It sounds like a schoolyard chant, something shouted over handclaps and jump rope. Like many nursery rhymes, it’s dark at the center. Different kids might use different words, but the story’s always the same:
I was born—in a lump
Mother died—and my daddy got drunk
Left me here to—die or grow
In the middle of Tobacco Road
Grew up in—a dusty shack
And all I had—was a’hangin’ on my back
Only you know—how I loathe
This place called Tobacco Road
But it’s home—the only life I’ve ever known
Only you know how I loathe—Tobacco Road
Gonna leave—get a job
With the help—and the grace from above
Save some money—get rich and old
Bring it back to Tobacco Road
Bring that dynamite—and a crane
Blow it up—start all over again
Build a town—be proud to show
And keep the name of—Tobacco Road
But it’s home—the only life I’ve ever known
I despise you—because you’re filthy
But I love you—because you’re home
73,368 people lived in Durham, North Carolina in 1950, about seventy thousand more than who’d lived and toiled there in the 1880s when the W. Duke, Sons & Co. and W.T. Blackwell & Co. Tobacco manufacturers began business, securing the area’s economic future. The 1920s through the 40s brought the establishment of religious and secular schools and colleges, including Trinity College, later renamed Duke University, and the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), which would add a law school. Churches, arts organizations, newspapers, and medical schools prospered, and desegregation lawsuits reigned under the widening shadow of racism and within shafts of light brought by a vital and active civil rights movement. Despite antitrust lawsuits initiated by the federal government, the tobacco industry flourished, defining central North Carolina identity and spurring economic and cultural growth, but at great cost, exploiting the poor and working class who assured its manufacturing.
In the early 1950s John D. Loudermilk Jr., born and raised in Durham, was a teenager in need of some pocket change, so he delivered telegrams and money orders along an alley known locally as Marvin’s Alley, sometimes called Morven’s Alley—now it’s Morven Place—on the east side of town. “Along that road were a lot of real tough, seedy-type people,” Loudermilk recalled, “and your folks would have just died if they thought you ever went down there.” Such “tobacco roads”—named for the massive industry that begat them—proliferated in the early- and mid-century South. “There were a bunch of [them],” Loudermilk noted. “Anytime you had the tobacco industry in a town down south you had a tobacco road, because that’s where the people lived who were the workers in that industry. They just developed that way.” It was thought that because the tobacco, cotton, and other industry mills virtually owned the street and the meager houses on it, Marvin’s Alley was mostly shielded from the police; truth or not, the street became notorious for its gambling and prostitution, for the drunks splayed out on front porches as the sun rose. “Run-down, Victorian, white clapboard houses,” Loudermilk remembers. “Workers.”
Loudermilk rode his bicycle to Marvin’s Alley with a flashlight and a fistful of money orders to deliver: muddy road, no cars, seven or eight houses, each darker than the next. “But each porch lamp had a light in it of different colors,” he remembered. “I didn’t know what that meant. So I knock on the door of the first house, and the lights come on inside. And it was full of people. Quiet. Because they were not supposed to be so free with their Saturday nights.” Loudermilk would peer through the front doorway at the suddenly illuminated folks inside who, propped up on the couch, would quietly smile and nod back at him. “And when the guy was through with the business at the front door, I left, and he’d turn the lights off. And I went to the next house. That was Tobacco Road.”
A decade later, the imagery of the dark, mysterious alley and the people who lived there haunted Loudermilk and the words of the song he’d write and record. That kid born in a lump—some will sing “bunk” or “trunk”— whose parents vanish, who’s left to live or die alone, who hates Tobacco Road, enacts the great dream: he leaves town and, blessed by the Lord, earns lots of money, comes back, bulldozes that lousy road, and rebuilds it, proud, at long last, of the name. But there’s a paradox in the chorus made graphic by a change in melody and mood, a nagging conflict that makes the song real: the place will always be home, no matter how bleak and despised, as it’s the only life he knew. Can a song solve that puzzle, make something joyful of it?
Raised in the Baptist church, Loudermilk didn’t know the world and the people of Marvin’s Alley. He wasn’t writing autobiography. “My mother didn’t die in childbirth,” he made clear. “My daddy didn’t get drunk. I never saw him drink a drop. He smoked cigarettes and died as a result of it. I never heard a dirty joke or a curse word from my father.” The angry man in “Tobacco Road” lives in that space between Loudermilk’s upbringing and the zones he crossed in Marvin’s Alley, between home and fantasy, real life and fiction. Loudermilk already knew the power of the imagination, of an interior life engaged with the world outside. “Dad, he was very, very quiet. I’d come home at night after work and he and mother would be sitting in the dark having watched the sunset go down. And I said, ‘What are y’all doing in here?’ He said, ‘You’ll know someday’.”
Loudermilk died on September 21, 2016, at the age of eighty-two; every obituary I read referenced “Tobacco Road” in the first paragraph, if not in the headline. Like most writers chiefly identified with one song, Loudermilk’s career accomplishments tend to be flattened. Born into musical bloodlines (his cousins were Ira and Charlie Loudermilk, the peerless and influential Louvin Brothers), he learned the guitar early. When he was a boy, his father, a carpenter whose hands helped build local tobacco and hosiery factories, made a ukulele out of a cigar box for him; his mother, a missionary, taught him how to play it. He made appearances on regional radio and television stations and, while in college, wrote a poem that he set to music. At the television studio where Loudermilk worked as a set painter and house musician, the country singer George Hamilton IV happened to hear him singing. He recorded and released “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” on the Colonial label in 1956. It reached number six on Billboard Pop.
Inspired, Loudermilk dropped out of college and moved to Nashville, where Chet Atkins introduced him to Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, two professional songwriters who, Loudermilk noted, weren’t pursuing a recording career of their own. Fifty years later, Loudermilk described that meeting as “a revelation and a revolution.” He joined the Acuff-Rose publishing company, and soon the songs came tumbling out of him: they included “Sittin’ in the Balcony,” a hit for Eddie Cochran; “Amigo’s Guitar,” a hit for Kitty Wells; “Waterloo,” a hit for Stonewall Jackson; “Bad News,” a hit for Johnny Cash; “I Wanna Live,” a hit for Glen Campbell; “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)” and “Paper Tiger,” hits for Sue Thompson; “Talk Back Trembling Lips,” a country hit for Ernest Ashworth and a pop hit for Johnny Tillotson; “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” a hit for the Casinos; “Ebony Eyes,” a hit for the Everly Brothers; “Abilene,” another hit for George Hamilton IV, his biggest; “This Little Bird,” a hit for Marianne Faithfull; “Indian Reservation,” a hit for Paul Revere & the Raiders.
Over a ten-year span Loudermilk released a half dozen albums and over twenty singles under his own name (and, earlier in his career, under the name Johnny Dee, sometimes with the Bluenotes) but scored only one Top 40 song, “Language of Love,” in 1961. His songwriting reputation would grow sterling—the run of charting singles illustrates it; his induction to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1976 confirmed it—but he would never earn with his own recordings the kind of commercial successes his songs provided others. Columbia released “Tobacco Road,” Loudermilk’s tenth single, in early 1960. It sniffed the charts and retreated. The following year, he’d discussed his songwriting with The Tennessean: “I’m looking for the most different thing I can find. Everybody’s writing ‘I love you truly.’ You’ve got to find something new. I talk to drunks at the bus station, browse through kiddie books at the public library [and] get phrases from college kids and our babysitter. You’ve got to be looking all the time.”
Loudermilk never stopped seeing those shadows along Marvin’s Alley, the briefly lit faces in dark homes. The song’s swampy, recognizable opening melody issues from Loudermilk’s acoustic guitar; the essential, ominous emphases in the verses—one, two, three, four—are less menacing here than they’ll be in others’ versions of the song, but there’s a disquieting, tense hush surrounding them. It’s cinematic: something has happened here, or will soon. Ageless with reverb, Loudermilk’s singing voice is plain but emotive, assured, and in touch with the tensions the song describes. Born in a lump? What does that mean? A small scrap, an afterthought, a cousin to the “great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go,” as Kate Chopin wrote in her novella about love and lust and childbirth in the Victorian South sixty years earlier? Momma dies, daddy’s wasted, a child is left to die in the middle of a road. In the signature, end-of-verse two-bar reckoning of time and place—tobacco road-whoa-whoa-whoa—the external setting moves to an interior space that the singer can’t ever really escape, both liberation and trap. And we’re only thirty seconds into the song.
The remaining three verses flesh out the story. The singer grew up in this shack, with few clothes and necessities, and has grown to hate the place—loathe is the word that Loudermilk chooses; you don’t hear that word in pop songs too often these days. Who’s the “you,” the only one who understands? The Lord? A girl? The listener spinning the 45 in a rec room or bedroom? There’s an implicit invitation to witness the journey of redemption and renewal that follows: success, rebranding, the inability to shake the past. The chorus tells this old-as-dirt story, and in Loudermilk’s original, the tone lightens, becomes kinder, as though the singer’s made some sort of bemused peace with his past: the bass walks now, laying down a groove of ease into which the drummer and piano player are relieved to settle. But two words, “loathe” and “home,” gnaw at this ease. The bothersome, nagging four-one emphases in the verses soon come back to haunt, for good, until—and as—the song’s bittersweet end.
“An interesting tale of back-shack existence,” opined Billboard in a January 25, 1960 review of the song. “The tune has a minor flavor employing a repetitive figure. Loudermilk wrote the tune and handles it with conviction.”
Sincerity wasn’t enough to put “Tobacco Road” on the charts. Loudermilk pressed on, re-recording the song for his second album, 12 Sides Of John D. Loudermilk, released on RCA in 1962, and ultimately turning his attention to writing and recording other songs. But “Tobacco Road” wouldn’t lay low. Loudermilk had unwittingly located a pulse. He wrote his song about homes that he’d only glimpsed, and imagined someone leaving one of those homes in bitterness and returning in triumph, only to find that triumph made uneasy. Loudermilk’s argument—we flee home, and remain there— is so universal in its absurd logic that men and women of differing backgrounds can enter the song and make it their own.
A decade after “Tobacco Road,” Billboard ran an advertisement for Loudermilk’s latest album Volume 1: Elloree, proclaiming that “John Loudermilk, the author of ‘Tobacco Road,’ ‘Abilene,’ and countless other modern standards is his own best interpreter.” History has proven that claim suspect. Soon after its release, “Tobacco Road” was picked up by other artists who sensed something between commercial potential and timelessness in the song. In 1961, Johnny Duncan & His Blue Grass Boys recorded a spare, twangy version as a B-side; Frank Ifield issued a version, also a B-side, in the U.K.. In ’62, Bobby Brinkley (“With Orchestra and Chorus”) recorded a somewhat melodramatic, brassy take, again for a flip side, and The Bluegrass Gentlemen issued an acoustic honky-tonk version on their self-titled album, complete with close harmonies on the chorus.
The following year, “Tobacco Road” would receive its most accomplished interpretation yet. Born and raised in the south Chicago projects, Lou Rawls grew up singing in the Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church and later in several gospel groups, both in Chicago and Los Angeles, including the Chosen Gospel Singers and the Pilgrim Travelers. Following a stint in the Army, and a near-fatal car crash, Rawls with his rich baritone signed with Capital Records in 1962, where he was paired with jazz pianist and arranger Onzy Matthews and turned his attention to secular music. Backed by a big band, Rawls cut “Tobacco Road” as the title track for his third album. He wastes no time with an introduction, singing “I was born in a dump” impatiently as his band begins to play. His voice is stern, admonishing—listen to this. Utter silence greets the title phrase; he’s got his audience. A harmonica joins in the second verse, answering his lines as the band settles in and Rawls sings about home and the stubborn ways it defines us, his voice too finding its home in the gorgeous lower register of his range. In 2017, you listen to this and you hear Lou Rawls—the voice from the records, from movies and television, from the beer commercials—in 1963 you heard only the voice, absent of later celebrity, a man on a road in his head looking ahead, looking back. Stuck.
A minute in, the band grows more confident and supportive: a saxophone enters in the left, a drum fill allows in some blaring horns, and before we know it, Rawls has drifted away, the horn player is soloing, and the band has taken over the song, expanding it. This is what can happen in a cover version: the musicians approach from whatever angle their gifts and enthusiasm and biases give them, and the words, key, and melody of the original must adapt or collapse. Written by a young Southern white man having peered down a dark alley where he doesn’t belong, played in a quiet folk arrangement, “Tobacco Road,” a few years later, becomes a big-band, swing number sung in southern California by a midwestern African American steeped in the gospel tradition.
I’ve often wondered if writers can cover literature in the way musicians cover songs. A band can get up on stage and cover a song by a well-known artist or an obscure one, sometimes slavishly respectfully, sometimes turning it over and reinventing. Bands and musicians release entire albums devoted to other artists’ material—there’s a cottage industry of cover and tribute albums. We think nothing of a singer turning another’s song inside out, paying respect to influence and history. Some cover songs are ironic jokes, some are overly earnest. (Let’s forget about tribute bands for now.) Occasionally a writer will read another writer’s work at her own reading, or at a benefit or tribute to another writer, but that’s not covering the work as a musician does. We don’t think of a band playing another’s song as much as we think of the band interpreting that song, assuming it. Where is this tradition in literature? Where’s the poet who covers Wallace Stevens? The fiction writer who covers Colson Whitehead? The essayist who covers M.F.K. Fisher?
I’m not thinking here of a self-conscious homage, or of an imitation written as an exercise or to shed a writer’s block. I can go in front of a crowd and read a piece by, say, Lester Bangs, or Ander Monson—or more intriguingly, by James Baldwin or Nancy Mairs or Virginia Woolf—but how would I cover it, where would my interpretation come in? How would I filter the essay’s style and content and place in history through my own? I can mimic it, cop a certain voice or tic of style, but could I really deconstruct, rebuild, and newly, wholly inhabit the piece the way, say, The Byrds did with Dylan, the way the Beatles did with Little Richard, the way the Ramones did with Chris Montez? (Insert your own favorite transformative cover versions here.) Or for that matter, the way Roy Lichenstein and Andy Warhol co-opted popular, mass-produced imagery and made it their own? Perhaps if I collaged three or more essays by different writers a la Richard Hamilton. An interesting mess. Maybe.
A song is covered for any number of commercial, audience-pleasing, or personal-stake reasons. A singer might announce, onstage or in front of his bedroom mirror, “This song matters to me because...”. Sometimes a musician covers a song to learn something technical inside of the playing, in the odd chord or tricky time changes. Sometimes a musician covers a song she’s loved since she was a child and first heard on the radio or in her dad’s record or CD collection; sometimes a musician covers a song dictated by his manager or record label. A song has an opening: you climb in. Or a song casts a silhouette: sometimes you step inside of it and you’re home.
They came together in Surrey, England in 1962, their name inspired by an Everly Brothers song. The Nashville Teens were a brawny outfit, muscling their way through American R&B and Blues, forging a reputation for magnificent live shows, one of which was seen by Mickie Most, a studio producer associated with Columbia Records in the U.K.. Most produced “Tobacco Road,” the Teens’ debut single, and it was a major success, hitting number six in the U.K. Singles Chart and fourteen in the Billboard Hot 100 in the heady summer of 1964. Art Sharp, one of the Nashville Teens’s two lead singers (the other was Ray Phillips), worked in a record store in Woking, and among the American imports he’d discovered there was 12 Sides Of John D. Loudermilk, which included the re-recorded “Tobacco Road.” Sharp brought the song to his band, who loved the earthy Americana in the lyrics and mood. The Teens’s version was my introduction to the song, as it was for millions of others.
The recording gives the impression of a marauding group of juvies. The Teens stomp their way through, the original’s somber and reflective tone replaced with amperage and assault. Drummer Barrie Jenkins and bassist Pete Harris need their collective weight to hold down John Allen’s guitar line in the song’s excitable opening; snarling, the guitar threatens to break loose. The noisy approach originates in the band’s considerable native energy. (They’d be tested: Jenkins, Harris, and Allen famously backed Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star-Club in Hamburg, West Germany in April of 1964, and they needed every ounce of their strength and stamina to keep up with The Killer.) The Teens seem to find particular glee in the song’s destroy-the-place-with-dynamite-and-a-crane scene, a laddish taste for annihilation.
By the time Most entered the studio with the Nashville Teens, he’d produced hit records for the lightweight Herman’s Hermits (“I’m Into Something Good”) and also the rough-and-tumble Animals (“House of the Rising Sun”), so the Teens’s arrangement didn’t trouble him; it sounds like he just turned up the faders, needles to the red, and said to the lads, Let it rip! The four-one emphases are hammered down, the land beneath Marvin’s Alley withstanding the territory-staking shocks as if the Teens want to pulverize the song’s paradoxes to dust beneath their feet. Fighting for the rare spaces offered by the band, and competing at the mic, Sharp and Phillips sing the cinematic “I was born in a bunk” against the more abstract “lump,” and harmonize on the title phrase and verses. Rollicking, the chorus seems to have gotten loose and made it to the local pub, where John Hawken’s barrelhouse-piano sixteenth notes and boogie-woogie runs send things into a different, gladder direction, the darkness of the verses giving way to boozy joy—anything, I guess, to ignore the conflicts in the song which, naturally, return. Loudermilk may have plugged his ears against the noise that the Teens made, but he got it.
There are many different ways to tell the same story. Thirty-five hundred miles way in the Bronx, New York, five kids who call themselves The Trenchcoats were kicking up some noise of their own. After lineup shuffling and identity crises common to young bands, the guys changed their name to Bloos Magoos—a yoking together of their beloved blues and of Moo Goo Gai Pan, the latter consumed in a restaurant by, and duly inspiring, the band’s manager, who suggested the name change. They later revised their name to the more conventional Blues Magoos. After releasing a single (“The People Had No Faces”) that went nowhere, the band signed to Mercury in 1966 and cut their debut, Psychedelic Lollipop, with producers Bob Wyld and Art Polhemus. We grin at the title a half century later, but the album was among the first to use the word “psychedelic,” an early, visionary pivot from Top 100 ethos toward the hallucinogenic culture just on the horizon. Mercury released two singles from Psychedelic Lollipop, “We Ain’t Nothin’ Yet,” which charted in early 1967, and “Tobacco Road.” By the mid- and late-1960s, Loudermilk’s song was on its way to becoming a standard of sorts, a minimally difficult song for kids in bands to love, turn up loud, and learn, and Blues Magoos stepped into that tradition. At nearly five minutes, their visit to the alley is an extended one, by mid-1960s AM radio standards, at least. Six years later, the song would close the third side of Lenny Kaye’s wildly influential compilation Nuggets, securing the ear-ringing version as a staple of American psychedelic garage rock and roll.
Here's a story: a young director needs a rock and roll band to score a controlled building implosion in Staten Island for a silent 16mm art film. Blues Magoos, through some friends of friends they know in the Village, where they were the resident band at Night Owl Cafe, are hipped to the gig. They decamp to the site, dig the chaotic scene, and return home to write and record a two-minute avant-garde instrumental of atmospheric amp feedback and tape-echo. “Peppy” Thielhelm’s and Mike Esposito’s slashing guitar chords and anxious riffs, Ralph Scala’s stabbed organ notes, and Geoff Daking’s menacing drumming create a soundscape that conjures toppling buildings, smoky ash, rubble, air-raid sirens, noxious fumes, and a lone witness laughing and whooping it up on the sidelines just beyond the warning tape. You need a hard hat just listening to it. But the film project falls through—the kid’s trust fund dried up—and Blue Magoos are left with an instrumental piece. Straggling along in the Village the next week, one of the band members starts humming “Tobacco Road” and, in an instant of clarity, the guys know where to use that instrumental, the perfect musical translation of returning home with dynamite and a crane, blow you up start all over again. They might have to convince the skeptical suits at Mercury, but...
None of this true, of course, save for the reference to the Night Owl Club where Blues Magoos did often play, with exotic lava lamps next to them onstage. I spin this yarn as a way to make sense of the middle two-and-a-half minutes of “Tobacco Road.” Virtual audio vérité, the fantastic passage is of its era, the band pushing the limits of a three-minute pop song, deconstructing something that, though only six years old, likely felt passé in form; the rave-up double-time also suggests that there were plenty of Yardbirds records lying around their rehearsal room. Whatever its origin, the middle takes “Tobacco Road” to a new sonic place, far removed from Loudermilk’s stately, folky original. The band finds its way back to the song’s original riff by the end but, at that point, after we’ve ducked and braved the maelstrom in the middle, we’re solidly in the rowdy half of the 1960s, which, come to think of it, may have started during one of Esposito’s detonations on this record. Scala’s Farfisa organ is back to its noble and cheery frat-rock obligations by the end, but the road under our feet feels different now. In a little more than half a decade, Loudermilk’s song has popped up on sonic maps in cities large and small, sped up, slowed down, quieted, shrieked, strummed, garlanded with brass, pummeled with amps, played in cramped garages and mammoth studios, stretched beyond recognition.
The end of the 1960s felt a century removed from the opening of the decade, and yet “Tobacco Road” remained in the rehearsals and set lists of musicians and bands. Among others, Jefferson Airplane recorded a version, for Takes Off in 1966, Brother Jack McDuff issued a jazz-arranged instrumental, also in 1966, Spooky Tooth covered it on It’s All About in 1968, David Allan Coe released a version as a single in 1969, and in 1970 Eric Burdon and War, on Declares “War,” rolled out the horizon of Loudermilk’s tale to nearly fourteen minutes.
A cover song suggests as much about the era it’s performed in than about the men and women who play it. Look around you, the singer says to the song, what have you got for me? Native Detroit Rare Earth issued their second album Get Ready in the fall of 1969. The band were known to indulge loudly in the era’s propensity for jamming, weed-enhanced improvisations aimed at expanding a pop song as one’s consciousness expanded; simultaneously, albums grew suite-stuffed, their two, sometimes four sides emboldened with conceptual and aesthetic possibilities as endless as the skies above open-air festivals. Bubblegum stuck to Top 40, for sure, and tiny regional labels saw to it that the Pop and R&B 45 wouldn’t die, but songs on albums were growing longer, sensual journeys of amplification and tactile sound textures that favored virtuosity of ensemble and soloist playing.
Infamous for their 21-minute-long version of the Temptations’s “Get Ready,” Rare Earth reign in things a bit while at Marvin’s Alley. Yet at over seven minutes, their “Tobacco Road” is to my ears less about the song than about the band, Loudermilk’s original now a vast stage where players swap solos as their way into and out of the song. Things start dramatically, the opening riff played slowly, vividly etched with percussive strikes and Kenny James’s organ wandering curiously up and down the road. Peter Hoorelbeke’s vocal is characteristically robust as he takes center stage, and as Rod Richards’s snaking guitar leads replace the organ, Hoorelbeke demurs, allowing Richards’s playing to dominate. The full band arrives in the chorus which, before concluding, makes room for saxophonist Gil Bridges, followed by room for James. More solos compete with the verses as the song comes to a close, the finish extended in the era’s fashionable way, the chords prolonged until their shelf-life expires. The second verse didn’t arrive until nearly four minutes into the song. Loudermilk would’ve delivered his money orders and nervously scampered home twice already.
The immensely gifted, multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter recorded “Tobacco Road” for his debut Entrance, in 1970. He enters the alley scatting, reaching deep into his Beaumont, Texas adolescence where he and his brothers were exposed to jazz and blues as well as rock and roll, his controlled miasmas and occasional, startling Bobby Marchan-meets-Little Richard screeching foregrounding his presence in the song, which is otherwise performed conventionally. Winters’s remarkable, virtuosic vocal performance is, finally, more about itself than about the unraveling of words and story. The following year, backed by his rocking band White Trash, he released a popular live version on Roadwork, devoting the entire third side to a seventeen-minute blues workout overflowing with competing sax and guitar solos. I feel stiff-armed from versions like Rare Earth’s and Winters’s, as if I must pay homage to the musicians’ considerable, on-display talents before I can hear the song’s complexities. This is my problem, of course, not yours. You’ve got your collection, I’ve got mine.
I’m equally curious about Bobbie Gentry’s version. Gentry was aloft on the mammoth success of “Ode to Billie Joe” when she returned to Hollywood with producer Kelly Gordon to record her second album. Released in March of 1968, The Delta Sweete didn’t match the commercial success of Ode to Billie Joe—it topped out at 132 on Billboard—and it’s a sadly underrated Americana original, an imaginative collection of linked songs about the tensions of Southern life near the close of a tumultuous decade, the bulk of it written by the Mississippi-bred Gentry. “Tobacco Road” opens the second side in an evocative wash of widescreen orchestral strings and brass; soon a waltz emerges, then a scratchy, dirty fuzz guitar announces the song’s riff, a harmonica and an acoustic guitar sweeten things, and we settle into the signature 4/4 beat. The echo of that strange waltz is still on her mind as Gentry sings, familiarly close-mic’ed and dryly recorded, her wonderful voice low in register, a woman assuming the Naturalistic doom of Loudermilk’s song. The waltz returns in the fourth bar of the verse, sticking around until the chorus, an odd push-pull between time signatures and between moods.
The Delta Sweete’s liner notes promised a concept of sorts, narrative songs concerning “the dust, the fragrance, the molasses, grits and grit, the love, sorrow, and the humor of the Delta country...the people, young and old, bad and good, from Monday to Sunday.” Jimmie Haskell and Shorty Rogers were tasked to arrange and cohere these songs. Haskell had worked with Gordon on Gentry’s debut, but Rogers was a new addition. Primarily a jazz trumpeter and producer/arranger, by the 1960s he had moved into pop production as well, including records for, among others, Bobby Darin, the Walker Brothers, and The Monkees. For The Delta Sweete, Haskel and Rogers seem to have had in mind a kind of pop-rococo storyscape, a yoking together of genteel and melancholy steamboat-era strings and brass with earthy, bedrock rural balladry, blues, and soul—a fascinating and illuminating blend of styles that’s echoed on the album’s memorable cover, where Gentry’s preoccupied countenance is superimposed over an image of a dilapidated backwoods shack.
I appreciate this instinct for bold arranging, and it works for much of the album, especially on “Okolona River Bottom Band,” “Parchman Farm,” “Sermon,” and on the hushed songs in the second half. But I’m unsure about “Tobacco Road.” The song starts by saying: Let’s dreamily waltz around, over, and through our past, our woeful upbringing, with a faraway smile on our faces. The adamant 4/4 in tension with the graceful 3/4 evokes the desire to leave a gloomy home against that romanticized home inevitably calling you back. Or is it the other way around? Haskell’s and Rogers’s hybrid confuses things; though intriguing and ambitious, their somewhat fussy arrangement remains, to my ears, theoretical. (Writer Holly George-Warren describes this version as “humid,” and though she’s being complimentary, to me that’s an apt way of describing a song that’s warm but fails to catch fire in the studio.) The chorus plays it safe, swinging gently in variety-show manner, and I’m always afraid that the Gothic waltz is going to return, and it always does. Gentry’s greatest instrument is her voice. Her arrangers get in the way here.
Forty years later, on an album suffused with rural and religious imagery, the Seattle-based hip hop duo Common Market—DJ Sabzi (Saba Mohajerjasbi) and MC RA Scion (Ryan Abeo)—released a “Tobacco Road” that isn’t Loudermilk’s, and yet also is. Scion was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, but the southern references in “Tobacco Road” are mostly abstracted, universalized, impressionistic, with Loudermilk present in Common Market’s song as a ghostly template. On top of a minimal, mid-paced groove that samples a loop of the sunny piano lick from Cat Stevens’s “Child for a Day,” Scion narrates a story about death and grief, both personal and regional, about work and success, about leaving but never truly leaving. “I will forever call it home,” he says. “And I feel it whenever I call home.” Nostalgia implies a return—it’s really the inability to return to a home that calls to us though we’ve paradoxically defined it by its absence. “There is no harvest without work,” Scion said later when asked to explain. “It means that sacrifice is necessary for prosperity. It means that these experiences are seasonal and cyclical. It means there is pain in life and hope in death. It means it’s OK to run away from home, but it’s unforgiveable to never look back.”
If there are an infinite number of ways to define home, there are also an infinite number of ways to return to it. The same month that Bobbie Gentry released her version of “Tobacco Road,” Junior Wells is sitting with his band—guitarists Buddy Guy and Walter Williams on lead and rhythm, respectively, Tom Crawford on bass, Levi Warren on drums, Douglas Fagan on sax—at a recording studio in Chicago, observed by producer Samuel Charters. Wells had lived in Chicago for two decades already, but you wonder about the storehouse of imagery he must’ve carried with him from Memphis, Tennessee, where he was born and grew up. He’d been a South Sider since the age of twelve—in addition to the harmonica licks he learned at the feet of Little Junior Parker, he must’ve brought north with him intuitions that become sobering realities. In the studio, he’s cocky. He’s thirty-three. He’s played with Muddy Waters. He’s got a story to tell. “It’s gonna kill you, right here,” he says at one point.
Loudermilk glanced from the threshold; Junior invites you inside. Here’s the story: he was born in the city, raised in the country, with no money, nothing but a cotton sack on his shoulder. The song’s pace is grippingly slow. Fagan’s cheery riff and Guy’s eighth-note lines say it’s ok, and for a while it is. But in the second verse, Wells starts telling the story that he really wants to tell, or needs to tell, and it, too, is as old as the dirt out front: you raised me up, you threw me down, you stole my money and my clothes, and if I see you again I’m gonna bust your nose. We’re inside Wells’s version of the song, now, and things have become pretty intimate. His harmonica picks up the story for the next sixteen bars, and when he returns to sing, the story hasn’t changed much. If anything, he’s more pissed off, but helpless, the song’s signature road-whoa-woah-woah replaced by a far more personal and plaintive cry: I don’t know-whoa-woah-woah. What to do or where to go? In the last verse, she promises that she’ll leave, and she does, and he begs her to return to come see him on Tobacco Road. But here’s the dilemma, which Wells understands enough to utter, though it sounds like he hopes the song will end before he has to: “You don’t know like I know, and I don’t know like you know.” As the song fades, you can practically see him waving goodbye to her from the front door, still railing about where his money went. In Wells’s story, the singer doesn’t leave Tobacco Road. Someone else does. She might’ve lived in one of those barely lit homes in Loudermilk’s version. There are a lot of stories to tell there.
Notes
“Tobacco Road,” words and music by John D. Loudermilk.
I’ve written about only some of the covers of “Tobacco Road” that have struck me in one way or another. There are hundreds of versions recorded and issued since 1960. You can find a lot of them online. Loudermilk’s song has nothing to do with Erskine Caldwell’s overheated—and in my estimation overrated—1932 novel of the same name, nor with Jack Kirkland’s successful Broadway adaptation or John Ford’s film version. To read Caldwell’s grotesque novel is to imagine a Very Special episode of Beverly Hillbillies wherein the Clampett family attempts, and fails spectacularly at, high drama. But judge for yourself.
Some of my thoughts about covering literature appeared at No Such Thing As Was.
“Along that road were a lot of real tough, seedy-type people...,” American Songwriter Magazine, January/February 1988
“There were a bunch of...,” “John D. Loudermilk: The Story Behind ‘Tobacco Road’ on the Viva! NashVegas® Radio Show,” February 23, 2013 (YouTube)
Drunks on front porches, “I well remember Marvin’s,” comment submitted by Phillip Maynard, Open Durham, December 15, 2012
On Loudermilk meeting Boudleaux and Felice Bryant (“a revelation and a revolution”), “Poets and Prophets: Salute to Legendary Country Songwriter John D. Loudermilk,” Country Music Hall Of Fame Web site, June 23, 2007
“I’m looking for the most different thing I can find...,” The Tennessean, 1961, quoted in “Songwriter John D. Loudermilk dead at 82,” The Tennessean, Juli Thanki, September 22, 2016
“An interesting tale of back-shack existence...,” Billboard, January 25, 1960 Billboard advertisement, September 4, 1971
Bobbie Gentry’s “humid” version of “Tobacco Road,” Holly George- Warren, “Mystery Girl: The Forgotten Artistry of Bobbie Gentry,” Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke, 2007)
“There is no harvest without work...,” “Interview: RA Scion (of Common Market),” The Find Mag, no date
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.