Levee Camp Moan Blues -Alger "Texas" Alexander - 1927
(Source: Michael Tuft, Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology, Garland, 1983, p. 4)

Note

Don Kent* points out in his note to the Yazoo reissue that Alexander's 'Levee Camp Moan Blues' is only nominally a blues. Even though he is accompanied by Lonnie Johnson on guitar [and Kent suggests that only a guitarist with Johnson's skills could follow the free metre of the singing], the piece is essentially a field holler. See also Dave Evans 'Big Road Blues' p 27: 'They [field hollers, field blues, arwhoolies] are a sort of worksong sung in the fields and levee camps ... They tend to be loosely structured, highly embellished and rythmically free, often consisting of falsetto whooping or hollering with no words or a very minimal text. Some, of course, do have more complex texts. Vocally they are very much like the blues, and they were an important... (Continues)