Song of the Day: October 27

Written by Elliott Hurwitt

Music Historian

In category: Song of the Day

Published October 27, 2015

This week’s Song of the Day curator is Elliott Hurwitt, longtime friend of NYFOS and music historian specializing in the works of W. C. Handy. 

from Elliott Hurwitt:

We don’t know a whole lot about Geeshie Wiley, who recorded “Last Kind Words Blues” and a handful of other songs, except that she worked in a duo with L.V. Thomas, who was a lesbian, and they were probably a couple. Wiley didn’t have a lot of luck with men; she is known to have killed her second husband with a knife in 1931, then pretty much vanished into the mists of time, probably returning to Texas, from whence she had journeyed north to record. She and L.V. entered a Grafton, Wisconsin studio of Paramount Records (a division of the Wisconsin Chair Company) with their guitars and cut this record when Wiley was around 22, in 1930; they made 5 other sides, some not released till the following year.

“Last Kind Words” isn’t strictly speaking a blues, but it represents song traditions that are surely older, and embodies blues feeling, hard luck and trouble. It is particularly strong in the eerie, the power to chill the blood: so, wishing you all an early Happy Halloween. The text, as with so many blues, is a jumble of multiple earlier songs, some of which must go back at least to the World War I period: “If I die, in the German war…” is a tip-off, and many of the other lines are found in numerous blues from all over the U.S.  Formerly very obscure, this record has become a cult item since it appeared in Terry Zwigoff’s biographical film Crumb in 1994. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2014 article in The New York Times magazine, “The Ballad of Geeshie and L.V.,” brought these inadequately known blues artists to still wider renown. Most recently, Greil Marcus provides a fine discussion of “Last Kind Words” in his latest book, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, where Geeshie is spotlighted alongside Bob Dylan and the great folklorist Bascomb Lamar Lunsford. It’s about time, too.

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