Re: Eldorado Cadillac/Billy Boy Arnold

[Will Vogtman <will_vogtman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just a funny story.
 
I used to do this tune with a band (it's still on our lists, but we haven't done it in nearly a year).  The bass player used to sing it.  One night he was driving a Calderado Elderac.  No one flinched but the band.   

Aeskow@xxxxxxx wrote:
Will asked who wrote the lyric 
"I got an Eldorado Cadillac..." 

The original, I Ain't Got You, was done by Billy Boy Arnold, a fine Chicago harp player, and the brother of both Jerome Arnold, who played bass for The Paul Butterfield Blues Band on their first album (later replaced by jazz drummer Billy Davenport) AND an excellent novelist whose first name slips my mind.  Brother #3, the literary one, wrote a novel called The Bluesman, which is well worth picking up if you find it in a remainder bin.  But he was clearly not the only Arnold blessed with literary talent: Billy Boy's lyrics for Aint Got You also include: "I got a Maserati GT/with snakeskin upholstery/I got everything I need/but I ain't got you."  And: "I got a Mojo/and a liquor store/I play the numbers/Yeah 444/I got a clothes store/But don't ya know/I'm all dressed up with no/Place to go."  The blues-as-poetry thing can get kind of pretentious, but not when it sticks to inner-city visions of heaven or hell.  Willie the Wimp, buried in his Cadillac coffin, has to be one of th!
e hippest
 dead men in history; William de Vaughn's "Be Thankful (For What You Got)" is wise advice from a lovable uncle ("diamond in the back/sun roof top/diggin' the scene/like a gangster lean"--people forget, but the point of the lyric is that you DON'T need "a car at all"--it might be the exact opposite of the Bling-Bling Academy of Hip-Hop Self-Realization), and ol' Lee Oskar himself co-wrote, with the rest of War, a little-known but highly cool album cut called "Whose Cadillac Is That?"--which, I guess, is the existential question which--like "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls"--we all come to grapple with at some point in life ("It tolls for thee"--which, in the original version, was actually "Do not ask for whom the drummer lays down a 4/4 shuffle in Bb; he lays it down for your harp solo.") 

Peace, Respect, and Still Diggin' the Scene with a Gangster Lean, 
Johnny T 


http://www.channelcatsbluesband.20m.com
http://www.cdbaby.com/willvogtman
		
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