BLUES STAY AWAY FROM ME

(Wayne Raney, Alton and Rabon Delmore, Henry Glover)

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© 1949 Fort Knox Music Company.

Recorded by Bob Dylan, vocal/guitar, with Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet), shared lead vocals; David Bromberg, dobro; Flaco Jimenez, accordion, Atlantic Recording Studios, New York, NY, Oct 1-14 1972 (released on "Doug Sahm and Band, " Atlantic SD-7254, Dec 1972)

Other Dylan performances:

• Lone Star Café, New York, NY, Feb 16, 1983 (guest performance with Rick Danko/Levon Helm)
• uncirculated 'Don't Look Back' footage, Savoy Hotel, London, GB, May 4, 1965 (with Joan Baez);
  
• uncirculated late Sep 1965 rehearsals with The Hawks (The Band), Woodstock, NY (rumored)

ORIGINAL RECORDING: The Delmore Brothers with Wayne Raney (hca), Cincinnati, OH, May 6, 1949 (K-2914)

• See also notes for "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (also covered by Dylan)

WAYNE RANEY.
About four o'clock one morning in Cincinnati's Gibson Hotel, Alton and Rabon Delmore and I were getting ready for a recording session the next day. Alton knew a guitar riff he had learned from Henry Glover, a black songwriter on the King Records staff at the time. We decided to put words to it and a song was born. We recorded it the next day.

Dorothy Horstman telephone interview, Aug 3, 1973; reprinted in Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy, New York, 1976, p. 161.

ORIGINAL LYRICS

as reprinted in Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy, New York, 1976,
p. 161.

Blues, stay away from me,
Blues, why don't you let me be?
Don't know why you keep on haunting me.

Love was never meant for me,
True love was never meant for me.
Seems somehow we never did agree.

Tears, so many I can't see,
Years don't mean a thing to me.
Time goes by and still I can't be free.