extract from "Totally Shuffled- A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
May 17th
Hambone Willie Newbern-Roll and Tumble
Blues-Okeh 78
Of course I’d
love to have the original Okeh 78, but this was ripped somewhere from the web
and was tagged as “Rolling Tumbling Blues” by Blind Will Newburn, so it took me
a while to find out what exactly it was. There are quite a few blues tracks on
the iPod that are misnamed and have the artist names spelled completely wrong,
as well as not stating what album they came from. I think that I must have
downloaded a whole bunch in one swoop; a bit of a lucky bag of blues if you
want to consider it that way. They are mostly really obscure tracks by pretty
much unknown artists-for example, it took me a bit of digging around to find
out anything about this song and the artists who made it.
“Hambone” Willie
Newbern was born in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1899, and recorded only six
tracks for Okeh over two days in March 1929 in Atlanta. All of them were
released as 78’s in 1929. I’ve only, to this moment, heard this one song by
him, but from the titles of the others alone, I’m going on a mission to try to
get hold of the others as they sound so good. “Nobody Knows (What The Good
Deacon Does)” -the A -side of this 78. “Roll and Tumble Blues” was one of the
earliest recorded versions of the Delta blues classic.
The other two 78s were “Way
Down In Arkansas” b/w ”Hambone Willie's Dreamy-Eyed Woman's Blues”, and “She
Could Toodle-Oo” b/w “Shelby County
Workhouse Blues”. Doesn’t a track called “Dreamy-Eyed Woman’s Blues” sound so
evocative merely because of the title?
There are images
of two of the labels of the 78’s on the net. Maybe the third one-which is the
aforementioned “Dreamy Woman’s” - is one of those apocryphal old blues records
that is known to exist but has not yet been found. Maybe there is only one copy
left, lying forgotten in a loft somewhere and gathering dust. Maybe it will
never be found, or maybe it’s been lost forever-the last copy being thrown out
as junk many years ago.
The labels however, are beautiful by themselves. Plain black with the Okeh logo and all the
other text in a plain white font, they helpfully include the description of
“Singing With Guitar” in a prominent position as well as advising that, “For
best results use Okeh Needles”. I love the idea of describing what the record
is on the label - Singing With Guitar- what more could be possibly needed?
As for Hambone
Willie Newbern, there’s little if nothing known about him. The blues musician
Sleepy John Estes recalled playing with him and Yank Rachell in the 1920’s and
1930’s, and that he was a pretty disagreeable character. That’s it. There’s no
known photograph of him and he died in a prison brawl around 1947 in Marvel,
Arkansas. All he left to the world were these three 78s. It’s quite odd to
think that 80 years after he recorded them, I’m sitting here on a drizzly Thursday
morning in Liverpool, a whole world away, listening and wondering.
Get/see/read Totally Shuffled here:
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