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BiTS: I gather that as part of that spot, you do the Leo Kottke cover ‘The Sailor's Grave On The
Prairie’.

TE: Yes, that's the oldest song on the album that I've been performing and playing. I got that
Leo Kottke album, the very first one he did, I think it was his first one, called “6-And 12-String
Guitar”, and I got that when it came out in the
early 70s, and I've been messing around with
that song for a long time. In fact, I even put it
on the Heartfixers album, but I did an electric
version of it on that album. This is the acoustic
version which I consider to be the correct way
to play that song.

BiTS: And if I'm right, you did a version of it on
the album called “Cowboy Blues”?

TE: No, I did it on the album called “Cool On It”,
by the Heartfixers.

BiTS: Okay.

TE: Maybe there's a collection named ”Cowboy
Blues” with it on.

BiTS: That's probably what it is. Probably what
I'm thinking of, yes.

TE: Yeah. It's on the Heartfixers “Cool On It” album, which was the final Heartfixers album in
1986.

BiTS: Okay, tell me something about some of the other music that's on there. Some of your own
stuff is pretty fabulous. I really like ‘Tallahassee Blues’, for example, which sounds like Robert
Johnson to me.

TE: Yeah, that's very much in the Robert Johnson early Muddy Waters vein. ‘Devil In The Room’
is more of a R.L. Burnside kind of Hill Country Blues. I've had people recently tell me that
‘Windowpane’ reminded them of Skip James or the Bentonia style of Delta Blues from Bentonia,
Mississippi.

BiTS: Yes. And there is a fabulous version of ‘Death Letter’ as well.

TE: ‘Death Letter Blues’, that was a tough sell to talk Alligator into letting me put that out because
there's no shortage of versions of that song. That song’s been recorded many times. But I like
the version I did and on that particular one, I ended up using not the studio version, but the demo
version of it that Eddie 9V produced for me.

BiTS: And did he play on it?

TE: No, he didn't. He just acted as producer and cheerleader. Basically, I went over to their
studio. He and his brother, Lane, have a studio in their home and I went over there and that's

where they make some of their albums. I wanted some young ears on it because I really dig the
music they make quite a bit and love the sound of it and just so alive. I did a demo of ten songs
over there and that would’ve been about a year and a half ago, Then when I went back to the
studio to record ‘Death Letter Blues’ for the album, and recorded it, I liked the demo version
better so I released the demo of it rather than the studio version.