In 1970, a young American folk singer named James Taylor released his breakthrough album, Sweet Baby James. Tucked away on it was a track called “Steamroller Blues” — and he never meant a word of it seriously.
It was a parody.
Taylor had grown tired of watching well-off young white musicians play at being blues singers. In his own words: “There were a lot of white guys playing the blues, college students singing Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and it seemed comical to me. ‘Steamroller’ was just meant to be a take-off.”
So he wrote the most absurd blues lyrics he could manage. The narrator declares himself a steamroller. He compares his love to a cement mixer, a demolition derby, and a napalm bomb. It is deliberately ridiculous.
James Taylor – Sweet Baby James (BBC In Concert, Nov 16, 1970)
A lovely accident shows up in the recording, too. Taylor had a heavy cold the day they cut it, but the album was on a tight schedule — so his blocked-up, congested voice went straight onto the finished record.
Three years later, the most famous singer alive picked it up and removed the joke entirely.
Elvis Presley – Steamroller Blues (Aloha From Hawaii, Live in Honolulu, 1973)
On 14 January 1973, Elvis Presley performed “Steamroller Blues” at Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite—the first concert by a single performer broadcast live worldwide —reaching more than 40 countries and an audience estimated at over a billion people.
And he played it completely straight. No wink, no irony. He treated it as a genuine, snarling blues number, threw his full seventies voice at it, and made it sound like it had been written for him.
The live recording was released as a single later that year and went into the Billboard Top 20. The Aloha album went to number one — the last chart-topping record of his lifetime.
It remains one of the strangest crossovers in music history. A sarcastic album track mocking white blues singers, performed in deadly earnest by the most famous white blues singer who ever lived — to the biggest audience anybody had ever assembled.