Big Stars Falling Blues
Title: Big Stars Falling Blues
Artist: Tampa Red
Year: 1954
Label: RCA Victor
Genre: Blues
Well now the big stars are falling. It can’t be very long before day.
Well now the big stars are falling. It can’t be very long before day.
When day began to break, it may drive your blues away.
The saddest hours is just between daylight and dawn.
The saddest hours is just between daylight and dawn.
When the one that you love has said goodbye and gone.
You going to roll and tumble. Your eyes are going to fill with tears.
You going to roll and tumble. Your eyes are going to fill with tears.
She’s been gone just a few hours. It’ll seem like a thousand years.
You’re going to grieve and worry. Your heart is going to ache you so.
You’re going to grieve and worry. Your heart is going to ache you so.
Because your love has said goodbye. You’ll never see her face no more.
Tampa Red is one of two blues artists who Grant mentions to Jefferson while relaying news from the quarter. He was born in Georgia on January 8, 1903, raised in Tampa, FL, then made his recording career in Chicago. Red developed a style of guitar playing known as bottleneck blues, characterized by melodic plucking instead of strumming chords. The name bottleneck comes from the use of plastic or glass tubes to slide up and down the fretboard. That style of blues is associated with musicians from the Mississippi Delta, although, as Red’s playing suggests, it migrated to other parts of the country as well as to other genres of music. He recorded with many notable musicians, including Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, and Sonny Boy Williamson as well as releasing many songs under his own name. A few of his well-known songs—including “Black Angel Blues” and “It Hurts Me Too”—have become blues standards. Red also had a reputation for singing bawdy and humorous songs—sometimes called hokum blues—which would qualify as “sinning music,” as Grant says the old folks call it.
This particular song, however, strikes a more melancholic mood. Red recorded it in December 1953 a few days after his wife Frances Coles died. It follows a standard blues form, with each verse repeating the first line followed by a rhyming second line. It tells the story of a man waiting for daybreak, apparently unable to sleep because the grief caused by a lost lover. Knowing that Red had himself just lost a wife, we can read the lyrics not as referencing a breakup but a more profound loss of life. Although his wife had only been dead about a week, we can imagine how to him it felt “like a thousand years.” This song stands as a reminder that blues musicians often addressed personal tragedy and social injustice indirectly, dramatizing those issues as romantic relationships.
Read in the context of A Lesson Before Dying, the lyrics resonate with Jefferson’s experience of waiting for his execution day. Jefferson often stays up late in his jail cell listening to the radio. At the end of his journal, we learn that he spent his last night listening to Randy’s Record Shop. He notes when “day breakin” and when the “sun comin up” before he says goodbye to Grant. As in the song, the most treacherous hour seems to be just before dawn when Jefferson is “shakin an shakin” and has to remind himself to “stay strong.” By the time morning comes, he seems to have driven some of his blues away, noting the clear blue sky and a song bird. Just as Red faces the death of his wife with a resolute last line of goodbye, Jefferson faces his own death with a resolute message for his community: “tell them im strong tell them im a man.”
