Tangier Sound

I have been listening to Willie McTell’s Dyin’ Crapshooter Blues over and over again for the last few months. I don’t think a single recording has had this kind of hold over me since I first heard Mississippi John Hurt on the radio.

I think the thing that has me fascinated about this song is the delivery. The chord progression almost feels random, as if Willie McTell is simply improvising chords to a piece of free verse poetry, but at the same time there is a very definite melody line running through the song.

Willie McTell may or may not have written this song. Martha Copeland recorded this song in 1927, but her version comes across like a rehash of Minnie The Moocher and other big band girl/boy gone bad songs.

Whoever wrote the song – which is really just a retelling of the same theme found in St. James Infirmary Blues, The House of the Rising Sun, The Unfortunate Rake, Streets of Laredo and a zillion other cautionary tales – Willie McTell gives a performance in this recording unlike anything I’ve ever run across before. At the end of the song he breaks up the lyrics into almost rhythmic fragments that speed up and slow down to create a crazy sort of tension. He turns what Martha Copeland recited into something that is horrible and funny at the same time.

Sixteen real good crapshooters,
Sixteen bootleggers to sing a song.

Sixteen racket men gamblin’,
couple to tend bar while I’m rollin’ along.

He wanted 22 women outta the Hampton Hotel,
26 off-a South Bell,
29 women outta North Atlanta,
no, little Jesse didn’t pass out so swell.

His head was achin’, heart was thumpin’,
little Jesse went to hell bouncin’ and jumpin’.

Folks, don’t be standin’ around ole Jesse cryin’,
he wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he dyin’.

One foot up, a toenail dragging,
throw my buddy Jesse in the hoodoo wagon,
come here mama with that can of booze,
I’ve got the dyin’ crapshooters blues, I mean,
the dyin’ crapshooters blues.

Willie McTell is reported to have said in an interview that it took him three years to put this arrangement together and that, “I had to steal music from every which way you could get it to get it to fit.”

It seems that he worked that way a lot. Another one of his great songs, Delia, used the melody for The White house Blues. That makes sense when you realize that White House Blues was based on the melody of Battleship Maine, which was based on the melody of The Ship That Never Returned which was based on some long lost song before that.

Folk music really isn’t anything more than a way to recycle creative ideas. Old songs have been changed from the beginning to fit the world around any given artist. Willie McTell wasn’t a blues singer or a “songster”. He was an amazing musician who was bigger than any stamp, label or category.

Willie McTell, to me at least, stands as proof that music isn’t something precious that has to be persevered and recited by rote as the fakelorists (yeah, that’s an intentional misspelling) would have you believe. Music is something you can play around with. Something you can slap into to new shapes and textures.

I got a note the other day from a synthesizer player who is taking up the banjo (talk about a cool mix of traditional and modern sounds) and the first thing that crossed my mind was, “Man, I wonder how a synthesizer would sound on Dyin’ Crapshooter Blues?”

Heck, I wonder what would happen if a modern hip-hop artist got his or her hands on the lyrics to this song. I bet it would sound pretty cool.

You can find one more Willie McTell tune (Statesboro Blues) at archive.org. Juneberry78s.com has a really nice collection of tracks you can download in the password-protected part of the site (just send them and email for a free password) including downright amazing versions of Baby, It Must Be Love and Wabash Cannonball.

You can learn more about Willie McTell on Wikipedia. There is also an interesting article about Willie McTell on pseudopodium with an mp3 download of Dyin’ Crapshooter Blues.

A search on http://www.seeqpod.com will turn up a few more Willie McTell clips.

Blues Lyrics Online and Harp Amps both have collections of Willie McTell Lyrics.