Cumberland Blues

Phil Lesh’s passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I’ve been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is “Cumberland Blues.” Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense musical oddness. Here’s the studio version from Workingman’s Dead. It includes Jerry’s only banjo performance on a Grateful Dead song, aside from the last few seconds of the “Dark Star” single.

There is a real Cumberland mine in Pennsylvania, and another in Kentucky. In his collected lyrics, Robert Hunter says in a footnote to this song: “The best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who’d worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, ‘I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would’ve thought if he’d ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it.'” I half suspect that Hunter made this story up, but the lyrics do sound legitimately folkloric. In his Pitchfork review of Workingman’s Dead, Steven Thomas Erlewine compares Hunter’s lyrics on the album to Robbie Robertson’s, because both of them have that plausibly timeless Americana quality.

Casual listeners to this tune have to grapple with the fact that Jerry, Bobby and Phil are not excellent three-part harmony singers. Steven Thomas Erlewine chooses to look at the bright side: “The trio’s voices don’t quite mesh, sometimes hitting a dissonant chord, sometimes scrambling for the same note; their effort isn’t merely heard, it’s felt. All that fumbling winds up as an asset on Workingman’s Dead, adding a bit of messiness to the tight performances.” If I’m in the right mood, I experience that messiness as authenticity rather than sloppiness or indifference, but I can easily understand people who just find it off-putting.

The studio version of “Cumberland Blues” is fine, but for me, the canonical version is the one on Europe ’72.

The Dead compiled this album from performances recorded on  one of their hottest tours, and then re-recorded the vocals in the studio. The singing is still far from flawless, but it’s certainly better than it is on the original live recordings. I wish they had taken this approach for all of their albums. I’ll dig into the Europe ’72 recording in depth below, but first let’s look at some other noteworthy performances.

The beloved 5/2/70 show from Harpur College includes a strong “Cumberland Blues” featuring extra guitar by David Nelson.

If you like the Brent Mydland era, this performance is a pretty good one.

There are a surprising lot of covers of this song out there. Why? I mean, I love it, but if you asked me to pick a Dead tune that normal people might enjoy, “Cumberland Blues” would not be one of my first 30 suggestions. And yet, plenty of artists are out there performing it.

Daniel Donato’s group doesn’t have the Dead’s intensity, but they do sing in tune, which is a welcome change of pace.

Bluegrass covers are a no-brainer. The Travelin’ McCourys do a good one, and they tag Flatt and Scruggs’ “Cumberland Gap” onto the end.

David Mansfield’s solo mandolin version works very well too.

The Day of the Dead compilation includes an unexpected medium-slow soul arrangement by Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band. 

Vampire Weekend does a weird sort of meta-commentary on the song. I find it annoying, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

On a more positive note, here’s a choir of elementary school kids singing it.

Let’s return our attention to the Europe ’72 version. Here’s an annotated listening guide.

• 0:00 Phil’s bass begins the song, a high-register G major pentatonic figure that is burning from the first stroke of the pick. The rest of the band filters in for the intro groove on G7.
• 0:39 A disruption of the hypermeter, the first of many in this tune. I hear the hypermeasures as being four bars long, and the intro cuts the last hypermeasure off halfway through.
• 0:41 Verse one. It stays on G7 throughout. On the line “the sun is getting high”, the word “high” has a prominent E in it. That’s a weird note to end a phrase on. It’s the sixth of the chord, effectively a suspension which you would expect to resolve down to D.
• 0:57 The song doesn’t really have a chorus, but if it did, this is where it would go. The line “I gotta get down” comes on the song’s first real chord change, and it’s a doozy, going from G7 down a half step to Gb. This is an extremely counterintuitive choice for a supposed country song. I guess the logic is that the chord literally “gets down”, but it would have been way more obvious to drop a whole step to F. The rest of the chords in the section are equally weird too. On the second “I gotta”, the chord jumps up a major third to Bb, and on the second “get down”, it slides up a further half step to B. I have no idea what to make of this. On “gotta get down to the mine”, the chords descend chromatically: Bb, A, Ab and home to G7. This move, at least, I can understand. It’s probably supposed to evoke the descending diminished chord blues cliche: G7/B, Gdim7/Bb, Am7, G7. Jerry didn’t know what diminished chords were at this point, so he sometimes approximated them by sliding major or dominant chords around. He does the same thing in the chorus of “Brokedown Palace.” Jerry eventually did learn about diminished chords, and you can hear him exploring them in “China Doll” and “Ship of Fools”.
• 1:07 Jerry’s first solo, on G Mixolydian with a lot of bluesy string bends. He sounds good here, but has not yet reached maximum intensity.
• 1:39 There’s a half hypermeasure, and the hypermeter gets turned around as a result.
• 1:49 Another half hypermeasure. The more professional-sounding Dead cover bands do a better job of not getting lost in the hypermeter, but they lose that unpredictability and asymmetry that the original band’s jams often have.
• 1:51 Verse two, musically the same as the first. I don’t know whether “Little Ben clocks” are a real thing, but there are Baby Ben clocks.
• 2:07 Chorus two, musically same as the first, but with a pretty wild G9 chord in the vocal harmony at the end of the last line.
• 2:17 Jerry’s second solo. This is where he really takes flight. He begins with a raging country riff that alternates the flat seventh F and the sharp fourth C-sharp bent most but not all of the way up to the fifth D. The F is half a beat long and the not-quite-D is a beat long, making a one-and-a-half-beat pattern that cycles in and out of phase with the underlying 4/4 groove for eight entire bars. Jerry uses lots more odd-length phrases in the rest of the solo, frequently losing not just the hypermeter, but the meter as well. It gives the jam a chaotic energy that I love.
• 3:04 The meter gets seriously confused in here. I hear an implicit bar of 5/4.
• 3:14 Half hypermeasure.
• 3:24 Hypermetrical chaos: two bars of 4/4, a bar of 3/4, and a bar of 4/4.
• 3:28 Hypermetrical stability returns and the jam comes in for a landing.
• 3:36 Verse three, just Bobby, singing better than usual, on a nice bluesy melody. Check out the blue note he hits on the word “bill”.
• 3:52 What do we call this part? I think of it as the bridge, for lack of a better term. The line “Can I go, buddy, can I go down” is on C, and the line “take your shift at the mine” is on D. This would seem to be an obvious IV to V, setting up a big cadence back to I in the next phrase, but no.
• 4:00 I don’t know what to call this part either. Maybe it’s the bridge part B? The line “Gotta get down to the Cumberland mine” is on C. You would naively think that this is another IV chord in G, but no, as it turns out, it’s the I chord in C. Phil and Bobby’s response vocals on “gotta get down to the Cumberland mine” are over F and C, a IV-I plagal cadence, neatly filling a hypermeasure. But then on the line “that’s where I mainly spend my time”, several strange things happen. The band sits on F for five and a half bars. However, Jerry, Bobby and Phil only sing the F chord for three and a half bars. Then the vocals resolve to C an entire two bars before the instruments do. I guess that is implicitly two bars of Fmaj9? I assume that they did this accidentally while rehearsing, decided they liked it, and kept it.
• 4:10 And now this is, what, the bridge part C? The line “Make good money five dollars a day” is back on C for one nice orderly hypermeasure. However, metrical and harmonic weirdness resume on the line “made any more, I might move away”. It’s on F for two and a half bars. But then the “way” continues on Em for one bar, then on Am for two bars, and then on Em again for two more bars. If we are still in C major by this point (and it’s not totally clear that we are), then Em is the iii chord, which is not something you typically emphasize so hard in a country song.
• 4:22 Jerry’s third solo, all on G7, with more of a flowing linearity than the first two solos. Hypermetrical stability returns, but what about the key? At the beginning of the solo, I’m hearing G7 as the V7 chord in C. By about eight bars in, however, it starts sounding like I7 in G. That’s a neat trick. They do the same thing in the China>Rider transitional jam.
• 4:53 I despair of coming up with a sensible name for this part. Bridge two? Also, where does the section start? On first hearing, the words “Lotta poor man got the” sound like a pickup,with the section starting on the words “Cumberland blues”, as the chord changes to C. In retrospect, though, the section actually started before “Lotta poor man”; the hypermeter has reset itself without your noticing. At least the chord changes get more conventional in here. The line “just to pay his union dues” is on A resolving to D, a classic secondary dominant, V/V resolving to V. This would then conventionally resolve back to G.
• 5:10 Resolution gets deferred until after two bars each of C, D and C again. I guess this part is the outtro? After all that confusion, the song ends conventionally, on the I chord at the end of a complete hypermeasure. Whew!

So what does this all mean? I haven’t talked about the lyrics much, because other people have done it at length. No one in the Dead ever worked in a coal mine or did any other manual labor so far as I know. That isn’t automatically a problem; plenty of people sing old folk and country songs whose lyrics are remote to their own experience. Is it better or worse that this is a Robert Hunter original rather than “authentic” folkloric material? I can’t decide.

Buzz Poole’s 33 1/3 book about Workingman’s Dead has a whole chapter on “Cumberland Blues”, but it hardly talks about the song at all. Instead, Poole uses its labor theme as a jumping-off point for the story of the band as a business. He observes that most of the band’s founding members were high school dropouts, and if their music careers hadn’t worked out, they would very likely have ended up in a similar situation to the narrator of “Cumberland Blues”, though probably more like Phil’s post office job than literal coal mining. Of course, the band did succeed at creating a very successful business on their own terms, but it ended up becoming a trap, since they couldn’t stop touring without firing members of their enormous organization. As Poole puts it: “The band went from being the workers to becoming the mine from which others benefitted, extracting the valuable deposits until there was nothing left to haul out” (p. 102). That is bleak!

What does a person like me get out of this song? My main theory is that the words don’t actually matter all that much; they are providing color and vibe for the main musical content, which is everything else. Maybe I enjoy the vicarious blue-collar authenticity that comes from listening to people sing about the hardscrabble life of an honest laborer. This is my latent Puritanical work ethic rearing its head. The Grateful Dead would seem to be the least Puritanical Americans of all time, but in spite of their hedonism, they did keep up a relentless work schedule, especially Jerry. I guess the contradiction is what makes them interesting.