Gone Daddy Grunge

People who love the blues often ask: "Who was Gone Daddy Grunge"? Although there can be no easy answer to this question, several respected musicologists believe that it was Gone Daddy who taught Charlie Patton his first blues song after seeing him perform a polka for a homicidal juke joint crowd. Or perhaps it was the other way around, as some eyewitnesses claim - no one seems to be quite sure.

A mysterious figure who vanished soon after recording a few sides for the Parlosonic label, Gone Daddy is remembered for his acerbic wit and a tendency to drink everything in sight. Unable to stay in one place for long, he could often be found playing on street corners from Albany to Dallas for hootch and spare change. An iconoclastic figure, his only known influence was the legendary Malcolm "Pussy Boy" Jackson who wrote the song "If It Smells Like Fish, I'll Eat It", on which Gone Daddy's recording of "What's That Smells Like Fish" was undoubtedly based.

Some say that Gone Daddy may have spent the last years of his life on a chain gang after stabbing a man in an altercation over the problem of Authenticity in German existential philosophy, but this is merely speculation. Nevertheless, his reputation grew in the years following his disappearance, and it is widely held that Leadbelly won his pardon from prison after performing a Gone Daddy composition for the Governor of Texas.

Even as his legend continues to evolve, all that we really know is contained on eight sides recorded by Gone Daddy for $50 and a bottle of rye while he was passing through Chicago. This furtive glimpse into the depths of a troubled but unbowed soul is the only surviving testament of a desperate man just able to stay one step ahead of the Devil. And so, sadly, Gone Daddy Grunge is destined to remain cloaked in the shadows of history.