LISTEN TO ONE: I Got a Woman
There's a reason why a street singer like Snooks Eaglin, or a medicine show performer like Pink Anderson, played songs they'd heard on the radio. They were playing for the people, and their livelihood depended on catching and holding the attention of passersby, who might be factory workers or street sweepers, waiters or chefs, doctors or lawyers or teachers, Black or white. And the one thing these disparate groups had in common was the radio. If you wanted to hook them into stopping and listening, you played songs that they'd respond to.
This is Anderson's third album for Bluesville, and in many ways his most representative one. Rediscovered by
Sam Charters, the great folklorist whose work spurred the blues revival, he made two albums for Bluesville that were mostly blues, although, as Charters observed in the liner notes to the first collection,
he didn't think of himself as a blues singer. He had spent most of his life as a medicine show entertainer, and he had sung the blues only when he was playing at small parties, or just for himself when the long hours of his job were over. It was only when he began singing that he realized how fully he had developed his own personal blues style.
Anderson was doing what he had done all his life, singing for the people. And if the people was one person, a dedicated folklorist who wanted to hear the blues, then then the blues were what he would give.
In this session, once again in Anderson's Spartanburg home, he sang the repertoire he was most familiar with -- the medicine show favorites, and some songs from the radio. Charters describes their recording technique --
Pink and I did all the recording for his Prestige albums in the front room of his house. The only problem we had was refreshing his memory on some of the songs he hadn't been performing. Usually he would get the first line or so, then we'd strain some more of the corn whiskey, and the rest of the song would come back a verse at a time...I had a large, heavy Ampex tape that went in the trunk of [my] old Plymouth coupe. As always, I did the recording with the microphone held in my hand, so I could pull it back if he leaned too close, and I could move it down to the guitar for his solos.
A far cry from Rudy Van Gelder's studio, but it got the job done.
For this session, he sang old favorites from the medicine show circuit, some patter songs and some hokum, and some songs from the radio (which Charters, deep as he was in his blues collecting, did not seem to recognize as popular hits). He sang "In the Jailhouse Now," the Jimmie Rodgers classic which had recently been a hit again for country singer Webb Pierce, and one that had also made Snooks
Eaglin's list, Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman," a song that was well on its way to becoming a standard in almost every genre. Blues singers like Eaglin and Anderson, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, recorded it. So did rock and rollers (Elvis Presley, Bill Haley), doowoppers (Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, the Dells), contemporary pop singers (Sammy Davis Jr., Bobby Darin), traditional pop singers (Jo Stafford, as "I Got a Sweetie"), country singers (Carl Perkins, the Everly Brothers). Jazz versions were recorded by Jimmy Smith, Herbie Mann, Johnny "Hammond" Smith. Anderson gives it that comfortable, well-worn version of an old pro singing what the people want to hear.
The Bluesville album was called Medicine Show Man, Vol. 2. It was rereleased many years later by Folkways, and Charters reminisced:
It's been more than twenty years since I saw Pink Anderson for the last time, but if I close my eyes I can still remember his long, lanky body looming in his shadowy doorway when he came to answer a knock, and I can still hear his deep, pleased laugh when he told me one of his old medicine show jokes.
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