sliding delta

Old blues tunes can be cryptic and mysterious. Sometimes the meanings of certain words or phrases is forgotten over time, and such is the case with the song Sliding Delta.

There are a currently a couple interpretations circulating that deal with the possible meaning of the phrase. One is that it dates from the time of the great flood of 1927, the worst water disaster the gulf states endured in modern times up until Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2006. Another theory is that Sliding Delta was a local name for a train that ran near the small town of Avalon, Mississippi, and that the song originated with John Hurt, an Avalon farmer who recorded it in 1928, during the one and only recording session of his youth. (He recorded again in the 1960's as Mississippi John Hurt after he was "rediscovered" by blues researchers.) The lyrics of Hurt's version support this second theory regarding the origins of the term.

The sliding delta runs right by my door;
I'm going up the country, baby, don't you want to go?

My suitcase is packed, and my trunk's already gone,
I can't sleep, baby, and the world is waiting on.

When Tommy Johnson covered the song the following year, his version was vague and the lyrics extremely generic and all-purpose, in that special way that only certain kinds of blues lyrics can be. But Sliding Delta is one of Johnson's masterpieces all the same, and all the elements that made him memorable are there -- the resonant and perfectly-intoned voice, the extremely clean and precise fingerpicking, the ghostly falsetto, and the dovetailed interplay between the sung and picked parts, which gives the listener the impression that Johnson uses the instrument as an extension of his voice.

As with most of Tommy Johnson's songs, the words are difficult to understand. However, this music is about the sound, and not the sense. As Lewis Carroll wrote, "Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself."

Tommy Johnson was one of the genre's flawed geniuses, a tragic figure who was snared by that old devil alcohol early in life and never got free of it. Among the Great Old Ones (as I like to call the blues masters of the 20's and 30's), he had the most notorious reputation of anyone among this fraternity of mostly hard drinkers, and one of his favorite refreshments was the methanol -- the "juice" -- found in the cooking fuel Sterno. His habit of drinking Sterno inspired his most famous song, Canned Heat, and the song lent its name to one of the best-known of the San Francisco rock bands of the '60's.

Cryin' canned heat, mama, cryin' sure, Lord, killin' me;
Canned heat don't kill me, I may never die."

Johnson's work is narrow in scope, as he was limited to maybe half a dozen song types, or templates. A listener familiar with old blues soon recognizes the small number of song patterns circulating within this mostly orally-transmitted tradition, and the tendency of singers to recycle the patterns in which they were most fluent and retrofit them with new lyrics. So while Tommy Johnson left few songs, most of them are outstanding examples of the genre at its best.

He was the first blues musician to claim to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the flawless guitar technique he exhibited drunk or sober, a brag later reincarnated by Robert Johnson (no relation), but I've always suspected the Devil took possession of poor Tommy earlier than the contract specified. He recorded only twice, cutting seven sides for Victor in Memphis in 1928, and nine more for Paramount the following year for Paramount at the company's studio in Grafton, Wisconsin. He might have recorded more but mistakenly believed that he had signed away his right to do so, when in reality he had signed a copyright settlement with the trio the Mississippi Sheiks allowing them to use one of his melodies for a recorded set of lyrics of their own. However, he was too intoxicated at the time to fully understand the nature of what he had signed, and went through the rest of his short life unaware of the oversight.

There's a rough version of Sliding Delta posted on YouTube, but it contains all flaws of the original recording made by Paramount, a bargain-basement label which used outmoded equipment and technology (the diaphragm method) long after all the big recording firms had begun using electricity. A much better version of the song is on Yazoo Records' two-CD collection, "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of," consisting of transcribed, extremely rare and seldom-heard 78 rpm discs. It includes blues, gospel, and string band barn dance-style country music, all mingled together and all lovingly re-mastered by Yazoo's cadre of expert and dedicated engineers. If you don't want to buy the whole enchilada, you can hear a 29-second snippet of Sliding Delta as well as a lot of other good stuff at Amazon.

Even better yet, you can listen to the entire Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of version of the song on MP3 at Rhapsody.com.