As we close out Black History Month, and my two efforts to say something worthy of the subject ended up in the e-trash, I was thinking about giving Nina Simone the final word on the month here on my blog. A question struck me; has anyone covered “Mississippi Goddam?” Would anyone dare?
But I sure do like the song. I recall the original from my childhood. We lived in a small redneck town in Colorado back then, and the music was the perfect soundtrack for a part of my childhood spent on the back of a horse rather than a bicycle.
Of course, the rock&roll chased almost everything else out of my musical tastes for a time, and I have to admit I was slow to put anything by Hank Williams back in my personal playlists (kicking myself there), but I don’t think there has ever been a moment I heard him on the radio, or in a movie, or on some friend’s stereo that I didn’t smile a little and enjoy the music. Hank Williams was full of amazing tunes.
But Lonesome is in a class all by itself.
Puts a lump in my throat every damned time!
I actually think what brought me back to the original was the cover by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes back in the oughts. That song did more damage to my truck speakers driving back and forth from Flagstaff to the middle of the Navajo Nation. Their version was made to be loud, very loud! They probably took a small portion of my hearing down along with the speakers, not that Black Sabbath hadn’t already vandalized my hearing well before they added their two cents of post-punk goodness.
…or badness.
All is forgiven though. They led me back to Hank.
A few years back, I added one more version of this wonderful tune to my playlist, a cover by Hurray for the RiffRaff. Moni always says this version is a little too slow for her taste, which is odd, because she loves the RiffRaff even more than I do, but their version of Lonesome is just a bit too slow for her.
I love Moni anyway.
I know this tune has been covered and re-covered by many great artists, but these are the versions I know and love.
I grew up listening to Green Manalishi, the Priest version of course.
To say that I loved that song is hardly the half of it. I recall waiting by the stereo with a cassette recorder, hoping it would play soon, and hoping the damned DJ would announce it in time for me to his record. That and “You Got Another Thing Comin'” led me to Judas Priest. Combined with a few other things, it led me to Heavy Metal. To say that I took an interest in the genre is putting it mildly. For an adolescent male back in the 80s, Heavy Metal was more like a religion than a musical genre. I didn’t just embrace metal on account of this song and others like it, I instinctively renounced others. To love music from another genre just felt wrong; metal was my music. I made exceptions, but they were few and far in between for a few years there. My interest in metal back then was an oath of allegiance. Remembering now what it was like to sit in front of my dad’s old stereo with a tape-recorder waiting for a Green Manalishi to make an appearance, I can’t help but chuckle at he foolishness to come even as I wish I could have (just for one moment even) the magic and the intensity of my initial interest in this song.
I don’t know when I first learned that one of my favorite Priest songs was actually a cover. I imagine, I must have responded with something like; ‘cool’, but I don’t think I sought out the original. As with Diamonds and Rust, I was happy to know that there was a history to this song, but I didn’t make too much of an effort to learn what it was.
I think I listened to the full version of this song only recently. It was a Fleetwood Mack song, made long before Stevie Nicks brought her own haunting vocals to the band. This was one of Peter Green’s final contributions to the band.
What is a Green Manalishi?
To Green, it was a green dog, if you can imagine that, a green dog and a dead one at that, dead but still barking. The dog, according to Green represented money.
Yes, drugs were involved.
In its own way, the Green version of this tune is just as hard hitting as the Priest cover. It’s slower, more minimalist, and yet so much more haunting. Anger always came through loud and clear in the Priest version; in the original it’s dread. I always imagined Rob Halford angry at some old flame who wouldn’t go away. I would never have imagined the Green version was an old lover; every note suggests something more sinister, more arcane. I wouldn’t have guessed it was a dog or a money, but listening to the tune now, death and worse seems quite likely the point of the song.
I have two versions of this song in my favorites list now.
Like most any white kid in the suburbs of the 70s and 80s, I listened to hard rock. As I got older, I came to understand there was some kind of relationship between the blaring guitars and thundering drums making their way into my ears and the old blues artists of what then seemed to me like ancient times. In college, I learned a bit more about it from a History of Rock&Roll class, and from a friend with a good stash of old blues albums, but it wasn’t until I started buying those albums myself that I realized just how much my favorite bands owed to the old blues artists. In time, I came to see just how much of what I loved about Rock&Roll was already there in blues.
Needless to say, this meant I had a whole new range of music to explore.
One of my favorite songs, then and now, would have to be Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks.
I’m sorry, I meant to say that one of my favorite songs has always been the Led Zeppelin version of When the Levee Breaks.
Zeppelin absolutely nailed this recording, but listening to four British guys play the song, I always had the sense that the lyrics didn’t quite fit. Sure, it was Robert Plant’s vocals on the albums, but it wasn’t his voice (in the literary sense) that animated the story. No. The voice that shaped the lyrics belonged to Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe, the original artists to record the song. Realizing this, puts the tune in a whole new perspective. Minnie and Joe were singing about the great Mississippi flood of 1927, an event far closer to their own lives than those of the Mighty Zep. Zeppelin may have carried their story forward a bit, but not without taking a few ghosts along with it.
I still love the Zeppelin version, but I feel just a little better knowing where it came from. No. I don’t always need that to enjoy a song, but in this case, the story itself keeps pointing back to its beginnings. The song keeps alluding to an origin that doesn’t sit well in the mega-hit from the early seventies. For me at least, the song is a little more interesting when you can grasp the traces of dialogue within it, when you can hear at least a trace of Minnie’s voice in that of Robert Plant.
Lately, my favorite version of the song comes from Buckwheat Zydeco. I didn’t expect that. Really, When I first hit play on this version, I fully expected to mumble ‘that’s interesting’ and switch half-way through the tune to something else (something louder and meaner). But no! He frickin kills it! Zydeco seems to keep a lot of the Zeppelin version in his own approach to the song, but of course he adds something new to the mix, something rather cool. Hearing Zydeco’s own vocals onto the blaring guitars and thundering drums makes for an interesting twist in the story. Without erasing the classic rock influence, Zydeco manages to bring the song back closer to its original home. It all gets a little more interesting when this version of the song turns out to be a nod to the hardships brought on by Hurricane Katrina. You can hear a lot of history in this recording, both in the lyrics and the in layers of musical style.
I have fond memories of Zeppelin, the dreaded version of course. Don’t worry I love the leaded version of zeppelin too, but there is something about an Elvis impersonator belting out Robert Plants lyrics to a slightly more rhythmic version of the standard Zep. tunes, …it was hilarious and beautiful at the same time. I’m talking about Dread Zeppelin of course. If you don’t know what I’m talking about the, not even Jah can save you.
I saw these guys at a New Year’s performance at Calamity Jane’s in Las Vegas many many years back. They put on a Hell of a show, and yes I still inflict their tunes on my friends whenever I get a chance. I always thought the most brilliant thing they ever did was this little gem For those insufficiently familiar with the original Zeppelin canon (shame on you again!), the name of the tune is of course, Moby Dick.
…a fact that has had me laughing for about 2 decades now.
My friend, Mike, likes to make fun of the lyrics. I laugh, because It’s a fair cop. That doesn’t stop me from loving this song. It’s crude, and it’s angry, and frankly, I think that suits its subject rather well. When one thinks of war protest songs, Heavy Metal isn’t normally the genre that comes to mind, but perhaps this is one well-earned exception. Hell, I even like the cheated rhyme!
In fact this song has four places on my favorites play-list rather than one, because there are a few non-Sabbath versions of War Pigs that are well worth a listen. The Suck doesn’t add too much to the composition, but this apartheid era rock band seems so out-of-place in South Africa, they get triple credit for simply thinking of recording the song. Hayseed Dixie is of course funny as Hell, but I think they are as sincere about it’s message as anybody. Check out their remake of Holiday to hear these rednecks take sarcasm and bitterness right to 11. The most creative reworking of War Pigs may come from the Dresden Dolls. Theirs may also be the most earnest. Unfortunately, I don’t think they ever recorded it in a studio; one has only a few live bootlegs to choose from. The version below is the best I can find.
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Postscript: Since writing this, I have discovered a couple new versions of this song; Brownout and Brass Against.