Blues Transformations in the Music of Cream
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Figure 3.1. Blues Songs covered on Cream alburns (only first instance given) Fresh Cream, Atco 206 (1966) "Cat's Squirrel" (also "Mississippi Blues"): Charles Isaiah ("Doc") Ross "I'm So Glad": Nehemiah ("Skip") James "From Four Till Late": Robert Johnson "Rollin' and Tumblin'": attributed to Muddy Waters "Spoonful": Charlie Patton, "A Spoonful of Blues" (1929); attributed to Willie Dixon (U.K. version only) Disraeli Gears, Atco 232 (1967) "Outside Woman Blues": Blind Joe Reynolds Wheels of Fire, Atco 700 (1968) "Sittin" on Top of the World": Armenter ("Bo") Chatmon and Walter Jacobs Vinson of the Mississippi Sheiks, recorded by Howlin' Wolf "Crossroads": Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues" "Traintime": John ("Forest City Joe") Pugh; attributed to John Group "Born under a Bad Sign": Booker T. Jones and William Bell Top of the Milk, Atco 4534 (1968) "Steppin" Out'": James Bracken "Big Black Woman Blues": Tommy Johnson, "Big Fat Mama Blues" Early Cream, Springboard 4037 (1977) "Louise": Howlin' Wolf; attributed to Whiting/Robin "Five Long Years": Ike Turner "The First Time I Met the Blues" ("The First Time I Met You"): Eurreal ("Little Brother") Montgomery "Stormy Monday": John Lee Hooker "Too Much Monkey Business": Chuck Berry
of songs comprising variations on a basic pattern.23 This interrelation reflects the tradition in which blues songs were copied and varied, in a continual reworking of basic musical and textual material, in an oral tradition stretching back into the nineteenth century. The advent of recordings meant that songs could be documented in a fixed form, but it also allows us to see how Johnson varied his material, as the differences between the alternate takes of his songs we have left today indicate. In the two cuts of "Cross Road Blues," for instance, the first version recorded has additional verses and is faster and more raucous, closer to "Terraplane Blues," than the slower, more measured second version.24 The discussion below concerns the second recorded version. As with many of Johnson's songs, "Cross Road Blues" may be interpreted within the context of the textual and harmonic structure of the model twelve-bar blues form (fig 3.2).25 In this form, the text is organized in a three-line AAB structure. Each line occupies four bars, with bars divided into four internal beats, and each begins on a different harmony—I, IV, then V—but all end on I. The textual form is thus complemented by a maximum of harmonic differentiation at the onset of the three lines, with the successive I, IV, then V chords also creating a large-scale harmonic progres-