Better than I love myself;
An’ if he don’t have me,
He won’t have nobody else.
Thus in a single song we have examples of the processes of borrowing, combining, changing, and misunderstanding through which formal material often goes when it gets into the hands of the common folk. The composite of four stanzas presented above has no very clear meaning in its present form, but at that it is about as coherent as any of the blues from which it was assembled.
Left Wing Gordon, whose story is told in [Chapter XII], is a good study in the relation of folk song and formal blues. Left Wing’s repertoire is practically unlimited, for he appears to have remembered everything that he has ever heard. One of his favorite expressions is
You don’t know my mind,
You don’t know my mind;
When you see my laughin’,
I’m laughin’ to keep from cryin’.
This comes from You Don’t Know My Mind Blues, a popular sheet music and phonograph piece today. Left Wing sings dozens of stanzas, some evidently from the published versions, some of his own making, ending each one with “You don’t know my mind,” etc. Nearly all of his songs showed this sort of mixture of formal and folk material.