Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald Page B

“Milk Cow Blues,” this record would have been familiar to many blues buyers at the time, and Arnold’s frenetically inventive performance has an energy and excitement that Johnson does not even approach. Its unpredictable slide work slices and stabs around the comic arithmetic of the lyric, and Johnson’s version sounds stolid and flat by comparison. However,Johnson made one essential change that would prove decisive, transforming an entertaining, upbeat song into an anthem: Kokomo may have been a logical destination for the Indianapolis-based Scrapper Blackwell, who originated the number, but Chicago was the promised land, and would become the world famous “Home of the Blues.” Arnold’s “Old Original Kokomo Blues” sold a lot more copies than Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago,” but in the eyes of history he bet the wrong pony. Later singers would often ignore everything else about the Johnson record—even dropping the whole concept of math-oriented stanzas—but the association with Chicago would make this Johnson’s most-covered song. Tommy McClennan weighed in first in 1939, followed by Walter Davis in 1941, and so on up through the chart-making 1959 hit by Junior Parker and beyond. 6
    Johnson continued the traveling theme on his next number, “ Rambling on My Mind ,” but this song would be remembered less for its lyric than for the slide triplets that Elmore James adopted for his hit version of “Dust My Broom.” “Rambling on My Mind” was the first slide piece Johnson recorded, and there is clearly something about the technique that inspired him not only as a player but as a vocalist. For the first time in this session, he gets a touch of the Delta tear, the Son House rawness into his voice, sounding more passionate than on the three previous songs.
    In terms of structure, “Rambling” provides some interesting insight into how Johnson thought about his compositions, because its two takes are so different. He seems to have defined this song by its first verse, “I got ramblin’, I got ramblin’ on my mind/Hate to leave my baby but you treats me so unkind,” and its central bridge verse. As with “Kind Hearted Woman,” this bridge is carefully worked out, framing a programmatic train imitation played on the bass strings, which Johnson introduces by saying, “I hear her coming now….” This sort of announced musical mimicry was common on the nineteenth-century stage, in both classical and minstrel performance, and continued to be featured by medicine-show players and vaudeville entertainers, but it was rare in blues. 7 It is a self-conscious display of instrumental technique, the sort of thing that intellectual purists—whether in classical, blues, or jazz—tend to dismiss as cheap theatrics rather than seriousmusic, though for blues fans of the period a greater drawback would have been that such interludes break up the dance rhythms. In Johnson’s work, these programmatic breaks show the extent to which he saw his records as arranged performances, rather than simply assemblages of blues verses. Clearly, he was already thinking of himself as a featured entertainer, able to hold an attentive audience, and not just as a juke-joint dance musician.
    Surprisingly, considering the care that went into the bridge verse, Johnson seems to have considered the rest of “Rambling on My Mind” to be little more than filler. Though from the record company’s point of view his two takes of the song were essentially identical—they turn up interchangeably on the released 78s—Johnson’s lyric changes completely from one to the next. The first take is lyrically repetitive, with three verses that are differentiated by only a couple of words, and a fourth that continues to use the same tag line. By contrast, take two has no repeated verses, and its lyrical variety is reinforced