Vicksburg Blues

DESCRIPTION: Singer has the Vicksburg blues: "my baby didn't want me no more" but "she's restin' on my mind." He looks for her in town but "she had moved away." He leaves, gets word where she may be, and is going to hop a freight back.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1930 (recording, Montgomery)
KEYWORDS: grief love separation train travel nonballad lover
FOUND IN: US(SE)
RECORDINGS:
Scott Dunbar, "Vicksburg Blues" (on USDunbarS01)
Little Brother Montgomery,"Vicksburg Blues" (Paramount 13006, 1930); (1968, on "Faro Street Jive," Folkways Records FTS 31014)
NOTES [529 words]: The description combines both Little Brother Montgomery recordings listed. He recorded different versions of "Vicksburg Blues" after 1930, including a "Vicksburg Blues No. 2" (Bluebird B6072, 1935) and "Vicksburg Blues Part 3" (Bluebird B6697), with different words. Other singers had their own "Vicksburg Blues" -- with their own words -- using Montgomery's tune and influenced by Montgomery's piano arrangement. Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup has "Crudup's Vicksburg Blues" (Victor 20-2205, 1946). Otis Spann hads "Vicksburg Blues" (1966, on "Otis Spann's Chicago Blues," Testament T-2211). Scott Dunbar's version includes lines from Little Brother Montgomery and Spann or -- more likely -- Crudup (one Dunbar line is "I got the Big Boy blues").
The "Forty-Fours" complex of blues -- starting with "Vicksburg Blues" and the two "Forty-Four Blues" -- is explored in great detail in his "The Forty-Fours" in Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues (New York: De Capo Press, 1968). Here are a snippets from that long article:
"... the piano tune of The Forty Fours or Vicksburg Blues -- is the unifying theme that holds all the variants together ...." (p. 95)
"'...1922 ... I come over to Vicksburg...' explained Little Brother Montgomery '.... That's where I met Ernest Johnson ... that's where we originated these numbers like Vicksburg Blues, 44 Blues and things like that.'" (p. 94)
"Eurreal Montgomery did not claim exclusive credit for composing the theme. Among the people that he mentioned who played the tune in its formative period were ....
"On the tune which these men developed Little Brother Montgomery commented, 'It's a blues, it's a barrelhouse, honky-tonk blues. People danced by that, did the shimmy by that. It's a thing we just made up; you could keep addin' to it.' From this it appears that originally The Forty-Fours was a piano piece for dancing. The shimmy dances, though depending on undulating movements of the body which shook the heavily fringed shift dresses of the period, were not necessarily fast. The sensuous 'snake-hip' movements of the shimmy or the shuffle of the 'slow drag' would have been effective at the medium tempo of the tune.
If The Forty-Fours began as a dance tune it probably had no words initially, and this is supported by Roosevelt Sykes's assertion that there were no lyrics to the tune when he first heard it. But when he recorded his '44' Blues and Little Brother Montgomery made his Vicksburg Blues both had definite, though very different, vocals." (pp, 94-95).
"It is interesting that while Sykes's vocal is on a different tune from the piano theme, Little Brother Montgomery's vocal line is closely related to the melody of the piano theme, itself. It is possible therefore, that the piano tune was modelled on a pre-existing vocal tune which survives in Vicksburg and that Sykes had not known of the vocal but learned the mature piano version." (p. 95)
"Roosevelt Sykes, ... learned the tune from {Lee] Green ..." (p. 102)
"[Green's] vocal had a rise and fall shape similar to that of Little Brother's ... his earlier [1929] recording showed greater affinity to Roosevelt Sykes in the vocal ...." (p.104) - BS
Last updated in version 5.1
File: RcVicksB

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