“Ninety Nine Years and One Dark Day” is a Jesse Fuller song. Fuller (1896–1976) was born in Jonesboro, Georgia, settled in Oakland, California, in 1929, and worked for years on the Southern Pacific Railroad. He became a one-man band known as “The Lone Cat,” playing 12-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo and cymbal, along with the fotdella, a foot-operated bass of his own design and construction. He is best known for “San Francisco Bay Blues.” Fuller recorded the song for the British label Topic at Cecil Sharp House in London on 19 March 1965, and it appeared that year on his LP Move On Down the Line (Topic 12T134).
Fuller’s version is the story of a man who shot his woman with a forty-four after finding her with another man. He is put in prison with a ball and chain, works in the rain, is thrown in the dungeon after a fight, and lives on bad food and a hard bed. On record Fuller explains the title before he sings: ninety-nine years is a life sentence, and the dark day is the day you die.
Tim O’Brien rewrote the words for Hot Rize. The band recorded the song in January 1979 at Colorado Sound in Denver for their first album, Hot Rize (Flying Fish FF 206), with O’Brien singing lead. Charles Sawtelle played guitar, Pete Wernick banjo and Nick Forster bass, and the album credits “Jesse Fuller; arr/lyrics Tim O’Brien.” O’Brien kept the shooting with a forty-four and the bad food and hard beds. His prisoner has been inside twenty years or more and spends his days breaking rocks in the yard. No singer can convince the warden he did no wrong. He never learned to read or write, his life has been one long fight, and nobody showed him the righteous way.
Later bands took up the Hot Rize text. Josh Williams & High Gear recorded it in November 1993 for The Old Town of Home (Copper Creek, 1994), credited to Fuller and arranged by O’Brien. Bill Kreutzmann’s band BK3 played it in 2008.
