Prompt: "A song by someone who was born in the 19th century"
Selected by Joe
"Southern Can Is Mine"
Blind Willie McTell
single, 1931
Okay, I take it back. Today's prompt was more difficult than yesterday's. Not because there isn't any worthy music from musicians born before 1900—of course there is, duh—but more so because I am just not personally familiar with most of it. I pictured my own personal Summer Song Challenge playlist consisting of great (or at least interesting) music that I loved (or might grow to love) and wanted to share with (or inflict upon) the world. A prompt like today's forces me to choose something that I'm not already familiar with, and that feels uncomfortable.
I don't want to act like I'm speaking as a Blind Willie McTell advocate. I know very little about the guy. He was born in 1898, so he's here. I've heard the name before because Bob Dylan has a song called "Blind Willie McTell" that ended up on a B-sides compilation I acquired very early in my music education, but that doesn't mean that I could sing you that song off the top of my head, or be able to tell you a single lyric (assuming here that the song is biographical at all, which I can't in full honesty confirm for you without looking it up). I know he is a Piedmont blues singer, in the same vein as the only other two Piedmont blues singers I've ever featured on this blog before today—Mississippi John Hurt and Doug Quattlebaum. But that's it.
I don't want to act like I'm speaking as a Blind Willie McTell advocate. I know very little about the guy. He was born in 1898, so he's here. I've heard the name before because Bob Dylan has a song called "Blind Willie McTell" that ended up on a B-sides compilation I acquired very early in my music education, but that doesn't mean that I could sing you that song off the top of my head, or be able to tell you a single lyric (assuming here that the song is biographical at all, which I can't in full honesty confirm for you without looking it up). I know he is a Piedmont blues singer, in the same vein as the only other two Piedmont blues singers I've ever featured on this blog before today—Mississippi John Hurt and Doug Quattlebaum. But that's it.
So this blog post can't possibly be constructed the way I want it to be, because I can't speak as a source of knowledge at this point. All I know is what I read on the guy's Wikipedia page. And I could list some of the things I found out there—that he was known for playing the twelve-string guitar; that he recorded for the Library of Congress in 1940 and was paid $10 for it; that he had substance abuse issues and ended up playing music on the street for most of the final years of his life; that the final time he recorded was when an Atlanta record store owner recognized him busking outside the store and exchanged a tape-recorded session in the store for a bottle of corn liquor; that it's actually pronounced "MAK-tul" and not "mik-TELL"—but why come to Puke on Your Birthday for that when you could read all of it and more on the same website that I took it from?
I could also say that the song that I chose today is covered by the White Stripes, and it's the final song on their great 2000 sophomore album De Stijl. At least here I can speak with a non-zero amount of authority, being familiar with the White Stripes' discography and Jack White's interests in old music (his Third Man Records has released archived recordings of Blind Willie McTell before). In fact, I'll say something that might be a little ridiculous and possibly flat-out wrong, but have at it anyway: in Blind Willie McTell's vocals, at least on "Southern Can Is Mine," I can very distinctly hear Jack White. What I'm saying is that Jack White must have partially based his own singing voice off of McTell's, because they are quite similar. That's the only hot take I can provide at this juncture. Sorry it's not more.
I like this music but I struggle to take it seriously sometimes. I said that yesterday about the young folks, and I see the similarity in how I feel, but I also think that my feelings are for the opposite reasons. With the Linda Lindas, I failed to take them seriously because not enough time has passed since they started making music, and they haven't yet leveled up to the point where I feel like there's something special there. With Blind Willie McTell and all his peers, maybe too much time has passed. This song will be 100 years old in eight years. That's a long time, and it's enough time that a lot of the shine that it must have once had has worn off. Even the goddamn White Stripes cover is 23 years old and feels older than that. So much music in the past century has taken McTell's music as its base and added to it, and artists every year just keeping adding and adding, and at this point Piedmont blues music is buried so deeply that I have a hard time breathing when I'm down there.
But I also have a lot of time to dig, so give me time, and I'll eventually uncover this shit for myself. I'm just not there yet.
I could also say that the song that I chose today is covered by the White Stripes, and it's the final song on their great 2000 sophomore album De Stijl. At least here I can speak with a non-zero amount of authority, being familiar with the White Stripes' discography and Jack White's interests in old music (his Third Man Records has released archived recordings of Blind Willie McTell before). In fact, I'll say something that might be a little ridiculous and possibly flat-out wrong, but have at it anyway: in Blind Willie McTell's vocals, at least on "Southern Can Is Mine," I can very distinctly hear Jack White. What I'm saying is that Jack White must have partially based his own singing voice off of McTell's, because they are quite similar. That's the only hot take I can provide at this juncture. Sorry it's not more.
I like this music but I struggle to take it seriously sometimes. I said that yesterday about the young folks, and I see the similarity in how I feel, but I also think that my feelings are for the opposite reasons. With the Linda Lindas, I failed to take them seriously because not enough time has passed since they started making music, and they haven't yet leveled up to the point where I feel like there's something special there. With Blind Willie McTell and all his peers, maybe too much time has passed. This song will be 100 years old in eight years. That's a long time, and it's enough time that a lot of the shine that it must have once had has worn off. Even the goddamn White Stripes cover is 23 years old and feels older than that. So much music in the past century has taken McTell's music as its base and added to it, and artists every year just keeping adding and adding, and at this point Piedmont blues music is buried so deeply that I have a hard time breathing when I'm down there.
But I also have a lot of time to dig, so give me time, and I'll eventually uncover this shit for myself. I'm just not there yet.
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