JTR

Untangling the history.

It took me a little bit to put all of these pieces together, but I finally figured it out. "JTR" has become a recent favorite of mine by the Dave Matthews Band, although I never really knew where the title came come. It didn't seem to fit anywhere in the song, so I started doing some research.

To make a long story short, "John The Revelator" is a traditional gospel folk song that was recorded back in the 1930's by Blind Willie Johnson.


Then, in 1999 Dave Matthews was collaborating with Carlos Santana for his then-unreleased Supernatural album. They created a song titled "John The Revelator" that was different from the original folk song. With that said, they borrowed the chorus, and the song evolved from there. Although the song was actually never released on Santana's album, it was added on later with the "Legacy Edition" that was released two weeks ago. The song was called "John the Revelator" during it's creation process, it was released two weeks ago as "Rain Down on Me". (Copyright laws maybe? I'm not too sure)


Ok, so anyways......
After the song was originally scrapped from Santana's project, the Dave Matthews Band re-worked it for their scrapped album, which many fans refer to as The Lillywhite Sessions. In the studio, some of the lyrics were changed and dropped, including the lyric about John The Revelator. When this happened, the song's title was changed once again, this time to "JTR", where it stands today.


Although the song was never released on an album, the song started appearing fairly regularly at DMB shows starting in the summer of 2000. At the end of 2001, it disappear completely until it re-emerged in 2006. It got pretty steady play that year, but sadly has been missing ever since. It was last played on 9.3.06, and I (we?) are still waiting for it's return.

Here's to JTR in 2010.

Oo, by the way. Yesterday was SecretSunday. PostSecret of the week...