Dubious songwriting credits to the contrary, Big Joe Williams wrote and recorded the earliest known (1935) version of "Baby Please Don't Go," a song that has survived virtually unchanged from the Mississippi Delta to British hard rock. Sure, some guitarists like Angus Young and Ted Nugent have offered slick and fancy licks over breakneck tempos in their versions, but the song remains the same, to quote a phrase. In fact, take a listen to Lightnin' Hopkins' solo version from 1967 if you want impressive fretwork.

The confusion over songwriting credit can at least in some part be attributed to the give-and-take oral folk and blues tradition. According to the web site Earlyblues.com, Leonard Caston recorded a version between the two by Williams, and by the second Williams take, Big Joe was incorporating some of Caston's lyrical changes, such as the line "Make you walk the log." It is likely that Williams adapted the song from the old chain-gang song "Another Man Done Gone," which also inspired or was inspired by other blues songs such as "Alabama Bound" and "Don't Leave Me Here."

Williams was what they called a "walking" musician, a Southern blues version of the troubadour or wandering minstrel. He would play juke joints, work camps, dances -- anywhere that would have him. He was an influential and innovative guitarist who played his own hot-rodded guitars that ranged anywhere from one- to nine-string variations of the instrument. "Baby Please Don't Go" was from his second known recording session, in 1935, for the Victor subsidiary Bluebird. This version was cut with a fiddle and washboard accompaniment, but it is the later 1941 recording, now named simply "Please Don't Go," with a fuller band and more contemporary sound, that is the version that influenced subsequent covers of the song. Here, his verse lines are sung in a call-and-response with John Lee, aka Sonny Boy Williamson. Williams likens the hold his woman has on him to both being kept as a pet and shackled in prison, thus the allusion to "Another Man Done Gone": "Baby, please don't go/Baby, please don't go back to New Orleans/You know I love you so, baby please don't go...Don't call my name, you got me way down here/Wearing a ball and chain."

The most likely link between the Williams recordings and all the rock covers that came in the 1960s and 1970s would be the Muddy Waters 1953 Chess side, which retains the same swinging phrasing as the Williams takes, but the session musicians beef it up with a steady driving rhythm section, electrified instruments, and Little Walter Jacobs wailing on blues harp. John Lee Hooker also recorded "Baby Please Don't Go" for Chess in 1952 and again for Riverside in 1959, but the song remains more closely identified with Waters. Hooker's early version is a link in the chain between Williams' more deliberate take and Waters' rocking recording. Them scored a Top Ten hit in the U.K. with its famously frenetic single (later available on Them Featuring Van Morrison (1987)) that features sessionman Jimmy Page shredding a wicked solo that forever colored the song, though the credit is not without controversy; Them's guitarist, Billy Harrison, claims that he at least created -- if not recorded -- the famous riff that forms the backbone of the arrangement, and at least one other bandmember insists that it is not Page playing the part. Alan Henderson plays the amphetamine-rush, pulsing two-note bass line that was later lifted by Golden Earring for "Radar Love." Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes scored some success in America with Them's arrangement in 1968. Mose Allison also recorded the song in his hip and laid-back style in 1961 on V-8 Ford Blues.

Bill Janovitz, www.allmusic.com