I suppose I have mentioned The Country Blues as a thing. It’s a thing.
The Blues form came to America from West Africa in the unfortunate way that most of the cultural things that came to America from Africa came. Country music came on a long strange path from India. Carnatic music left india as little groups of string players that exchanged melodic “solos” and went from place to place to place, making it’s mark in the Romanie culture in eastern Europe and roaming into the Gypsie Jazz scene in Spain and France and across into the tinker and traveler cultures in Ireland and Scotland, as it was not fixed to a place into England and eventually appalacia flavoring the string band traditions of all of those places and the melodic choices and the words and the themes and it didn't stay there either. It roamed to the Mississippi delta where it met up with the blues proper and gave the owners of guitars something to keep themselves with when the banjoists and fiddlers left them for jazz.
Country blues tries to get a guitar to do the work of a whole band. It bucks the traditions of the string bands and embraces stride piano and the stuff that would become rock and roll and what it touts and flaunts barely more specifically than womanizing is booze.
The country blues, it says, “Time signature? Naw, man- feel!”
It leans on phrases and shapes and runs and it thumps along all bleedin’ and drinkin’ peach brandy from its sock and showing you where you're wrong and swaggering.
When you leave it it calls you. It calls you baby and reminds you that you like it- confident from being a little high.
It could be any dance, but for the sake of this song, It's a Drunken Waltz, the country blues.
It's a drunken waltz the country blues
Step out the frying pan get the fire on your shoes
Don't have to live like you mean it if you're preachin’ born to lose.
It's a drunken waltz, the country blues.
She says. “You don't have to reinvent the wheel.”
I say. “Whatima do, baby? That's the way that I feel.”
She says “fine, but when you're sober you ain't got no sex appeal.
And you don't have to reinvent the wheel.”
So I sit alone and I pick guitar.
And if I had you I would wonder where you are,
But I don't, and I don't care how gone or how far.
I never wonder where you are.
So there is waltzing to be done and there are drinks to be had and if someone showed up with some cocaine, well, it wouldn't be that bad…except for waking up in the afternoon wondering, where's all that money that I had?
Oh well. It wouldn't be that bad.
Ting ting solo which is the core melody from a circus waltz called, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeez, because when I drank I was even more sure I was funny than I am now.
*repeat first verse*
The first collection of pieces I made available without a band on board was an album called Reinventing the Wheel, the title to which was inspired by the lyrics of this very song.
Which you can buy right…
Here:
