Loving you baby is as easy as falling off a log

This is from the 1965 album Woman Blue. It is very faithful to the version that ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax found and compiled in 1934, an autobiographical song of an eighteen year old woman locked up in jail for murder. More of a plaintiff dirge than its successors' treatments. Its antecedents include Blind Lemon Jefferson's Deceitful Brownskin Blues, which was released as a single in 1927. A man named Bob Coltman discovered the song in the Lomax songbook and started performing it in the late fifties.

Judy Roderick was born in Michigan, grew up in Indiana, lived much of her later life in Montana. She was an early player in the Greenwich Village scene and played at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Judy died at the too early age of 49, succumbing to a heart attack brought on by childhood diabetes.