I’ve loved a Mick Hucknall version of this song for a few years now, but delving into amazon revealed a whole new level of amazing with this version by David “Honeyboy” Edwards.
From Wikipedia:
Edwards was born in Shaw, Mississippi in 1915. Edwards was 14 years old when he left home to travel with blues man Big Joe Williams, beginning life as an itinerant musician which he led throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He performed with famed blues musician Robert Johnson with whom he developed a close friendship. Honeyboy was present on the night Johnson drank poisoned whiskey which killed him, and his story has become the definitive version of Johnson’s demise.
He described the itinerant bluesman’s life:
On Saturday, somebody like me or Robert Johnson would go into one of these little towns, play for nickels and dimes. And sometimes, you know, you could be playin’ and have such a big crowd that it would block the whole street. Then the police would come around, and then I’d go to another town and where I could play at. But most of the time, they would let you play. Then sometimes the man who owned a country store would give us something like a couple of dollars to play on a Saturday afternoon. We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then…we might hop a freight, go to St. Louis or Chicago. Or we might hear about where a job was paying off – a highway crew, a railroad job, a levee camp there along the river, or some place in the country where a lot of people were workin’ on a farm. You could go there and play and everybody would hand you some money. I didn’t have a special place then. Anywhere was home. Where I do good, I stay. When it gets bad and dull, I’m gone.
Folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Edwards in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1942 for the Library of Congress.
Sample the song/ buy it on amazon here.