DUTC#54 January 28, 2024

Feature Songs: “Pick a Bale of Cotton” / “The Midnight Special”

This final January DUTC for 2024 was inspired by my friend Randy Dafoe’s post (Dec.9, 2023) on Mostly Music Covers featuring one of my all-time favorite musicians Ry Cooder (https://mostlymusiccovers.com/2023/12/09/ry-cooder/). At the end of the post, Randy mentions Ry’s latest album, a collaborative effort with Taj Mahal (another favorite of mine), and features one of the songs from that album, “Hooray Hooray,” written by Leroy Kirkland and Sonny Terry. I had heard a few cuts from this new album some time ago, but it was not in my, shall we say, “wheelhouse” at the time of his post and…well, I think you can figure out what’s coming!

As a follow up and a “tip-of-the-hat” thank-you, I wanted to feature two other songs from the album Get On Board, both by Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “The Midnight Special.” Both these songs are actually traditional American folk songs, with the former also labelled as a traditional American work song, but many of the lyrics to these songs have been re-worked over the years in many subsequent covers.

The Songs

“The Midnight Special” (sometimes titled “Midnight Special”) is another song that is thought to have originated among prisoners in the American South. The song refers to the passenger train, Midnight Special, and its “ever-loving-light” (sometimes “ever-living-light”). The song is historically performed in a country-blues style from the viewpoint of the prisoner. It has been performed by a wide range of artists over the years, including the aforementioned Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Abba, and Paul McCartney, just to name a few. My favorite Big Bill Broonzy story comes from when he was being interviewed about his music and the interviewer asked: “Do you consider your songs to be folk music? ”to which he responded: “All music is folk music: I aint never heard no horse sing a song.”

“Pick a Bale of Cotton” (sometimes titled as Pic a Bale o’ Cotton) was first recorded by Texas inmates James “Iron Head” Baker (1933) and Mose “Clear Rock” Platt (1939). It was later popularized by Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter). Johnny Cash, Harry Belafonte, The Vipers Skiffle Group, The Quarrymen, and Lonnie Donegan have all also released adaptations of the song. In some versions, the song is sung with increasing speed as it progresses, with ensuing verses having references to “me and my wife” replaced with lines like “me and my gal,” “me and my papa,” or “me and my friend.”

Lyrics in the song were first recorded in print by Howard Odum in 1905: “Get up in the mornin’ when ding dong rings” / “Look at the table – see the same damn thing.” However, these lyrics are known as “floater lines,” appearing in various African American songs of that period, most notably in “Grade-Songs,” which are about prison captains and have nothing to do with a train or a light. The first printed reference to the song itself was in a 1923 issue of Adventure magazine. The song was first commercially recorded on the OKeh label in 1926 as “Pistol Pete’s Midnight Special” by Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell, who was a member of McGinty’s Oklahoma Cow Bow Band. As is the case with many of these songs that come to us from this era, there are many contradictory stories to what the lyrics mean.

The Artists

Walter Brown “Brownie” McGhee (1915-1996) was an American folk and Piedmont blues singer and guitarist, best known for his collaboration with the harmonica player Sonny Terry. McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and, at about the age of four, contracted polio, incapacitating his right leg. He spent much of his youth immersed in music, singing with a local harmony group, the Golden Voice Gospel Quartet, and teaching himself to play the guitar. He also played five-string banjo and ukulele, as well as studying piano. He eventually underwent surgery that was funded by the March of Dimes, enabling him to walk. At age of 22, McGhee became a travelling musician, working in the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Later in his career, McGhee appeared in small roles in films and on television. He and Terry appeared in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy The Jerk, and in 1987 he gave a small but memorable performance as the ill-fated blues singer Toots Sweet in the supernatural thriller, Angel Heart.

Saunders Terrell (1911-1986), known as Sonny Terry, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician, who was known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included whoops and hollers and occasionally imitations of trains and fox hunts. He was born in Greensboro, Georgia, and his father, a farmer, taught him how to play basic blues harp. He sustained injuries to his eyes and went blind by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work, and was forced to play music to earn a living. After his father died, he began playing with Piedmont blues-style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller.

It is his relationship to Fuller that eventually led to his partnership with McGhee. After Fuller’s death in 1941, Columbia Records promoted McGhee as “Blind Boy Fuller No.2.” By that time, McGhee was recording for Columbia’s subsidiary Okeh Records in Chicago, but his real success came after he moved to New York in 1942, teaming up with Sonny Terry, whom he had known since 1939, when Terry was Fuller’s harmonica player. The pairing was an overnight success. As a duo, Terry and McGhee did most of their work from 1958 until 1980, spending 11 months of each year touring and recording dozens of albums. Despite their fame as “pure” folk artists, in the 1940s Terry and McGhee fronted a jump blues combo with honking saxophone and rolling piano, which was variously billed as “Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers” or “Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five.” In 1982, they both received a National Heritage Fellowship, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. That year’s fellowships were the first bestowed by the NEA.

Henry St. Claire Fredricks Jr. (1942), better known by his stage name Taj Mahal, is an American blues musician. He plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, as well as many other instruments, often incorporating elements of world music into his work. Mahal has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more that 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Hawaii, and the South Pacific. At a fairly young age, he recognized the stark difference between the “popular music” of his day and the music that was being played in his home, as his father was an Afro-Caribbean jazz arranger and piano player. He became interested in jazz by listening to the likes of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Milt Jackson. As his parents came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, they instilled in their son a sense of pride in his Caribbean and African ancestry through their stories. He chose his stage name, Taj Mahal, because of dreams he had about Mahatma Gandhi, India, and social tolerance. He started using his stage name in the late 50s, early 60s, around the same time he began attending the University of Massachusetts. Despite a path leading to working in agriculture, Mahal decided to pursue music instead of farming. In college he led a rhythm and blues band called Taj Mahal & The Elektras.

For Information on Ry Cooder, please check out Randy’s excellent bio at the link above!

Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder originally joined forces in 1965, forming The Rising Sons when Cooder was just seventeen. The band was signed to Columbia Records, but an album was not released, and the group disbanded a year later. The 1960s recording sessions, widely bootlegged, were finally issued officially in 1992. Cooder then played on Taj Mahal’s 1968 self-titled solo debut album. Fifty seven years later, they teamed up again for Get On Board. It is well worth the wait!

First up are the two originals/covers by Terry & McGhee, followed by the cover/covers by Cooder and Mahal. Enjoy.

“Pick a Bale Of Cotton.” Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Original release date 1952.

“The Midnight Special.” Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Original release date 1978

“Pick a Bale Of Cotton.” Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal. Get On Board, 2022.

“The Midnight Special.” Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal. Get On Board, 2022.

Los Angeles 2024