Lyr Add: When a Woman Blue

Subject: Lyr Add: WHEN A WOMAN BLUE
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 17 Jan 06 - 11:19 PM

Lyr. Add: When a Woman Blue
Arr. Leo Sowerby

When a woman blue, when a woman blue,
She hang her little head and cry-
When a woman blue, when a woman blue,
She hang her little head and cry-
(Hah hah hah high!)
When a man get blue
He grab a railroad train and ride.

I'm go'n lay my head, I'm go'n lay my head,
Down on dat railroad line-
I'm go'n lay my head, I'm go'n lay my head,
Down on dat railroad line-
(Lah hah hah blue!)
Let de train roll by,
And dat'll pacify my min'.

Carl Sandburg, 1927, "The American Songbag," pp. 236-237, with music.
Note with song- "This arrangement is based on the song as heard at the Wisconsin Players' House in Milwaukee, where it arrived through an Oklahoma poet named Ellis, who heard it from Negroes in the cotton fields of Texas. It is an early blues, not to be hurried in its rendition; if you feel like giving it very slow and very draggy that is the way for you to give it; it is a massive, lugubrious gargoyle of a song."

Any additional verses or versions?

This song seems to have been included in Brown, "North Carolina Folklore," vol. 3, "Oh, When a Man Get the Blues," collected 1919. Not seen.
Some have suggested that it may be a precursor of "I Know You Rider" and "Woman Blue."
Thread 40592: I Know You Rider

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: WHEN A WOMAN BLUE
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 18 Jan 06 - 08:07 AM

'Tisn't.

For detailed discussion re "I Know You Rider" being a distinct and different song, see thread 40592 cited above.

"Woman Blue" as given by Sandburg is nothing like. Simply two early floating blues verses, unrelated to "I Know You Rider."

True, the Lomaxes called the "I Know You Rider" original by the same title, "Woman Blue," but that was an offhand name without any particular integral relationship to its internal content -- in other words, the title didn't belong to the song. Which is why I retitled it "I Know You Rider" when I began performing it in the 1950s.

This is a tangled question! But to put it most simply, "Woman Blue" (Sandburg) is no more related to "Woman Blue" (Lomax) / "I Know You Rider" (rev. and arr. Bob Coltman) than any other two early blues are related to each other. They share mood, feeling, but not song family.

Bob

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: WHEN A WOMAN BLUE
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 18 Jan 06 - 08:44 AM

Concerning other versions of the Sandburg pair of verses, they are legion.
The first verse appears in literally dozens of 1920s blues, though it was less common in the 1930s. Lomax has one or two, I think; so do other collections.

The second verse, "I'm gonna lay my head," is common to many blues songs. It also spawned a less terminal variant,

I'm gonna lay my head on some railroad track,
Train come along, I'm gonna snatch it back.

which was featured in, among others, a blues called "Snatch It Back," issued in 1927 on Paramount by the eerie tenor/12 string picker Buddy Boy Hawkins.

A look through the Newman White, John Work, Odom and Johnson and Dorothy Scarborough books will probably turn up some earlier instances, as I suspect these verses have been around since at least WWI and likely before.

The point is that these two verses, as said above, are common "floating" verses in the blues repertoire. They barely make a distinct song in the Sandburg version, but what glues them together is the melody.

It sounds like it came from the vaudeville stage. If you sing through the Sandburg score you can feel the "yowza" touches that a stage singer would use, and a field hand would not. Mr. Ellis of Oklahoma must have rearranged it to suit himself. Indeed he probably was a hoofer/warbler, given the nature of that Milwaukee boarding house.

This tune is similar to -- not the same as, but in phrasing curiously like -- the melody that later turned up as "Broadway Blues" by Allie and Pearl Brock (The Brock Sisters), also recorded by Paramount, 1929, and released on their Broadway label. That too has a very stagey feel -- which is not to run it down. Indeed "Broadway Blues" is a great record. I wonder if the Brocks retitled it from an earlier commercial blues in honor of the label's name?

It is its tune and stage flavor that make Sandburg's "Woman Blue" such an interesting song, unique among blues despite its common words. Sandburg has several other early blues; they give us a glimpse of what people thought blues were, before the "down-home" and "city" blues styles became so prevalent as to wipe out what went before.

Given that he was traveling in a crowd of poets, lawyers, newspapermen and soon, perhaps it isn't strange that Sandburg's blues so often have a commercial feel. But that's just what makes them wonderful, because they seem to hark from a different era and milieu than even the earliest of the recorded blues. He has strange and wonderful things like "Baby in a Guinea Blue Gown" on p. 80 of his folio "New American Songbag," as well as more common things like "Joe Turner" and "C.C. Rider" in fine early versions.

He had a good ear for the blues, and it was interesting to hear him sing them, too, in that brooding, dark, strange voice that was unlike anyone else's.

Bob