Tom Paxton on ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’

In an extract from a new interview with Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon covering their songwriting partnership and new album ‘Together’, Tom describes writing ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’.

Jason: ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’ came up and there’s been so many different interpretations. You mentioned that you were blown away by Pete singing quite a number of your songs. What’s your feeling of the various versions of that song, country versions, everyone’s got a different spin. Are you pleased that it’s interpreted in different ways?

Well, the one I’m thrilled with now is Dolly Parton singing it on the tribute album for Doc Watson. That performance has just got a Grammy nomination, which I just think it’s just too exciting. She’s up against Chris Stapleton and Jolly Roll. I don’t know who else, but it’ll be very hard, even for Dolly Parton to win that one. But it’s a beautiful version. Her original hit version with Porter Wagner was almost bluegrass. It was quite uptempo. There’s a YouTube clip of her backstage at Merlefest with Doc Watson singing it the way Doc sang it, which is more the way I sing it, a slower version.

There’s so many really good versions of that song. I think that Judy Collins was the first one to record it. She recorded it and I didn’t have a deal yet when I wrote it. I wrote it just in time for my first album with Elektra. There was a version that The Seekers did. Judith Durham, what a voice. There are hundreds of clips on YouTube of people, amateurs singing it because they love it. Now and then I’ll go on YouTube and find a song on mine and see how many covers there are. It’s astonishing, but nothing to equal ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’, that’s the one everyone records. It embarrasses me to say I wrote it in 20 minutes. It just came flowing out. That’s virtually a first draft. Oh, to be young and write them like that. [laughs]

Jason: I’d like to clarify this, because of information on the internet and it’s very hard to determine what is actually correct. Some say it was your response to Bob Dylan. Is there anything in that?

No, there’s no truth to that at all. As a matter of fact, it started melodically. I had learned a different way to play a G chord than the songbooks, the instructions book would tell you. And this way, you hold the G on the sixth string and the first string, you hold the G and move your first and second fingers to make a C chord. And you can go from the C to the G and back very easily. [John plays the riff] If you had listened to what John just did, you can hear the first line of the melody. It’s just that your ear will pluck it.

The only song like that would be ‘Ramblin’ Boy’. A month or so before I wrote it, I’d heard first Dave Van Ronk and then Bob Dylan sing this traditional song, ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’. A beautiful song of friendship and of death that really moved me. Then I sat down one night at The Gaslight with a little shirt pocket notebook. And in between sets, I wrote three lyrics that night. And the first and the third were just awful. But the middle one was ‘Ramblin’ Boy’. It was because I’d heard that song and it was almost my homage to that song.