Dock Boggs

I was pleasantly surprised the other day, trawling youtube for something to write about, to see this clip of Dock Boggs performing "Country Blues" in the mid-1960s:



It's a pretty great performance, and it has a quality that I've found in a few late performances by jazz saxophonist Lester Young, and a few other people at the end of their performing careers and lives. When the clip starts out, Boggs looks and sounds a little tired, and he can't make his phrases at the sleepy tempo he picks. Everything is a bit gloomy and tired, and the banjo playing is abnormally simple and sloppy, but performing one of his "hits" from 40 years earlier, he wakes up. Each verse is a little faster than the one before it, and his singing gets gradually more confident. By the end of the tune, Boggs is sitting up straighter, tapping his foot, and nearly smiling, although that never quite happens, out of respect to the gothically depressing lyrics, typical for the repertoire Boggs usually chose to record.

I also had a good time comparing this clip to the original 1928 recording he made:



The earlier recording is a very different arrangement. It's at a faster tempo, with more complex banjo playing, more consistent phrasing, and a higher key. There's a pretty clear decline in Boggs' playing and singing over the 25-year-long break he took from performing, but there's also a deliberate change in the way Boggs approaches this song at two very different points in his life, and I think I can hear the difference between a young man singing about how he's messing up and an old man looking back at his youthful mistakes.