So, when I started on this rewriting/translating project, I had heard versions of Joe Turner #6, but only later ones.
After it was translated from bluegrass to blues, or whatever happened there. It's really tough to know from what remains of the available historical record on the internet.
But... what I didn't know at the time was that the song had been rewritten from the ground up like 27 times, and that variations of it have appeared in every musical genre there's been since 1906, when it was first written by W.C. Handy. And the most recent rewrite, before mine, happened about ten years ago.
Super interesting.
So I don't feel bad about rewriting it.
Finding the structure
The problem with the original, is that it's a mostly unstructured banjo song written in 1906, and I had to figure out where the different sections of the song were, in order to translate them for a contemporary audience.
I wanted to translate the song, because I was in the middle of a really nasty breakup with my ex, someone I had been with for a decade and a half and... y'know, some feelings in music are universal, and transcend time.
So I saw a lot of myself in the piece, and a lot of the arguments I had with my ex. It really resonated with me, on this spiritual level, and I wanted to do the same thing here that I had done with my translating sonnets project a few years back.
The translation rules
And that's interesting because of the rules.
1. You want to translate as closely as possible, changing the language, without changing the point of the piece.
2. Only omitting details that can't be translated (like riding trains), and supplementing new details (truck fixed up) that will aid future translators a century, or however long from now. (I'm not expecting that to happen, but if it did...)
Here, I made the command decision, initially, to try to do it as a modern pop country song. I mean, it's got all the elements, love, hate, neglect, petty nonsense, drama! There's a reason pieces like this stand the test of time in some form.
From country to soul
Around draft 5, I realized pop country was too boring for this, and it needed some soul and r&b elements to get to the point where my vision was for the piece.
And that led me to draft 6. I was happy with Draft 6, but then I started experimenting with moving some of my older work from Suno into Udio, and I figured out how to migrate the song, without really hurting the instrumental elements that I really liked.
So this is draft 7. And it's a ride.
Hope you enjoy.