High water risin' - risin' night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner lookin' East and West
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
High water everywhere

There is no Twelfth Street and Vine in Kansas City.

Vancouver, BC, Canada has one:

From: "Ross Oxby"  ten_bob_revolutionary at hotmail.com 
To: karlerik@monet.no
Subject: '12th street and vine'
Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:58:17 +0000

High water risin' - risin' night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner lookin' East and West
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
High water everywhere

The entire verse of High Water is almost certainly a stamp-sized
miniature, or microcosm, of Big Joe Turner's 'Old Piney Brown is
Gone'. A ballad detailing Turner's search for and failure to find
'a friend of mine' in Kansas City, 'Old Piney Brown Is Gone'
recalls how the protagonist searched 'Eighteenth and Vine' - a
crossroad junction in the centre of Kansas made famous in the
1920s and 30s for dance halls, jazz clubs, blues joints and an
all round blazing nightlife:

"In the 1930s, Kansas City possessed 120 night clubs and 40 dance
halls; most featured jazz performances. Jazz venues in the 18th
and Vine Historic District included the Eblon Theater, Subway
Club, El Capitan Club, Sunset Club, and Lincoln Theater. The area
also offered support services for musicians through Mutual
Musicians Local #627, housed in a building at 1823 Highland
Avenue which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
"

An inner city area now associated with black ghetto history and
then populated, one assumes, by the mid and late-Thirties by the
blacks of the Great Migration (admittedly, to much lesser extent
than the likes of Detroit and Chicago further North). Knowing how
volatile such ghettos always were, it's not hard to imagine how
the vital entertainment of the area described above could have
been juxtaposed with the kind of violence that would lead to
Piney Brown being "last saw" (sic) on Eighteenth and Vine.

Dylan's work, itself a delightful tapestry of blues tradition and
cliche, paints in a verse the torment and frantic search Turner
detailed in his entire song. Quite where Dylan got 'Twelfth
Street' from initially flummoxed me, but a quick seqarch revealed
this helpful little site
and gave me this lifeline:

"The nightly performance of live jazz, dance halls and night
clubs, located along both 18th and 12th Streets, established
Kansas City's reputation as a music mecca "

Clearly, rather than simply retelling the story, Dylan has done
his research. Like the whole of Love and Theft, High Water is a
semi-transparant, often inverted mask of early Twentieth Century
American popular song that through its very ambiguity intrigues
the curious and delights everyone else through a manipulation of
a tradition only made possible by a flawless knowledge and love
of it.

I hope this helps someone.

Ross Oxby.


In addition, and more specifically, '12th street & Vine' is
mentioned in the Lieber-Stoller song, 'Kansas City'. This was
performed by that other notable bluesman Muddy Waters on the
recent reissue of seminal live album Muddy "Mississippi" Waters
Live. This may be where Dylan got the 12th Street reference as
opposed to 18th Street on Joe Turner's Piney Brown. If anything,
it is further example of the depth of blues knowledge and history
juxtaposed and flowing throughout High Water (For Charly Patton).