BABY, PLEASE DON’T GO
“Baby, Please Don’t Go” is a blues song that has been called “one of the most played, arranged, and rearranged pieces in blues history” by music historian Gerard Herzhaft. Delta blues musician Big Joe Williams popularized the song with several versions beginning in 1935. Other recorded renditions include one by Bob Dylan on the famous bootleg album, Great White Wonder (1969). (More from Wikipedia)
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me. To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them.
(September 2017)
