The Big Easy List: Baby, Please Don’t Go

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As quickly as this year is moving, I feel almost compelled to say “Merry Christmas.” Yes, it’s August! And, given that it’s hot in most of the US right now, we’ll head to someplace that’s always hot…New Orleans! The Big Easy! NOLA!! The Crescent City! A bowl that’s four feet below sea level and surrounded on three sides by water (the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico). Not exactly an engineer’s dream, but it was a good location when it was founded way back in 1718. Lots of songs feature NOLA, so let’s get rolling! Baby, Please Don’t Go - Them And what better place to start than with some Delta blues! That’s one thing about New Orleans: you’ll get musical gumbo as tasty as the culinary kind. New Orleans is considered the birthplace of jazz, but there was a lot of blues coming out of those deltas. Blues songs got passed around from plantation to plantation and juke joint to juke joint. (Not unusual: look at the origins of some of the folk songs.) By the time they got recorded nobody knew who really originated the song, so whoever recorded it got credit for it. That’s how this song got the writing credit to Big Joe Williams, who first recorded it in 1935. Many other blues acts recorded it, including John Lee Hooker. That’s where Van Morrison heard the song. Then just 19, Morrison was in a band called Them. They recorded it for a single, stuck an original tune on the other side (“Gloria”), and unleashed it on the world. It was their first major hit (although it was hardly a “hit” at the time), and to this day gets rock and roll radio airplay. Countless rock acts have covered the song since, most owing their rendition to the Them version. Their Rolling Stones-sounding rendition is one of the classic songs of the transition phase of rock and roll from its innocent era. Oh, and a fun fact: one of the session musicians on this song is a young guitarist named Jimmy Page. Baby, Please Don’t Go Traditional (credited to Joe Williams) Recorded by Them Released as a single, 1964 NEW ORLEANS LYRICS: Baby, please don’t go down to New Orleans