Riley Puckett became the poster child of weird old American country music when Nick Tosches plastered his face on the cover of his groundbreaking 1985 book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n’Roll. Puckett’s an odd-looking bird, to say the least, which must be the reason Tosches used his photo, because Puckett himself warrants only two passing references in the book.
Puckett was blind, but looks cross-eyed. He has a dimpled chin, jowls, no lips to speak of, and what with his high forehead his facial features seem to have retreated to the center of his face. The effect is hard to describe. Perhaps Tosches thought he best personified that “twisted.” And there’s no denying that his photograph could have come straight out of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip.
But twisted isn’t the word that comes to me. He looks inscrutable, sphinxlike. It’s true that his eyes, one seemingly entranced by his nose and the other buried in the shadow cast by his brow, give him an otherworldly look. It doesn’t help that the book cover paints him in lurid colors, his face a sickly lime green, his hair, shirt collar and tie a bright pink. Tosches did Puckett a disservice, to an extent; in a photo I’ve seen of a younger Puckett he looks dapper, his hair pomaded—he’s almost movie star handsome. This Puckett, an older Puckett obviously, just looks lost in some kind of Depression-era fever dream.
Riley Puckett was born in Georgia in 1894, and early on was dubbed the “Bald Mountain Caruso.” This stemmed from the fact that he had a good voice, and didn’t sound as hillbilly as many of his country contemporaries. He was also an influential guitarist. He recorded a lot of music during his relatively short life, but he’s primarily remembered for being the first country singer to stand up on his hind legs in a recording studio and yodel, first in April 1924 to the song “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep,” then to “Sleep Baby Sleep” in 1927.
It might have seemed to a strange thing to do, but yodeling was all the craze in the United States at that time, and the only real question is one of transmission—Puckett hardly invented yodeling, so where did he hear it? People had been yodeling on record since around 1894, but Puckett’s personal inspiration was probably George P. Watson, who cut a yodeling version of “Sleep Baby Sleep” in 1897, when Puckett was all of three years old.
He could have heard it on his parents’ Victrola, while playing on the floor. It’s also possible he heard yodeling at one of the traveling black minstrel shows that toured the country in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Monroe Tabor (aka “The Yodeling Bellboy”) was giving “Sleep Baby Sleep” the Alps treatment as far back as 1908 and who knows how long before that. Could a young Puckett have been sitting in one of his audiences, blindly agog?
What’s indubitably true is that soon after Puckett recorded his song other country musicians began making hay off the craze, the most famous of them being America’s Blue Yodeler, Jimmie Rodgers. What’s also indubitably true is that blues musicians were yodeling on record before Puckett walked into a studio and began making like the Von Trapp Family Singers. Indeed, the popularity of yodeling was such that Bessie Smith cut “Yodeling Blues” in 1923, and she doesn’t even yodel on it. But the craze reached its apex with the likes of singing cowboy Gene Autry, who put the Alps on horseback and rode off into the sunset, making like Austria with a lasso.
But we’re not here to talk about Puckett’s yodeling. He didn’t do much of it on record—it was anything but his trademark. He yodels on the hobo song “Waiting for a Train,” and did a version of “Blue Yodel (“T” for Texas),” a Jimmie Rogers standard, but such numbers are dwarfed by the many, many (I’m guessing 190 or so) yodel-free records he released, both solo and during his years (1929–1941) with Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers. Great songs like the hilariously macabre “The Cat Came Back,” the great “Ragged but Right” (later to be covered by everybody from George Jones to the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band) and “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” (Doc Watson, the Flying Burrito Brothers and more), which I’m guessing served as an inspiration for the Grateful Dead’s “Don’t Let That Deal Go Down.”
My favorite of Puckett’s songs (and he cut a lot of great ones) is “Nobody’s Business.” The song has an interesting history, one that speaks to both the cross-pollination between the blues and country music and what happens to a song as it moves through the years and across state lines. In the case of “Nobody’s Business,” there’s a lot to unpack. Because the original slow blues version, which was recorded variously under the titles “Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business but My Own,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do,” and other names by the likes of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Witherspoon, Otis Spann, and I could go on, bears scant resemblance to what the country folks would do with it.
And people differ on when it was written. In 1911, by pianists Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins? They published it. But did they “borrow” it from a traditional that was making rounds in the first decade of the Twentieth Century? This is what I love about old-timey music—you follow a song back, and further back yet, from Vaudeville to sharecropper shack, musician, and in the end you have to wonder whether it was being sung on the Ark.
“Nobody’s Business” underwent a strange transformation when it moved into the country realm, one that went far deeper than the fact that it was jacked up in tempo and turned into a corn-fueled hillbilly roadster. The lyrics, which varied radically over the course of its recording career, took a very dark turn. You won’t hear it in the lyrically cosmetized banjo rave-ups recorded by the likes of the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Country Gentlemen, Josh Graves and Cousin Jake, the Stanley Brothers and who knows how many others. (The more you look, the more you find.) Mississippi John Hurt recorded it under a variety of names, and his versions have some menace, but they pale in comparison to the version Riley Puckett would record. The same goes for the version recorded by Warren Caplinger’s Cumberland Mountain Entertainers.
Because dig deeper, and what you have on your hands is a cold-blooded song about murder, hard drugs, and hot dogs. And what I find remarkable about Puckett, who wasn’t exactly Robert Johnson and whose catalogue is heavy with sentimental songs like “Come Be My Rainbow,” “I’m Drifting Back to Dreamland,” “When You Wore a Tulip,” and “Tuck Me to Sleep in My Old Carolina Home,” is that he ended up recording the most bloodthirsty version of the song in existence. Turns out he deserved that “twisted,” but not for any reason Nick Tosches goes into in his book.
The simplest explanation of how Puckett came to record the song he did could be the most obvious one—namely, that the version (or versions) of the song Puckett first heard were the darkest ones. It’s almost certain he heard the version by fellow Georgian Charles Nabell, who coincidentally was also blind, and who recorded the song for the Okeh label in 1925.
At first I thought Puckett might have heard Nabell sing it in person, but by the time Nabell recorded it he’d long since picked up stakes and moved to Missouri. Puckett cut three different versions of the song (one for the Montgomery Ward label!) over the course of his career, but the only one I’ve been able to lay ears on was recorded in 1940 on the Bluebird label, and it’s highly unlikely he recorded a version before Nabell did in 1925, making it doubtful he was the fella who first put to record the evilest version out there.
Here’s how it goes: in 1925 Nabell recorded his version. Two years later Earl Johnson (yet another Georgian, and one much influenced by Puckett’s outfit, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers) and His Dixie Entertainers recorded a bloodthirsty version for the Okeh label entitled “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.” This is black humor at its blackest, with one notable deviation from the Nabell version—Johnson leaves the infanticide out of it. That infanticide was featured in a song recorded for public consumption tells you a whole lot about old-time America. The song is worth printing in full for its lightning shifts between bible black imagery and lighter comedy:
Sometimes I ramble, get drunk and gamble,
Nobody’s business if I do;
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business,
Nobody’s business if I do.
Some of these mornings, I wake up crazy, kill my wife and save my baby,
It’s nobody’s business if I do;
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business,
Nobody’s business if I do.
Morphine’s gonna run me crazy, cocaine’s gonna kill my baby,
Pretty girls gonna cause me to lose my mind;
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business,
Nobody’s business if I do.
When she rides in a Ford machine, I buy the gasoline,
Nobody’s business if I do;
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business,
Nobody’s business if I do.
That’s where my money goes, to buy my baby clothes,
Nobody’s business if I do;
She runs a weenie stand, way down in no man’s land,
Nobody’s business if I do;
That’s where my money goes, to buy my baby clothes,
Nobody’s business if I do.
She rides in a Cadillac, oh boy she makes the jack,
Nobody’s business if I do;
That’s where my money goes, to buy my baby clothes,
Nobody’s business if I do.
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business.
Nobody’s business if I do.
(A much later version of “Nobody’s Business” would also show up on record by Don Reno & Bill Harrell with the Tennessee Cut-Ups, released in Our Year of the Lord 1967. Oddly enough, Don and the boys have restored the homicidal stuff, missing for decades, but taken the drugs out. You want to kill somebody down south, fine. But we’ll have no talk about no dadblamed hippie narcotics.)
But let’s back up. What makes Nabell’s original version such a humdinger is the first line of the second verse, in which Nabell swaps out that save my baby with slay my baby.” Nabell’s lyrics also involve a chicken (not obscene, thank God) and some other stuff—in general, Nabell’s is the wordiest version of the song that would ever be recorded.
And at last we get to Puckett’s version. He may not sound like Caruso, but he’s a far smoother customer than your average country boy—unlike Nabell and some of the others, he doesn’t sound like he just crawled out of some whisky still holler. He’s a crooner, and by country standards he almost sounds cosmopolitan. Nabell sings the song, Puckett performs it, although he’s anything but histrionic. He still sounds matter of fact, as if slaying his baby is simply a private matter, something any reasonable person might do, so mind your business thank you very much. Why, he sounds almost carefree, going about his homicidal business.
What’s also interesting is that Puckett’s version includes both Nabell’s “slay my baby” and Earl Johnson’s lines about the weenie stand “out there in No Man’s Land,” which don’t show up in Nabell’s version. This seems to indicate that Puckett was familiar with both versions, and did some cut and pasting. Either that or he heard a recorded version I can’t lay my hands on that includes both, or heard somebody play one live.
We’ll never know, probably. Country music of this time was incestuous—you took from those closest to you. What’s more, there’s also the question of origins—did Nabell write the lyrics he sang? Or did he hear someone else sing them? And if so, where, and when? Did those lines about murder, morphine, cocaine and cigarettes (“are gonna cause me to lose my mind”) come straight out of his imagination? Until I run across an earlier version that includes them, the answer will be yes.
Riley Puckett led a life bookended by medical misfortune. He was blinded in infancy by medical incompetence, and in the end it was a pimple (a pimple!) gone septic that sent him to his grave. He was 52 years old. But this is less a review of Riley than it is of a certain kind of song, one that is born god knows where and when, that wanders from here to there, and relies for its bed and board on the whims of those who hear it, change the words and melody around, record it and pass it on, from country to city and race to race, always evolving, always alive, always ragged but right.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
