What if Bye Bye Blackbird was Country

There is a moment in a country song when the steel answers the voice and the road stops feeling long — this track hands that moment to a 1926 jazz-age standard. The goodbye at the song's centre is untouched; everything around it turns unhurried and open, with fingerpicked acoustic guitar, a pedal steel that answers each line, upright bass, brushed drums, a light fiddle and Wurlitzer pads, and one close, conversational lead vocal carrying the old words over the top of it all.

The words are Mort Dixon's lyric and the tune is Ray Henderson's, published as a song sheet in 1926 by Jerome H. Remick & Co., and this version sings them exactly as printed — from "Blackbird, blackbird, singing the blues all day" to "Blackbird, bye bye." 12 A song sheet published in the United States before January 1, 1931 now sits in the public domain. 3

Play it on the long drive home, in the kitchen at the end of a week, or any evening that wants a familiar melody wearing unfamiliar clothes.