Touched Down In The Land Of The Delta Blues
One Song + One Mic = Substack Sessions SS0006
What an iconic intro
Those Thursdays come around pretty quickly when you’re working on different things simultaneously. This week’s song is one of the oldest tunes in my repertoire. But still it took me a very long time to bring it to this arrangement because sometimes you get so used to a version that you don’t want to change the way you play it until you notice that this version in the key of A feels so much better.
The first few notes on the piano of the original recording are so iconic and make it an even bigger challenge to create your own version, when you’re a piano-playing guitarist/singer who is not really a virtuoso on those 88 keys. That’s why I never performed - Walking In Memphis - Apple Music | YouTube Music on piano so as not to be too close to the original and sounding like a somewhat mediocre copy of this Marc Cohn classic.
Despite being played pretty frequently on most of the radio stations around here I never got sick of the song, which makes it a true evergreen after 33 years on the airwaves.
Substack Sessions SS0006 - Walking In Memphis
So before you listen to my Substack Session version, again here the morning version of - Walking In Memphis - from my ‘Start Your Day With A Song’-series on my YouTube channel. Always interesting to hear the little details that happen in #livemusic.
Surprisingly when I listen back to these two versions there are some pretty cool phrasings popping up at places that I can’t even remember. Again #livemusic.
Like Use Somebody from last week - Walking In Memphis - will be on Spotify | YouTube Music on February 22nd 2025.
Previous Substack Session Songs
SS0001 - Waiting In Vain
SS0002 - Big Yellow Taxi
SS0003 - Green-Tinted Sixties Mind
SS0004 - Testing My Temper
SS0005 - Use Somebody
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It really is a fabulous track.
And there is actually a pretty good cover in Swiss-German version by the late great Polo Hofer