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The Biscuit Rollers

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"Why Don't You Quit Your Low Down Ways?"

Video by Andy Brooksbank

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well what must a picture and a live performance be worth? See and hear Blind Boy Fuller's, "Why Don't You Quit You're Low Down Ways?" and Willie Brown's "Mississippi Blues" from THE BISCUIT ROLLERS video, "THE BACK PORCH TAPES".

Music

Where we can we'll give you some background and history of these songs. It is a fascinating subject as popular music reflects the society and culture from which it is created. From Memphis Minnie to Madonna folk or country blues in particular is a snap shot of history.

Ragged and Dirty

From The Biscuit Rollers CD, "One Kind Favor".

It's interesting how Bob Dylan takes this William Brown tune from the 1940s, alters the lyric slightly and then releases it in 1993 on the album, "World Gone Wrong" with the credit listed as "Words and Music by Bob Dylan. To be fair, as with most early blues every body "borrows" from everybody else. Or as John Hiatt more directly put it, "If it ain't nailed down, I'll steal it."

As Dylan says, "one of the Willie Browns did this". Actually it was the obscure William Brown of Sadie Beck's Plantation, Arkansas, who recorded Ragged And Dirty plus two other songs ["Mississippi Blues" and "East St. Louis Blues"] under his own name for the Library of Congress on July 16, 1942 [released on Library of Congress AFS L59]....
The song is much older than William Brown's version... It has often appeared on record under the title of Broke And Hungry or similar.... Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded Broke And Hungry in Chicago around November 1926, and John Estes... cut his own version, Broken Hearted, Ragged And Dirty Too, in Memphis, September 26, 1929.

John Way, World Gone Wrong -- More About the Songs, Telegraph 47, Winter 1993, pp. 42-43.