MAKE ME A PALLET ON THE FLOOR
Created on 24/06/2007Latest update on 02/03/2024
Artist: Buddy Bolden
Author: traditional
Year: 1894
New Orleans early jazzman, never recorded, but he's credited for introducing this classic tune. (see also: Buddy Bolden's Blues) W.C. Handy waiting on a train in Tutwiler, MS in 1903, wrote in his diary he was sitting next to a black guitar player who sang these words while displaying strange effects up and down the neck of his guitar with a knife. Unaware Handy witnessed the oldest evidence of blues, or at least blue notes and slide effects. (see also: Yellow Dog Rag) Two years later Howard Odum collected that same song in Lafayette County, also in Mississippi.
Covers:
- 1917:
W.C. Handy's Orch. [for Columbia]
- 1925:
- 1926:
James P. Johnson [on QRS cylinder roll]
- 1928:
Leake County Revelers [as Make Me A Bed On The Floor]
- 1929:
Virginia Liston [for Okeh]
- 1938:
- 1940:
- 1940:
- 1942:
- 1943:
Jimmy Yancey [vocal: his wife Estelle]
- 1944:
Woody Guthrie [with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry]
- 1944:
Black And White Quartet [with James P. Johnson]
- 1952:
- 1954:
Louis Armstrong [as Atlanta Blues]
- 1955:
- 1958:
Cisco Houston [as Make Me A Bed On The Floor]
- 1961:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1962:
Gus Cannon [on Stax]
- 1962:
- 1964:
- 1965:
- 1966:
- 1967:
- 1968:
- 1969:
Otha Turner [as Black Woman in a way David Evans describes as the original way, the way it must have been sung on the cottonfields in the earliest days of the blues; re-issued on the Library of Congress cd Afro-American Folk Music From Tate And Panola Counties, MS (Rounder)]
- 1971:
- 1973:
- 1976:
- 1977:
- 1979:
- 1980:
- 2000:
- 2001:
Mark Selby [on Mississippi John Hurt tribute Avalon Blues]
- 2002:
- 2002:
North Mississippi Allstars with the Taylor Grocery Band [as Pallet for Thacker Mountain Radio in Oxford, MS]
- 2003:
- 2006:
- 2009:
- 2018:
John Oates [as Pallet Soft And Low]
