Let the Good Times Roll

I caught Brad Paisley on Letterman last night.

I don't know much about him, but I do know that I have read several letters from metalheads to guitar magazines raving about his guitar playing.

So here was Paisley, and what was he doing? "Let the Good Times Roll," which I know as a BB King song (originally done by Louis Jordan, though probably written by someone else).

I couldn't find a clip from Letterman, but this one's just as good:


Okay, I love his tone, for starters. He solos twice, and the steel player and fiddler both get solos too. He sings one verse twice; not sure why, as he left out the whole "I've got 50 cents more than I'm gonna keep" verse. Still the whole song barely clears three minutes.

I like it!

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I've heard a lot of versions of the song over the years. It's hard to mess up, but I've seen it done. It's probably blasphemy to say that I'm not a huge Etta James fan, but her brand of blues belting doesn't do much for me ("At Last" aside). I have a video somewhere of her basically bludgeoning the song, and she muffs the very verse I mentioned above, saying, "I've got a a quarter and a nickel, but don't let nobody play me cheap--I've got fifty cents more..." blah blah blah. Do the math.

I guess I fell in love with the song in the mid-80s sometime when I was listening to Together Again...Live by BB King and Bobby "Blue" Bland.

It opens the LP, and goes on for six minutes as everyone vamps. I swear at one point it sounds like King is yelling, "Watch it, Bob, watch it!" and Bland is yelling, "Oh shit!" I mean, was a riot breaking out or something?

Great version

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Little-known fact.


On the cruise, after I almost sang "Rocket Man," I noticed that the song list also had "Let the Good Times Roll."

I seriously considered going back at some point to sing it. Why not? But then I realized that my travel mates probably didn't know the song, and singing it just for myself was a bit more self-indulgent than I felt up to.

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Funny, if you look up that song on Youtube, you find lots of covers by little-known blues bands. It's one of the staples of the genre for sure.

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Gonna wrap it up. Maybe tomorrow I'll blog about our evening at the Greek Festival.

Y'all have a good weekend.