In the hot August days of 1933, John Lomax arrived at the sprawling camps of the notorious Mississippi prison Parchman Farm. He brought with him his 18-year-old son Alan and a new 315-pound battery-run acetate disc recorder in the trunk of his Ford. He was on a mission from the Library of Congress to record the folk songs of blacks in the south, and was touring the prison farms of several states, considering them an excellent place to find old songs that were “the least contaminated by white influence or by modern Negro jazz.”
(You can also hear him explain his purpose in his own words in this 1933 interview – with some commentary on it here.)
Over the course of three days, the Lomaxes set to work recording a number of songs from the prisoners in Parchman. They weren’t looking for blues songs in particular; most of their attention was focused on the work songs, field hollers, badman ballads, and folk tunes sung by men with colorful nicknames like Bootmouth, Bowlegs, Double Head, Lifetime, Scrap Iron, Tappin’ Head, and Tight Eye. But on August 9, they ventured into the sewing room in the women’s camp and recorded a few of the religious songs sung by the group of women, and a couple of blues songs from individual singers. (None of the women were identified in their notes.)
One of the songs was called “Prison Rider Blues,” four verses long and ending with a familiar verse:
Lomax later wrote that the singer was “an eighteen-year-old black girl in prison for murder.” The song seemed unique – was it an antique unrecorded folk blues kept alive in the prison walls? Or was the singer free-associating from familiar folk themes, making up her own lyrics? Or had she learned the song from someone else in prison who’d composed the song?
Little Brother Montgomery was a young jazz & blues piano player based in
Mississippi during the ‘30s. He later became well-regarded after moving to
Chicago, but at the time he was probably little-known outside Mississippi. He primarily
played in jazz bands and only had a couple of records out at that point, one of
them the popular “Vicksburg Blues,” released by Paramount Records in 1930. On
the other side was “No Special Rider Blues.”
The unknown singer must have heard the record as a teenager and liked it enough to keep singing the song in prison. (The theme of loneliness and missing your lover would have carried extra weight in Parchman.) She sings four of the verses quite faithfully (the first one & last three), with just minor word changes, like adding an extra “rider” in the last verse. Ironically, Lomax probably had no idea he was recording not an ancient folk song, but a brand-new “modern Negro jazz” song. (He was sometimes blissfully unaware that the prisoners had learned some of their traditional “folk” tunes from popular records and the radio.) He was looking for “long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio [and] still sing the distinctive old-time Negro melodies.” Yet here, by some fluke, he recorded a teenage girl singing a recent release by a jazz player that he probably could have found in the local record shops.
Interestingly, despite the popular “Vicksburg Blues” being on the same record, “No Special Rider Blues” doesn’t seem to have inspired any covers by other blues artists. (Skip James’ 1931 “Special Rider Blues” is a totally different song.) So the song has more or less languished unnoticed in obscurity – although Chuck Leavell recorded a cover recently, he omitted the last verse! But the Lomax recording, meanwhile, was taking on a new life of its own.
Lomax didn’t release his field recordings at the time (this would remain impossible until the 1940s). Instead, he used them to compile a songbook, American Ballads & Folk Songs, printed in 1934. You might think he would simply transcribe the songs faithfully, to preserve the authentic folk traditions, but this was not his style. Instead he often reshaped them into fanciful creations of his own. As one scholar writes, “The Lomaxes were notorious for lumping fragments together and rewriting them to create unidiomatic messes.” The Jail House Bound CD liner notes admit, “As was often true of his songbooks, John Lomax altered the sequence of stanzas, changed words, or even compiled a version from several sources…[writing,] ‘We have brought together what seems the best stanzas, or even lines, from widely separated sources.’”
“Prison Rider Blues” was renamed “Woman Blue” in the book. (Not to be confused with “When a Woman Blue” in Carl Sandburg’s 1927 book American Songbag, a totally different song, though ironically a verse from that was also sung separately at Parchman.) Lomax provides a little introduction stating that he got “the tune and the first stanza of these blues” from the singer. But only the last verse she sang is actually included. It’s possible someone tipped off Lomax that her song was on a commercial record; or perhaps she sang other songs that weren’t recorded. In any case, the rest of “Woman Blue” is a lengthy farrago of random verses with no known source – some known from other blues songs, some not.
You can find the full text of Lomax’s “Woman Blue” on the Grateful Dead Lyric & Song Finder (ten verses in all), but here I’ll just post the verses eventually picked up by the Dead:
It was quite common for verses to float around from one blues song to another; but this usually doesn’t mean the songs are related. As Bob Coltman writes: “We ought to be wary of linking blues that are quite separate just because they happen to share a line or a verse. Just listen to…the prolific bluesmen of the 1920s and you will hear scads of verses shared and traded in and out of songs that are otherwise quite distinct -- not to mention the great blueswomen…who did the same. Blues verses were a vast pool from which singers recomposed to create individual songs… Antecedent versions of blues are not like antecedent versions of other kinds of songs. They're not like Barbara Allan or John Henry. [Most] blues were assembled on the spot out of often disconnected "floating verses" that may or may not fall into a coherent story.”
In a way, this is what Lomax did with “Woman Blue,” discarding the partial song he recorded in Parchman Farm and recasting it as more of a love song with compiled verses from here & there, toning down the existential despair. And so the song remained for over two decades, one of many lyrics in a book that was thought to document a dying tradition, the last gasp of black musical folklore. Little did Lomax guess that two decades later, young musicians in the ‘folk revival’ would be looking at his book with greater interest for obscure old songs they could sing.
Folksinger
Bob Coltman remembers: "I got the song in the mid-1950s from the Lomaxes'
1934 American Ballads and Folk Songs…
It's on p. 196. Apparently I was the first to pick it up and sing it, though it
had lain around unnoticed in that well-known collection for twenty years… The
Lomax headnote says "An eighteen-year-old black girl, in prison for
murder, sang the tune and the first stanza of these blues." The Lomaxes
added a number of "floating verses" from other, uncredited sources,
and named it "Woman Blue."
So
I resurrected and debuted the song. I followed the tune given in Lomax, roughly
but not exactly, changed the song from a woman's to a man's viewpoint, dropped
two verses, and was its first arranger, voice and guitar in a heavy drag
downbeat, sort of an early folk-rock sound.
I
sang it a lot in folk circles around Philadelphia, in concerts, around Boston…[and]
around New York State and New England circa 1957-60. I also sang it in the
west, in Wyoming…and on the West Coast, especially in San Francisco and Los
Angeles, late summer-early fall '59. Then I went in the Army (sorta like
prison) and everything went on hold.
Coltman never recorded his version, but you can find his lyrics here – he mostly left the Lomax song intact and unchanged, respecting the ‘folk tradition’ perhaps a bit more than Lomax did! But his account illustrates an integral part of the folk (and blues) process: rather than making a record, he instead traveled far and wide across the country, playing the song to scattered gatherings of folkies, some of whom picked up the song from him and started playing it on their own. To those unfamiliar with the Lomax book, the song would have appeared to come out of nowhere, an antique traditional.
The
Mudcat thread has some lengthy discussion about who learned the song from
Coltman and when; and Harry Tuft (a fellow folksinger) has a somewhat different
account in which he’s the one who spread the song to various players, and John
Phillips added a new chord arrangement. Rather than try to untangle all the threads
here, I’ll just list the most well-known recorded versions up to the time the Grateful
Dead started playing it:
Joan Baez, I Know You Rider 1960 (unreleased) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbVtL_SNLa4
Tossi
Aaron, I Know You Rider 1961 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiiH2fqE24
Judy
Henske, I Know You Rider 1963 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngfuZ7Lyid0
Kingston
Trio, Rider 1963 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoM69rZEaIk
Big 3, Rider 1963 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7so5tECqKMY
Serendipity
Singers, Rider 1964 - https://youtu.be/cEsX8krviM4?t=1481
Vince
Martin & Fred Neil, I Know You Rider 1964 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUOwVmf65o8
Gale
Garnett, I Know You Rider 1964 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5etHTC-3jo
Alice
Stuart, Woman Blue 1964 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlY4BFIkfI
Judy
Roderick, Woman Blue 1965 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwIl-7KykuQ
Warlocks,
I Know You Rider 1965 (demo) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-SEVBYNXak
Byrds,
I Know My Rider 1966 (unreleased) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQFNLFnErFE
Janis Joplin & Big Brother, I Know You Rider 1966 (live) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUZrvG2X--M
“I Know You Rider” had a hesitant start on record – Joan Baez didn't release her 1960 recording, so Tossi Aaron was the first to release the song the next year. Many other folk artists like Bonnie Dobson & Judy Collins were evidently playing it at the time, but without making any recordings, though a couple of very obscure 1962 versions were released. Then the dam burst in 1963, as Judy Henske & then the Kingston Trio popularized the song on record, and a flood of folkie versions followed.
A couple things to note: the song was always shortened for records, with different artists picking different verses to sing out of the mass that Coltman handed down. (If he hadn’t spoken up, we might think that they’d all independently drawn the song from the Lomax book, so different are their selections.) Some of them also felt free to make up new verses of their own, for better or worse.
Stuart & Roderick, aware of Lomax’s book, went back to the “Woman Blue” title to fit their more melancholy versions. But you can tell who the hardcore folk collectors are when they add older verses from Lomax or from other ‘20s blues songs! (I've added an appendix listing the lyrics of various '60s versions here: I Know You Rider Lyric Variations)
It’s a surprise in general how different most of these versions are from each other in lyrics and style; they cover quite a wide range from tender sadness to rollicking boisterousness, from weeping women to hollering men, the song suiting any style well. And that was before the rock bands got hold of it! Lomax could hardly have imagined the eventual fate of his “Woman Blue,” but he might have appreciated its infiltration into a younger generation of modern white listeners.
When the Warlocks picked “I Know You Rider” as one of their first songs to adapt in 1965, they fit right into this progression. It was Jerry Garcia’s idea to cover the song, and he’d likely heard more versions of it in person than on record. (Weir, hearing Tossi Aaron for the first time 40 years later, commented: “I never heard these recordings, but they were typical of the current versions of these songs at the time… I heard folkies doing these songs this way back in the early ‘60s… Jerry could have picked up his versions from these or any of a number of other similar versions.”)
Eric Levy writes, "There were countless people performing the song, which spread like wildfire. So our attempts to isolate where Jerry may have learned it--a Joan Baez performance, Tossi Aaron's album--now seem misguided. Jody Stecher says the song was literally everywhere in the early-to-mid '60s. You were guaranteed to hear it any time you went to a folk club or coffee shop or even a party. In Stecher's words, asking where Jerry learned it is like asking where he learned 'Three Blind Mice.'"
Garcia himself said (in an interview for "The History of Rock 'n Roll"): "It's an old folk song. It used to be like a standby, really, in the coffeehouses and stuff like that. I never performed it as a bluegrass person...I never was a folkie very much, you know, I just wasn't that good, you know - I mostly played in bands with other people. But I always liked that song, no matter who did it, you know? And there was like all these folk versions of it...that were really modern versions of it. I always liked the song, so...of the ones that I could remember, the arrangements, the versions of it melodically, as far as the chord structure and so forth, that was the one that I sort of culled from my own memory. I don't remember where I learned it. I don't remember who taught it to me or why I even chose it, except it's just a nice song. And I thought it would be ideal to do with an electric band."
According to Phil Lesh, Garcia had played it before the Warlocks formed - at Phil's first practice with them, "I asked to start with 'I Know You Rider,' a traditional song I'd loved when I heard Jerry do it as a folkie."
Like the other artists who’d taken up “Rider,” Garcia trimmed it down to pop-song record length (the early studio demos toss out almost all the verses), and selected the verses he liked most, so the Dead’s version isn't an exact lyrical match to any earlier recording. Though Garcia may have heard some of the records, they weren’t a strong influence on him, except perhaps for the chords – the Warlocks were probably the first band to play an electric version. It’s also striking that in the verses Garcia picked, the romantic element of the song (emphasized in most of the earlier records) is almost completely excluded and it becomes more a portrait of a desperate soul, closer in spirit to the original desolate feel of “No Special Rider Blues.”
However I don’t know of any recordings of “Easy Rider” at the time that actually include this verse, or several other random verses they included, so this appears to be another of the Lomax mix-&-match patchwork songs. (Odetta sings “Easy Rider” on a 1956 album with the verses drawn straight from Lomax’s book – another example of a folk-song rendition taken from the page rather than from an actual musical tradition.)
Alex Allan covers these variations at the end of his “I Know You Rider” discussion. It seems there was probably some unknown folk singer who all but rewrote “Blues Jumped the Rabbit” (keeping only the first verse from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1926 “Rabbit Foot Blues” recording), and the new version then spread across the folk scene. But it’s still a mystery who or what inspired Jerry Garcia to grab this verse for the Dead’s “I Know You Rider.” Nonetheless, it’s an excellent fit – Lomax himself couldn’t have added a better verse to this song of loss and longing.
Ironically, one of the sad absences in early Dead history is their version of “Parchman Farm” (known to be played at the Matrix on 1/7/66). Most likely they covered Mose Allison’s popular 1958 version, however it’s possible they were doing Bukka White’s 1940 classic. In either case, it was one of the early covers they dropped as they found their own style.
Meanwhile, Little Brother Montgomery was still playing “No Special Rider Blues” in the ‘60s and later, never guessing that it had somehow inspired a whole new folk-rock song among the white kids, thanks to one lonely young girl stuck in Parchman Farm thirty years earlier, singing a blues from the life she missed.
*
