Thursday, March 26, 2015

Get Thee Behind Me Satan - the Almanac Singers

All kinds of people I know want the White Stripes record Get Behind Me Satan. OK.

That need fooled me at first as one of the earliest tunes I ever learned on guitar was Get Thee Behind Me Satan - a formula from the Bible that precluded Jack White's interpretation of 'get behind me' meaning 'I need you behind me - get on my team'. It originally meant get out of my way. (Maybe that's obvious. Who knows these days.)


What I liked about the old Almanac Singers tune as I learned more about popular music was that the blue notes in the chorus managed to avoid the actual Blues. They just sounded a bit flat and odd. But they were blue notes even if the band didn't know it. The group just hadn't had the chance to listen to real blues and figure out how it really went.

The song was a union-promoting ditty and as a descendant of the Wobbly movement myself, I'm all for it.

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