“Good artists borrow, but great ones steal.”

– author unknown

“The name is McKinley Morganfield, nicknamed ‘Muddy Waters.’ I stole from all the guitar pickers.”

– Muddy Waters to Alan Lomax, summer 1941.

Back in 1941 in a Mississippi Delta plantation, tractor driver McKinley Morganfield spotted a young white man coming towards him. He thought the stranger was a tax collector; instead the visitor turned out to be folklorist Alan Lomax, who wanted to record Morganfield for the Library of Congress. What came about was the first recordings of the artist better known as Muddy Waters, who would later abandoned the acoustic blues he played in juke joints of Mississippi and plugged in his Gibson for the noisier Chicago bars, starting what would be known as the Chicago blues.

Forty years later and thousands of miles away, I was going to Sacramento’s Rio Americano High School, your average middle-class suburban high school attended mostly by white kids, though there were a couple of black kids and a handful of Asian Pacific American kids, including yours truly. The school’s student-run radio station could only be heard as far as the parking lot and would often pump out music on the front lawn during lunch breaks. The student deejays played nothing but the day’s hit-makers – Culture Club, The Fixx, Taco, Wham, Quarterflash, a-ha, etc. You get the picture.

First of all, before I get chastised by all those ‘80s pop music-obsessed freaks, I want to state that I don’t hate all ‘80s pop songs. Some of them are pretty damn catchy. But when you hear the same goddamn songs 200 times every weekday between 12 to 1 p.m., well you feel like you’re stuck in a bad John Hughes flick (then again, are there any good John Hughes flicks?).

So during my sophomore year, I was fed up. I had my share of the “Pac-Man Fever” and “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” bullshit. I headed down to Tower Records to look for something different, and for some reason the name Muddy Waters popped up in my head. At the time, all I knew about the guy was that he wrote the song “Rollin’ Stone,” whose title christened both a rock group and a magazine and inspired a Bob Dylan hit. I picked up a cassette tape of Muddy’s “Hard Again,” produced by blues guitarist Johnny Winters.

I put the tape in the car stereo. The first song was “Mannish Boy,” which Muddy first recorded in 1955 and was actually a rewrite of another song by fellow Chicagoan Bo Diddley. With a booming voice, Muddy growls a soulful vocal warm-up calls with Winters responding. Then Muddy screams out, “Woo!” and the band kicks in with that famous five-note riff – bum-ba-bum ba-bum! And for over five minutes and just one chord, Muddy hit my gut like moonshine. He’s the M-A-N!

After wearing down that tape, as well as my tape deck, I went back to Towers and bought records by the many artists from whom Muddy had “stolen” – Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy – all those old “race records.” Then I purchased a bunch of old Chess Records LPs by Muddy’s contemporaries – Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon. From there, I explored R&B, then jazz, then world music, then bluegrass, country, classical music, traditional ballads, gospels, experimental music, avant-garde – and the journey still continues.

Mr. Morganfield guided me through music and inspired me to become a musician myself.

So what song changed your life?

“Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

– Steve Earle

“I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

– Townes Van Zandt

Last year, the ghost of Townes Van Zandt followed me around.

In December, at a farewell party for writer Hilde Jaegtnes (about whom I should write a blog), Ryan Fuller of Fort King was plunking a familiar song on a beat-up guitar. The tune caught my ear and it took me only a couple of seconds to recognize the melody. I jumped in and joined Ryan in singing Townes’s “Flying Shoes.” Immediately afterwards, we warbled through “Pancho and Lefty” and “White Freightliner Blues,” and just then everything seemed right – a wild stormy night in the middle of Los Angeles, at a sweet dear friend’s so-long soiree, I’m drinking Champaign and singing Townes Van Zandt’s songs.

Three months earlier, I caught Steve Earle at the Troubadour; he was promoting his latest CD, “Townes,” a tribute to his songwriting mentor. As for Earle’s said Bob Dylan remark, I have to concur. Like most songwriters, I believe Dylan is the greatest living American poet. But every time I hear a Van Zandt song, that Texas Troubadour kicks Dylan off the top of the list – at least for a few months or so.

Townes Van Zandt had created some of the most heartbreaking songs of all time (“Waiting ‘Round to Die,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Marie,” “Poncho and Lefty”). His lyrics are one-part St. John of the Cross, one-part Charles Bukowski – “Every cruel day had its nightfall” (“Rake”); “Won’t you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing” (“Lungs”); “Everything is not enough, and nothing is too much to bear” (“To Live Is to Fly”); “She’s a sight to see, and a treasure for the poor to find” (“If I Needed You”); “You’re going to drown tomorrow if you cry too many tears for yesterday” (“Only Him or Me”). You get the picture.

He once said that his influences were poet Robert Frost and bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. But I think Townes is closer to Hank Williams, for his voice breaks in the right spots, just like Hank’s did. Van Zandt and Williams had a lot in common: They both suffocated their demons with booze, drugs and the dust from the road. They also both died on a New Year’s Day. While Williams passed away in the back seat of a Cadillac on his way to the next gig, Van Zandt died forty-four years later, in 1997, resting uncomfortably on his bed in Tennessee.

So I’m putting on my cowboy boots. Where is Dylan’s coffee table?

“Tell my baby I said so long/Tell my mother I did no wrong/Tell my brother to watch his own/Tell my friends to mourn me none.”

– Townes Van Zandt

So what ghosts have followed you around?

Below: The best scene from James Szalapski’s brilliant documentary, “Heartworn Highway,” featuring Townes Van Zandt and “Uncle” Seymour Washington.

You can throw a guitar off a cliff, and as it bounces off rocks on the way down, it will, all by itself, play “Gloria.”

– Dave Barry

I was blasting Patti Smith’s Horses in the car. The first track: “Gloria.” This was the very first version of “Gloria” I have ever heard.

Okay, that’s not true. It sounded cool to say that.

No, the first “Gloria” I heard was probably the first one almost all Americans heard – the 1965 single recorded by the Chicago blues-rock band Shadows of Knight. But of course that single was not even the first recording. No, it was originally recorded a year earlier by Van Morrison and Them. Van the Man wrote the song when he was an 18-year-old singer somewhere in Germany for his bar band, the Monarch. It began as a blues exercise that he and his bandmates would extend for about 15 minutes. Then it shrunk down to a two-and-a-half-minute single – three chords, chugging away like a train picking up steam, as the singer gutturally talks about his five-foot, four-inch girlfriend who comes to his house around midnight. This femme fatale discreetly knocks on his door, enters his room, and makes him feel “alright,” leaving him helpless, hopelessly moaning her name, first by spelling it out, then by chanting it over and over again. Now that’s some girl.

There have been countless garage bands, rock stars, and punks who have followed what the ol’ Monarchs did with this song – jamming for several minutes, revealing every dirty little thought that has been brewing in their adolescent minds. Hell, even Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison have their versions out there – 10-plus-minute workouts of noise, swank, and carnal knowledge – but frankly I think all those versions suck.

No, there’s only one version worthy of this perverted extension, and that’s Patti Smith’s invocation, her “In Excelsis Deo” as she called it. This is a Catholic girl’s experimentation with lesbian lust, starting with the blasphemous “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” followed by the narrator’s stroll into this boring party, then a vision of this “sweet young thing,” leaning and humping on the parking meter outside the window. And the outsider’s name is … well you know what it is.

The tower bells chime in Patti’s heart. It’s midnight. Time to take that big plunge.

So what was the last song you blasted in your car?