See See Rider
"See See Rider", also known as "C.C. Rider", "See See Rider Blues" or "Easy Rider", is a popular American 12-bar blues folk blues song that became a blues and jazz standard. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was the first to record it on October 16, 1924, at Paramount Records in New York. The song uses mostly traditional blues lyrics to tell the story of an unfaithful lover, commonly called an "easy rider": "See see rider, see what you have done", making a play on the word "see" and the sound of "easy".
Background
"See See Rider" is a traditional song that may have originated on the black vaudeville circuit. Its is similar to "Poor Boy Blues" as performed by Ramblin' Thomas. Jelly Roll Morton recollected hearing the song as a young boy some time after 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, when he performed with a spiritual quartet that played at funerals. Older band members played "See See Rider" during get-togethers with their "sweet mamas" or as Morton called them "fifth-class whores".Big Bill Broonzy claimed that "when he was about 9 or 10—that is, around 1908, in the Delta —he learned to play the blues from an itinerant songster named "See See Rider", "a former slave, who played a one-string fiddle ... one of the first singers of what would later be called the blues." Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson performed the song in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area between 1912-1917.
The song is possibly connected to the Shelton Brooks composition "I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone" that was inspired by the 1907 mysterious disappearance of the 28 year-old Jockey Jimmy Lee, "The Black Demon", a well-known black rider who won every race on the card at Churchill Downs.
Composition
Ma Rainey's rendition of "See See Rider" is based on a traditional folk 12-bar blues, such as the rendition by Lead Belly in which the lyrics follows the traditional repetition of the first line of the stanza structure. Ma Rainey's rendition opens with the three couplet introduction credited to Lena Arant that explain why the songstress is blue. The following lines are adapted in the less typical repetition of the second line of the stanza pattern.Gates Thomas collected a version of "C.C. Rider" in the 1920s in south Texas. It repeated the second line of the stanza rather than the first that is more common in blues. Folklorists recorded regional variations in stanza patterns such as ABB and ABA in Texas vs. AB in New Orleans.
Renditions
In October 1924 "Ma" Rainey was the first to record "See See Rider Blues" at Paramount Records New York Studio. Her Georgia Jazz Band included Louis Armstrong on cornet, Charlie Green on trombone, Buster Bailey on clarinet, Fletcher Henderson on piano, and Charlie Dixon on banjo. The record was released in 1925. While the copyright listed Lena Arant as a composer, she was responsible only for the first three rhymed couplets at the beginning of the song.In 1943, a version by Wee Bea Booze reached number one on Billboard magazine's Harlem Hit Parade, a precursor of the rhythm and blues chart. Some blues critics consider this to be the definitive version of the song. A doo-wop version was recorded by Sonny Til and the Orioles in 1952. Later rocked-up hit versions were recorded by Chuck Willis and LaVern Baker.
Other popular performances were recorded by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels and the Animals. The Animals' version also reached number one on the Canadian RPM chart and number eight in Australia. The arrangement of the song was credited to Rowberry.
In his later years, Elvis Presley, having befriended Wayne Cochran in Las Vegas and admired his band's performing of the song, regularly opened his performances with the song, as in the performance recorded for his 1970 album On Stage and in his television specials Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite and Elvis In Concert.
Recognition and influence
In 2004, Mama Rainey's "See See Rider" was selected for the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress to preserve its legacy for future generations. In 2004, her recording received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. Film director Martin Scorsese credited the song with stimulating his interest in music. He commented:In 2018, the Blues Foundation inducted "See See Rider" into the Blues Hall of Fame as a "classic of blues recording". In addition to hit singles, it notes the song's popularity among "blues, soul, jazz, pop, country, and rock performers".
John "Big Nig" Bray, the leader of a crew that hauled cypress logs from Louisiana swamps in the 1930s, borrowed the frame and tune of "See See Rider" for his "Trench Blues", a semi-autobiographical heroic blues ballad recounting the experience of a Black American soldier in World War I, as recorded by Alan Lomax. "See See Rider" was among the most known Black American play party songs in Alabama in the 1950s.
Origins of the term
The spelling of the song name See See Rider is likely a pronunciation spelling of "C.C.Rider". Many sources indicate that "c.c. rider" refers to either early "church circuit" traveling preachers who did not have established churches or "county circuit" riders who were attorneys following a circuit judge. Debra Devi, a researcher of the language of the blues, recorded a hypothesis that during the American Civil War C.C. stood for Calvary Corporal, a horseman officer. Riding is the most common metaphor for sexual intercourse in the blues. The rider is a term for a sexual partner. In Black American usage "rider" can be either male or female. This folk etymology appears to stem from somebody by the name Alex Washburn who came across this interpretation of "c.c. rider" in a folk song collection by Alan Lomax, a prominent American field researcher of folk music.The term see see rider is usually taken as synonymous with easy rider. In dirty blues songs it often refers to a woman who had liberal sexual views, had been married more than once, or was skilled at sex. Although Ma Rainey's version seems to refer to "See See Rider" as a man, one theory is that the term refers to a prostitute and in the lyric "You made me love you, now your man done come," "your man" refers to the woman's pimp. So, rather than being directed to a male "easy rider," the song is in fact an admonition to a prostitute to give up her evil ways.
There are further theories:
- Easy rider was sometimes used to refer to the partner of a hypersexual woman who therefore does not have to work or pay for sex.
- Another theory is that the term easy rider sometimes originally referred to the guitar hung across the back of a travelling blues singer.
- Big Bill Broonzy states, on his album Big Bill Broonzy, that the first time he heard that song was by a man who "loved to be on the water, and that's why he wrote this title, and that's the title of the song: it's Sea Sea Rider".
- Big Bill Broonzy also states, in a conversation about his youth with Bill Randle on his album The Bill Broonzy Story, that See See Rider was a blues singer before playing the tune.