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Earlier I had posted a video of Peter Paul and Mary singing this song. Here is the man that they learned it from. Reverend Gary Davis, born in Laurens South Carolina in 1896, went blind early in his childhood. Davis was encouraged to become a musician in order to earn a living. It may seem odd now, but blind children were often taught to play a musical instrument and sing and sent out to become street performers at that time.

Davis moved to Durham North Carolina in the 1920s and became a part of the thriving Piedmont blues scene. He made his first recordings in Durham in 1935. In the 40s Davis moved to New York and began playing on the streets of Harlem. He became known as a patient, if demanding guitar teacher in New York. Some of his students, during the 60s, were David Bromberg, Roy Book Binder, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Weir, Stephan Grossman and my own guitar teacher, Rolly Brown.

Davis also became the pastor of the Missionary Baptist Church in Harlem. Most of his songs, that we know, are Gospel music but he was known to teach his students some of his older blues material when his wife was out of the house.

Richard Fariña, a Cuban/Irish American from Flatbush, New York, dropped out of Cornel in 1959 and moved to Greenwich Village just in time for the great American folk scare. He married folksinger Carolyn Hester and went on tour with her as her manager. While in Europe with Hester Fariña met Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi, and was soon divorced from Hester and living in California with his new 17 year old wife. The Baez sisters were the daughters of physicist Albert Baez and had lived in California, Boston, Baghdad, Paris and finally back to California, growing up.

Richard and Mimi wrote some songs and began performing them, starting with the 1964 Big Sur Folk Festival. They recorded two albums for Vanguard Records before Richards death in a motorcycle accident in 1966. Mimi went on to found Bread and Roses, a non-profit organization that brings live music into prisons, hospitals and nursing homes. The double LP “Bread and Roses” is a recording of a fund raising concert that she held for the organization.

Of course Richard and Mimi made an appearance on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest television show. Here they sing one of the songs that Richard co-wote with Mimi’s sister Pauline.

Ferdinand Joseph Lamenthe, aka Jelly Roll Morton, born in New Orleans in 1890, claimed to the inventor of jazz. His “Jelly Roll Blues,” published in 1915 is certainly one of the first jazz compositions to make it to print.

This recording of “Hesitation Blues” is from a series of interviews Morton did with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1938. “Hesitation Blues” uses a traditional melody with lyrics written by various people over the years. Billy Smythe and Scott Middleton copyrighted the song in 1915, yet W. C. Handy also published “Hesitating Blues,” using the same tune and lyrics that are only slightly different, in the same year. Art Gillham recorded the song in 1925 and it was republished and copyrighted again in 1926 under his name along with Smythe and Middleton. As he states in the beginning of the recording Morton allowed people to believe that he had written the song for many years as well.