Re: Smokestack Lightning

Date: 22 May 2003 11:20:35 -0700
Newsgroups: rec.music.country.old-time
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I think in the Sheiks song the smokestack lightning is just setting
the scene for the more important bit of the stanza, which is that he
found his baby laying on the cooling floor, that is, if it's meant to
be literal, he found his woman dead in a slaughterhouse.
Wolf recorded "Smokestack Lightning" for RPM in Arkansas under the
title "Crying At Daybreak" first, and then five years later recorded
it for Chess in Chicago under the better-known title -- same tune.
(The RPM version is the superior performance in my opinion.) Now, the
so-called "Crying At Daybreak" on RPM, with its theme of him crying,
that was a "sequel" record that Wolf came up with to try to match the
success of his previous hit "Moaning At Midnight" with its theme of
him moaning. So I think what probably happened was that the word
"crying" in the Sheiks song ("... crying, I found my baby laying on
the cooling floor") made him think of that particular floating lyric
when he was throwing together various floating lyrics for his crying
song for RPM. (He changed the Sheiks' "... don't you hear me talking
pretty mama" bit to "... don't you hear me crying.") And then a few
years later when he was even more popular and needed to come up with
lots of material for Chess, he rerecorded the song, with no one
involved worrying terribly much about what title they put on it.
Joseph Scott