Artist: Big Joe Williams
Author: Mary Johnson
Label: Bluebird
Year: 1935

With his Washboard Blues Singers. Also cut it as Don't Leave Me Here. Melodically related to Elder Greene's In Town and I'm Alabama Bound. In '41 Big Joe recorded it again for Bluebird and in '47 for Columbia with Sonny Boy Williamson and Ransom Knowling. The latter version inspired most of the covers. In an interview Big Joe Williams credited Mary 'Signifying' Johnson as the author. This singer born in 1900, once married to Lonnie Johnson, recorded a Baby Will You Please Come Home and a Baby Please Don't Leave Home No More. More female variations on Baby Please Don't Go: Vera Hall's Another Man Done Gone ('40) where she mourns her prison bound lover, and I Gotta Man In New Orleans, sang by Josephine Parker in the Mississippi State Prison Farm in Parchman in '36. Uncontrolled evidence of an earlier existence with Papa Harvey Hull & Long Clive Reed in the twenties. (see also Stack O Lee Blues and Another Man Done Gone). Joe Williams probably picked up this worksong while serving time in a 'county farm', just like the main character in Another Man Done Gone.

Also by Clifton Chenier, Rory Gallagher, MC5, Rod Piazza, Sonny Landreth, Watermelon Slim, Vince Gill, Webb Wilder, John Mellencamp, Jessie Mae Hemphill and Bob Dylan. Baby, Please Don't Go by The Orioles ('52 - Jubilee) is another song. It inspired James Brown's first hit Please Please Please.