A question to the Doper community: what is the saddest, grittiest, most depressing, most down-home, most mojo-ain’t-working-no-mo blues song out there? I’m looking for something that’s sung by a bluesman who is, like, 120 years old, with at least 118 of those years being miserable. I’m talking about something that makes the original version of “Sweet Home Chicago” as painfully moaned by Robert Johnson, sound upbeat by comparison.
To make the challenge a bit harder, let’s exclude prison worksongs.
I’m Gonna Kill My Baby.
I can’t recall the writer’s name, I know that he lived or spent some time in Arkansas. At any rate, he did kill his baby and as I recall died in prison.
Son House, “Death Letter” – no contest. The most chilling, sad, agony-wrenched blues I’ve ever heard (and I’ve listened to a lot).
First verse:
I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?
It said, “Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead.”
I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?
You know, it said, “Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?”
My personal favorite blues-iest blues song, Lightning Hopkin’s “Buddy Brown’s Blues.” With lyrics like:
“When a man get’s hairy,
You know he need a shave.
When a woman get’s musty,
You know she needs to bathe.”
It made me fall in love with the blues when I was but a young lad. I wanted to learn to play that song so bad when I first heard it. Alas, it took me many years to get to the point where I could do it justice.
Anything by Otis Taylor. There is nothing more bluesy than something like his “St. Martha’s Blues” about his own great grandfather’s lynching; “Three Days and Three Nights,” about a man desperately trying to get the medicine he needs to save his dying child; “My Soul’s in Louisiana,” about an innocent man’s lynching.
His songs are on subjects that make Robert Johnson look like he’s whining about trivialities. The blues don’t get any darker than this – and oddly, his songs also manage to be uplifting, too.
