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Many Blind Boy Fuller songs have a similar riff, including

  • What's That Smells Like Fish
  • Rag, Mama, Rag
  • Truckin' My Blues Away
  • I Crave My Pig Meat
  • Get Your Yas Yas Out
  • Baby You Gotta' Change Your Mind

and Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant sounds a lot like all of them. I have to imagine that Guthrie was aware of this. I don't know much about blues; what's going on here? Is Guthrie deliberately working in the style of BBF, or in the same style that BBF was working in? Are the BBF songs all variations on some widely-used blues riff, and Guthrie used the same one?

Web search for "blind boy fuller" "alice's restaurant" finds a number of other people who have noticed the resemblance to What's That Smells Like Fish.

Mark Dominus
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1 Answers1

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It's #2: the BBF songs are all variations on some widely-used blues changes, and Guthrie used the same one. It's often called the "Five Chord Ragtime" progression because it's built around a five-chord sequence of fifths (I-VI7-II7-V7-I). Here it is in C:

C---A7---D7-G7-C---

C---A7---D7---G7---

C---C7---F---Ab7---

C---A7---D7-G7-C---

Not only was it common in early blues repertoire, it is all over Broadway and Tin Pan Alley as well.

My favorite version adds another fifth to the first and last strains:

C-E7-A7---D7-G7-C---

rwf

Robert Fink
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