3:11
single, 1940
Written by Blind Willie McTell
McTell recorded this song three times, but this is the original version, as evidenced by the spoken-word introduction, in which he says it's a song "I made myself, originally this is from Atlanta." Interestingly, he wrote it around 1927 and it was recorded in that era by several different women blues singers, but he didn't commit it to wax until 1940. Over a sparse twelve-string, McTell lays out the hallucinatory dying wish of the funeral of a gambler who used "crooked cards and dice," shot by the police; the reason is not given. The dying man demands, among other things, police in his funeral march, the high sheriff at the head playing blackjack. "One foot up, a toenail dragging / Throw my buddy Jesse in the hoodoo wagon." A marked card on his hearse, the judge putting dice in his shoes. "I want nine men going to the graveyard / But only eight mens comin' back." It's an eerie, surreal vision, the revenge poetry of the damned, and it's easy to see how this ironic black humor inspired Dylan's later, similarly hallucinatory jeremiads.
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