Track List
- Rabbit Foot Blues
- Shuckin' Sugar Blues
- Booster Blues
- Dry Southern Blues
- Long Lonesome Blues
- Got The Blues
- Black Horse Blues
- Corrina Blues
- Old Rounder's Blues
- Beggin' Back
- That Black Snake Moan
- Stocking Feet Blues
- Bad Luck Blues
- Broke And Hungry
- Chinch Bug Blues
- Deceitful Brownskin Blues
- Electric Chair Blues
- See That My Grave Is Kept Clean
- Low Down Mojo Blues
- Jack O' Diamond Blues
- Chock House Blues
- Change My Luck Blues
- Lemon's Cannon Ball Blues
- Lemon's Worried Blues
- Prison Cell Blues
- Long Distance Moan
- bonus download track: Bakershop Blues
Although Blind Lemon Jefferson’s complete recordings have been reissued, they are without texts and in poor sound. Our restoration with Sonic Depth Technology offers a greater clarity which enables a more accurate transcription of his words. The absence of lyrics has further obscured a major artist whose life’s facts remain unknown. Jefferson has become a blues icon: the survival of but one photograph along with sparse knowledge of his career and personal life has encouraged legends which become caricatures rather than interpretations of his art in relation to his life. Leadbelly, his one-time senior partner, spoke of their days in Dallas with varying accuracy, yet a more significant musical reciprocity is heard on their recordings. Jefferson’s career and art place him with Blind Blake and Papa Charlie Jackson as the first fully-documented professional bluesmen, highly skilled, distinct composers with extensive repertoires. With the absence of facts, Jefferson’s words become our only guide to his life, to the society he depicted in song and sounds. His texts give us a rural Hogarth, a Breugel displaying a vast panorama, a vivid depiction of his society’s deeds, thoughts and emotions. A balladeer who aimed to satisfy his audience’s tastes, it is inevitable that Jefferson’s individuality crept into his texts. One example of his craft lies in unique virtuosic guitar lines which support the texts’ messages as a separate entity, similar to Schubert’s Lieder. in the flow of their contrasting textures and rhythms.
Past efforts to transcribe his lyrics often had errors which present Jefferson as an ignoramus, as though these specialists deemed him as hardly more than an illiterate without a mother tongue who mangled content and syntax into incomprehensibility: One misreading of Corrina [C. C. Rider] is commonly perpetuated: “Aint no potatoes, cross-hound killed the vine.” Attentive listening detects: “frost has killed the vine,” as any farmer could explain. One published transcription of Begging Back Blues [Grossman. Texas Blues. Oak Publications, 1984] has the following (with corrections in bold):
Grossman: “Oh my baby, take me back, Why a wanna, take me back.”
Jefferson: “Oh my baby, take me back, What have I done, take me back.”
Grossman: “And I went in, half past six, I went out the rich man’s gate.”
Jefferson: “Every evening, half past eight, I’m laying around the rich man’s gate.”
Grossman: “Working and studying, thinking I was grand,
Gotta get that best gal back, rich man’s hand.”
Jefferson: “Working and studying, thinking I was grand,
How to get that biscuit out of that rich man’s hand.”
Grossman: “She turned around two or three times,
Take you back Henry, wintertime.”
Jefferson: “She turned around two or three times,
Take you back in the wintertime.”
Certain words defy transcription: our text contains these enigmas as gaps or phonetic approximations in italics, awaiting a keener set of ears to bring us towards a more definitive transcription. We deliberately chose to give Jefferson’s words in their correct spelling in order to illustrate his regional inflection. (ex. “Cuba” is pronounced “Kew-baing.”)
Read on as you listen, and a great man’s language will once again come to life, rich in metaphor, puns, sexual imagery, pain, irony, misogyny, a blend of the real and imagined, the testimony of an artist who bore much physical and emotional tragedy. — Allan Evans © 2003
ERRATA:
Pages 2-3 and Track 10:
Text has:
thinking I was grand
Should read:
thinking out a plan