Part 4.
Quite an elaborate concept behind a name.
Well, I mean there are more obvious connections that you could make and that I like as well. All sorts of things. Bones is another word for dice, for example, so that's were the old roving gambler image kicks in. I also like to think that I play skeleton music, kind of stripped down to the bone, you know. And people always used bones as talismans, like rabbit's feet and stuff. A black cat bone is a common voodoo charm, for instance. It's a good blues name.
Which takes us right to the opening number on Another Man Done Gone. "Backwater Blues" is probably one of the most famous blues. I thought it was written by Bessie Smith ?
Yes, it's usually credited to her, but it probably had a country prototype as well. Bessie Smith started her career in minstrel shows as well, by the way. The song tells the story of the southern floods of the late twenties and was recorded and performed by countless blues artists, many of whom were personally affected by the heavy rains and rising tides. The first version I ever heard was on a live album by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Besides "Backwater Blues", the flood disaster inspired some other great tunes like Mississippi John Hurt's "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues" or John Lee Hooker's talking blues "Tupelo". Much much later Nick Cave also wrote a song called "Tupelo" that drew on the same historical incident, but cast it in kind of a mythological frame of reference.
You said these old songs tell more stories than just one. What does the song have to say to us, who are not flood victims?
I think it gives us one of the most powerful images for loss and defeat, for losing the ground beneath our feet. It doesn't necessarily take a flood to make you feel things are coming apart. I guess all of us, at one point or another in our lives, experience some kind of personal tragedy that all of a sudden leaves us in a dark dungeon with no idea how to possibly go on. But at the same time, we know that we'll have to somehow. And it's that kind of emotional state that is captured by the song. Trying to escape from the rising water, the singer climbs a hill, condemned to watch helplessly as everything he loves and lives for goes below the line. His house, his belongings, livestock, ancestors' graves. Like all the other victims, he knows he won't be back to start all over 'cause what he felt before has been washed away. They will all move on, probably find a place somewhere else, settle down ... but from now on they'll be homeless drifters, displaced and uprooted, trying to regain what's been lost.
The philosopher George Lukács once coined the expression "transcendental homelessness" to describe the human condition, and I do hear and feel that in a simple song like "Backwater Blues."
