Listening to Prestige 453: Mercy Dee Walton

At a younger age, I spent some time looking for this guy without success. The reason--Mose Allison covered his "One Room Country Shack" on his debut album, Back Country Suite. A huge Allison fan from the moment I first heard him, and always a fan of good songwriting, I wanted to hear more from the composer of this terrific blues. But the liner notes said that Mose had learned the song from a record by an old blues singer named Mercy Dee. Research tools being harder to come by in 1958, blues reference material being scarce and rhythm and blues reference material nonexistent, I ran into a dead end.

Mercy Dee Walton recorded his R&B hit version of "One Room Country Shack" for Specialty in 1953, and he did actually bill himself as Mercy Dee, although I was only able to track him down when I discovered his full name. Allison was the first to cover it, and since then, it has become a blues standard, recorded by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Paul Butterfield, Snooks Eaglin, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann, Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and many others.

Rhythm and blues records generally don't have the kind of complete session notes that jazz records do, but the Specialty recording of "One Room Country Shack" does credit Jesse Sailes on drums. Sailes has never gotten the acclaim that has gone to other studio drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, but he was an important figure, appearing on records by blues and R&B greats like B. B. King, Elmore James and Amos Milburn, but also on jazz sessions by Louis Armstrong and Jay McShann, and even on records by Doris Day and folkies Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders.

Many of the details about his Bluesville session remain nearly as elusive as did Mercy Dee himself. when I started looking for him. Some of his discographies don't acknowledge its existence at all. Some of them have K. C. Douglas credited as accompanying him on the guitar. One of them lists the session as having been produced by Kenneth L. Goldstein and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder.

In fact, the record was made in Berkeley, CA, by Chris Strachwitz, one of a series of recordings of Walton by Strachwitz in the winter and spring of 1961, some for the label he had just started, Arhoolie, and this one which was licensed to Bluesville. It did not include Douglas, although the guitarist had been in the studio with Strachwitz for the Sidney Maiden session which preceded this one. Maiden does join Walton,

most notably with some very hot playing on "Five Card Hand."  Otis Cherry is credited as the drummer, with Marcellus Thomas providing backup vocals. Strachwitz had met Thomas when he drove Big Joe Williams to a recording session, and had done a couple of sides with him, but decided he wasn't distinctive enough to merit a whole album, Perhaps he had gotten here, as well, by driving one of the principals.

The precision with which Walton describes the isolation of country living in "One Room Country Shack" ("Only crickets and frogs to keep me company / And the wind howling round my door") is typical of the way he could use language to capture a moment. Often, as in the case with "Shack," those moments had to do with farm life and hard labor, to which Walton was no stranger. He had worked as a farm laborer in Texas before moving to California, and he want back to it again in California in the late 1950s, as the success of "Shack" became a dim memory and the money started to dwindle. In "Have You Ever Been Out in the Country," he shows what it's like to be working in the fields:

High noon I fall up under some shade tree, tryin' to figure what move to make
12:30 I'm right back down between two middles, tryin' to get my numbers straight

In "Pity and a Shame," he delivers the kind of wry observation on the vagaries of love that one associates with his one-time Specialty labelmate, Percy Mayfield:

Now it's a pity and a shame, the tricky actions of a woman's brain,
Soon as you find you want her and her only, right away she;'ll go and make a change.

He can put you right in the middle of the action at a poker table in "Five Card Hand":

I got a five card hand, and I don't know which way to play,
I need a queen like you, to make my hand OK

Now the Kid drew aces, and he stacked them back to back,
I looked at my hand and not a smile did I crack

And like Mayfield, he has a sense of fatalism, both about women and life in general. From "Sugar Daddy" (from this session, but issued on Arhoolie:

Sometimes I get so thrilled and excited, holding some fine chick in my arms,
Then I get sad thinkin' about all the foolish bachelors who's money'll be spent long after he's gone.

And from "Shady Lane":

You may be a wino or a gambler or have your picture in the hall of fame,
Take your pick, one is as good as the other when they lay you down in shady lane.

Since tomorrow isn't promised to no man, all your planning may be in vain,
So swing today and be merry, tomorrow you may be way down in shady lane.

And tomorrow came soon for Mercy Dee Walton. He died in 1962, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The Bluesville album was called A Pity and a Shame.