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.

Listening to Prestige 452: Sidney Maiden

Sidney Maiden was very lightly recorded in his lifetime, so we can thank Prestige Bluesville for this, his only LP recording. Maiden was a West Coast transplant from Louisiana who hooked up with Mississippian K. C. Douglas in Oakland, and they worked together frequently, making a few records under Douglas's name and a few under Maiden's. Their style probably reflects their adopted West Coast home more than their southern upbringing: they don't really sing or play Delta blues. With Maiden's harmonica and Douglas's guitar, their style, if anything, is more reminiscent of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, New Yorkers by way of the Piedmont country.

Douglas was reunited with Maiden for the Bluesville session, and their eclectic set includes a couple of numbers associated with Terry and McGhee, "Fox Chase" (here called "Sidney's Fox Chase") and "Sweet Little Woman."

Maiden’s song selections in general are interesting, and the credits for them are interesting too. We live in a world where any combination of notes is likely to be litigated, and any hit song will bring lawsuits out of the woodwork. This probably got started with the plagiarism suit against George Harrison for allegedly pirating the tune of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for his "My Sweet Lord," and it really kicked into high gear recently when the estate of Marvin Gaye won a $5.3 million lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Gaye's estate claimed, and a judge upheld, that Thicke/Williams's "Blurred Lines" had plagiarized Gaye's "Got to Give It Up."

There's a certain magic in the words "5.3 million dollars" that one would not find in discussions of music of a different era. Miles Davis took composer credit for a tune written by Jackie McLean, "Dig." McLean considered suing Miles, and consulted a lawyer, but the lawyer told him that even if he one, the royalties for a jazz composition would not cover the cost of the lawsuit.

So it was with the blues. Composer credit for "Sidney's Fox Chase" on the Bluesville album goes to Sidney Maiden. It's probably a tune that predates the 20th century, but it's certainly best known by Sonny Terry, and its first prominent exposure was Terry's performance of it in John Hammond's 1938 "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall. A 1944 recording gives "Arranged by Sonny Terry" in lieu of any composer credit at all. The flip side of that record is "Sweet Woman," composer credit to Sonny Terry, although it was probably composed by Terry's mentor Blind Boy Fuller, and its antecedents are likely earlier than that. Here, co-composer credit is given to Maiden and fellow Oakland resident Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller.

In those days, songs, especially in the blues and rhythm and blues worlds, were somewhat protean, coalescing, separating and re-coalescing, with no one paying too much attention, unless by chance one flew beyond its niche audience and became a hit in the pop (white) world. Such was the case with "Earth Angel," probably written by Jesse Belvin, with parts of it lifted from other sources. "Earth Angel" became a huge national hit, enough of a moneymaker for Belvin to sue for credit, and eventually receive partial credit.

Maiden's name is on all of the songs on this album, and he likely as not did write most of them, but a few co-writing credits are interesting. "My Black Name" is credited to Sonny Boy Williamson/Sidney Maiden, but Williamson first recorded it in 1941. B. B. King would later record it, in 1964, as "I Can Hear My Name," composer B. B. King. "Sidney's Worried Life Blues," credited to Sidney and Big Maceo Merriweather, was recorded by Big Maceo in 1941, with Sidney's name nowhere near Maceo's composer credit, and the same song, as "Someday Baby Blues," written by Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, was recorded in 1936. "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" (Sidney Maiden/Memphis Minnie) was recorded by Memphis Minnie, again in 1941, which was coincidentally around the time that Maiden arrived in Oakland and began to be exposed to a wide range of recorded blues.

All of this is interesting rather than shocking. There was no $5.3 million at stake, nothing to make it worth suing anyone for. "Worried Life Blues" and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues" did, later on, make some money for someone. "Worried Life Blues" has become one of the most recorded blues songs of all time, with versions by nearly every big name blues artists, by rhythm and blues stars like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, even as a jazz tune by Oscar Pettiford. And then into bigger money territory when recorded by rock stars the Animals, the Blues Magoos, and Eric Clapton. Very little of which benefitted Merriweather, who died in 1953, or Maiden, whose name was only attached to his version. "Me and My Chauffeur" was recorded by Nina Simone, Big Mama Thornton, and Geoff and Maria Muldaur, among others, but its closest brush with big bucks came in a recording by an early (pre-Grace Slick) version of the Jefferson Airplane. Memphis Minnie lived to 1973, but the last 13 years of her life were confined to a nursing home after a stroke, barely getting by on social security, so it doesn't seem that she saw much from "Me and My Chauffeur."

Any blues becomes personal in the hands of a good bluesman or woman, and that's the case with all of the songs on this collection. Sidney Maiden is worth a listen.