Long before I knew who Duke Ellington was, I adored a Grateful Dead song vaguely named after one of his early hits. I was most attached to the Brent-era version on Without A Net:
This is not the Dead at their absolute best. Jerry sounds like he’s about 95 years old, and some of those drum fills are like sneakers tumbling in a dryer, as critics of the band often put it. But it gets the idea across well enough for my teenage self to be enraptured.
Only much later did I hear the studio version from Wake of the Flood.
The arrangement on this recording is as cluttered and unfocused as the live versions, but it has a compelling groove to it, and it features Vassar Clements on fiddle. (I’m surprised they didn’t use fiddle more often.) I also enjoy hearing Jerry’s sweet tenor before it got turned to sandpaper by cigarette smoking.
If you want to hear the band stretch out on the tune, the version from 5/7/77 is a good one. It does a nifty transition into “Big River” at the end.
There are some covers out there by other jam bands. Billy Strings’ playing on this version by Blackberry Smoke is very tasty, he has a Jerry-like vibe without copying him too closely.
Goose does the song too, and they take it into a long doubletime jam. This is not to my taste, but they certainly do play and sing well.
The song’s title is a reference to “East St Louis Toodle-oo“, co-written by Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley. My favorite recording of it is from 1937, featuring Cootie Williams on trumpet.
Steely Dan also recorded a version, which is too fast and sarcastic and does nothing for me at all.
Anyway, the first verse of “Mississippi Half-Step” begins with a reference to the mark of Cain. A half-step is a country dance, a variation on the Texas two-step. It’s also the musical interval between any two adjacent keys on the piano or frets on the guitar. “Toodle-oo” is an old-timey or affected way to say good-bye. Rock and rye is a mixture of rye whiskey and rock candy, which I guess was a popular drink at one time, and which sounds horrendous. Half a cup of it would get you extremely drunk. As for what the rest of the song is about, your guess is as good as mine.
The narrator is a typical Robert Hunter character, living in a mythic America of some unspecified time in the past, down on his luck, in trouble with the law, in a complex relationship with a woman. The mention of styrofoam is remarkable for a Hunter lyric, because it’s so rare for him to reference something from the present day (at least, the present of the early 1970s.) Jerry apparently objected to that word, because he didn’t want the song to be tied to a particular time period, but it stayed anyway.
I loved these lyrics as a teenager. I even used the line about losing my boots in transit for my high school yearbook quote. This does not mean that I understood the lyrics, at all. I guess my feeling at the time was, better to be mysterious than to be understood. That was one of many things I was wrong about as a teenager. It also seems hilarious to me now that I identified with this world-weary drifter character, with whom I had just about nothing in common. I do still love this song, though, less for the lyrics than for its structure and harmony. It’s all standard early jazz/ragtime changes, but they are in a strange order.
The tune goes back and forth between C major and A minor, its relative minor. There are places where it’s pleasantly ambiguous which of these keys you are in.
Intro
| Am Am/G# | Am/G Am/F# | D7 | G7 |
The tune begins in A minor with a standard descending chromatic line cliche. The D7 is a secondary dominant, V7 in the temporary key of G. Then G7 is the V7 chord in the main key of C.
Verse
| C | E7 | F | Am |
| F | C G | D7 | G7 |
| C | E7 | F | Am |
| F | C G | F | E7 | % |
The verse seems like it’s going to begin with a standard old-time country or ragtime progression. There’s the tonic C, and then E7, the secondary dominant leading to Am. Jerry doesn’t resolve there right away, he puts in a deceptive cadence to F first. It creates a pleasantly muddled sense of which chord is the settled one. Everything else is straightforward, but it’s nice how the sixth and fourteenth bars break up the harmonic rhythm. It’s also nice how there’s an extra bar of E7 on the end, making the form a little odd.
Prechorus
This is simple, just four bars of Am. Brent adds a descending chromatic line underneath, which works nicely.
Chorus
| F | C G | F | C G |
| F | C G | Am | E7 | % |
Standard country harmony for the first six bars, but then it’s nice how it goes i to V in E minor rather than the more expected V to i. Also, the extra bar of E7 on the end makes the chorus nine bars long rather than the more conventional eight.
Solos
| Am | E7 | C | D7 |
| F | Dm | B7 | E7 |
| Am | E7 | C | D7 |
| F | Am | D7 | G7 |
Usually you would just play solos over the verse and/or chorus changes, but Jerry uses a whole new progression. It begins with the same back-relating dominant that ended the chorus. The E7 resolves to C rather than Am. After C, there’s a D7 that you expect to lead to G7, or maybe to Am, but no, it leads to F. There is no real functional explanation for this move, but it does have satisfying voice leading. The F leads to its relative minor Dm, no big surprise there, but then Dm leads to B7. What? This will make retrospective sense; the B7 is the V7 in E minor, and it resolves to E7 which is the V7 in A minor, taking us back to tonic for the second half of the solo. That Dm to B7 jump is a big one in functional harmony terms, but the voice leading is great: D goes to D-sharp, F goes to F-sharp, and A stays on A.
After all that excitement, the second half of the solo section is more conventional. The last four bars are one long extended predominant to dominant to tonic in C major.
Coda
| A7 | % | D Dsus4 | D |
The last chorus ends with an extra-extended E7 (“on my way……”) that resolves not to Am but to A major. Or more accurately, it resolves to A7, because the feel from here on out is A Mixolydian. This feels like a new song, and the lyrics are apparently unrelated. Maybe the whole narrative was this guy fleeing Mississippi across the Rio Grande to Mexico? Or maybe Jerry and Hunter just like the sound of the words “Rio Grande-ee-o”. This Mixolydian groove got very extended in live performance; the Dead could never resist an open-ended Mixolydian jam.
I have said before that Dead tunes work better as templates for amateur participation than as fully realized works. I love “Mississippi Half-Step” very deeply, but I don’t unreservedly love any of the Dead’s recordings or performances of it. No one ever leaves any space, the swing is stiff and triplet-y, and Jerry can fall into “meedly meedly meedly” phrasing if he isn’t deeply focused. The song works best in my imagination, or when I sing it to myself. Then its sly wit can exist unencumbered by the Dead’s neglectful performances.