It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 4

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         He knows all those songs

Don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flagging down the “Double E”?
Don’t the sun look good, goin’ down over the sea?
Don’t my gal look fine, when she’s comin’ after me?

“You also cover Leroy Carr’s “Alabama Woman Blues,” which you’ve played in concert in the past. Around 12 years ago, you listed it as one of your 10 favorite songs of all time. What do you find so alluring about it—or at least about Carr’s original recording of it?”
“I think it was where it hit me in my own life. It was one of the first songs I heard as a teenager, not really knowing anything about Leroy Carr. But there’s something about the sadness of that song. There’s a certain atmosphere to his recording. Something about it is so poignant, moving, simple and sad. My version is much more out there and upbeat, but you really should listen to Leroy Carr’s version.”

(Clapton, GuitarWorld, 19 May 2016)

Eric Clapton’s I Still Do oozes melancholy. Starting with the album’s title. “It’s a quote from my auntie,” Clapton tells interviewer Paul Whitehouse, in the promo video for the album’s 2016 release. Auntie is on her deathbed. Clapton pays a farewell visit and thanks her for all the good care and love she gave him, back when he was a troublesome, difficult child. “Well, I liked you,” Auntie says, “and I still do.”

The album is basically a “regular” Clapton album that follows the formula: a few self-written songs, a few covers (as usual from J.J. Cale and from Dylan – in this case a wonderful “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” sounding like a forgotten outtake of Ry Cooder’s masterpiece Chicken Skin Music) and a few blues classics.

So the melancholy is evoked not so much by the track list, but mainly by the sound. Working with master producer Glyn Johns again for the first time in forty years (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Eagles, to name but a few), Clapton has mostly experienced veterans around him. Men like Andy Fairweather Low and Paul Carrack and Henry Spinetti (Dylan’s drummer on Down In The Groove, 1988), and one of Dylan’s “secret heroes” (according to the Biograph booklet, 1985), Paul Brady. All men who are already approaching seventy, who have been making music at Premier League level for more than half a century and whom you no longer need to explain what a song needs. Which we hear pre-eminently in the classics: Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway”, Skip James’ “Cypress Grove” and in the opening, in Leroy Carr’s indestructible “Alabama Woman Blues”, the song with the now over-familiar closing lines

Don't the clouds look lonesome across the deep blue sea
Don't my gal look good when she's coming after me

It is one of the best examples for Dylan’s 2008 radio lesson, a great example for “certain phrases are used over and over in the folk process, and are crossing the boundaries between country and blues music.” Well, would have been a great example, but the DJ never mentions songs of his own. In 1930, Leroy Carr records “Alabama Woman Blues”. Charley Patton also knows the song and records “Poor Me” four years later, in the last recording session before his early death in 1934: Don’t the moon look pretty shinin’ down through the tree? And apparently those lines with the lonely clouds, the moon and look good resonate with Bob Wills when he records his rip-off of Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues” in 1947:

Well, good evenin', don't that sun look good goin' down
Well, good evenin', don't that sun look good goin' down
Don't your home look lonesome when your lover ain't around

… “Brain Cloudy Blues”, the song Elvis seems to hear when he records his version of “Milk Cow Blues”, and the song Dylan plunders for both “Quit Your Lowdown Ways” and “Rocks And Gravel”, both in 1962. And “Rocks And Gravel” is then still a bit more than a song that just reuses “certain phrases” here and there; the entire song is cut and pasted from front to back. The first stanza is borrowed from Mance Lipscomb’s “Rocks and Gravel” (1961, but Mance’s song is in turn a rip-off of “Rock And Gravel Blues” by Peg Leg Howell from 1928); the continuation comes from Leroy Carr’s “Alabama Woman Blues” (Did you ever go down on the Mobile and K C line / I just want to ask you, did you ever see that girl of mine), just like the lonely clouds and the closing line copy Leroy Carr’s Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me, the closing line of yet again “Alabama Woman Blues”. The closing couplet of Dylan’s cut-copy-and-paste piece “Rocks And Gravel” is then:

Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't my gal look good, when she's comin' after me?

Leroy Carr remains a loyal supplier, by the way. Even into the 21st century. In “Blues Before Sunrise” from 1934, for instance, we hear halfway through:

Today has been such a long and lonesome day
Today has been a long and lonesome day
I've been sitting here and thinking
With my mind a million miles away

… which we hear return almost verbatim as the first verse of Dylan’s “Lonesome Day Blues” from 2001.

Still, in the end, neither Leroy Carr nor the almost literal copying of the moon shining through the trees from Charley Patton’s “Poor Me”, but rather Bob Wills’ “Brain Cloudy Blues” seems to be the station from which Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” departs. And not so much because of those certain phrases, but mainly because of that peculiar addition on the first recording sheet: “cloudy”. We hear how on The Cutting Edge producer Tom Wilson gives the go-ahead with the words “Phantom engineer number cloudy take one,” and we hear Dylan chuckle – it seems that Wilson is making an in-joke, referring to something that has just been discussed or happened; an educated guess is that Dylan mentioned Wills’ song or maybe even played a few bars of it. Or perhaps that Wilson thus hints that he sees through Dylan’s theft, and Dylan giggles because he is caught.

Anyway: Leroy Carr, “Milk Cow Blues”, Bob Wills’ “Brain Cloudy Blues”, Mance Lipscomb, and Dylan’s own “Rocks And Gravel”… this one verse illustrates not only the DJ Dylan’s words about certain phrases used over and over, but also what G.E. Smith, Dylan’s guitarist in the 1988-90s tells us in the fascinating interview with Ray Padgett for Flagging Down The Double E’s, Ray’s brilliant Dylan newsletter of 2 March 2025:

“We still had cassettes back then, and on the bus he’s playing these cassette tapes of all this great old traditional stuff, because by then he knew I was really into it. He said, “This is a good song, you should learn this one.” “And this one, see how this turned into this, and then Hank Williams wrote–” You know, he totally knows the history of all that music in the United States. He knows all those songs. Just off the top of his head.”

“This turned into this”… it is as Dylan later says in his famous MusiCares speech (2015): “All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing.” And then that connection is not a neat serialisation, not a relay-like succession where from Song 1 something is carried over to Song 2, and from Song 2 then something again to Song 3. No, “Milk Cow Blues”, Robert Johnson, “Brain Cloudy Blues”, Elvis, “Casey Jones”, Mance Lipscomb, Charley Patton’s “Poor Me”, “Rock And Gravel Blues”, William “Brother Bill” Burroughs, The Foggy Mountain Boys, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and Dylan’s own “Rocks And Gravel”: it is a labyrinth, a pit full of wriggling snakes biting each other’s and their own tails.

Why exactly these particular songs, one might still ask. “Well, I liked them,” he’d say most likely, “and I still do.”

———–

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 5: He smelled like cigarettes and Dixie Peach

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door