KEY POINTS:
Professor Oscar Bullock of Oxford University is very excited. For he believes he has found the first blues lyric ever written. And the reason that he is so excited is that he is a professor of Tudor literature, and he thinks he has unearthed this daddy of all blues lyrics in a collection of Elizabethan poetry, written more than 400 years ago. He now thinks the history of the blues will have to be rewritten.
"We always think that the blues started in Victorian times," he says. "You know the sort of thing. Those couplets with the first line repeated. 'Lord, I woke up this morning and my girl had gone. Yes, I woke up this morning and my girl had gone. And nobody I met knew where she had run.' Simple stuff, but effective. Well, we know that the music was African-derived, but the lyrics are another matter. They could not possibly have come from Africa, being in English. So where did they come from? Nobody has ever traced them back to a convincing ancestor. But now I think I have cracked the mystery. The blues came from Elizabethan poetry!
"Listen to this."
He picks up a crackly bit of paper, and reads: "I did wake up this morning with an aching head.
Yea, verily, I woke up this morning with an aching head,
And my lady was not to be seen anywhere in my bed.
I ran like a madman, and did cry out her name,
Yea I did run like a madman and also cry out her name,
But Echo, for to mock me, cried back the same."
"You see!" exclaims the Professor. "It sounds Elizabethan! It has 16th-century diction! But it is the very form of the blues! And the subject matter too!
"Now, nowadays we don't say things like 'I did wake up this morning' or 'I did cry out her name'. But in the American black dialect of the blues, it is very common for a singer to say 'I done woke up this morning' or 'I done called her name'. Maybe that mode of expression came straight from Tudor ancestry. And isn't there, by the way, something oddly Shakespearean about that phrase, 'call her name'?
"Again, note the 'Yea, verily' that creeps in. Just like 'Yeah', isn't it? And when he calls his girlfriend his 'lady', well, is it so very different from 'baby'?
"Listen! Here's three more verses from the same poem!"
Again, excitedly, the professor reads from the old paper.
"Lady, lady, lady, you have left a broken heart.
Oh yes, my lady, you have left a broken heart.
For it is not in this wise that I thought we should part.
I shall leave you, my lady, to ease the pain.
Yes, I shall leave you, dear lady, for to ease the pain.
Go down the station and take the next train.
I shall hie me to Chicago, that is my purpose now,
Let me get me to Chicago, I care not how.
For there are many ladies in that town, I trow."
The professor chuckles.
"I think that settles it," he says. "Over the years it developed into the traditional blues which we know as Going to Chicago. And we now know that it originated back in Tudor England!"
But surely, professor, nobody knew about Chicago until the 19th century! There was no place called Chicago until the 19th century! And there were no trains! It cannot be a genuine Elizabethan lyric!
"I don't understand you," says the professor. "This is a genuine manuscript. It must be genuine."
He looks hurt. I explain to him that there are such things as forgeries and hoaxes and practical jokes and student pranks ... It slowly sinks in.
"Oh, my God," he says. "But I have already made a six-part TV series based on this! Did Shakespeare Write the Blues? It starts next Tuesday ... Oh, my God ... "
I creep away, leaving him to his pain and agony.
