There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where
Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay
right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train.”
He wasn’t talking about ‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ by Margaret Lewis, but
he could have been. Simultaneously sophisticated and raw, with Margaret’s
phrasing a complete joy, if you can say that about a song that has such a
bruised, brooding air about it: “It's a long, lonely road to travel and lose.”
‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ first appeared as the flipside of ‘Goin’ to St. Louie’ (“to get lost in a crowd, can't stand this silence, it's too doggone loud”), a 1959 single on the RAM label of Shreveport, Louisiana, run by Mira Smith who appears backing Margaret as Grace Tennessee, playing her electric blues guitar accompaniment for this rockabilly torch song. It is among many numbers composed by Mira with Margaret, something I first heard on a 1995 Ace CD Lonesome Bluebird, and with my limited knowledge of Margaret’s career I assumed it couldn’t be beaten. I was wrong.
