Walkin’ Blues: “She Got a Elgin Movement”

So, I’m making a playlist, but instead of just pulling a song or two from the Hindu Love Gods album, I go down the rabbit hole, listening to the whole thing for the first time in a while. The name “Hindu Love Gods,” btw, is a workaround for record company contract constraints that would make the collection unreleasable under the better-known names of “Warren Zevon along with ¾ of REM.” Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry had guested on a Zevon session, after which the four gentlemen may possibly have spent the night drinking whiskey and playing covers, tape rolling. For years, my go-to songs from this session were the rough-but-inspired versions of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret,” and Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” (a blues standard best known via the Howlin’ Wolf and Koko Taylor versions, respectively).

This time around, though, the thing that’s making my ears tingle is “Walkin’ Blues,” which has been done by everybody from Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton, from Taj Mahal to the Grateful Dead, and on and on. I had always thought it was a Robert Johnson song, though I’ve since learned that Son House is the original songwriter, and first recorded the song in 1930. Robert Johnson recorded it in 1936, not only covering “Walkin’ Blues,” but also synthesizing the song with lyrical and musical elements from a couple of other Son House songs. Those changes, plus the fact that Johnson’s version is better recorded and is also a stronger performance (my opinion, sure, but I’m in good company on this), make Johnson’s version the go-to option of the early versions. In 1941, Muddy Waters reworked the song, recording it with revised lyrics, as “Country Blues.” In 1950, Waters’ first single for Chess Records was “Walkin’ Blues,” in a version more like the House and Johnson versions.

Anyway, I’m listening to the rock energy and drive of the Hindu Love Gods version, and it’s great, when I notice Zevon sing a lyric I’d never fully registered before, a lyric that gets my curiosity revved: “She got a Elgin movement, from her head down to her toes.”

My first thought is that maybe he’s saying “elegant” with an alternate/rural pronunciation. I’ve heard this kind of thing lots of times, especially from older folks in Eastern North Carolina, where I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  For example, the word “kindly” sometimes gets used in a context where it’s clear that “kind of” is more what’s meant, as in “he’s kindly short-tempered.” “Irish potatoes” morphs, passing through “Ahrshtaters” to wind up sounding almost like “ice-taters.” But it’s not cold potatoes, it’s just regular old boiled potatoes with salt and butter. 

So, my experience with local ways of saying things had me thinking that this “Elgin movement” is something like that, maybe a regional quirk of pronunciation that Zevon has picked up from Mississippi by way of Mr. Johnson.  But nope. This is the kind of thing I might have puzzled over for weeks back in the pre-internet era, but as things are now, a name-brand search engine set me straight right away.  

Elgin was a brand of watches, well known and well-advertised back when the song was written, and for decades afterward. The image from this blues song, then, is that the woman being referenced has, um, you know, a steady and reliably rhythmic movement, from her head down to her toes. It’s a sexy and arresting image, that the enticing way she moves is as steady as the motion of a watch. The company’s long been out of business, so a sly reference that was easily understood at the time requires a little context now.

Now that I knew the answer, I started wondering, is this a pretty commonly known thing that I somehow missed? I mean, it’s a famous song, so surely somebody else has wondered about this. I posed the question, with no context, to a panel of knowledgeable bluesologists: Carl Settles (longtime Austin musician and accomplished blues pianist), Darcie Fromholz (Austin music expert and an employee at Antone’s, Austin’s Home of the Blues, way on back in The Day), Woody Russell (noted blues-Americana-jazz artist), Leeann Atherton (folk-blues-Americana singer-songwriter, as well as a music educator), and Wammo (spoken word artist/musician/singer-songwriter, formerly of the acoustic blues band The Asylum Street Spankers). 

“So, y’all,” I asked, “in ‘Walkin’ Blues’ what does the phrase ‘Elgin movement’ mean?” While it was a head scratcher for four of my five experts, Darcie Fromholz not only knew, she had a cool story about how she had come to know. One night long ago at Antone’s, in the Austin of hazy recollection, the question occurred to her, in about the way it had to me. “Huh. What’s THAT lyric all about?” Fortunately for her, she began to wonder this while located in a legendary blues venue, and thus was able to ask one of the cornerstones of the Austin blues scene, recording artist Angela Strehli, who was present at the time. Angela Strehli wasn’t sure, but she did know who was certain to know the answer: Albert Collins (!!!), who was playing there that night. If you don’t know who Albert Collins is, I’m not gonna help you out. Look him up. Anyway, Mr. Collins told Ms. Strehli, Ms. Strehli told Ms. Fromholz, and Ms. Fromholz then got to kinda blow my mind decades later, with her cool response to my query.  

All this makes for an interesting bit of lyrical context for “Walkin’ Blues,” but it also turned my mind to other lyrics that make very specific references that may be hard for future listeners to parse. Will Elliott Smith’s 1997 song “Rose Parade,” with its reference to marching “like the Duracell Bunny” make sense to people decades from now? In the Grateful Dead song “Sugar Magnolia,” written by Bob Weir and Robert Hunter, there’s a reference to a woman who can not only dance a Cajun rhythm, but can also “jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive.” I know, and you may also happen to know, that a Willys is an early version of a Jeep, but that reference obviously had much wider currency back in 1970, when the song was first released. At what point will it quit making sense to most people? Moving across the pond, Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” extols the virtues of that particular model of motorcycle, with the protagonist stating that “Nortons and Indians and Greeveses just won’t do/They ain’t got the soul of a Vincent ’52.” These types of motorcycles are British bikes [Correction: while the other two are/were British bikes, Indian is an American brand], and one of the bunch—Greeves — isn’t even made anymore. As with the other examples, then, understanding the Thompson lyric in its particularity requires some information, some specific context that is at some point going to move out of common cultural knowledge.

P.s.: guess what song I now cannot stop playing every time I pick up the guitar? Yup.

Behind the Sonnet: Blues Edition

Good news! A sonnet of mine, titled “Train I Ride (1953)” has just been published in a very cool online journal called The Museum of Americana, as part of a special music issue. This, of course, is right up my alley. I wrote the poem in 2003, submitted it a few places at the time, but I am recently seeking homes for a few old poems that I think deserve some attention and some light shining on them. This one’s a favorite. It’s my loosely-based-in-reality imagining of an awkward blues-obsessed Memphis teenager named Elvis Presley getting to meet and talk with local DJ and guitar hero Riley “B.B.” King. That’s the true part, along with Mr. King being pretty nice to the kid. But the scene I’m painting is imagined, not based on any existing account of a real meeting. I’ll link to the poem at the end of this entry, and I hope you’ll go read it after this behind-the-sonnet background.

So, some of y’all are familiar with my poem “Riley’s Blues,” which is more or less a superhero origin story for a certain recently-departed genius blues guitar player. A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to perform it with Wammo accompanying on bluesy harmonica, as part of the Austin Poetry Slam 20^th anniversary show, and it’s been published a couple of places, including this excerpt in the San Antonio Current years ago, to promote a B.B. King show (which means there’s some chance Mr. King actually read a few lines of my poem about him, so how cool is that?).

 

Anyway, here’s the background story of two poems: “Riley’s Blues,” and this sonnet that I’m so happy to finally see published. It starts with my brother.

My brother Guy, who died in August of 2003, was an Elvis freak. Spend any time around him, and you found yourself in an Elvis-heavy environment. Skinny Elvis, fat Elvis, early Elvis, late Elvis, gospel Elvis, Vegas Elvis, Hollywood Elvis, it didn’t matter. For Guy, it was all good. Sometimes the fixation became annoying. He’d come to the breakfast table, and instead of reading the newspaper, he’d have the latest Elvis biography and he’d read passages aloud. No context. He’d just launch. To me it sounded very much like that old Far Side joke: “Blah-blah-blah-Colonel Tom Parker; blah-blah-blah-Elvis’s dead twin; blah-blah-blah-Elvis’s sorry excuse for a father, blah-blah-blah-Sun records,” and so on. And so on. And, God help us all, soooooo onnnnn.

I tried to be patient. My brother was, cell by cell, being destroyed by Huntington's Disease, the disease that had also killed our father, and for a while, Guy lived with me at my house and I took care of him. I tried to provide patience and love, and I (mostly) pulled that off for almost four years, till he got a lot worse, and went to live with our mother. She hired a full-time nurse and so was able to keep him at home until the end. But this isn’t mostly about my brother; it’s mostly about two poems and how I came to write them. It’s about how way leads on to way, to steal a line from Robert Frost. It’s about what one sets out to write versus what one actually does write, and it’s about the poems that keep following us around for a while, even when we think we’re done with them.

At the time Guy was living with me, I was transitioning from an academic career track (say it with me, folks: “crappy academic job market plus paralyzing dissertation dread”) to being a writer. Over a span of several years, I sold some essays, got a job writing poetry reviews for an online bookseller, taught some business writing classes, edited some online courseware, wrote album and concert reviews for some local papers and zines, came close but got turned down for a Michener Fellowship at the University of Texas, and — with an unerring instinct for where the money isn’t — mostly wanted to write, perform, and publish poems.

 And I had some limited success. When I went to open mics, my poems were received well (but weren’t anybody’s favorites). When I went to poetry slams, I did okay (but didn’t win). When I submitted poems to journals, editors sometimes sent back appreciative comments (but only occasionally published the poems). But I was writing all the time; I was burning with it. Sometimes I’d start with a turn of phrase and run with it; sometimes I wrote scores of forced villanelles and awful sonnets, to build up my form muscles, because who knew when I’d want to write about something and only a sonnet would do? 

Sometimes I’d listen to instrumental music, and would write whatever flew into my head while listening. Sometimes I’d pull ten random words from the dictionary or from songs on the radio, or from Scrabble games, and I’d make myself write a poem that tied them together. Sometimes I’d start with moments of my own experience, and write a kind of lyrical reportage, like hey y’all, here’s what it was like to be in this moment. I felt myself on the verge of a breakthrough.

One morning in 1996, I was making a pot of coffee and Guy was sitting at the breakfast table muttering. I remember exactly what he said. It was “Blah-blah-blah-B.B. King.” I love B.B. King, and so, even though I was pretty sure I’d misheard, I said, “What was that you just said?” And he told me: when Elvis was a misfit rube kid from Tupelo, transplanted to the big city of Memphis, he heard blues music on B.B. King’s WDIA radio show, and, as a teenager, went down to Beale Street to puppy-dog around after the guitar-slinger and radio host. King at this point wasn’t famous outside Memphis, but he was a local celebrity, and there was no particular reason for him to give the kid a second glance. But he liked him, and talked to him about music a little, was slightly encouraging.

Well, I thought, this is the poem I’ve been fixing to write. What a great story! I could hear the rhythms of it in my head right away, and knew what the title should be. I told Guy, and he laughed, said, yeah, that’s just right. I wanted to write the poem as a conversation. It would be about a common love of the blues bringing together unlikely friends, and I wouldn’t sweat accuracy too much. After all, I was writing a poem, not an academic journal article. My brother was thrilled I was talking with him about Elvis and borrowing his books. He was looking forward to reading what he started calling my Elvis poem.

But if the academic in my soul was dormant, he was not dead. I began reading up on Mr. B.B. King (born Riley King), and, you know, way leads on to way, and pretty soon the story of King’s own hard childhood edged out the story of his brief and casual friendship with young Elvis Aaron Presley. My original title fell away. For a couple of weeks, I became obsessed with the new poem I was writing. If a line produced no bliss for me, I killed it. King’s story was so uplifting, such a testament to the power of art to heal and uplift, and I myself — not least because of the disease that was killing my brother and that I knew might someday kill me — needed some healing and uplifting. And the poem I wrote, “Riley’s Blues,” took me to a new place as a writer, a place where I suddenly felt some authority of voice, saw that I could combine hope with hardship, could conjure in my lines a musicality that had not been there before.

At open mics, the poem was an immediate favorite. “Riley’s Blues” gave me my first win at the slam. The poem has appeared in a couple of publications, one of which even paid. “Paid?” my poet friends asked. “What, like money?” Yep, just exactly like money. Some Austin poets have even written affectionate parodies or answer poems, or will sometimes refer to this or that line. In other words,  the poem was a genuine turn in our cool little scene’s ongoing poetic conversation. Not that I don’t still struggle in my journey as a writer, but “Riley’s Blues” was a nice leg of the trip. And for a poem that isn’t about me, it’s very personal. (In fact, it’s due to fandom and appreciation for this great musician and his beautifully transcendent personal story, that my youngest son wound up with the middle name Riley.)

You might be wondering, so I’ll go ahead and tell you: no, my brother was not happy with me at all. “It doesn’t say anything about Elvis anywhere in here!” he said, hurt and betrayed. This bit of predictable Elvis fandom was a little funny, a little sad. Guy was losing his ability to reason outside some very narrow boundaries of understanding. I told him I’d written a different poem from the one I had set out to write, but that I was happy with it. Someday, I said, I’d pick back up the original idea of the Elvis-B.B. King poem. Really. And I meant what I said. That was 1996.

Off and on, I tried to write the thing, but failed and failed and failed. My brother died August 16, 2003, and his death, though awful, was a blessing, because he had been suffering so terribly. In the weeks after the funeral I felt something nagging at me, and one October morning, I knew what it was. Easily, in one sitting, I wrote the poem I’d been stuck on for seven years. Somehow the mess of lines in my head and on various scraps of paper came together as a sonnet, and that long-ago title became my last line.

Guy and I sometimes got along and sometimes didn’t. Here’s the two of us in our early twenties, during a good period, with my dad's mom, Grandma Ruth. 

Maybe you know this: the way it is between brothers can be complicated. I’ll never be square with mine. On this one matter, though, I can say — knowing what it would count for in our own set of books — hey, Guy, you know that poem I promised you? Here it is.