played, there are moments of influence and shared ideas but all is given over to his fecund imagination to create a unique musical experience. Davis’s version stands alone, even when compared to the many songs of a similar nature collected and recorded in the prewar years. These include Honey, Take a One on Me and Cocaine Habit observed by Howard W. Odum (1911); Cocaine Blues by Luke Jordan (1927); Charlie Poole’s Take a Drink on Me (1927); Tell It to Me by the Grant Brothers (1928); Cocaine by Dick Justice (1929); the Memphis Jug Band’s Cocaine Habit Blues (1930); and Take a Whiff on Me as sung by Lead Belly, Blind Jesse Harris, and Will Starks (all for the Library of Congress, 1933, 1937, and 1942 respectively). (Versions of Cocaine Blues attributed to Western swing artists T. J. “Red” Arnall and Billy Hughes circulated in country music circles from the late 1940s and were essentially rewrites of the murder ballad Little Sadie.) The first documented performance by Davis is from a landmark 1951 interview he gave to Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold, who wrote tellingly in her notes that the song “ought to bring him in a million dollars.” It debuted on the album, Pure Religion and Bad Company, recorded in 1957 by Tiny Robinson and Fred Gerlach and released in England in the early 1960s as Davis’s first post-conversion commercial recording containing secular material (not counting the one-off instrumental for Mose Asch, Civil War March). Davis’s version of Cocaine Blues is the first song both Townes Van Zandt and Keith Richards admit to learning on guitar, and it was also the first drug song in the repertoire of Bob Dylan. According to his autobiography, Life, Richards picked it up while at art school from folk musician Raymond “Wizz” Jones, who had in turn learned it from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the 1970s, singer songwriter Jackson Browne covered it on his multi-platinum album, Running on Empty, thinking it was a Dave Van Ronk song. Van Ronk steered Browne to Davis’s publishing company, recalling in his autobiography, “Now get away from me before you see a grown man cry.” Legal until 1914, cocaine was a much-used drug in America at the turn of the century. As John and Alan Lomax observed: “Old-timers remember the day in New Orleans when you could buy cocaine and opium at the corner drugstore and when the men in the levee camps used to bum a ‘tab of cocaine’ just as free and easy as they do a chew of tobacco today.” Favored by stevedores on the Mississippi River, cocaine also acted as a stimulant gladly provided by white landowners to black laborers. Explained Will Stark to Alan Lomax, cocaine existed in Delta work camps because it at once encouraged work and provided release from it. As Davis recounted in one live performance: “Way back yonder when I was a child, I’d been hearing tell of cocaine ever since I been knowing what drinking was. Used to be, they’d tell me, when they’d sniff cocaine, they’d put it on the point of a knife, you understand, and sniff it up their head, you understand – they had the biggest kind of drunk.”

16

Cocaine Blues As sung by Reverend Gary Davis on “Demons & Angels: The Ultimate Collection, Part 3” (2005) (Spoken intro) Now then, some people drinks rum; some drinks this here homemade wine, or some thing and another. Some people drinks gin, all that kind o’ stuff. Some folks takes a needle and some folks sniff cocaine. Way back yonder when I was a child, I was hearin’ tell o’ cocaine, ever since I been knowin’ what drinkin’ was. Used to be, they tell me, when they used to sniff cocaine, they’d put it on the point of a knife, and sniff it up to here, y’understand. They had the biggest kind o’ trouble. Now they studied a better way, y’understand, for to get it, y’understand. Sometime you get it in your vein. They call it now today a narcotic, you understand. Of course, what I’m sayin’, it doesn’t matter. Well, it’s that same name that they give it way back yonder, cocaine, but it’s that same narcotic. Sometime our brain get filled up with cocaine and ain’t had took ... neither. Sometime you get tied up in love, y’understand; you got cocaine a-plenty; you don’t have to snuff none. Ain’t that right?

As sung by Reverend Gary Davis on “Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964” (Document Records, 2007) (Spoken intro) I’m ‘on play y’all what you want now. Done been dead long time ago. Snuffin’ this cocaine, he won’t snuff alone no mo’. Cocaine has got all around my brain. Come in one mornin’ just about broad daylight. Me and my gal had a great big fight. Cocaine done got all around my brain. Got up this mornin’ ‘bout half past nine. My gal’s got a chair and tried her best to knock me blind. Cocaine has got all around my brain. Send for the doctor and send for ‘im quick. This cocaine has done made me sick. Cocaine has got all around my brain. Run here, woman; won’t you run here quick? This cocaine has got me sick. Cocaine has got all around my brain.

I hear the boy says: “I’m goin’ uptown, I’m goin’....” He said: My baby’s got somethin’ I sure do like. What is it? He said: “Cocaine, gettin’ all around my brain.”

Run here, please, baby, won’t you run here quick? This cocaine has—get me worried. Cocaine has got all around my brain.

Said: “See that woman comin’ yonder, dressed in black?” “I b’lieve to my soul she gon’ take me back.” Cocaine all around my brain

I been out all night long; ain’t slept none yet. This cocaine is givin’ me a terrible fit. Cocaine has got all ‘round my brain.

Here’s somebody draggin’; can’t hardly make it. Said he oughta been dead Long time ago, snuffin’ cocaine up the head. Cocaine all around my brain.

Comin’ home I didn’t know hardly how to act. My gal struck me in the head with a seven-pound ax. Cocaine has done got all around my brain.

Here come a man with a pretty girl. Talkin’ ‘bout your good gal, y’ought to see mine. She ain’t so pretty but she do’s just fine. Cocaine all around my brain. Here’s a fella done got too much of it, and ‘bout to kill ‘im. Say: “Run here, baby; please, ma’am, run here quick. This cocaine is just about to make me sick.” Cocaine all around my brain.

Met my gal coming; she’s all dressed in red. She had a thirty-eight special to kill me dead. Cocaine has got all around my brain. Woke up this mornin’ feelin’ bad. Worstest feelin’ I ever most had. Cocaine has got all around my brain. (Spoken) What you talkin’ ‘bout?

(Spoken) That one o’ that old-time playin’, you see?

I tell you men, you just ought to be like me. Drink good corn whiskey; let that ol’ cocaine be. Cocaine has got all around my brain.

One o’ these mornin’, it won’t be long, You gon’ wake up and call for me and I’ll be gone. Went to get somethin’ now: cocaine. It done got all around my brain.

I found myself settin’ down on some lonesome road. Said to myself I done spent all my money for room and boa’d. Cocaine have got all around my brain.

(Spoken) Here come a hot— a tall person.

(Spoken) Pretty bad when a man spendin’ money like that, you think?

All you people ought to be like me. Drink that good corn whiskey; let the cocaine be. Cocaine all around my brain (Spoken) That fella got some sense; he want somethin’ to do him good, not to kill him, you see? .

17

Cocaine Blues by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Delia (Source - Late Recordings 1970-1971 & Directly from Rev. Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: The guitar part of Delia is based on that of Cocaine Blues. It starts out with four bars of Cocaine in C and jumps up to the G form C, 5th fret. After a half bar in C it moves to D form F - easiest to play the C form. It lands back in first position C, half bar to Am half bar. The rest is the Cocaine Blues F and concluding C. Bill Ellis: Davis told Stefan Grossman that the first blues he heard was Delia played by an itinerant guitarist named Porter Irving ca. 1910, which would have put Davis in Greenville, South Carolina, around the time he began playing with Willie Walker. It also reinforces what Barry Lee Pearson has argued was a later introduction of blues in the Piedmont region than in the Deep South. Delia is more accurately a proto-blues ballad, i.e., a ballad with strong blues traits such as its twelve-bar metrical structure and insertion of the singer into the song’s events. Such turn-of-thecentury blues ballads were crucial in the development of the blues and were often based on true events (for example, Frankie and Stagger Lee). Likewise, Delia developed and spread in true ballad fashion based on a real murder. Thanks to the research of John Garst, we know that, on Christmas Eve 1900 in Savannah, Georgia, fourteen-year old Delia Green got into an argument with a teenaged boy, Moses “Cooney” Houston, who went into a rage and shot her (and who served twelve years of a life sentence for the crime). Variants of the song began appearing as early as 1901, often under the title, One More Rounder Gone, or mixed with events and floating verse from Frankie. Indeed, Davis’s version, which shared a few verses with Delia as sung by fellow Laurens County residents, Lil and Babe McClintock, seems to borrow from Frankie by making Delia the one who does the shooting and goes to prison. Onetime Davis disciple Bob Dylan covered Delia on his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, mixing Blind Willie McTell’s version with Davis’s in regard to melody, harmony, lyrics, and guitar phrasing. (And this Delia should not be confused with the different, if related early 1950s hit, Delia’s Gone, by Bahamian singer Blind Blake, which has inspired its own lineage of covers by Harry Belafonte, Josh White, Johnny Cash, and others.)

24

Delia First Version: from the singing of Rev. Gary Davis Delia, Delia was a-goin ‘ her last go round When ol ‘ Cutty came by And shot her to the ground All the friends I had are gone. Delia, Delia made a lunge to run, Sheriff shot her down With his great big Gatlin’ gun. All the friends I ever had are gone. Rubber-tired carriage, rubber-tired hack Done took poor Delia to the boneyard, Ain’t never brought her back. All the friends I ever had are gone. Men in Atlanta tryin’ to pass fo’ white. Delia ‘s in the graveyard Six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone. Men in Atlanta drinkin’ out a silver cup Delia’s in the graveyard, Ain ‘t never goin ‘ to get up. All the friends I ever had are gone. Delia, Delia, how could it be ? Wanted everyone, But you never had time for me All the friends I ever had are gone. Second Version: from the singing of Blind Willle McTell Delia was a gambler, gambled all around She was a gamblin ‘girl, She’s layin’ her money down. She ‘s all I got is gone. Delia see her mother, took a trip out West. When she returned, Little Delia had gone to rest. She ‘s all I got is gone.

Delia ‘s Mother weeped, Delia ‘s father moaned. Wouldn’t hurt so bad, But chile died at home. She ‘s all I got is gone. Delia, Delia, how can it be? Say you love them rounders And don’t love me. She’s all I got is gone. Cutty’s he’s in the barroom, drinkin’ out of a silver cup. Delia she ‘s in the graveyard May not never wake up. She ‘s all I got is gone. Rubber-tired buggy, double-seated hack, Taken Delia to the cemetery But failed to bring her back. She’s all I got is gone. Delia, Delia poor girl she ‘s gone. All I have She has left me all alone. She ‘s all I got is gone. Judge said to Cutty, “What that fuss about?" “All account of those gamblers Tryin’ to drive me out. “ She ‘s all I got is gone. Cutty said to the judge, “What might be my fine?” “I done told you poor boy You got ninety-nine. “ She ‘s all I got is gone. Up on the house top, high as I can see, Lookin ‘ at those rounders Lookin' after me. She ‘s all I got is gone. Curly lookin ‘ high, curly lookin ‘ low, Shot poor Delia down With that April 44. She ‘s all I got is gone.

25

Delia by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Baby, Let Me Lay It On You (Source - Rev. Gary Davis Blues & Ragtime) Ernie Hawkins: Played in the key of G this is one of his most famous, happiest and fun songs. It starts in first position G and walks up through a famous Blind Blake G riff: open G string, to the 3rd fret, open B to it’s 3rd fret to the open E and up to the 1st fret, which is the 7th. On to the C chord, where it walks up in a similar way to the C7, fifth fret G form. So in the C it starts on the 2nd string, first fret, to the 3rd, 4th, first string open, to the 3rd , 5th and 6th frets, which is that C7. It moves up to the difficult Gary Davis G form with the first finger on the 5th fret, fourth string - the G root - and the last three fingers forming the D form, 7th fret. It moves down from that G to an A7 form D7 on the 5th fret, down further to the E form G, 3rd fret, left thumb on the low base, 3rd fret. From there it moves down the a 1st position E and on through the circle of fifths with A7, D7 and G. It ends by going through the great and famous Blind Blake turnaround of G, G7, C, Eb7 played by descending on the 4th string from the third fret to the open D. Bill Ellis: Also recorded by Davis under the titles Mama, Let Me Lay It on You and Please Baby, this popular blues number – played as an eight- or ten-bar AB + refrain form – has a rich history beyond the Davis/Fuller lineage (which is arguably the most influential given its later imprint on versions by Bob Dylan and others). Variants, in fact, can be found from New Orleans to Chicago, from Texas to the Carolinas, though a case can be made for Chicago as the key point of commercial diffusion. Windy City-recorded versions include the following five early examples: its first appearance on record in 1930 as Can I Do It for You? by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe, whose comedic repartee seems to model black vaudeville duos such as Butterbeans and Susie; Big Bill Broonzy, Jazz Gillum, Black Bob, and Carl Martin as the State Street Boys for 1935’s Don’t Tear My Clothes; and 1936 recordings by Sheik Johnson and His Washboard Band (Baby Let Me Lay It On You, unissued), Georgia White with Les Paul (Daddy Let Me Lay It on You), and the great Washboard Sam (Don’t Tear My Clothes). Also in Chicago in 1936, Cincinnati bluesman Walter Coleman debuted the song type under the title, Mama Let Me Lay It on You. This was two months prior to Blind Boy Fuller’s first of two recordings under the same name, and by the time he recorded it a second time in 1938, at least a dozen variants existed on 78 record. Chevrolet, a north Mississippi fife and drum version from 1959 by Lonnie and Ed Young, prompted Alan Lomax to suggest the song had possible origins in British balladry, specifically Paper of Pins. Following that line of query, Paul Garon notes that variants of Paper of Pins were collected in Mississippi, and that Cecil Sharpe collected versions of a related song, The Keys of Heaven, in North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. This, of course, would help explain both the geographic dispersion and differentiation of the song as a later blues type, albeit one solidified through activity in the Chicago prewar blues scene. In later years, other bluesmen continued to perform variants, including Lightnin’ Hopkins (Baby Don’t You Tear My Clothes) and Champion Jack Dupree (Baby Let Me Lay It on You). Davis did not record the song until 1964 for The Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis (in instrumental form as Please Baby), yet it’s clear that his and Blind Boy Fuller’s arrangement are deeply connected regionally and musically. Given the musical tutelage that Davis – the older musician in the relationship – imparted elsewhere on the upstart blind performer, it’s safe to assume Fuller acquired ideas for this song from Davis as well. That’s not to say Davis authored the song, as the above history should illustrate. However, his arrangement by way of Fuller informed a later generation of folk performers, who made Mama Let Me Lay It on You a coffeehouse standard. As Eric von Schmidt explained, he learned Fuller’s version from Geno Foreman; Bob Dylan in turn acquired the song from von Schmidt, who is credited with the arrangement, as Baby Let Me Follow You Down, on Dylan’s eponymous 1962 Columbia debut. Such is the convoluted path of this song that, two years later, the Animals released Baby Let Me Take You Home, which appropriated both Dylan’s version and a pop-soul variant, Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand, recorded by Atlantic act Hoagy Lands and written by Wes Farrell Bert Berns (who were also behind the hit, Hang On Sloopy). It’s worth noting that von Schmidt credited the majority of Dylan’s version to Davis, while Dylan himself once told Cameron Crowe, “I think it’s a Reverend Gary Davis song.” Baby, let me lay it on you Baby, let me lay it on you. Baby, let me lay it on you. I’d give your everything in this God almighty world, if you just let me lay it on you. Please sugar, let me lay it on you. Please m’am! let me lay it on you. I’d give you everything in this God almighty world, if you just let me lay it on you. Please m’am, let me lay it on you.

I’d buy you a brand new car; buy you a motorcycle on the side. I’d give you everything in a God almighty world, just let me lay it on you, please. Please sugar I’d buy you a Greyhound bus, and give you a nice jet plane I’d tell you what I’ll do, I’ll run behind, here’s $1000, let me lay it on you, any jet complaints? let me lay it on you, cadillac and a motorcycle, let me lay it on you

31

Baby, Let Me Lay It On You by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Candyman (Source - Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: Candy Man appears to be, and sounds like, at first hearing, a beautiful, fairly simple 16-bar song. Rev. Davis was always playing it, even in his sleep, according to Dave van Ronk. In fact, it is fiendishly conceived. I have found it to be very difficult to teach. The melody starts on the open G string, and moves back and forth from that G note to the relative minor, the A on the second fret. Where the melody starts is where the first beat lands. This means that the first beat starts on the high base, rather than the low. This reverses the beat from almost any song that can be found in this guitar tradition. A handful of Rev. Davis’ songs start this way, a notable other example being You Got The Pocketbook, I Got The Key. The tip-off comes with the three base notes at the end of the progression the G, E, C. That C, rather than being the first note in the last bar is the last note, the 4th beat. Van Ronk recorded it as a normal song, with the beat in the usual place. In his biography, written by Elijah Wald, he says that he knew he had it wrong and actually dreamt that he was playing it right for the Rev. This song is another example of Rev. Davis taking a simple country-style song and turning it into something unique to him and very special. Bill Ellis: One of Davis’s most beloved arrangements, Candy Man was such a favored cover by Dave Van Ronk and others during the folk and blues revival that, at Roy Book Binder’s first lesson with the Rev, the burgeoning guitar picker played Candy Man, to which Davis replied, “Good Gawt-a-mighty, you sound like Dave Van Ronk!” Robert Tilling noted that Davis’s Candy Man and his equally imitated Cocaine became so popular in English folk circles, both could be “heard in nearly every folk club throughout the country.” Davis made several claims how he acquired the song. Like Cocaine and You Got the Pocketbook, I Got the Key, he said Candy Man came from a carnival ca. 1905. He also mentioned he had learned the song from a medicine show (which could well have been part of a carnival), and that it was taught to him by Will Bonds, who was part of Davis and Willie Walker’s Greenville, South Carolina, string band (and it’s just as possible that Bonds picked it up from some sort of traveling show). Given the song’s New Orleans provenance, a likely candidate might be A. G. Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, a leading African American tent show for the South and Midwest that came through South Carolina in 1905 and was capable of seating several thousand. Other folk-blues guitarists had Candy Man in their repertoires: Mississippi John Hurt’s catchy version made the rounds as well in the 1960s, while a rendition also known as Going to New Orleans by Tylertown, Mississippi-born, New Orleans-based guitarist Jewell “Babe” Stovall is a clear, if less complex, variant of how Davis played it. Davis remarked that in his youth he could perform Candy Man all night long for country parties, switching out rhythms to mimic the dances of the day. Indeed, Stefan Grossman captured Davis playing Candy Man as a two-step and a waltz as well as frailing it on the banjo. The simple-sounding arrangement is deceptively complex – a folk polyphony built from a concurrent treble melody, inner voice two-note riff, and reverse bass that moves the tune forward with anticipatory syncopation against the measure line (not unlike how Cuban musicians accent the last eighth note of the fourth beat instead of the expected downbeat on the one). The term “candy man” refers in Crescent City slang to a pimp, which Van Ronk noted in his autobiography with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: when asked if it was a children’s song, Davis retorted, “Yeah, you get lots of children from songs like that.” (Interestingly, the same sexualized meaning informed the creation of Roy Orbison’s swamp blues, Candy Man.)

Candy man been here and gone Candy man been here and gone Candy man, salty dog, If you can’t be my Candy man You can’t be my salty dog.

Candy man, candy man, Candy man, been here and gone, Candy man, salty dog, I wish I was in New Orleans, Sitting on the candy stand.

Little red light, little green light (6x) Well, stop on the red, and go on the green Don’t stop for Mister in between

Run get the pitcher, get the baby some beer, (6X) I’d give anything in this God almighty world To get my Candy man home.

Candy man, candy man, Candy man, fattenin’ hog, Candy man, Santa Claus, If you can’t be my candy man, Can’t be my fattenin’ hog.

Candy man, salty dog, Candy man, fattenin’ hog, Candy man, salty dog, If you can’t be my Candy man You can’t be my man at all.

35

Candyman by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Hesitation Blues (Source - Rev. Gary Davis Blues & Ragtime) Ernie Hawkins: This is a 12-bar C blues based probably on the W. C. Handy song. The first four bars rock back and forth between the Am and E7 chords. From there it falls into a standard Gary Davis C blues. This song is a perfect platform to get comfortable playing and singing these blues. The Rev. seemed to be able to spin endless verses from this progression. Playing blues in C with the style is a good way to break into the way he uses runs and reply to the melody and improvise. C is the perfect key for this because runs easily fall to hand. The I is the 1st fret of the second string, The III is the open E and the V is the 3rd fret, high E. The 3rd and minor 3rd are right there: 4th fret B string to open E. The G form C chord on the 5th fret makes it easy to play the Rev.’s patented trumpet lines down to the first position. Bill Ellis: One of the most popular songs of its day, Hesitation Blues was performed widely in just about every musical context, from marching bands to vaudeville singers, country string bands to blues players (Jim Jackson, Sam Collins, DeFord Bailey, and Lead Belly all recorded versions). The song appeared in vaudeville acts by 1913 and in 1915 had two rival sheet music arrangements: The Hesitation Blues by St. Louis native Billy Smythe, brother-in-law Scott Middleton, and Art “Whispering Pianist” Gillham (who finally received credit in a 1926 reprint); and, most famously, The Hesitation Blues by W. C. Handy. A number of classic blues singers added the Handy version to their shows including Bessie Smith, who by early 1916 was getting up to four encores a night with her interpretations of it and St. Louis Blues. Jelly Roll Morton claimed authorship in his 1938 interview with Alan Lomax, but attributions aside, the song most certainly had older ties to folk verse. Song collector Newman Ivey White called Handy’s version a “modern” version, while Lead Belly recalled hearing it prior to 1910. Indeed, Abbe Niles wrote in Handy’s 1926 landmark, Blues: An Anthology (the first published collection of blues songs), that the composer initially heard the song sung and played by a “wandering musician” who had taken it from a hymn. That the melody shows up in sanctified song tradition – notably as Denomination Blues by Washington Phillips in 1927 and That’s All by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the early 1940s - lends curious credence to the idea that gospel artists weren’t necessarily channeling Handy; rather, it’s possible that Hesitation Blues has at least partial roots in the gospel song atmosphere of the Third Great Awakening. Davis said he learned Hesitation Blues around 1916 when “a fella come through jiggin’ it on the piano.” This would coincide with the song’s rise in popularity, when Handy’s version, especially, was taking the vaudeville stage by storm. But Davis claimed he had never heard of Handy. Frankly, I find this doubtful. The two legends performed at the same 1950 Town Hall memorial to Lead Belly, and Davis also could play Handy’s St. Louis Blues. That Davis didn’t want to share credit with his distinct version of Hesitation Blues – which bears little with either published version – is more likely the case. Musically, all period versions of Hesitation Blues are performed in a twelve-bar setting with similar melodic contour and phrasing, especially the use of the major-sixth neighbor tone motif that begins each verse. The song’s refrain – sung in Handy’s version as “Tell me how long will I have to wait? Oh, won’t you tell me now, why do you hesitate?” – is the core lyrical element common to all versions, Davis’s included, and it shows up in variants collected in, among other places, North and South Carolina and Alabama. Other than that, renditions vary, and Davis’s is the only one set in a minor key and the only one that modulates (to the relative major). Blind Blake’s Rope Stretching Blues has a similar harmonic construct and might have informed Davis, though a variant of Hesitation Blues collected in 1919 from a Durham, N. C. informant, I Got De Hezotation Stockings and De Hezotation Shoes, reveals a possible regional preference toward the minor key. Between 1962 and 1971, Davis was recorded singing at least 50 different stanzas to the song. Lyrical similarities and shared floating verse (notably portrayals of the sexual “handy man”) can be heard in other performers and performances – Hesitation Blues and more – including Walter “Buddy Boy” Hawkins’ Voice Throwin’ Blues (1929), Bo Carter’s All Around Man (1936), and Charlie Poole’s If the River Was Whiskey. Occupational couplets were notably collected in black verse of South Carolina and Alabama, and Davis built stanzas from images of the boiler, bookkeeper, chauffeur, coal digger, cradle rocker, digger, doctor, ginner, grocery man, milkman, miller, plumber, preacher, well digger, and wine presser, among others. When Davis sang Hesitation Blues, the song could stretch to 20 minutes and 30 verses (a feat documented on at least one occasion for a private party in the late 1960s). Hesitation Blues, in fact, was one of Davis’s greatest songs for lyrical invention and improvisation. A master rhetorician – he was a preacher, after all – Davis was a deft handler of witticisms, innuendo, and allusive speech, sometimes combining his funniest, most sexualized material with biting commentary and protest, as he did in Hesitation Blues (like the verbal barbs of great comedians, Davis’s potent social criticisms became “safe” through the guise of humor). The constant musical and lyrical invention Davis brought to Hesitation Blues is also a perfect example of Roger Abrahams’ assessment that black song is less about form than process, less about fixed text than performance.

39

Hesitation Blues I woke up this morning just ‘bout half past four Hesitation blues was knocking on my door Refrain: Tell me, how long, do I baby, have to wait Can I let you know? Why must I hesitate?

Well, I ain’t no back-breaker, ain’t no back-breaker’s son But I can stretch out my back, ‘til your back-breaker comes I ain’t got no woman and I ain’t got no kid Ain’t got no daughter to be bothered with

Ain’t no use in me working so hard I got me two good women working in the rich folks’ yard

I ain’t no rent payer, ain’t no rent payer’s son But I can scrape up a few rents, ‘til the rent payer comes

I ain’t your good man, ain’t your good man’s son But I can get in the place of your good man, ‘til your good man comes

Well, I ain’t been to heaven but I’ve been told St. Peter learnt the angels how to do the Jelly Roll

Well, I ain’t no miller, ain’t no miller’s son But I can grind a little corn, ‘til the miller comes

Me and my buddy and two or three more We get good women everywhere we go

I ain’t no wine presser, ain’t no wine presser’s son But I can buy you a little groceries, ‘til the grocery man cames

Well, I hitched up the mule and the mule wouldn’t pull Took the hunches off the mule and put the hunches on the bull

I ain’t no cradle rocker, ain’t no cradle rocker’s son But I can do a little rockin’ for you, ‘til the rocker man comes

Blacker the berry the sweeter the juice I’d be a fool if I quit the woman I got because it ain’t no use

Well, I ain’t no doctor, ain’t no doctor’s son But I can cure a few cases, ‘til the doctor comes

I got hesitating stockings, hesitating shoes I got a hesitating woman singing me the hesitating blues

Eagle on the dollar say, “In God We Trust” Woman flashy, wants a man but I declare she want a dollar first

My good gal quit me, I ain’t going to wear no black I always got something to make her come running back

I ain’t no bookkeeper, ain’t no bookkeeper’s son But I can keep a few books, ‘til the bookkeeper comes

Men in the country hollering, “Whoa, haw, gee!” Women in the city flying around asking the question, “Who wants me?”

I ain’t no milkman, ain’t no milkman’s son But I can keep you supplied, ‘til your milkman comes

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust Just show me a woman that a man can trust

I ain’t no chauffeur, ain’t no chauffeur’s son But I can do a little driving, ‘til your chauffeur comes

You know, my mother told me when I was just six years old I’m going to be a good women getter, God bless your soul

40

Hesitation Blues by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Penitentiary Blues (Source: Directly from Rev. Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: Virtuoso D blues improvised around a melody in standard tuning. I learned this back in the sixties. I’ve heard one other version, I believe from Stefan Grossman, which is very different. It makes me think that he improvised around a loose theme. If this is true, his powers of improvisation, here in D, are mind blowing. Not only is he working around a theme but as he invents his way along, he does it with complex counterpoint. On the base, he often sticks to the A and D in the D chord. But then he works the song around a repeated base run: A D F# D, the same run that he uses in G in Crucifixion. He uses the whole neck, moving the D chord up through the A form, 5th fret (where the song begins) to the G, 8th fret. Though we rarely hear him play blues in this key, it is amazing how intimate he is with it. He sticks faithfully to the progression and weaves the melodic lines through it the way a jazz pianist would. Sliding the D chord from the first to the second fret enables you to play the minor 3rd to the major on the 1st string as easily as with the C chord. This is the middle of the run that falls from the 1st string 5th fret (the V) to the 3rd fret 2nd string, the I. Around the middle of the song he breaks off base and melody picking and works out with single line base runs. This song is not just virtuosic, it is soulful, bluesy and beautiful. Bill Ellis: Starting with Penitentiary Bound Blues in 1925 by classic blues singer Rosa Henderson, blues and country tunes alike abound with “Penitentiary” in the title. Many have an East Texas provenance, such as singer Bessie Tucker’s signature hit, Penitentiary, and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s less-than-hearty endorsement of Groesbeck, Texas, Blind Lemon Penitentiary Blues, both from 1928. There were also penitentiary - themed blues by Sylvester Weaver, Texas Alexander, Jimmie Davis and many others. Davis’s Penitentiary Blues is not like any of the above, yet doesn’t appear to be an original composition. It is one of two known blues tunes that Davis played in the standard-tuned key of D (the other having been the 1912 vaudeville-finessed Shelton Brooks hit, All Night Long).

46

Penitentiary Blues by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Florida Blues (Source: Directly from Rev. Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: This is a 12-bar blues that modulates from the key of G to C. Rev. Davis showed it to me back in the sixties. As this is the only version I’ve heard, I don’t know if he was improvising around the song or played it as a relatively set piece like Slow Drag. In the C part, the 12th bar has a Ab7 instead of G. For the G part, the melody starts on the open 3rd string (the I) and walks up, in the manner of Blind Blake, to the minor 3rd, then the 3rd, then to the fifth. It does exactly the same thing with the C chord. It then moves up to the D form G, and down to the E form. In the C part he used the minor to major, 4th fret second string to 1st string open beautifully. As he played that melody, he was able to harmonize a counterpoint middle line on the same frets of the G and D strings. He taught us all how to do this with Fast Fox Trot. This is an example of the Rev. arranging a recording from a band for solo Piedmont guitar. He was a master at this. His guitar not only imitated a piano but brilliantly and effortlessly, it seemed, reproduced the sounds of a whole band. Bill Ellis: The impact that traveling circus and minstrel bands had on the set lists of provincial, rural musicians cannot be overstated. According to Ragged but Right, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff’s landmark look at turn-of-the-century race entertainment, the black sideshow band of the Gollmar Bros. Circus, for example, featured in its 1916 season such newly minted hits as Florida Blues, Walking the Dog, and Pray for the Lights to Go Out, all songs that a preordained Davis readily adapted as well. Florida Blues is, in fact, a great example of how Davis the young Piedmont musician was always fitting his style to the tunes of the day. First recorded in 1916 by Prince’s Band – and advertised by Columbia as a fox-trot – the song was registered for copyright in 1914 by William King Phillips, a Jacksonville, Fla. clarinet and saxophone player who had worked with W. C. Handy circa Memphis Blues fame. Handy & Pace, in fact, published Florida Blues in what was one of William Grant Still’s earliest song arrangements. Many recorded versions followed including Handy’s own in 1923, a 1935 reading by Wilbur Sweatman at his final sessions, and the classic 1937 rendition by Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, though Davis’s folkblues adaptation likely took its cue from the 1926 Victor 78 by the Dixieland Jug Blowers. With sections in the keys of G and C, Florida Blues is one of some half dozen tunes in Davis’s repertoire that modulated between keys (Soldier’s Drill, Devil’s Dream and Hesitation Blues being the other notable examples).

55

Florida Blues by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Can’t Be Satisfied (Source - Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: This is a brilliant example of Rev. Davis’ unique A blues style. If you hear anybody else playing these runs, for instance Blind Boy Fuller or Brownie McGee, you can be sure that the Rev. taught them. The same sorts of runs appear in other famous blues such as Mountain Jack recorded in the thirties and Seven Sisters. They form the backbone of Twelve Gates. These blues are wickedly improvised around a handful of stock phrases. They use the whole fret board to sing clarion trumpet calls. He uses every rhythmic variation in the book, seamlessly throwing in triplets and double timing perfectly as the progression rolls along. It starts with a high call in the D/C form A on the 8th fret, works it’s way down the neck through the A form D, back up to the D form and finally down to the famous 1st position A run that forms the heart of these songs. He slides up from the 1st to the second frets on the D, G, and B strings, hits the open high E and rolls down on the bases by pulling off the 1st fret, D string to the major 3rd, 4th fret A string, resolving on the middle A note, 2nd fret G string. The chromatic base runs he peppers throughout are the same ones he got down so pat from early on, that we can hear in his thirties recordings. This whole style of A blues is full-blown from the start and, as I said, unique to Rev Davis. Every key, genre, regional style, it seems, he wholly made over into something deeply original. At the the same time he shows a deep mastery of those very traditions he transforms. Bill Ellis: Blues comprised 33% of Davis’s secular repertoire and only 14.6% of his entire oeuvre, a surprisingly low percentage, perhaps, for a musician known as one of the premier blues guitarists of his day. Yet, Davis’s blues are among his more fascinating pieces. Contrary to popular myth, Davis continued to perform blues post- conversion, though it was typically within the more private confines of lessons and parties. What Davis rarely did after he became a minister was sing a blues – most were performed instrumentally and those with lyrics were nearly always delivered in a spoken drawl. This suggests Davis, indeed, had a moral compass when it came to the highly secular form. The outward theater of a blues performance was certainly acceptable, especially on a concert stage, where his blues won an audience over before he launched into the sanctified heart of a show. But to sing a blues convincingly was nothing short of embodying not only the music but the culture, something Davis was not willing to do in later years save the occasional house party where libations were in good supply. At his first commercial recording session in 1935 for A.R.C., Davis performed two blues which served as templates for many if not most of his subsequent blues improvisations: Cross and Evil Woman Blues (a.k.a. Ice Pick Blues) in the key of E, and (I’m Throwing Up My Hands, Ain’t Gonna Work Here No More) (a.k.a. Mountain Jack) in the key of A. Davis rarely sang verses around Mountain Jack after that debut session but would often use its musical ideas and riffs for broad instrumental explorations that he interspersed with call-and-response moments between spoken exhortations (“Oh, Sylvie!”) and answering guitar. It never failed to provide comedic relief for friends, listeners, and audiences, who were often encouraged to fetch things for the blind Baptist minister through such musical beckoning – “Bring me a drink please, ma’am!” Favoring the keys of A, E, and C for his most spontaneous, off-the-cuff blues performances, Davis called on the twelvebar blues structure for some of his more expansive musical mediations, not unlike how Renaissance and Baroque lutenists played unmeasured preludes to get warmed up, familiarize themselves with the inner workings of a key, and rehearse ideas in a safe yet open framework. Such blues performances by Davis are also a good example of what scholar Alex Lubet calls “social confluence” in music, whereby a musician is constantly adjusting his or her identity based on the circumstance or context. For Davis, having a grab bag of guitar tricks based on Mountain Jack meant he could respond to any situation with an open form that he then filled with the activities and actions of any given moment.

62

Can’t Be Satisfied by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Slow Drag (Cincinnati Flow Rag) (Source - Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: This is one of the Rev’s greatest and most beloved guitar showcases, and one of the great virtuoso pieces in the whole Piedmont canon. It is a highly syncopated dance tune using a “New Orleans” beat. Part I is the most distinctive, complex and difficult part. It features two bars of a rising base from the G to the C and descending treble that move opposite, that is down from the G to the C. While this sophisticated counterpoint is happening, The Rev. maintains the tricky New Orleans beat on both ends. It uses the A form C on the 5th fret for the high part of the melody. To my ears this is a melody appropriated from a section of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. This rag was so famous and beloved that any one of it’s parts would be instantly recognized and celebrated. Part II enabled him to pick and chord on up the fretboard, opening the way for further improvising. Often he stretched these parts beyond the bounds of the progression, which was unusual for him. Bill Ellis: notes for both: Make Believe Stunt (Maple Leaf Rag) and Slow Drag (Cincinnati Flow Rag): The hip hop of its day, ragtime manifested itself on stage, record, and in the home in a variety of settings, from classic ragtime played by pianists, banjo virtuosos, and singers of rag songs to marching bands, down-home string ensembles, and even xylophonists. Like many musicians of his generation, Davis – who was a teenager when ragtime was the hottest music on the planet – came under its syncopated spell. He mastered many types, including rag songs (Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?) and the folk, or blues, rag style favored by vernacular country and blues musicians (Twelve Sticks is a prime example in the Reverend’s canon). But Davis also played the classic rags of Scott Joplin, notably two of the composer’s finest: his signature 1899 hit, Maple Leaf Rag, and 1901’s Sunflower Slow Drag, cowritten with Scott Hayden. Davis acquired both during his stint with Willie Walker when the two blind guitarists led a six-piece string band in Greenville, South Carolina. Working ca. 1910, the two Piedmont blues pioneers honed a hot sound that drew on the hits of the day including Joplin’s aforementioned masterpieces. Both well known tunes were typically retitled, however, with sly allusion to the originals: Maple Leaf Rag became Make Believe Stunt and Sunflower Slow Drag became Cincinnati Flow Rag. Such coded, mondegreen-like frivolity on the part of Davis and/ or Walker at once recognized the source material yet suggested rightful co- ownership given the extent to which the guitarists added their own ideas to a preexisting framework. This was certainly the case for Joplin’s 1901 “ragtime two-step,” Sunflower Slow Drag, from which Davis borrowed only in the broadest sense. Joplin’s original asserts itself most notably in the melodic and harmonic thrust of the B strain (a static melody that made extended ninth and sixth chords of the dominant and tonic respectively), though Davis’s opening melody is a chromatically-altered cousin of Joplin’s A strain as well. The rest is Davis’s imagination at work. Stylistically, a slow drag was a moderate tempo dance in which couples were “hanging on each other and just barely moving,” as vaudeville entertainer Coot Grant once told Marshall and Jean Sterns. Cincinnati Slow Drag has also been issued on record under such titles as Low Drag, Stovepipe Stomp, and Floor Sweepin’ Rag. Davis claims to have learned Maple Leaf Rag from Walker a little more than a decade after its debut. That the two rural Southern musicians made this classic piano rag a priority in their set lists should not be surprising. As the biggest selling piece of music in its day, Maple Leaf Rag was working repertoire for nearly every popular musical act of the era, from the United States Marine Band (in the tune’s first extant recording from 1906) to banjo star Vess L. Ossman to an arrangement with lyrics by Sydney Brown. (Curiously, Davis also added words to Maple Leaf Rag – heard on several live renditions from the 1960s – though his folk verse is not indebted to anything Brown penned.) Like Sunflower Slow Drag, Maple Leaf Rag finds Davis just as creative – and loose – with his source material. Out of some eighty measures contained in Joplin’s original piece, Davis appropriates roughly half, all coming from the A and B sections, or strains, which were usually the most memorable parts in a formal rag. Typical of piano rags, where different themes and often keys were strung together to create a longer piece of music, the structure of Maple Leaf Rag as conceived by Joplin is AA BB A CC DD, with A and B in the tonic (the key of A-flat), a C “trio” strain in the subdominant (D-flat), and a D strain return to the tonic. Providing compositional balance and symmetry, Joplin placed a single A statement in the center of the piece. This is not the Maple Leaf Rag of Davis’s imagination, however, which fittingly deserves the alternate title of a Make Believe Stunt. Davis crafts four sections as well, albeit absent of Joplin’s order and all set in the tonic-centered key of A major. Davis’s A strain borrows from the second half of Joplin’s A section followed by a B strain modeled on the first half of Joplin’s A section (skipping, in the process, the transitional minor chord arpeggios of the original). Davis’s C strain then acknowledges Joplin’s B section while a D strain appears to be entirely of Davis’s own creation (though

74

the appearance of a passing IV chord subtly references Joplin’s D section). Interestingly, Davis uses the flat-VI chord found in Joplin’s A strain for recurrent cadential material, and in doing so, eschews the cadence Joplin wrote. Further, Davis freely moved parts of the rag around into larger organizational patterns that varied each time he performed the piece. This not only provided length, it lent at once spontaneity and predictability to the overall structure. Examining numerous performances, a hidden logic appears to have been at work. Specifically, B always goes with A, D always goes with C, and C always goes with A, leaving A able to go to any strain. Also, every performance ends on C. Allowing for slight variation, the core structure, then, becomes ABACADCAB with the ordering of ADC or ABADC into a concluding statement or statements. The end result is a rag with incredible formal logic, one that bears strong resemblance to Joplin’s original but possesses a unique musical and compositional character all its own.

75

Slow Drag (Cincinnati Flow Rag) by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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C Rag (Source - Rev. Gary Davis Blues & Ragtime) Ernie Hawkins: This is a wonderful little rag that the Rev. said he learned from a piano player. It is beautifully symmetrical and a sweet example of his key of C ragtime blues (that is: jazz) style. It begins with a classic Rev. Gary Davis C run out of first position and moves up to a diminished A on the 5th fret. Back to the run and up to a diminished C on the 8th fret. He resolves it with a II IV I progression and a IV bVI V turnaround. The bridge moves up the the III, an E7 chord made from Rev. Davis’ distinctive C form that uses his left thumb to cover the two low strings, in this case, on the 7th fret. (Merle Travis is the only other player I know who independently, it seems, used this fingering.) From there he uses the E form A minor on the 5th fret, running down to the first position A minor. Down two frets from the E7 he then uses the same fingering for there D7 on the 5th fret, and then moves down to the 1st position G-G7, with the 7th on the D string, 3rd fret. Bill Ellis: “I never did find the name of this tune. I heard it on the piano one time.” So said Davis to Stefan Grossman, who recorded the Reverend in several takes of this catchy number. Like much in Davis’s vast repertoire, he took that sole listening experience – likely decades prior – and crafted a mesmerizing arrangement based on “the piano around my neck,” as Davis liked to call the guitar. Nodding to a preexisting, yet-to-be-identified work, Davis’s arrangement speaks as much to his own inimitable style. Tasty diminished chords pepper the eight-measure A section followed by an eight-measure B section built on a reliable ascending fourths, i.e., circle of fifths, pattern (in this case, E7-AD7-G7, or V7/VI-VI-V7/V-V7), and it’s testament to Davis’s harmonic savvy that he chose to keep the submediant chord in the progression minor where other folk blues players would have rendered it major to match the pattern’s other dominant seventh chords. This enigmatic work – which is more likely an early jazz stride piano piece than an actual rag – is a tune that deserves renewed appreciation by Davis and fingerpicking aficionados.

87

C Rag by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

First Section

& 44



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Don’t Let My Baby Catch You Here (Source: Directly from Rev. Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: This is a neat circle of fifths ragtime-blues number cautioning infidelity. Though it’s in G it starts on the III, the B7, A form, 4th fret. It walks through the progression—E, A, D—until it gets to the G and works it’s way through the Blind Blake G turnaround, G, G7, C, Eb7, runs down G to G, 1st string through the 3rd. It then takes the middle notes of the E form G, on there 2nd and 3rd strings and walks down chromatically to the open strings. Then it repeats the Blake run, double time. Bill Ellis: I haven’t been able to identify this song’s provenance, but I suspect it has roots in African American vaudeville and/or the female classic blues singers (Davis knew Aggravatin’ Papa, for example, which was a hit for Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter, among others). This 16-measure tune is divided into two distinct phrases: the first eight measures are built on a circle of fifths harmonic progression in the key of G that moves through a string of secondary dominants (B7-E7-A7- D7), ending on a half cadence; the second eight measures begin with the common chromatic walk-down favored by blues players regardless of region, although ragtime-informed East Coast guitarists like Davis tended to fill in the harmonic implications (in this case, G – G/F – C/E – Eb7). As Davis explained to Ernie Hawkins, the song concerns infidelity, interestingly from the woman’s perspective: “That’s what a woman tells her outside man. Don’t want him killed, you see?” The core line – “He’ll cut you and shoot you and stab you to your heart, drink your blood just like wine” – mirrors the sentiment, “I’ll cut your throat, drink your blood like wine, because I want you to know he’s a man of mine,” that Jelly Roll Morton sang for Alan Lomax in the 30 minute blues tour-deforce, The Murder Ballad. Davis also uses the oft-heard floating verse that begins, “If I had me a heaven of my own,” echoed in folk blues by Son House, Texas Alexander, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and others. Say, don’t let my baby catch me, catch you here, Don’t let my baby catch you here. He’ll cut you, shoot you, stab you to your heart, Drink down your blood just like wine. Said I’m gettin’ old, my seeds are gettin’ cold, I’m gettin’ old, my seeds gettin’ cold, I’m gettin’ old, seeds gettin’ cold. I can’t get enough to save my soul. He said, “Baby, if I just had me a heaven of my own, If I had me a heaven of my own, If I had a heaven of my own, I’d give all the good-lookin’ women a home right around my throne.”

94

Don’t Let My Baby Catch You Here by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Make Believe Stunt (Maple Leaf Rag) (Source - Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis) Ernie Hawkins: This is another virtuoso piece, possibly learned from Blind Willie Walker when he and the young hot guitarist Gary Davis led a string band together. It is, of course loosely based on Scott Joplin’s famous Maple Leaf Rag. Throughout the song, the main fingerpicking employed is Rev. Davis’ right hand ‘thumb roll’. Since he used only the thumb and forefinger of the right hand for picking, he devised a perfect way to play triplets. It goes: thumb, finger, thumb, thumb, finger, finger, thumb. This pattern rolls through the whole tune and gives it it’s distinctive syncopation. He starts with the A diminished, 5th fret, goes down to the 1st position A and then to the the base run that repeats throughout. He marches through the song’s diminished chords, triplets, runs, dissonant chords (the Ab5) until it sweeps up the neck, the the D form A on the 9th fret. He stays up there through the E form A and there C7 form E. Bill Ellis: for notes on this song, see Slow Drag.

98

Make Believe Stunt (Maple Leaf Rag) by Rev. Gary Davis © Chandos Music All Rights Reserved Used With Kind Permission

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Discography There are many available recordings of Rev. Gary Davis. We have listed those that we feel are essential.

Rev. Gary Davis and Pink Anderson Gospel, Blues and Street Songs

Complete Early Recordings Yazoo 2011 • Recorded 1935

Riverside (RLP-148), Original Blues Classics OBCCD-524-2 • Recorded 1956

Titles: PINK ANDERSON: John Henry, Every Day in the Week, The Ship Titanic, Greasy Greens, Wreck of the Old 97, I've Got Mine He's in the Jailhouse Now REV. GARY DAVIS: Blow, Gabriel, Twelve Gates To The City, Samson and Delilah, Oh Lord Search My Heart, Get Right Church, You Got To Go Down, Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning, There Was A Time That I Was Blind

Titles: I Belong To The Band, The Great Change In Me, The Angel's Message To Me, I Saw The Light, Lord, Stand By Me, I Am The Light, O Lord Search My Heart, Have More Faith In Jesus, You Got To Go Down, I Am The True Vine, Twelve Gates To The City, You Can Go Home, I'm Throwin' Up My Hand, Cross And Evil Woman Blues, I Can't Bear My Burden By Myself, Meet Me At The Station

Pure Religion & Bad Company Smithsonian Folkways • Recorded 1957

Harlem Street Singer Original Blues Classics OBCCD-547-2 • Recorded 1960

Titles: Samson and Delilah, Let Us Get Together , I Belong To The Band, Pure Religion, Great Change Since I Been Born, Death Don't Have No Mercy, Twelve Gates To The City, Goin' To Sit Down On The Banks Of The River, Tryin' To Get Home, Lo I Be With You Always, I Am The Light Of This World, Lord I Feel Just Like Goin' On

Titles: Pure Religion, Mountain Jack, Right Now, Buck Dance, Candy Man, Devil's Dream, Moon Goes Down, Cocaine Blues, Runnin' to the Judgement, Hesitation Blues, Bad Company, I Didn't Want to Join the Band, Evening Sun Goes Down, Seven Sisters, My Heart is Fixed, Time is Drawing Near, Crucifixion

Guitar & Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis Original Blues Classics OBCCD-592-2 • Recorded 1964

Little More Faith Original Blues Classics OBCCD-588-2 • Recorded 1961

Titles: You Got To Move, Crucifixion, I'm Glad I'm In That Number, There's A Table Sittin' In Heaven, Motherless Children, There's A Bright Side Somewhere, I'll Be All Right Some Day, You Better Mind, A Little More Faith, I'll Fly Away, God's Gonna Separate. When I Die I'll Live Again

Titles: Maple Leaf Rag, Slow Drag (Cincinnati Flow Rag), The Boy Was Kissing The Girl (And Playing Guitar At The Same Time), Candy Man, United States March (Soldier's Drill), Devil's Dream, The Coon Hunt, Mister Jim (Walkin' Dog Blues), Please Baby, Fast Fox Trot, Can't Be Satisfied

If I Had My Way Smithsonian Folkways 40123 • Recorded 1953

Say No to the Devil Original Blues Classics OBCCD-519-2 • Recorded 1961

Titles: Say No To The Devil, Time Is Drawing Near, Hold To God's Unchanging Hand, Bad Company Brought Me Here, I Decided To Go Down, Lord I Looked Down The Road, Little Bitty Baby, No One Can Do Me Like Jesus, Lost Boy In The Wilderness, Tryin' To Get To Heaven In Due Time

Titles: If I Had My Way, If the Lord Be for You, Twelve Gates to the City, You Got to Move, We Are the Heavenly Father's Children, A Friend Like Lonely Jesus, Get Right Church, Marine Band, Shine On Me, There's Destruction on This Land, He Stole Away, The Uncloudy Day, Say No to the Devil, I Belong to the Band, Give Me a Heart to Love, He Never Has Left Me Alone, Got On My Traveling Shoes, Civil War Parade

Rev. Gary Davis Blues & Ragtime

Rev. Gary Davis At Home & Church

Shanachie 97024 • Recorded 1962-1966

Titles: Walkin' Dog Blues, Cincinnati Flow Rag, She's Funny That Way, Whoopin' Blues, Twelve Sticks, Children Of Zion, Buck Rag, Hesitation Blues, C-Rag, Baby Let Me Lay It On You, Cocaine Blues, Buck Dance, Candyman, Wall Hollow Blues Little Boy, Little Boy Who Made Your Britches, Whistlin' Blues

Rev. Gary Davis At Newport Vanguard 73008, Vanguard 79588-2 • Recorded 1965

Titles: Samson & Delilah (If I Had My Way), I Won't Be Back No More, Buck Dance, Twelve Sticks, Death Don't Have No Mercy, You Got To Move, Lovin' Spoonful, She Wouldn't Say Quit. I've Done All My Singing For My Lord, Twelve Gates To The City, I Will Do My Last Singing In This Land Somewhere

Demons and Angels Shanachie 6117 • Recorded 1958 -1966

Titles: DISC ONE: Buck Dance, Soldier's March, Baby What You Going To Do, Twelve Sticks (The Dozens), Save Up Your Money John D Rockerfeller Put The Panic On, I Am The Light Of This World, Nobody Cares For Me, Slippin' Till My Gal Comes In Partner, Blues. Crucifixion, Rag Blues In C, Blues In E, Square Dance Verses, Don't Know Where To Go, He's My King, I'm Throwin' Up My Hands (Ain't Gonna Work No More), Cross And Evil Woman Blues, Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning, I'm So Tired Of Being All Alone DISC TWO: I Am The True Vine, Lord, Stand By Me, Won't You Hush, Mean Old World, Moon Is Going Down, Sportin' Life Blues, God's Gonna Separate, Soon My Work Will All Be Done, Blow Gabriel, Get Right Church, I Want To Be Saved, Oh Glory, How Happy I Am, There's Destruction In That Land (Message From Heaven), Tired, My Soul Needs Resting, Georgia Camp Meeting, Bill Bailey, Honey Get Your Towel Wet, She Wouldn't Say Quit, You're Going To Quit Me Baby DISC THREE: I'm Going To Sit Down On The Banks Of The River, Twelve Gates To The City, I Heard The Angels Sing, Twelve Sticks, It's A Long Way To Tipperary, When The Train Comes Along, Little Boy Little Boy Who Made Your Britches, All Night Long, Who Shall Deliver Poor Me, Jesus Met The Woman At The Well, Lord, Search My Heart, Lord On Your Word, Let Us Get Together, Cocaine Blues, Devil's Dream, Blow Gabriel, Sun Is Going Down, Spoonful, Whistlin' Blues, Virgin Mary

SGGW 130/1/2 • Recorded 1962-1967

Titles: DISC ONE (At Home): Twelve Sticks, Sally, Where’d You Get Your Liquor From, Babylon Is Falling, What Could I Do, Children of Zion, Hesitation Blues, Candyman (on 5 String Banjo), Steal Away And Pray, Goin’ To Chattanooga, Packing Up, Get Ready To Go, Untitled, You Cry Because I’m Leaving, Don’t Let My Baby Catch You Here, Lord Let Me Live Longer, I Want To be Saved, Waltz Time Candyman, Little Boy Who Made Your Britches, Talks about Verses Not Sung, C Rag, Two Step Candyman DISC TWO (At Home): Piece Without Words, Lord Search My Heart, Slippin’ To My Gal Comes In Partner, Sun is Going Down, Raise A Ruckus Tonight, Save Up Your Money, John D. Rockefeller Put the Panic On, Soon My Work Will All Be Done, You’re Gonna Need King Jesus, I’m Going Back To Jesus, Blues in C, Saddle It Around, People Who Use To See, Italian Rag, Candyman, Nobody Don’t Care For Me, Fox Chase, Talk on Blind Boy Fuller DISC THREE (In Church): Amazing Grace, Sermon, I’m a Soldier In The Army Of The Lord, Sermon, Lord I Feel Just Like Goin’ On, Steal Away, Can’t Make This journey By Myself, Sermon, I Will Overcome Someday, God Be With You, From the Brandeis University: I Got Religion I’m So Glad, I’m a Soldier In The Army Of The Lord

Rev.Gary Davis Live At Gerdes Folk City SGGW 114/5/6 • Recorded 1962

Titles: DISC ONE: You Got To Move, Intro to Come Down And See Me Sometime, Come Down And See Me Sometime, Wouldn't Say Quit, Oh Lord, Announcing Guitar lessons, People That Use to See, Can't See No More, There’s Destruction In This Land, Intro to Soon My Work Will Soon Be Over, Soon My Work Will Soon Be Over, Intro to Oh Glory, How Happy I Am, Oh Glory How Happy I Am DISC TWO: I Want To Be Saved, Just A Closer Walk With Thee, Death Don't Have No Mercy, Lord I Won't Go Back In Sin, Candyman, Buck Dance, Samson and Delilah, Working On The Building, I'll Fly Away, Sun Goin’ Down, Fox Chase DISC THREE: God's Gonna Separate, Lord Search My Heart, Jesus Met The Woman At The Well, Say No To The Devil, I Am A Pilgrim, All Night Long, Trying To Get To Heaven, Thank You Jesus, Twelve Sticks, Intro to Tesse, Tesse, Lord They Tell Me, Right Or Wrong

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