PHOTO's: Will the Real Blonde on Blonde image sign in please -- and hum a few bars of "Ain't no More Cane"? Response to Pribek's Relentless attempts to Confuse Me, "Its all been ground down to molasses"
Retrieved by Pat Darnell [HERE]
Sometimes it pays dividends to go to sites that have been tenderly set up to preserve and protect valuable works. So in response to the full court press by Pribek [HERE] and many other places, here is the lucidity
his question requires: Trying to stump me in my passion for Texas Hill country, Pribek wrote, "...any cane on the Brazos?" Link | May 30th, 2009 at 10:13 amTherefore I answer: Cane is gone along the Brazos. It is a muddy fast moving, geological youngster of a river. There is no beaches or ox bows, nor lazy Huck Finn Islands found along the Brazos course. However, I will have to get back to you on the situation of how much cane can be found today, if 5% or 50% of its original marsh grasses...
The other connection, I think Mr Pribek is
also trying to fool me with Bob Dylan and his Basement Tapes. I had the double album Blonde on Blonde, until someone absconded it. I probably should have drilled pin holes in the two records to signify them as mine. If you have my B on B, and you are reading this, please contact me and tell me how it has been going.It turns out, I never really liked the album, since it's mixing is [low quality] questionable -- "...Blonde on Blonde has been issued in no fewer than eleven different forms, with marked differences in mixes and track lengths. No specific version has been established as canonical [wkpd]..."
I must have had one of the bad ones... eh?
One more little negative thing about Dylan; his singing voice puts a desire to avoid and reject his cuts. It is a clash of temperaments, I never have fully appreciated his nasal, deep-South, country attempt. That is because I grew up down here where the real thing can be heard and hated. I assume, and correct me if not possible, that Dylan is from a Northern rural Minnesota upbringing. His adaptation of the deep South Delta Blues Rock voice is an agitation as a shade fake in my ear. Call me a purist, but down home is down home... no?
To understand some of this would require one to work here with the scorching sun on your back, and impossible clay mud sticking to your boots. One has to stay hydrated like you cannot believe, and that is the tonal basis you find usually from New Orleans, to Black Baptist Churches of Houston near briny back waters and marshes along the Intracoastal Waterway located from the Rigolets, Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal to Industrial Canals in Texas .... a different breed lives down here.
Dylan is okay for trying, I suppose, but he has never been the real thing for my listening pleasure.
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Ain't No More Cane
Album: The Basement Tapes [SOURCE]
"This is actually a prison work song rather than a normal work song, if you feel like splitting hairs about it. It functions the same way as any work song, but the vocabulary is that of the Texas prisons and it is about prison life. There are many versions of it, the arrangement that the Band uses should be noted to the "king of the twelve string guitar" Huddie 'Leadbelly' Leadbetter. Bruce Jackson's book 'Wake Up Dead Man' has a lot of information about this song as well as other prison songs."
--Erin Sebo
G C G
Ain't no more cane on the Brazos(1)
G A D
Oh, oh, oh, oh...
G C G
Its all been ground down to molasses
D7 C G
Oh, oh- oh, oh- oh...
You shoulda been on the river in 1910
They were driving the women just like they drove the men.
Go down Old Hannah,(2) don'cha rise no more
Don't you rise up til Judgment Day's for sure
Ain't no more cane on the Brazos
Its all been ground down to molasses
Captain(3), don't you do me like you done poor old Shine
Well ya drove that bully(4) til he went stone blind
Wake up on a lifetime(5), hold up your own head
Well you may get a pardon and then you might drop dead
Ain't no more cane on the Brazos
Its all been ground down to molasses.
[ footnotes by Source:]
1. For all those without a grasp of American geography, the Brazos is a river in Texas which features in many prison songs because it runs past virtually all of the old prisons in Texas.
2. Old Hannah is the name given to sun.
3. Captain is one of the ranks in the hierarchy of prison guards, the man in charge of half the workers in a field.
Also used outside the prisons to mean the White boss. In some of the old slave songs the singers call Jesus their captain.4. Bully: an inmate working in the line. The word can also be used as a verb, in which case it means working hard.
5. Lifetime sentence that is.
2 comments:
Not to distract from your good post here, but I feel I must point out that, according to the AP Stylebook a male with yellow hair is "blond" and a female with yellow hair is "blonde". I suppose one might consider a guitar with unstained pale wood, but I think one must at least consider that the album title is a reference to lesbianism.
As usual, nice catch Mr Jacoby. I am not unconvinced Dylan didn't feel like he is part of his generation. I get a sense that he felt he might have been born in the wrong era, even though he experiences fantastic wealth, fame, and modern paranoia.
That Joan Baez, and the fashion model story, when he was separating from his first wife...[??] I dunno. He might have had a belly full of alternative sex styles back then.
If he were born, say, in Napoleon's time, he would have been a favorite with old Bonaparte.
Or someone in charge forgot to look up "blonde and/or blond" in Merriam-Webster and simply made a typo. Thanks DJ for dropping by. pdnf
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