Forty-Four Blues (II)

DESCRIPTION: My baby heard the 44 whistle blow like it won't blow no more. Don't think you're better than the lover I had before. Before long you'll look for me and I'll be gone. I'm going to get my lover to drive my blues away.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1929 (recording, Lee Green)
KEYWORDS: parting train nonballad lover
FOUND IN:
RECORDINGS:
Mae Glover, "Forty-Four Blues" (Champion 16351, 1931) (also released as: Mae Muff, "Big Gun Blues" (Varsity, 1931))
Lee Green, "Number Forty-Four Blues" (1993, on "Leothus Lee Green Vol. 1 1929-1930," Documnent DOCD-5187)
NOTES [250 words]: Ironically, Mae Glover's "Forty Four Blues" was also issued as "Big Gun Blues" but her 44 is only a train. The gun is only in "Forty-Four Blues (I)."
Paul Oliver (p. 100), noting that the early players and singers of the "Forty-Fours" complex of blues were from the Vicksburg area, writes that "Train Number 44 was running on the Illinois Central line whose old Yazoo and Mississippi Valley track from Memphis and Clarksdale ran by the levee at Vicksburg south to Louisiana. In common with many blues the instrumental may have been named after the train although, unlike so many others, it does not imitate the train rhythms to any markrd degree."
Mae Glover sings, "I got blues will last me nine months from today, I'm going to get my sweet man to drive my blues away." Lee Green's version is, "I got blues will last me nine months from today, I'm going to get my sweet woman to drive my blues away." Oliver (p. 108) comments, "Why has she nine-months' blues? Presumably because she is pregnant as her man leaves her. The blues has no particular impact as sung by Lee Green but has immediate significance when sung by a woman. It suggests that this is in fact, a woman's blues and that Mae Glover's was the blues in its original form, transposed with no special regard for the sense by Green"
The Paul Oliver refences are to his "The Forty-Fours" in Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues (New York: De Capo Press, 1968). For more of his comments on the "Forty-Fours" see the notes to "Vicksburg Blues." - BS
Last updated in version 5.1
File: Rc44Bl2

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