Baby, Please Don’t Go—Bukka White

#365Songs: June 21

The best way I can think of to try and explain the experience of discovering and experiencing the country blues for the first time is to equate it to meeting the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen and discovering they speak an entirely different language than yours.

When they speak, you can recognize certain commonalities — inflections, pauses, pacing — that feel familiar, and yet you cannot understand a thing.

And yet you know you must learn to know this person, and you feel as if you’re destined to know this person, and you instantly believe that somehow your whole life has been building to this moment where you will meet and come under the spell of this person.

You are beguiled, in awe, obsessed, and yet in no way can you claim to have any reason for feeling this way. Because this person is a stranger. You know nothing of their background, their history, their feelings or views.

And you wonder, are you just smitten by their beauty, or is there some deeper connection waiting for you to discover it?

But it actually doesn’t matter.

The intensity of your reaction ensures you will pursue connection, and almost immediately, those initially sensed commonalities become small moments of understanding. You develop a kind of rudimentary language together, and through these clumsy early attempts at shared meaning, you can feel the initial spark growing into something more substantive — a warmth that will envelop and sustain you as you continue to explore communication and understanding.

With every one of these moments, you feel your conviction in the rightness of it all being justified — it truly is as if you’ve waited for this person all your life, and it will never really matter to you that they come from somewhere else, that they have walked a path so different than yours, that they speak with a voice from far beyond the boundaries of your own language.

All you know is that you feel born to build a bridge to and with and from this person.

That’s what it’s like, and yet, it’s not like that at all.

The country blues wasn’t so much a stranger speaking a language I didn’t understand as it was a destiny I didn’t know I was working towards.

I was learning how to play guitar, as was a very good friend of mine. We were learning together, and our friendship — as all great friendships do — enacted both allyship and competition.

The more intensely he swore fidelity to Randy Rhoads and Yngwie Malmsteen, the more intensely I pledged to devote my life to Eric Clapton and Robert Cray.

Eventually, our shared learning moved into the rear mirror, and I continued my journey on my own, under the tutelage of my blessed parents and their brilliant music collection.

When I said Eric Clapton, they said Cream. When I loved Cream, they said John Mayall. When I loved John Mayall, they said Albert King. When I loved Albert King, they said Muddy Waters. When I loved Muddy Waters, they said Howlin’ Wolf.

And that’s where I hit my first bump in the road. At that tender juncture of my journey, Howlin’ Wolf was literally too intense for me. Too raw. Too powerful. I couldn’t find my way through the door he put in front of me.

I would come to understand soon enough that his rough and ready ways represented exactly the sound I was trying to get to all along.

But I had to find another way in and through.

I was too much a guitar player still, and not enough a singer, writer, or performer. I needed a guitarist to show me the way. And I needed a song I could understand.

That guitarist was Bukka White, and that song was “Baby, Please Don’t Go.”

Because I knew the song. But I knew the version by Them.

And when I heard Bukka White’s version of it, a needle in my brain just fell into the groove. I could see the bridge. I could cross it. I could feel it. And eventually, I could play it.

It would take me years, of course, but I got there. I met Bukka White in a crowd, and I learned his language, and my first love proved to be a complete love, and the sound of his voice and his guitar and his song are a language of the heart and of the soul for me.

The brutal chug of the rhythm, the ferocity of the slid melody notes, the guttaral urgency of the voice, the interplay of voice and guitar—the whole intertwined pulse and growl and stomp of it is just hypnotic to me, and there is no other music on earth that speaks to me like this speaks to me, and it’s as if a guitar can literally crawl behind my ribcage and replace my heart with its pounding embrace of life.

And this is Bukka White in Open D tuning on a National Resophonic, and this is literally the sound I have been chasing across what is now four decades of music making, and I am no less obsessed today than I was when I first heard it 40 years ago.

Country blues is a beautiful stranger that I have learned to communicate with, and I have the guitar playing of Bukka White to thank for this, because his propulsive, churning, funky and chugging style made sense to me in a way that nothing else could. His was the right hand I wanted, the right hand of god, the big beat. His was the guitar playing that said the right hand is god, and the left hand fingers are the mendicants.

This was the sound that said that there is no too loud. The sound that says you are playing as if it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!