Blues for Honey Mead (1979)
Genre: Country Blues
In February, 1977 I was half a year from finishing my undergraduate degree in Psychology when I experienced my first bad break-up. A close friend suggested a road trip to New Orleans for Spring Break as a diversion/distraction and I heartily agreed. We traveled from Michigan through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana—all states I’d never seen before, having never been South of Washington D.C.
It was my first time experiencing the amazing musical culture of the Crescent City. Even though Michigan had lowered the legal drinking age to 18 in 1971, to be able to wander the streets from bar to bar with drink-in-hand was a novelty. It seemed like the very definition of freedom to my 22-year old self.
It was still possible to see buskers of the Mr. Bojangles variety making a hardscrabble living on the streets. Their very natural, unadorned blues made a profound impression. It was my first time hearing music at Preservation Hall, first po’-boy, first beignet, first oysters on the half shell, first chicory coffee…On our return trip, we even had the stereotypically menacing experience of being stopped for no reason by a local Mississippi sheriff, who obviously wasn’t happy with a couple of longhairs traveling through his neck of the woods with northern license plates.
I returned home with a love of original Dixieland Jazz, country blues, grits, shrimp creole, gumbo, and jambalaya. I checked out an old, dusty, early 20th century recipe book of New Orleans specialties (with imprecise measurements!) at Waldo Library at Western Michigan University and attempted to recreate at home what I had eaten in NOLA (with limited success).
The trip also inspired me to write a “blues” based (almost) entirely on a true story.
My friend and I did have a (very) short, flirtatious conversation with a waitress on Bourbon Street, who struck us both as beautiful and intelligent, who said she planned on tagging the hyphenated name of Margaret Mead to her own last name (maiden or married we never discovered), and who disappeared into the night without a word, as mysterious as one might expect from a place of marvelous curiosities like New Orleans.
I wrote this tune when I got home under the influence of my experiences, recording a living room version with me on slide guitar and my brother playing banjo, trying to echo the types of sounds I heard on the streets of New Orleans that week.
I considered the song a throwaway until recently, when I decided to rework the lyrics to make them a little more self-deprecatory and a little more compatible with #Me Too. I couldn’t resist the fun (and pun) of making her name a redundancy. And I like the circular storytelling of the bookended first and last verse.
This little bit of musical mischief was just plain fun to make.