Searching for Crow Jane Blues

It began with Smithsonian Folkway’s Red River Blues by John Tinsley. I had the tune jingling in my ears after hearing it for weeks before I found it again. I listened to many Red River Blues songs by everyone from Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas to Lead Belly. No one sang it with the bright Piedmont Blues guitar and unique melody. Apparently putting “red river” into a song had been popular since the 1800s, and it was in a lot of songs. The tune, however, mattered more. I settled on a 1933 recording of Blood Red River by Josh White as the earliest version, and found guitar tabs for Big Bill Broonzy’s version from 1940. He called it Key to the Highway, and said the tune was based off a “childhood song.” His version led to the hit from Derek and the Dominoes (Clapton) and others during the Blues Revival of the 70s.

Fast forward to the Blues Revival of the 2020s. I’m listening to every blues record from 1920 to 1940 and I start picking up on something: the tune of Red River Blues. A lot of my favorite artists, Kokomo Arnold, Charley Patton, Blind Boy Fuller, and many others, have one or more versions of this song. Many include “red river” in the lyrics somewhere. Here is where it is strange. For all its popularity, there is not a wikipedia article or fan site on Red River Blues. I did find one for Key to the Highway. It is credited to a 1940 recording of Charlie Segar, which has Bill Broonzy’s lyrics but used a standard Bessie Smith melody, not the Red River Blues tune I was looking for. Wikipedia was a dead end, as were WeenieCampbell.com and all my guitar mags. This song is an obvious blues standard, more common than many on “List of Blues Standards (wikipedia.org)” which draws from scholarly sources such as the Journal of American Folklore and current sources such as the Blues Foundation publications. It seems surprising that with all their research they didn’t turn up an earlier version of this song.

Algia Mae Hinton, a Piedmont Blues legend (1929-2018), recorded two versions of the song in traditional style with an acoustic guitar. This was in 1999, showing this song’s enduring popularity.

For months, I kept a list of “twins,” songs to the tune of Red River Blues. I wasn’t keeping up with the dates, so I didn’t know who sang it first. I just began enjoying the many versions, and hearing a new one was exciting. My collection grew. I had ten recordings in acoustic guitar with a similar picking pattern, not including any recordings after 1940 such as John Tinsley’s version or the many versions of Key to the Highway. I finally set out to learn it. I hoped to find a guitar tab based on one of the earlier versions, so I began checking the dates. Charley Patton’s “Jim Lee” parts 1 and 2 contain the tune and some standard lyrics, and he recorded them in 1929. This seemed to be the earliest version, so I began searching for tabs for that particular song. Sadly, the internet could not offer a free guitar tab for Charley Patton, but on a site advertising guitar tabs for $9.95 per song, they gave a brief summary of their “Jim Lee Blues” tab, claiming the song “is found in a vast array of other tunes, most famously ‘Crow Jane.’ (playcountryblues.com).”

I jumped. Could there be an earlier version? Searching the term “Crow Jane,” not only did I find a new twin, it was possibly the oldest version. It contains the lyrics “red river” in the familiar pattern, set to dual acoustic guitars. The performer is known for only two studio sessions in 1927 and died without ever leaving a picture. His name was Julius Daniels, and his version was called Crow Jane Blues. Similar to most of the other versions, it told of a woman who had left him, named Crow Jane. It also contained a common line, “right from my window back to the rising sun.” When I searched for “Crow Jane” instead of “Red River Blues,” I discovered the 1964 recording by Skip James, another of my heroes, in the Piedmont Blues style. This seems to be the version with the most enduring popularity, and I quickly found free guitar tablature for Skip’s version.

In his two recording sessions and seven songs, Julius Daniels brought to records a pre-blues style that would shape popular music for 100 years. Perhaps he was simply a traveler, picking up tunes and riffs from people on front porches and railyards, like many other blues men and women of his time. He may not be the originator of Crow Jane Blues, but by recording it, he deserves credit for passing it along. My quest to find the earliest version had concluded, not with Blood Red River, Jim Lee, or Key to the Highway, but with the Crow Jane Blues.

Notes:

1. I have since learned that due to the sheer number of Crow Jane recordings in 1926-9, it was probably around long before. Blues people played the popular tunes of their time (Woody Mann, The Woody Mann Interview). Of the many people who played it, Julius Daniels recorded it in 1927 and Bo Weavil Jackson actually recorded it in 1926. Then Furry Lewis, Jim Jackson, and Charlie Patton soon followed. The year does not indicate when Crow Jane became a song so much as when these artists, all of them long time performers, first got a chance to record.

Despite a few notable exceptions (see below), recording black male vocalists was uncommon before 1926, when record companies like Paramount began recording small-town African American musicians in large numbers. Crow Jane Blues was a hit by that time, indicated by all the people who were already playing it. Regardless, Julius Daniels still deserves credit for his awesome version, not to mention his other cherished recordings. His lyrics are a perfect archetype for every other Red River Blues or Crow Jane Blues. With these reminiscences, I go back to practicing the song and performing it, so its popularity will endure for another century.

2. I originally wrote, “Before that time, racism prevented record companies from recording male black singers unless they were singing gospel. 1926 was a banner year for record labels across the south, who began recording male black men singing popular music for the first time in history.” I have since learned that the first ever record star was a black man, George W. Johnson, singing a pre-blues style on The Laughing Song, 1898. Bert Williams also made extensive popular recordings 1896-1922, a few of which show early forms of blues. The unrivaled blues and pre-blues hero, Papa Charlie Jackson, used the exact tune of Crow Jane Blues for Coffee Pot Blues in 1925, proving to be the actual earliest appearance of the tune on record. However, his lyrics were unrelated. Thanks to Joseph Scott for pointing out my error in the comments with useful counterexamples.

3. This fella, Marc van Zee, gives an accurate tutorial with a cool accent. I definitely enjoyed it and used the video to learn the song. He does the Blind Willie McTell version (1932), which is fairly standard musically, although the lyrics differ.

4. Here is my earliest list of twins for Crow Jane Blues; it has since grown to 79 songs, and I’ve written 2 versions of my own. There is a great free tab for the Mississippi John Hurt version, Sliding Delta (Ultimate-guitar.com). Dates and proper titles from Wirz’ American Music (www.wirz.de/music), which has exhaustive illustrated discographies for most classic blues artists.

Song	Artist(s)	Date
Crow Jane Blues	Julius Daniels	1927
My Monday Blues	Jim Jackson	1928
My Monday Woman Blues	Jim Jackson	1928
Jim Lee Part I, Part II	Charley Patton	1930 (rec. 1929)
Blood Red River	Josh White	1933
Old Time Blues	Carl Martin	1935
Looking For My Woman	Blind Boy Fuller	1935
Shine On Moon	Kokomo Arnold	1937
Tom Cat Blues/Untrue Blues	Blind Boy Fuller	1937
Pistol Slapper Blues	Blind Boy Fuller	1938
Key to the Highway	Charlie Segar, Big Bill Broonzy, Little Walter, Derek and the Dominoes, Led Zeppelin	1940 (1958, 1970)
East St. Louis Blues	Furry Lewis	1959
Crow Jane	Skip James	1964
Red River Blues	John Tinsley	1977

BONUS – AWESOME LIVE PERFORMANCE:

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee