This song was brought into my life a few years ago by my Mum, a reliable source of excellent music. It’s a blues standard, but my preferred version is Elmore James’ 1962 recording, with his incredible voice and slide guitar.

While It Hurts Me Too is superficially about a man’s love for a woman who loves another (highly unpleasant) man, to me it could as easily be about platonic love as romantic love. I’m bringing my own experiences to bear of course, but to me it sits on the same shelf as Strawberry Switchblade’s Let Her Go or the Dresden Dolls’ Delilah. It’s about watching from the sidelines, furious and helpless as someone you care about gets hurt, over and over again. For me it is inescapably about abuse.

While the song is old and has been re-interpreted time and again, when Elmore James recorded his version he made some lyrical changes to the hit version recorded by Tampa Red in 1949. Comparing the two there’s a subtle shift from a reasonably upbeat song imploring an object of desire to leave a cheating no-gooder, to a heartbreaking lament for the trap in which a loved one has been snared.

For example, Tampa Red sings:

That man you love, darlin’
He don’t want you ’round
Whyn’t ya make love with Tampa, darling?
And let’s jump the town
When things go wrong, so wrong, with you
It hurts me, too

And James sings:

He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you
It hurts me too.

What I like best about it is that unlike many other blues standards (and plenty of mainstream pop songs – see Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, The Beatles’ Run For Your Life, Tom Jones’ Delilah), It Hurts Me Too is a song about empathy, not jealousy. The singer claims no ownership over the woman, it’s her suffering that pains him, not the fact he can’t have her. For me, it works as an antidote to the musical tradition of the jealous murder of women by men. I believe it’s a song about love in the truest, broadest sense: what you feel, I feel.

It Hurts Me Too  by Elmore James

You said you was hurtin’, you almost lost your mind.
Now, the man you love, he hurt you all the time.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

Now, he better leave you or you better put him down.
No, I won’t stand to see you pushed around.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

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Amy Winehouse, for all the typically Machiavellian marketing behind her early development and signing, was an atypical star to launch, even before the drink, drugs, bisexuality, tattoos and self-harm and sprawling domestic disharmony on the streets of Camden set in. 2003 was a year of slickly manufactured, crowdpleasing pop anthems spawned by reality tv or established industry hit machines: Britney, Christina, Avril, Beyoncé, Sugababes, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud. In this climate, Winehouse’s debut Frank, an engagingly personal and subtly powerful blend of jazz, soul, dub and heavy drinking, stood out as an album of grit among gloss, accomplished and ambitious, recalling the eclectic and impeccably imperious style of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone.

Equally, despite her status as a product of the Sylvia Young and Brit stage schools, Winehouse was hardly manufactured, having been a genuinely talented singer, guitarist and songwriter from a young age. The lyrics she produced and her delivery of them were cool, critical and cynical – ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ is a punchily sung and scathing dismissal of the dominant gold-digging paradigm. Her definitive, self-mythologising single ‘Rehab’, despite its refrain’s predictable propensity to generate tasteless jokes and mawkish headlines in the wake of her death, is a staggering song of self-awareness, wiped clean of messy emoting or self-pity and resolutely swerving any courting of sorrow or sympathy. Its protagonist does not bewail her fate in the clasp of addiction but makes her refusal to be pathologised an active and empowering choice – ‘no, no, no’ means no. Like much of Winehouse’s material, the song addresses and analyses addiction, dependency, depression and the complexities of female independence with a wry, arch, clear-eyed and mocking wit that could have leavened the weight of many a confessional memoir.

To evaluate Winehouse’s career as a story of potential unfulfilled, as many obituaries are doing, is to ignore the quality of second album Back to Black, with its clutch of BRITs, Grammys and Ivor Novellos, as well as the sheer depth of its influence. Winehouse’s international success began a scramble by record companies to scrounge up similar eclectic and experimental female artists. It is perhaps unfortunate that all this process actually got us was an indistinguishable female-centred quirk-quake comprised of Little Pixie Roux and the Machine for Lashes, as well as current favourites Adele and Duffy – both well-behaved, clean and immaculately blue-eyed biters of a vintage musical style which Winehouse had almost singlehandedly reinvigorated. For all their undoubted technical ability, such singers purvey blandly perfect reproductions of retro soul, whereas Winehouse was able to inhabit past musical modes like she wore her Ronettes-inspired beehive, investing them with something contemporary and compelling through that awesome, syrupy, rolling contralto. Her aesthetic – glamorously grubby, leonine and Cleopatra-eyed – was similarly inimitable and atypical. Even Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with smoothing the path to mainstream success for other ‘strange girls’.

The tributes to Amy Winehouse clotting the front pages this past weekend reflect the other aspect of her fame: the purpose she served as media cipher. The narrative into which she was coralled – discovered, lauded, rewarded, exploited, drug-ravaged and wrung dry by the cynics and sycophants around her – is a traditional trajectory for women in the public eye, from Marilyn to Britney. Mixed in with the clichés of the demon-driven artist, Winehouse’s dedication to the life of a good-time girl provided an obvious temptation for the press to shoehorn the shapeless and slippery business of living into a rigid mould of Meaning, to make her a signifier of the plagues afflicting modern womanhood – not all of modern womanhood, of course, just those of us susceptible to the lure of urban independence and its giddy, glittering thrills.

There is an obvious irony in the fact that the media’s very concentration on her as a reliably scandalous page-filler embedded her in public consciousness as not an artist but a cautionary tale of misjudged relationships and worse-judged substance indulgence, eliciting a weird and volatile mixture of compassion and contempt. There was, too, a ghoulish and lascivious edge to public concern over Winehouse – as there was, back in the day, over Courtney Love and, latterly, Britney Spears – which is seldom present in attitudes to their male counterparts. The same organs which engorged themselves with pictures of Winehouse in her various stages of decline, distress and debauchery are continuing to objectify and sensationalise her as, inevitably, a ‘brilliant but troubled’ combination of tragic loss and dreadful warning. She deserves a better class of memorialist.

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

I say ‘less well-known’, what I mean is less familiar to the general public. Since she was ‘discovered’ in the 1950s (she was included on an album of field recordings of folk music, Instrumental Music from the Southern Appalachians , after a chance meeting with folk singer Paul Clayton) there have been plenty of tributes to her musicianship.  Bluesman Taj Mahal said she was the greatest influence on his guitar playing, and Bob Dylan went to visit her in 1962. When you listen to Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right (a rewrite of one of Clayton’s songs) I reckon you can hear Etta Baker’s influence quite clearly.

The album she recorded with her sister Cora Phillips in 2005, Carolina Breakdown, is casually incredible. Her astonishing skill is obvious, even to a cloth-eared listener like me. But it all seems very relaxed. I suppose that kind of confidence is what you get for playing the guitar for 90-odd years (she started learning when she was three…)

Here’s a radio interview with Etta Baker in 2005 and you can listen to some of her songs, see pictures and read more about her life on the Music Maker Relief website. Baker has none of the tragic glamour of Billie Holiday or the stature of Bessie Smith. When you see pictures of her, she’s… well, she’s a little old lady.  She’s usually grinning, wearing ill-fitting sweaters, and with the same owl-like glasses that the Queen wears. The admiration she has won is all down to how she played, and not how she looked.

She is not and never was a star. As well as playing the blues, she raised nine children and worked for 26 years in a local factory. Susan Simone of Music Maker Relief puts this in context:

Listening to Baker’s talent, the first question that comes to mind is why didn’t she get onto the stage earlier. To understand this, you need to understand how life was in the Carolinas for people who were living a hardscrabble life of farming and mill work. Opportunities for music were local not national. Skilled musicians played with family, for local dances, at church, or may be in a nearby town…. “My husband could play piano real well,” Baker reflects. “I believe we could have made it, but as he did not want to leave home, there was nothing I could say.”

Performing on stage or to large audiences is of course no measure of talent, or even of influence. And in interviews Baker herself didn’t seem to have any regrets. But when I hear her and her sister play I can’t help but wonder about all the other ordinary extraordinary women we’ll never know about.

Further reading

• Review of Carolina Breakdown

• Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis on Amazon

• Blog series: Feminist discourse in the lives and works of American blueswomen of the 1920s
  • Part one
  • Part two
  • Bibliography
  • Happy birthday Bessie Smith
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