Freddie King, Same Old Blues

There must be a time in my life before I’d heard Freddie King’s version of Same Old Blues. I just don’t remember what it was like.

Since I first heard the song, aged maybe 15 or 16, I’d estimate I’ve listened to it at least 650 times (approximately once every two weeks for 25 years, which sounds about right). Whenever I feel sad, or bitter, or just plain disappointed with the world — which I confess I do far more often than I should — Same Old Blues is the antidote, a tried and trusted way of dragging myself back into the light.

And yet, when I step back from the song there are many things about it that, objectively, shouldn’t work. The naff jazz flute that twinkles in after King sings the first line: ‘Morning rain keeps on falling’. And, well, the lyrics in general, which give the impression that Don Nix (who originally wrote Same Old Blues) had just heard about pathetic fallacy and was determined to pathetic fallacy the hell out of this one.

But then I hit ‘play’, the piano intro kicks in, followed by King’s utterly distinctive guitar work — which sounds like a cat being put through a mangle, but in a good way — and none of these things (the corny flute, the pat lyrics) matter any more.

My heart feels like it’s going to burst. And I mean physically explode.

What I love about songs, when they connect with me in this way, is that they provoke the closest thing to a spiritual experience I can imagine (being a determinedly non-spiritual person, in the traditional sense). It’s an irrational reflex that I rarely get from any other mode of art. Yes, I accept it’s possible to be overwhelmed by the sublime elements in a Turner seascape, a Shakespearean sonnet, an extended Kubrick tracking shot… but personally I get a far more visceral hit from listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Or, for that matter, Same Old Blues.

So I’m going to try and briefly break down what it is about the song that I find so powerful. I think in essence it comes down to the chord progression, which, once established, repeats itself until the coda — as if it can’t quite bring itself to move on to something new.

Things kick off with a I III vi (D/F#/Bm) progression, which is pretty much one of my favourite chord combinations ever. Here, the bluesy dominant major F# melts into the smooth Bm prompting almost exactly the same physical reaction that you’d get from sucking a lemon then immediately swallowing a spoonful of sugar.

But in a way that’s a fairly conventional device. What makes Same Old Blues special — the real heart and punch of the song — is the vertiginous ascent that begins halfway through each cycle, via G, G#dim, D, D7/C (I know it’s started to descend at this point, but it still feels like an ascent), resolving in a crunching B7 that you never quite see coming, and finally picking precisely through E7, A7, D, A7 and back to D again. As far as I’m aware, it’s not a particularly well-used progression, but it is has a purity and inevitability about it that makes you think it must be. A bit like when a song (The Weight or Girl From The North Country or Back To Black) pulls off the supremely difficult trick of making you think it must be a standard from a much earlier era.

When you throw in Freddie King’s vocal — like a rusty old piece of corrugated iron coated in golden syrup — and a soaring female gospel choir, I fail to see how someone could not be viscerally, uncontrollably, and yes spiritually moved by the song. It’s why I keep coming back to Same Old Blues over and over again, and why I don’t think I’ll ever tire of listening to it, even after another 1,000 plays.