Cross Road Blues part 2

 We had a holiday on Monday, I stayed home in Tuesday's bad weather, went to speech therapy on Wednesday, so today was a good day to go to the Studio and do a little work.  Besides, it's supposed to snow tomorrow.  I decided to bring with me something new, discs I burned for my father of old Jean Shepherd radio shows. He had been in radio most of his life, and had found a late night spot at WOR in New York by the 1960's.  A 45 minute show where he played his required commercials, but mostly told stories from his past, based on scraps of paper with a few words written on them.  One of those radio stories led to the classic film "A Christmas Story" (the one with Ralphie, the BB gun, and the leg lamp) which he narrated and had a small cameo in.  That radio show was on the air for more than a decade, and was basically just him telling stories, something that would never be allowed today.  But he still has a fan base, and many of those radio shows were recorded and can be heard today.  A while back I recorded those shows on tape (sometimes for listening to on my ride up to the university) from a weekly overnight radio show that specialized in such things, and burned a few to disc back when I could do that, usually accompanied with another short classic radio show, also rebroadcast.  Since my father currently has no place to listen to discs, they are mine again.   I know that they are good ways to pass the time, and brought some with me today.  One that I ended up playing was a Shepard show from 1965 and a Jack Benny "mystery melodrama" from 1950, with his usual crew, plus guests Frank Sinatra, Rosalind Russel, and Gene Kelly (all promoting various movies they had out, so what happens on tv talk shows today is not a new thing) and lots of flubbed dialogue, as sometimes goes with live radio.  The Shepherd show was about old radio days, which had him living in cheap places in the midwest, and having to open the radio stations and start up the transmitter, things I know far too well.  You see, I lived in Illinois for 3 years in grad school (where I did radio) and my first station was at a college in Virginia, where my blues show was grouped with the Jazz department, and for my first three semesters we had the job of opening the station and starting the transmitter every weekday morning.

Shepherd got a wake-up call from the "two-bit tank" hotel he lived in (with a bunch of salesmen and a smell he could never quite identify), while I had to set my own alarm and get up around 5:30 in the morning, walk across campus to the police station, show ID to get the key to the student center, walk to that, open the front door, walk down to the basement, open the station door, then begin the long process of starting up the transmitter, shut down the night before.  (press a button, wait 10 minutes, turn a dial, wait 20 minutes, etc)  As I waited for the steps, I called for the weather, pulled records to play on the air (back then all music came on vinyl), etc.  Do my 7 a.m. show, then put everything away, return the keys, and go home.  My final semester there, we went to 24 hours, and through my seniority, I got an evening spot.   My other stations were all 24 hours, and my specialty show happened afternoons.

I arrived at the Studio, popped in my disc, and got to work.  My task for today was to work on my latest Robert Johnson block, my take on Cross Road Blues.  I liked what I had before, but there was a big empty space in the composition, and I had no ideas what to put there.  After thinking about it the past few days, I decided just to move the background figure over a few inches to the center, which balanced things out a bit.  I also listened to the song some more, and read the lyrics, and came to an important conclusion- the song is often linked to the story of his trading his soul for guitar lessons and blues prowess, but it has nothing to do with that.  So I don't feel bad at all for coming up with my own interpretation that has nothing to do with his infamous deal.  

What I had settled on was the lyric "Ask the Lord above, "Have mercy, now save poor Bob if you please."  It has often been assumed that this is Robert (poor Bob) Johnson asking to be saved from the deal he had made with the devil, but the song makes no mention of the incident.  What I got to thinking was maybe he was asking for help saving him from himself.  No one knows for sure how he died, just that the death certificate says that he was 27 (making him an early member of the "27 Club", a group of famous musicians and singers who died at that age) probably from congenital syphilis (transmitted at birth from infected parents, an endemic disease among his population), but no autopsy was done, as he was just a poor black man in Mississippi and was treated as such.  He was known to be fond of whiskey and loose women, and according to story, it may be what did him in.  He had a reputation for hooking up with available women when he came to town, particularly less desirable women, who may have liked the attention and were less likely to have jealous husbands or boyfriends.  However, the popular story is that he was playing at a club, and he and a woman with a jealous man were flirting a little too much for the man's taste, and some poisoned whiskey was sent to the musician.  Another bluesman slapped it away, but Johnson did not like that.  More whiskey was provided, he drank it, got very sick, and never recovered.  That the illness came on so quickly, and he was relatively young, plus his reputation, have made this story plausible.  

So my illustration (shown above) is about my idea of the lyric- in which fans of the musician (then or now) might ask God to save the blues musician from himself, and his tendency to chase after alcohol and available women.  Because it may have been what did him in.  And his early death may have deprived us of whatever other songs he might have written and recorded.  The whiskey bottle came from the many left behind by my grandfather when he moved out of that house (he had converted the basement of a previous house to a hang out for his friends, complete with full bar, pool table, ping pong, and fireplace), the arm is mine, the rolled up sleeve from a shirt I found in the closet, and the woman from an old figure drawing of mine from more than a decade ago.  Is it done yet?  Probably not, but it's far enough along to be worth showing now.  I'll do some refining of the figure and arm, fix the label on the bottle, decide what to do with the background, and fix anything else that I decide.  No hurry here, as there is no deadline that I know of.

All of this only took one disc, so that was all I put on today.  But there are more of these, so I may bring some more radio shows to the Studio in the future.