“Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James (1931)
“Woman I loved, took her from my best friend
He got lucky, stole her back again.”
I don’t really know if seminal Delta blues performer Skip James came up with this little couplet on his own or was simply borrowing it from some traditional blues song. I just know it defines the peculiarities of love perfectly.
The “he got lucky” concept, which turns amour into a game of chance, is just so wonderfully happenstance. And how much more blues can you get in 16 words? He loses his woman and his best friend all at once.
This lyric would by recycled by K.C. Douglas in 1948 for his song “Mercury Blues.” That song would achieve its greatest fame when Alan Jackson released his version in 1993.
“Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds (1962)
“And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes and they came out just the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers and business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.”
Much of Americana music is built on protest – the poor versus the rich. Reynolds was a preeminent social songwriter in the days before Dylan. She wrote this brilliant takedown of the bourgeoisie in the early ‘60s, and Peter Seeger had a hit with it in ’63. Reynolds eventually released it on an album about five years later.
When Jenji Kohan was looking for the perfect way to open her suburban satire Weeds at the beginning of the 21st century, she found it by looking back 40 years. Reynolds' version served as the theme song for the show into its second season before Kohan began commissioning an array of others to record their own take.
Musicians from Elvis Costello to Regina Spektor to Death Cab for Cutie to Englebert Humperdinck all took a turn.
“After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young (1970)
“There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high
I was thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie.”
Young combined incisive lyrics with sensational rock and roll about as well as anyone ever has. This lyric, from the second verse of the title track of his third solo album, is a textbook example of withholding.
The song “After the Gold Rush,” which highlights a decline in America that is both environmental and spiritual, speaks of a looming threat, like the Star Child of 2001 returning with unknown intent. Young never reveals what the friend told him, which endows “I was hoping it was a lie” with mystical dread.
When Dolly Parton covered this song alongside Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt in 1999, she changed the lyric from “I felt like getting high” to “I felt like I could cry.”
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