Wild and Blue (John Anderson cover)

Reading vs. Singing

Wild and Blue by way of Brooklyn.

A recent Will Oldham Instagram post reminded me of this song. I first heard it played by my friend Brian Henneman around thirty years ago. Brian learned it from a record by John Anderson, who recorded it first. It was written by a man named John Scott Sherrill. But I thought it was one of Brian’s songs the first time I heard it. Which says a lot about how highly I think of Brian’s songwriting.

But it turns out Brian was a pretty big John Anderson fan, judging by the fact that before the Bottle Rockets he had a band called Chicken Truck, named after a song on John Anderson’s second album. None of that was on my radar much back then, though, as I was never as tuned in to top 40 country as my pal Brian was. So when this song got pulled out while we were sitting around with some guitars, I just sang along and felt proud that I knew someone who could write such an amazing song.

Here I’m including two versions I recorded on my phone. One is an earlier take sung to an old Stella 12-string like the model Blind Willie McTell played. It’s closer to the key of the original and I’m singing the lyrics while reading them, which means that they’re correct. But after a while I started moving the key around, once again looking for a spot where my voice didn’t feel like I was shouting in a quiet house late in the evening. I also got a little fixated with figuring out how to mimic the fiddle runs from John Anderson’s arrangement introducing the instrumental sections with my guitar. Which led me to a version sung from memory with incorrect lyrics.

I like the correct lyrics more. But any version of a song performed while not looking at a page and reading is always the one that sounds more natural to my quite possibly oversensitive ear. There’s a big difference between reading and singing, in my opinion. What do you think?

“Wild and Blue” Version 1