Fattening Frogs For Snakes
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Saturday, 24 December 2005 12:18 |
Pea Vine Blues
for Rick Steiger & R.J. Spangler
When the train runs through your back yard you know it's hard to stay in any one place too long
Take the Pea Vine Special hooked up to the Dockery Farm where the Delta blues came to flower just before the first world war
Pea Vine starts out from Cleveland, Mississippi, at 4:00 a.m., runs two miles south to Boyle (by Tommy Johnson's place in 1913)
then over to the private depot at Will Dockery's plantation, west over to Rosedale & back to Cleveland before nightfall
And when it's darkness on the Delta you can hear that train coming from a long way off & it's so easy to ride
Take the Illinois Central from New Orleans straight through to Chicago in 24 hours one way fare in 1940
is still just $16.95 or if you catch it in Memphis at the top of the Delta one way to Chicago for $11.10
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Or say you don t wanna go that far catch the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley RR & ride the Yaller Dog
up from Moorehead where the Southern cross the Dog all the way to Tutwiler where Highway 49 goes east & west & where, one night in 1903,
sitting in the station, waiting for a train that was already nine hours behind time, trying to get to a gig, the great W.C. Handy,
Father of the Blues, first heard a Delta man worry his guitar strings & sing his little railroad song:
Down by the station, catch that train & ride why stay in this godfor- saken place when it's so easy to slide
Detroit March 11/May 26, 1982
3.1.658 |