Over the last week, the topic of Chicago-centric songs has come up a couple of times for me. Once, when setting up the video page and watching Hicks roll out “Sweet Home Chicago” with Keb’ Mo’ from last March. The other time was in the comments to the album art post, faithful reader Curious Joe (if you can use the term for a relationship of such short duration) mentions being impressed that Hicks would give a nod to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band by teasing in their “Born in Chicago.” Nothing wrong with either song (though Sweet Home could probably stay out of rotation a bit), but it reminded me that there’s another Chicago song that I like much better, and that I particularly would like to hear Hicks do at some point.

Here it is, Count Basie’s “Goin’ to Chicago”, sung here by Fenton Robinson


fenton robinson
Now, there’s a couple of reasons I’d like to hear Hicks do this song. Last, there is a serious unbalance in the world between love songs and insult songs. In the spirit of equity and fairness, principles this country was founded on, we need more insult songs, and this one does just fine. But first, because Hicks, like Robinson (and, especially, Albert King), sings blues like it was soul, and I like that. And I guess, middle, because I already have a Hicks-Robinson connection in my brain because of an unsolved mystery that I’ve been working on/thinking about/ignoring for the last few months. You all did so well with album art, that I know you can google, so maybe you’ll help:

Here’s the deal. My all time favorite artist is probably Stevie Ray Vaughn. When Hicks first came on the scene, I wondered what he’d be like on some of Stevie Ray’s material. Wondered because Stevie Ray’s singing style was more traditional delta blues, but thought Hicks could kind of go nuts on the vocal or harp the way SRV does on the guitar. One of the songs I thought would fit well was “Texas Flood” - so I was over the edge when an early live taping of Hicks doing that song surfaced last summer. Here it is:

Texas Flood(ca 04?): Hicks, with Taylor Shaw-guitar, Clay Connor-bass, Derek Day-drums

Love the free-style vocal on it. Seems even that maybe Hicks was new to the song - he leaves the lyric early to go off to parts unknown, but there’s always that sink-or-swim aspect to improv anyway.

But all this got me looking into this song. It’s not an SRV original, that’s well-known. It’s a cover of an old Larry C. Davis tune. Here’s an .mp3 of the original, but for Stevie Ray, you get more. You’ll notice that Stevie Ray’s vocal on this tune is very close to Davis’ - the magic is in the guitar.

Larry C. Davis - Texas Flood

SRV - live at El Mocambo (1983)

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

So, I go along happily thinking only musical thoughts about these various performances until I make the probably misguided and definately unsuccessful attempt to learn to play TF. While doing that, I’m consulting a book by Wolf Marshall, in which he says:

In typical gentlemanly fashion, Stevie once gave $5000.00 to Larry Davis, who was credited with writing the song. When he later learned it was written by Fenton Robinson, the guitarist in Davis’s band, he laid some cash on Fenton as well.

Now, I’d already googled this song into submission when I was first thinking about SRV’s influences and had never seen anything saying that any one other than Davis had written it (can’t count a couple of truly misinformed people who were under the impression it had sprung whole from Stevie’s brain). So I went on a very brief rampage trying to find something to back-up the idea that Robinson wrote it. But I got distracted by the fact of Robinson himself and left the mystery behind to listen to his music.

But now I’m back wondering - who wrote Texas Flood? Want to wonder along with me? I’m going to email Marshall and I’ll come back with what he says. But see if you can google wider and deeper and come up with something. But here’s my theory: Davis did write the tune, but, naturally, Robinson, as his lead guitarist, would have created and laid down the tasty guitar solos that inspire just about everyone who plays this. That would be the part that would have caught SRV, and from his point of view then, Robinson wrote the song because he wrote the part he cared about. But we’ll see what Marshall says and what you find out. If you haven’t heard enough of TF, here it is one more time, with Robinson on vocal and lead guitar:

If you don’t like that question, here’s an easier one, because I already know the answer to it. There’s another controversy regarding misattribution of song authorship connected to Robinson, and it touches very tangentially on Hicks’ music in a totally other way.

Or you can just add to our collection of Chicago songs (not sure I can really stand that) or, better, our collection of insult songs. No love songs, not on this post anyway.

categories: music
 tags: , , , , ,