re: Ken Burns - Country Music Documentary on PBS

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It's based as much on Hank as Jimmie

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Not according to what I can find with Google. All the sources I'm seeing say just Jimmie.

Great episode tonight. The 3rd installment.

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I grew up listening to Punk, Prog, Zep and the Talking Heads, then life happened and my first gig in Nashville was tour guide at the old Country Music Hall of Fame and RCA Studio B. You had to learn your shite and it was terrifying facing my first live rounds tour. This Doc sends me down memory lane big time. It’s a trip to recognize Deford, Uncle Dave et al. on sight. And Marty shreds on Mando.

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From what I gathered from tonight's episode it seems to be an authentic tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame you had to first piss off Bill Monroe.

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country music is the white mans blues and really always has been. that shouldn't be news to anyone as far as the origins go. and that's not being political. country is based off of the 12 bar blues scale with variation

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I guess I left this part out: Blues, as we know it, depends on the European Scale of music.
There's been a lot of give and take, going on for a long time.

I've listened to Bill Monroe's Mules Skinner Blues plenty of times, but I never realized it was a cover. The show taught me that it was a cover of a Jimmie Rodgers song called Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues). But there's a little more to the story.

I noticed that the Rodgers lyric sheet they showed differed from how Dolly sang it on the cover they played on the show.

Well, it looks like everyone from pop to punk bands have rewritten it in various ways.

Rodgers 1930 recording appears to have borrowed the first verse from Tom Dickson's 1928 recording "Labor Blues." Dickson was a black Delta bluesman who appears to have recorded just 4 songs, all pretty similar. He may have lifted lines himself -- I'm just guessing here -- from field hollers or traditional songs that came before him, but who knows.

What caught my eye on the Rodgers lyrics sheet was the reference to Shine, an old racial term. That started with Dickson, who sang of quitting the job, not applying, because the Captain didn't pay.

Dickson sang it:

It’s "good mornin’ Captain", ‘e said "good mornin’ Shine",
Said "good mornin’ Captain", said "good mornin’ Shine".
"T’ain’t nuthin’ the matter, Captain, but I just ain’t gwine.

"I don’t mind workin’, Captain, from sun to sun,
I don’t mind workin’, Captain, from sun to sun.
But I want my money, Captain, when pay-day come."

Jimmie Rodgers wrote it as if applying for the job:

Good mornin' Captain
Good mornin' Shine
Do you need another mule skinner
Out on your new mud line?

I'm not sure if Rodgers saw himself as the Shine in the song, or if he was speaking to the Cap's helper. Who knows?

Later artists cleaned it up.

Bill Monroe went with:

Good morning captain. Good morning son
Do you need another mule skinner
Out on your new road line

Dolly Parton sang:

Well, good morning, Captain
Good morning to you, Sir
Hey hey yeah

Here are a couple of articles that talk about the history of the song.

Lyric Of The Week: Jimmie Rodgers, “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8)”

No Mules Were Skinned: The History of the Muleskinner Blues

An in-depth study of Tom Dickson's recorded output

I'd like to hear a shredding rock version. Aerosmith or Van Halen could have killed on this in the early days.

I was amazed by how often they re-purposed melodies (sometimes by songs that were on the charts simultaneously).

It seemed to be standard operating procedure, except with Hank Williams Jr. calling out Rock Around the Clock as a rip on Move it on Over.

Jerry Reed does a good version of Mule Skinner Blues.

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y is based off of the 12 bar blues scale with variatio

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I have no problem with this at all. The vast majority of musicians who started the genre were just as poor as the blacks they encountered. Rodgers and the Carters did the same thing musicians have been doing forever. Took bits and pieces of what they liked and shaped it into something they liked even better.

I hear blues, gospel (white and black) and Scotch/Irish in the early versions.

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Have you listened to the top 40 country songs out this week?

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underrated post.

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Did you see the part where they said Hank met Audrey after her first husband had walked out on her? Her first husband was my grandfather and he did NOT walk out in her, he joined the army and was fighting in WW2. I wish I knew where all the documentaries get the idea he left her and their daughter. He was sending his paychecks home to support them the whole time she was shacked up with Hank. He only learned about Hank when he returned from active duty and found Audrey gone.

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That's damn interesting right there, and I don't doubt you.
There's truth, and there is popular myth, and the longer that things go sometimes, the popular myth becomes Gospel Truth, To people who want to claim inside knowledge.