"On the Road Again" is a song recorded by the American blues rock group Canned Heat in 1967. A driving blues rock boogie,[3] it was adapted from earlier blues songs and includes mid-1960s psychedelic rock elements. Unlike most of Canned Heat's songs from the period which were sung by Bob Hite, second guitarist and harmonica player Alan Wilson provides the distinctive high pitched vocal, sometimes described as a falsetto.[4]
"On the Road Again" first appeared on their second album, Boogie with Canned Heat, in January 1968. An edited version was released as a single in April 1968 and became Canned Heat's first record chart hit and one of their best-known songs.
Earlier songs
"On the Road Again" is based on early blues songs by Tommy Johnson and Floyd Jones.[5] The lyrics to Johnson's "Big Road Blues" (1928) include: "Well I ain't goin' down that big road by myself... If I don't carry you gonna carry somebody else". In "Dark Road" (1951), Jones "reshaped Tommy Johnson's verses into an eerie evocation of the Delta":[6]
Whoaa well my mother died and left me Ohh when I was quite young, when I was quite young... Said Lord have mercy ooo, on my wicked son
Jones later remade "Dark Road" with the title "On the Road Again"[6] and added:
Whoaa I had to travel, whoaa in the rain and snow in the rain and snow My baby had quit me ooo (2×) Have no place to go
Both songs share a "hypnotic one-chord drone piece"-arrangement that one-time Floyd Jones musical partner Howlin' Wolf used for his songs "Crying at Daybreak" and the related "Smokestack Lightning".[6][7]
Recording and composition
"On the Road Again" was among the first songs Canned Heat recorded as demos in April 1967 at the RCA Studios in Chicago[8] with original drummer Frank Cook. At over seven minutes in length, it has the basic elements of the later album version, but is two minutes longer with more harmonica and guitar soloing.[lower-alpha 2]
During the recording for their second album, Canned Heat recorded "On the Road Again" with new drummer Adolfo "Fito" de la Parra. The session took place September 6, 1967, at the Liberty Records studio in Los Angeles. Alan Wilson used verses from Floyd Jones' "On the Road Again" and "Dark Road" and added some lines of his own:
Well I'm so tired of cryin' but I'm out on the road again, I'm on the road again (2×) I ain't got no woman just to call my special friend
For the instrumental accompaniment, Canned Heat uses a "basic E/G/A blues chord pattern"[4] or "one-chord boogie riff" adapted from John Lee Hooker's 1949 hit "Boogie Chillen'".[9] Expanding on Jones' hypnotic drone, Wilson used an Eastern string instrument called a tambura to give the song a psychedelic ambience. Although Bob Hite was the group's primary vocalist, "On the Road" features Wilson as the singer, "utilizing his best Skip James-inspired falsetto vocal".[4][lower-alpha 3] Wilson also provides the harmonica parts.[lower-alpha 4]
"On the Road Again" is included on Canned Heat's second album, Boogie with Canned Heat, released January 21, 1968, by Liberty Records. After receiving strong response from airplay on American "underground" FM radio, Liberty issued the song as a single on April 24, 1968.[11] To make the song more Top-40 AM radio-friendly, Liberty edited it from the original length of 4:55 to a 3:33 single version. It became Canned Heat's first single to appear in the record charts.[4][lower-alpha 5]
Although songs inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Detroit-era boogie"[3] had been recorded over the years by a variety of blues musicians, Canned Heat's "On the Road Again" popularized the guitar-boogie or E/G/A riff in the rock world.[7] As a result, "it's been a standard rock and roll pattern ever since".[7] Canned Heat used it frequently as the starting point for several of their extended jam songs, including the 40 minute live opus "Refried Boogie (Part I & II)" from their late 1968 Living the Blues album. When Hooker recorded an updated version of "Boogie Chillen'", titled "Boogie Chillen No. 2", with the group in 1970 for Hooker 'n Heat, it had come full circle.[24]
Notes
Footnotes
1 2 "On the Road Again, Canned Heat: This song... is psychedelic blues rock that benefits from studio overdubbing technology."[1]
↑ Bob Hite prefaces the recording with "OK... light and greasy, don't let it go down".[8]
↑ Author Charles Shaar Murray described Wilson's vocal style as "reminiscent of Skip James at his most ectoplasmic".[10]
↑ Wilson's harmonica solo has a note that is not playable without an overblow; he re-tuned his harmonica's six hole up a half step.
↑ "On the road again in French Chart" (in French). Dominic DURAND / InfoDisc. July 17, 2013. Retrieved July 17, 2013. You have to use the index at the top of the page and search "Canned Heat"
John Lee Hooker was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues that he developed in Detroit. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in Rolling Stone's 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists, and has been cited as one of the greatest male blues vocalists of all time.
Canned Heat is an American blues and rock band that was formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The group has been noted for its efforts to promote interest in blues music and its original artists. It was launched by two blues enthusiasts Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who took the name from Tommy Johnson's 1928 "Canned Heat Blues", a song about an alcoholic who had desperately turned to drinking Sterno, generically called "canned heat". After appearances at the Monterey and Woodstock festivals at the end of the 1960s, the band acquired worldwide fame with a lineup of Hite (vocals), Wilson, Henry Vestine and later Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor (bass), and Adolfo de la Parra (drums).
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