This diary starts with a text, received from an old friend in Virginia, a little after 11:00 AM on a Wednesday.
Standing with a guy with 3 bottles of Black Maple Hill 16 yr. Yes? Need to know now.
Two things happened immediately: 1) I grabbed my iphone and quickly typed “Yes. All of them.” Not “Really?” Not “How much?” Not “Wow. Those are rare.” Just “Yes”; just “all of them”. And 2) I invented a “personal emergency, sorry guys I have to go” reason to drop off a conference call about a $6.5 million dollar IT project in Latin America to call this guy and open a friendly catching-up-on-old-times conversation with “Tell me you are not fucking with me!” Bit of a jarring opener, I realize, but it made the point. …and he wasn’t.
Now, I am a scotch drinker at heart, (at liver?) but in the world of Bourbon, if someone calls you to say they can get you a bottle Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 year you pledge, on the spot, to do anything they want to get your hands on it from the mundane and common act of forking over an obscene amount of money all the way up to and including whacking your grandmother in the back of the head with a snow shovel. Granted: That’s an odd ask, but if that’s what it took to put my hands on 750ml of PVW 20, well…. I think we can all agree that Lois has had a long and fulfilling life at this point, amirite?
A small step down from this blunt-force-trauma-upon-a-loved-one inducing bottle of corn-based deliciousness is the mysterious Black Maple Hill 16 year.
Black Maple Hill is not a hill. It is not a place. It is not even a distillery. It is a fiction, owned by a man near San Francisco (oh the irony, as I type this in Berkeley) that provides NO INFORMATION whatsoever about backstory or history or recipe, or often even age, of their simple bottles slapped with a label depicting a quaint sketch of idyllic Kentucky woodlands. And it is amazing.
3 bottles? Of SIXTEEN YEAR?! Why not call me to tell me you unearthed a chest of medieval Spanish gold coins from a sunken galleon? Tell me you found the Ark of the god damned Covenant and it was sitting next to the Holy Grail and the withered reaching corpse of Perceval himself?
This is the text I received, and about 9 days later, these are the bottles I received in the mail. Delicately packed. Fastidiously shipped. 2 bottles (he kept one for himself, because he is not a blithering idiot), 1500 total milliliters of 95 proof sour mash nectar. Strong warm front, sweet hint of heather honey and a lingering finish longer than the teacher’s edition of War and Peace. It tells you sweet lies about slow-melted brown sugar and hints about the really expensive maple syrup from the Whole Foods aisle all while still rolling across your palate like a quiet rumbling storm of charred oak, whispered butterscotch and exotic spices once hauled on the whiplashed backs of nameless slaves along the Silk Road of Ancient Persia.
And here’s the thing: This post isn’t even about whiskey. It’s about what I started doing while drinking it. This diary is about The Blues.
This bourbon needed a soundtrack. It needed its own anthem. So I started putting together a playlist; I called it “Whiskey Throated Lullabies”. And that’s the vibe: Late night, warm weather, a bottle of liquor you didn’t expect to be drinking any time soon, a good set of headphones and a lot of time to kill slowly and luxuriously like a deranged serial killer staring into the wide eyes of a frightened prostitute that just realized she isn’t going home tonight.
There are one thousand genres and sub genres of music out there but if you are sitting on a balcony overlooking Californian hills, sipping a bourbon good enough to make a Baptist preacher kick out a stained glass window and you aren’t listening to low-down, slowed-down Mississippi Delta-inspired Blues then you need to start asking yourself the hard questions about life and your place in it.
So here I’ll share the forlorn arias of heartbreak and elusory hope that I started stringing together through a couple’a’three glass with the fervent wish that other fans of the True Blues chime in with additional songs that mesh with these to round out a playlist I plan on enjoying with whatever it is I wind up drinking next.
Note: I can appreciate good rocking Chicago Blues as much as the next man, but this is neither the time nor the place. Low and slow like a North Carolinian hog dripping fat over a pile of embers banked up since before the sun came up yesterday, know what I’m sayin’? This is not a rock or R&B list. This is not even a Bluegrass list. Nor is it a wild guitar shredding solo list. Listen to a few and think about the vibe.
Now, it was tempting to just rush right to the classics: Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, etc but I changed my mind. I figured it would quickly look like some Time-Life Book Compilation of the same songs everyone knows. I wanted it to be different. INSPIRED by the classics, but a bit of a side-road winding through stranger pastures, both old and new. Some good covers, new artists, a few old-schoolers and everything in between.
Anything that feels like the Blues and goes with the overall vibe. Here, let me walk you through what I had going on….
Somebody Loan Me a Dime is the first song I fired up on Spotify. Fenton Robinson recorded the original in 1967 but few people know this. Most people who know this song know it from Boz Scaggs and this is my favorite version of it. The 1969 studio album recording with Duane Allman (known affectionately as “Skydog” to his fans) on guitar.
The opening organ riff alone is enough to remind me that my glass is empty and shouldn’t be; or if I’m not drinking at the moment that my hand is empty and shouldn’t be. And of course, I already said Skydog is playing on it so I need not even attempt to describe the guitar solo that kindly introduces itself around the 4½ minute mark and quickly becomes your new friend.
Now it gets a little rocking at the end and Skydog is all over the place, but that's okay. It fades out after about 12½ minutes and by this point, I have the bottle open and I’m settled on the porch and starting to get a feeling for what I need to be listening to.
Big name blues songs and artists are flashing through my head but its early. I know I’ll get to those later and truthfully they’ll probably sound better a few glasses into this bottle anyway, so I go to a modern remake that has had me hypnotized for the last year or so: Dark End of the Street.
This was the biggest hit and trademark song for James Carr back in the mid-60’s written by a couple of guys that wanted to write a “cheatin song". Per wiki:
In the summer of 1966, while a DJ convention was being held in Memphis, Penn and Moman were cheating while playing cards with Florida DJ Don Schroeder,[1] and decided to write the song while on a break. Penn said of the song “We were always wanting to come up with the best cheatin’ song. Ever.”[2] The duo went to the hotel room of Quinton Claunch, another Muscle Shoals alumnus, and founder of Hi Records, to write. Claunch told them, "Boys, you can use my room on one condition, which is that you give me that song for James Carr. They said I had a deal, and they kept their word.” The song, lyrics and all, was written in about thirty minutes.
Its a good version and Carr did it well but his voice is too polished and showy (Background chorals? Really?) and his version is just a touch too fast. All things that could be fixed but what REALLY transforms this song is to have it sung by a woman. And not just any woman but Chan Marshall. Marshall, a native of Atlanta, records as a one-woman show by the name of Cat Power. She’s been around a while having been discovered opening local Liz Phair shows back in ‘94 and has some serious soul. The woman has her demons, is honest about them and battles them the best she can. Probably better than most of us could in her place. But those scars shine through when she picks up this song about infidelity, love and the fear of being caught and slowly pours it out in front of you in a perfectly mastered dark soul rendition. I never listen to the Carr version anymore. At all.
Her on-beat “yoooouuuu and me” refrains bridging you along verse to verse as her voice rises and fills out have you hooked from the beginning. For those listening on headphones, you can hear her count “<pause> ...three, four, <quick breath>” to herself to stay on beat before the last line. For some reason, I absolutely love that.
Now I’m feeling it, and I knew what I was bringing up next before Ms. Marshall’s sweet voice faded from my ears. My all-time without-question favorite bluesman: John Lee Hooker. But, still vamping on the modern blues vibe, I don’t want to jump in the way back machine quite yet. Nor is this the time for Hooker to blast my ears with “Boom Boom” or “Boogie Chillen”. So I go with a recent remake from an album he put out late in life where he did a list of his classics as duets with different major artists. Some of these were okay and very tribute-esque for the Old Master, but when he invited Van Morrison into the studio to remake I Cover the Waterfront, well…. magic happened. I have never heard a version of Hooker doing this at any point in his life that comes close to this take.
An amazing song about a man pacing the waterfront anxiously waiting for a boat to arrive carrying a woman he has not seen in a long time. I’ve been listening to this for years and still can’t help but close my eyes at around 3:45 when that deep voice rumbles “…..rolling so, so, so sloo-ow.” You even hear Van chime in from the background with an approving, if not appreciative, “Yeah..” as he feels the same thing.
At this point its time for a refill but I’m no where close to done. Not with the bourbon and not with the music. A little splash, a new ice cube and a quick search for Percy Mayfield. Mayfield was born in Minden, Louisiana and headed to Los Angeles to start his recording career. West Coast bluesmen typically adapted and started incorporating more jazz to appeal to their white audiences with a lot of bopping guitar solos and jangly piano riffs, but not Percy. Percy Mayfield is best known for his 1950 Billboard #1 hit single “Please Send me Someone to Love” as well as doing the original version of what we all now think of as Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” but that’s not what I was tapping into the Spotify search field.
Remember, we’re going low and dark here and what could be darker than Percy Mayfield’s slow deep voice singing about taking shows all over the country as a way to search for his old lover and that if he doesn’t find her soon he’s going to drown himself in the river. Written in 1953, The River’s Invitation would be covered plenty of times by names no less than Aretha Franklin and Joe Cocker, but for me, I’ll take Mr. Mayfield himself, off the Live album he recorded in the early 80’s.
I spoke to the river
And the river spoke back to me
And it said you look so lonely
You look full of misery
And if you can't find your baby
Come and make your home with me
Are you with me now? We’re four songs in… ...are YOU drinking at his point? I hope so….
So there I am, sitting on the balcony, letting my fresh ice melt a little into my liquid companion for the evening and I can’t make a decision. I am paralyzed. I can’t choose.
I mean, make no mistake: the next song is going to be Stormy Monday, the T-Bone Walker classic that will live for ever, immortal on the lips and hearts of every Bluesman across time. (This is the very song that inspired a young Memphis singer and disc jockey named Riley B. King, known to his friends as “B.B.” to take up the electric guitar. Turns out he had quite a knack for the thing.) But… ..which version?
I kicked a few around, but finally settled on one: Clapton. Specifically, CREAM from their live album in Royal Albert Hall London May 2-3-5-6 2005. But … whatever… what I wanted was Clapton. And here he is:
Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable.
Aaron Thibeaux (“T-Bone”) Walker died from pneumonia after suffering multiple strokes in Los Angeles 15 days before I was born. 30 years later, Eric Clapton shows he can single-handedly resurrect his spirit at will with nothing more than a guitar.
This post is getting long… I might have to break it up…
Next we dig into some Chicago blues. I know, I know… I said the mix had to be Delta but I also said anything goes if it feels right and its not my fault that Otis Spann happened to be probably the greatest piano player of the Chicago movement, and served as THE PIANO PLAYER for Muddy Waters both in studio and in live performances. The guy played with EVERYONE: Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Big Mama Thornton, you name it.
But he also had a solo career and like any good bluesman, knew how to pay homage to the classics and few things are as classic as the 20’s-era hit “Aint Nobody’s Business if I Do”. Originally a hit more for female singers like Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Sara Martin and the lyrics seemed to change every time it was sung, including some rather eyebrow raising versions with things like:
I'd rather my man would hit me, than to jump right up and quit me ... I swear I won't call no copper, if I'm beat up by my papa Tain't nobody's business if I do
Or when Jimmy Witherspoon put his version out in the 40’s with the lines
Some of these days I'm goin' crazy, buy me a shotgun and shoot my baby Ain't nobody's business if I do
Well okay then! Now I said we were doing dark blues but I didn’t mean THAT.
Here he is with the full band (Muddy Waters himself on guitar) from the Down to Earth collection that came out in 1995, long after we lost Otis. (This is the version I have on my mix, but if you want to see the man himself in action, here is some old footage of him doing this song ...with the baby shooting verse included. Fair warning.)
Spann died of liver cancer in Chicago in 1970. He was buried in the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. His grave was unmarked for almost thirty years, until Steve Salter (president of the Killer Blues Headstone Project) wrote a letter to Blues Revue magazine, saying "This piano great is lying in an unmarked grave. Let's do something about this deplorable situation". Blues enthusiasts from around the world sent donations to purchase a headstone. On June 6, 1999, the marker was unveiled in a private ceremony. The stone reads, "Otis played the deepest blues we ever heard – He'll play forever in our hearts".
He was posthumously elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980.
I’ll end this post with a modern favorite of mine and a great drinking song. Patrick Sweany is a Nashville-based blues/rock musician (though he was born in Ohio) that I discovered a while back on Pandora and have followed him ever since, including getting to see him live when he came to Virginia.
A good friend and guitar playing compatriot of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Sweany put out an album in 2007 with the perfect Bluesy title of “Every Hour is a Dollar Gone” . “Them Shoes” may be the best known hit from this release but that does not go with what we’re drinking. Instead we’ll go with a slow instant-classic called Hotel Women. A soulful dirge about the companionship options for a traveling musician.
Fantastic opening guitar riff, great pitch to his voice. “Woah, God forgive all the Hotel Women cuz they were there for me when it was all wrong.” Indeed Patrick. I’ll drink to that. ...and I often do.
I’ll stop there, even though that night lasted a lot longer than 7 songs. I’ll write up some more if people are interested but what I’d like to hear is songs I DONT know.
If you know of some good tracks that would match these please post them! PLEASE. If you cant find them on YouTube, just give me the name, artist and how to find the specific version (Album? Live Performance date?) and I’ll seek it out.
Cheers folks.