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The Hold Steady - The Prior Procedure

During a 1975 interview, B.B. King told William Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, how bricks were used to make a one string. Once you nailed this nail in there, put that wire around these two nails, like one on this end and one on the other and wrap it tight. Then you’d take a couple of bricks and you’d put one under this side and one under that one that would stretch this wire and make it tighter. And you’d keep pushing that brick, stretching this wire, making it tight until it would sound like one string on the guitar... Blues musicians also used baling wire to make one and two stringed instruments similar to those found throughout West Africa, where they are fashioned with resonators made of carved wood, a gourd, or a tin can. When I was about ten years old I made a fiddle out of a cigar box, a guitar out of goods boxes for my buddy Louis Carter, and we would play for the white people’s picnics. Big Joe Williams recalled making a one string guitar for himself as a child by stapling two thread spools to a small box and stretching bailing wire between the spools. He played it with the neck off a half pint whisky bottle. Harmonica players also used bailing wire to make neck racks for their harps so they could play guitar and harmonica at the same time.

When a conductor got a locomotive steaming at top speed, he was said to be balling the jack, as in they were balling the jack at the time of the wreck. The train was the jack short for the jackass carrying the load. To ball meant to go flat out, pedal to the metal, and came from the railman’s hand gesture signaling the crew to go faster. By the 1920s, the expression balling the jack had leapt from the rail yards into the popular lexicon as an expression for any wild, all out effort, from dancing to sex to gamblers risking everything on a single toss of the dice. Shortened to balling, it came to mean having a wild time in and out of bed. The phrase was given a push by the Balling the Jack fad, which reportedly began as a sexy juke joint dance involving plenty of bumping and grinding. It evolved into a group dance involving vigorous hand clapping and chanting or Balling the Jack for the Follies based on the African American ragtime tune. The Balling the Jack craze swept white America, eventually getting mixed in with the Lindy Hop to become a popular swing step.
Source: The Language of The Blues by Robert Sabin


The Hold Steady - The Prior Procedure
  • Produced by: Josh Kaufman
  • Released in: February 19, 2021
  • Released on: The Prior Procedure album

"The Hold Steady is Bobby Drake drummer, Craig Finn on vocals, Tad Kubler guitar and vocals, Franz Nicolay on keyboards, Galen Polivka bass) and Steve Selvidge guitar and vocals."

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