The Judge He Pleaded?

Anybody who's ever sung in a covers band has probably spent untold hours undergoing the torture of trying to decipher badly articulated, semi-drowned-out lyrics from top-40 rock records. But hearing and transcribing rock lyrics is shooting fish in a barrel compared to trying to do the same with ancient blues tunes. Besides having to unscramble the Ebonic dialects of the more rural singers, the transcriber often has to deal with a scratchy, low-fidelity product, especially if the song you're trying to learn was recorded on the Paramount label. Charlie Patton, one of the very best of the old-time bluesmen, seems to have gone out of his way to sing a peculiarly mushmouth style (Son House said Patton "sounded like he was choking"), and also recorded for Paramount, which never adopted electrical technology and produced all its discs using the cheap, acoustic methods that had been around since the birth of recording.

Try listening to Patton's "Screaming and Hollering the Blues" some time, where, under a layer of scratchy static, he sings "Vicksburg's on a high hill; Jackson just below," twice, then mutters an inaudible correction before the last line of the verse -- something about his having supposed to have sung "Natchez" instead of "Jackson" (which is right -- Natchez, not jackson, lies just below Vicksburg). You'll see what I mean.


In the case of "Viola Lee," written by Noah Lewis, the harmonicist with Cannon's Jug Stompers, and recorded by the group in 1928, Lewis's vocal is, by old blues standards, fairly easy to transcribe. But the song became garbled when it was covered by
the Grateful Dead in the mid-sixties, and Bob Weir later joked when asked about the lyrics by an interviewer, that that it went:

Read it and eat it, turkey crowed it;
Down de levee, candy coated.
Read it and eat it, candy coated down;
If you miss jail sentence, it's your own damn fault.

Judge the original lyrics for yourself by listening to the MP3 of the first version of this wonderful song. To review it briefly, I find Noah Lewis's vocal to be straightforward, crude, well-articulated and straight from the heart. The lyrics are sometimes confused (judges don't plead -- that's the defendant's job), but they work. The best thing about the record is Lewis's harp work; he was a top-notch player, and achieves a tone here sweet enough to die for.