Canned Heat - On the Road Again ( S1.1 )

"On the Road Again" is a song recorded by the American blues-rock group Canned Heat in 1967. A driving blues-rock boogie, 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 falsetto vocal. "On the Road Again" first appeared on their second album, Boogie with Canned Heat, in January 1968; when an edited version was released as a single in April 1968, "On the Road Again" became Canned Heat's first record chart hit and one of their best-known songs.

Earlier songs

With his record company's encouragement, Chicago blues musician Floyd Jones recorded a song titled "On the Road Again" in 1953. It was a remake of his successful 1951 song "Dark Road". Both songs are based on Mississippi Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson's 1928 song "Big Road Blues" (Canned Heat took their name from Johnson's 1928 song "Canned Heat Blues"). Johnson's lyrics include: "Well I ain't goin' down that big road by myself ... If I don't carry you gonna carry somebody else". Jones "reshaped Tommy Johnson's verses into an eerie evocation of the Delta". In "Dark Road" he added:

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

And in "On the Road Again" he 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".

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