Odetta - Miles - Jerry (3 Songs)

One of my favorite albums of all time is a collection of Miles Davis’ songs called Ballads and Blues. It captures his sound from the 1950s when he played with J. J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley, and Art Blakey.

An acquaintance of mine in high school gave me a dubbed copy of this album on cassette in my junior year of high school, and I immediately fell in love with it. I especially loved listening to it at night while driving home.

It’s funny to think back now, of a 17 year old kid with long hair driving through the suburbs at night, smoking cigarettes, ejecting a Sonic Youth or a Nirvana album and popping this in, but that was me.

When thinking of a song to suggest this week, I decided that I wanted to revisit this album and choose a song from it. The problem was, with all the songs being so good, I didn’t know which one to pick.

Then I had an idea.

Recently, I have been interested in writing haiku. By chance, there happened to be a song title on this Miles Davis album with seven syllables, so I decided to recommend that song and try to write a haiku made up of song titles as they are.

To choose two more songs, I set some parameters for myself. One, I must choose a song from an album I have owned, and two, the song has to be from roughly the same time period as the Miles Davis song that I chose to work with.

Using these parameters, I remembered an album by Odetta that I loved listening to in my 20s called Odetta and the Blues. As far as I know, this is an unusual album for Odetta because rather than sing and play the guitar alone in a folk/blues style, she is backed by a full New Orleans jazz band. I don’t know if she ever recorded something like this again.

Looking at the song titles on Odetta and the Blues, I chose to include Leavin’ this morning on my list of recommendations for Three Tune Tuesday because it has five syllables and creates an interesting opening or closing line for a haiku. In addition, it works well when used with the title It never entered my mind.

To complete my haiku, I needed one more song. This proved a bit difficult. I had imagined using something a little more jazzy to keep in line with the first two songs recommended here, but when it came down to using albums that I had once owned, I didn’t have a lot to work with.

While I’m sure there is a more appropriate song out there to pair with my first two selections (and for completing my haiku as well), I decided to use a Jerry Lee Lewis song (he is someone who was playing music at the same time as Miles and Odetta) to finish things with.

Jerry’s album *Country Songs For City Folks has a lot of great songs on it, and Green Green Grass of Home, while not quite five syllables, is a song I love.

So here you go @ablaze, my three songs for this week.