Free Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald Page A

Station Blues.”
    Johnson carefully varies his approach from verse to verse, adding a new phrasing pattern here, a neatly placed rhythmic break there, and using an Arnold-style bridge verse in the middle. Since there is onlyone take it is impossible to say how fixed this pattern was, but all the verses fit the car theme, and the interplay between voice and guitar is so tight that he must have worked much of it out in advance. The most distinctive touch is the way he keeps his slide in reserve, employing it only for emphasis at key moments. Any other player would have played slide riffs to punctuate the verses, but instead he plays fast, high figures with his bare fingers, and it is easy to forget he even has a slide until he breaks off the rhythm and hits one vibrating, heart-stopping note—on a bass string, at that—before singing the final phrase. When he plays a quick set of slide triplets—the same passage he used throughout “Ramblin’ on My Mind”—near the end of the bridge verse, it comes as a startling surprise rather than an expected affectation.
    All in all, “Terraplane” was the obvious choice for a single out of that first day’s recording, and it would have been a fine dramatic finish if Johnson had stopped there. Instead, he finished the session with “ Phonograph Blues ,” another double-entendre composition with lines like “We played it on the sofa, we played it ’side the wall/My needles have got rusty and it will not play at all,” balanced by a few romantically lonely phrases that would have been better suited to something like “Kind Hearted Woman.” It was well played and sung, but had nothing to set it apart from other Johnson efforts, and ARC did not bother to issue it.
    Once again, though, the song is interesting for what it reveals about Johnson’s compositional style. Melodically, “Phonograph” is very similar to “Terraplane,” including the central bridge verse, and he could easily have sung it over the same guitar part. Instead, he sang the first take over the accompaniment he had used for “Kind Hearted Woman,” and the second take over the accompaniment he had used for “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom.” The reason for switching arrangements in midstream seems to have been that, as with “Kind Hearted Woman,” his original take threatened to run over the three-minute limit. His solution was to recut the song with a faster arrangement that would let him get all the verses in, even though this meant sacrificing the varied melody of the bridge verse and just singing it like all the others—apparently he had not worked out an appropriate variation to fit the “Dust My Broom” arrangement.
    The ease with which Johnson made this transition suggests that his accompaniments on some of the other songs may well have been less fixed than we imagine. We have only the records, and since each song was recorded with a particular arrangement it is natural for us to think of them as a unit, but Johnson obviously had some stock arrangements that he used over and over. In a similar way, Josh White had novel and interesting arrangements for most of his own songs, but when the ARC producers handed him a recent hit to cover he would just sing it over a stock twelve-bar pattern. Johnson had several of these stock patterns, and it is probable that while we think of “Rambling on My Mind” as having one accompaniment and “When You Got a Good Friend” another—to choose two songs with virtually identical vocal melodies—Johnson would have used either song’s accompaniment interchangeably for the other. Or, to consider a more interesting example: When Elmore James played the “Ramblin’ on My Mind” arrangement to accompany the “Dust My Broom” lyric, he may just have been imitating what he had heard Johnson do on a different day.
    The one