Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name

Comic Strips and the Absurd

I speak here only of newspaper comic strips, not of comic books or animated cartoons, each of which has distinct generic characteristics. I am afraid that the copies here of The Squirrel Cage and Count Screwloose are too small to be legible and I don’t know how to make them larger. The reader might copy and enlarge these images or locate them on the web which is what I did at http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2013/08/tis-art-milt-gross-count-screwloose.html and http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/nov-shmoz-ka-pop-gene-aherns-mysterious.html both on Paul C. Tumey’s excellent screwball comics blog. See also Art Spiegelman’s “Foolish Questions,” a review of Tumey’s Screwball!: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny in the New York Review of Books, or at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/screwball-rube-goldberg-foolish-questions/. The two of them are experts; I am simply a reader. My observations, I hope, would have meaning even without the strips.

     The status of comic strips, considered by most (until the recent vogue for graphic novels) to be beneath the consideration of critics long meant that, while comic artists were bound by the commercial necessity to turn a profit, they were free to do most anything if they maintained a sufficient readership. Comic strips, meant to be rapidly and casually consumed, typically are built of stereotyped images and received opinions, but they have proved to be quite capable to ironic interrogation of their own conventions. Self-reflective themes, like that in this Nancy strip by Ernie Bushmiller, though often associated with sophisticated and avant-garde art, are featured in many of the very earliest newspaper strips.
     Like other genres of art, comic strips offer a variety of rewards to readers. Some strips such as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant have strong narratives while others such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo rely on verbal play. Winsor McCay created lush and dazzling visual fields in Little Nemo, while George McManus’ Bringing Up Father satisfied readers with the same reliable stereotype-based gags day after day.
     In spite of this range of possibilities it is surely true in general that comic strips have a natural affinity for the absurd. McCay’s motive in using dreams in Nemo and Rarebit Fiend and Kelly’s in making animals talk in a remote swamp is in part the same as Foster’s or McManus’ in using clichés so tired they invite play. Even more than in films anything can happen in the comics. The genre therefore offers an arena for questioning quotidian experience with imaginative leaps and fanciful non sequiturs. Such maneuvers belong to the medium as montage does to film or cadence to poetry.
     Within the category of the absurd artists have developed a broad inventory of possibilities. In the last sixty years the underground comics provided rich veins of nonsense, some of which were published like earlier newspaper comics strips, though they found a more congenial home in comic books. R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman and others have paid homage to the cartoonists of the past from whom they took inspiration, at times amounting to imitation. Much of what looked like sixties revolutionary weirdness in Zap was in large part hommage to past masters, an acknowledgement of tradition. Here I wish only to point out a couple of these early practitioners of the comic strip absurd who, though well-known to other cartoon artists and to specialists have faded from the public view: Gene Ahearn and Milt Gross.
     Though I relished the character Major Hoople in Gene Ahearn’s in Our Boarding House, I only recently came to read his The Squirrel Cage. An acorn in the title panel explains the strip’s name. The squirrel cage is where one would find nuts. Hence everything that happens in Foozland is crazy. Here is the April 22, 1945 strip.

     The first two panels contain a more or less conventional gag despite the nutty landscape and garb. The great wizard in his first appearance uses his supernatural gifts as a child might, to create an ice cream soda, numinous and suspended, for his enjoyment while strolling. Juvenile appetite has free rein here, inviting the reader to regress. The magic man then descends into the underworld through a trapdoor only to resurface in the guise of a refrigerator, still something of a novelty to many when the strip appeared. (It is called in fact an icebox.) Topping this absurdity, a small figure clad in warm furs then emerges. Next, Hearn’s Little Hitchhiker, widely regarded as the inspiration for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, with appears like an apparition, his thumb out inviting the unknown and, on his lips, the enigmatic mantra “Nov shmoz ka pop!” He stands next to a butcher block topped with ham and cleaver (itself utterly out of context) which, with the toss of the wizard’s spell, becomes a small-eared elephant with a brush tail. The license of magic and madness allows Hearn to slide from ice cream soda to a subterranean land and then, in quick succession, refrigerator, Eskimo-like figure, butcher’s block with ham and elephant of a sort never before seen. The reader can only gaze on astonished. Surely here are moves comparable to Lautréamont’s formulation "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." The Little Hitchhiker and the anonymous character with the smaller beard and hat signify their amazement at the spectacle that passes before them with question marks and radiating lines of amazement.
     Madness also enables Milt Gross to untether the story from observed reality. His strip Count Screwloose of Tooloose always begins and ends in a mental hospital, but the premise is that the Count regularly finds the outside world madder than the institution.

     In this February 22, 1931 strip the count is propelled over the walls of his institution by a fellow patient who believes himself to be the cow that jumped over the moon. The diminutive aristocrat notices a hobo who attempts to collect tips by reciting “Abou ben Adhem” in a rough pool hall only to be knocked in the head by a pool table hurled by those intolerant of poetry. He dashes from the hospital to which he has been taken wearing a sheet with his head bandaged as though he were wearing a turban. With the count observing from the rear, he follows a crowd of wealthy sophisticates where he repeats his recitation, this time to great applause. This is enough for the count who returns to the relative sanity of the Nuttycrest Asylum and the dependable company of his dog Iggy.
     The lower-class pool players are violent, demolishing culture in their refusal to hear the poem, practically the only work of Leigh Hunt to find readers from the time of its composition to the present. (It was included in the 1887 book meant for parlor reading out loud, Popular Poetic Pearls and is featured in a current internet list of “poems every child should know.”) Great though its middle-brow prestige may be, it would find little sympathy from real littérateurs. Yet the presumably superior judgement of the cultivated crew that applauds the bum in a hospital sheet is swayed purely by the attraction of the exotic, in essence by their own vanity.
     Gross suggests that both rich and poor have equally blind responses to the poem. Since Hunt’s all-too-simple theme, which no one ever hears, is the common humanity of all, the hostility of the ruffians and the rapture of the upper crust equally miss the point. The madman is the only one to see clearly, and he is driven back to the security of his pet’s affection beneath a painted moon. It is surely accidental that the strip appeared less than a year before the popularity of E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and Billy Rose’s song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” which says 'It's a Barnum and Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be.”
     Ahearn’s The Squirrel Cage takes place in a realm freed from ordinary reductive systems of logic and cause-and-effect. The phenomena in its world always elicit a puzzled fascination from the observer who need not even attempt to make sense of the scene. In fact the refusal to rationalize, the suspension of analysis with its attempt to seize control, has surely a liberating effect on the reader’s mind not wholly unlike the suspension of judgement (or ἐποχή) described by the ancient skeptics.
     Gross’s Count Screwloose of Tooloose portrays a world in which the sanest resident is a mental patient and the safest place to situate oneself is next to a loyal friend behind a high wall. The count might adopt Dalí’s oft-quoted bon mot, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
     Absurdity has countless other forms. I have always enjoyed the metaphysical desolation of George Herriman’s renderings of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County, the flabbergasted expressions in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, the elaborate inventions of Rube Goldberg, and the mute eloquence of Carl Thomas Anderson’s Henry.
     Mary Worth (created by writer Allen Saunders and artist Dale Connor) managed to survive for generations with soap opera and William Donahey’s single panel Teenie Weenies was visually ingenious while Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates made its appeal with action and adventure stories. Still, were my mood to build a comics pantheon, I would place at its height the artists of inspired absurdity who brought the imaginations of their readers to soar like their own in the moments it takes to scan a newspaper comic strip.

Tone in Middle English Double Entendre Songs

Double entendre lyrics appear worldwide and throughout history. In the late Middle Ages, as some performers came to rely on written texts, a number of such songs were recorded in manuscript. While most of the scant body of earlier secular lyrics on the theme of love were written casually and almost accidentally preserved, sometimes in margins by clerics primarily occupied with religious writings, [1] these poems provide a direct glimpse into the popular music of the day. Among the songs recorded from the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the double entendre genre was not confined to stimulating a “wink wink nudge nudge” Eric Idle-type response. One such work is an ingenious and elegant riddle, while another is coarse and transgressive, with hints of aggression and nastiness, and a third sounds like a good-natured joke. Each expresses an element of human eroticism.



1

I haue a gentil cook,
Crowyt me day.
He doth me rysyn erly,
My matyins for to say.

I haue a gentil cook,
Comyn he is of gret.
His comb is of reed corel,
His tayil is of get.

I haue a gentyl cook,
Comyn he is of kynde.
His comb is of red scorel,
His tayl is of Inde.

His legges ben of asor,
So geintil and so smale.
His spores arn of syluer qwyt,
In to the worte wale.

His eynyn arn of cristal,
Lokyn al in aumbyr,
And euery nyght he perchit hym
In myn ladyis chaumbyr.


This poem, perhaps the best-known of the late medieval English double entendre songs, is included in a 15th century manuscript on the same page as the beautiful haunting religious lyrics “Adam lay ibounden” and “I syng of a mayden.” [2] The rooster – cook is a variant form of cock -- has a history as an emblem of Christ from the earliest times, a tradition toward which this poet nods with the reference to the bird’s awakening him “my matyins for to say,” yet this association is playfully misleading. In fact, the expression “to say matins” was a euphemism meaning to copulate. [3]

With its extended description the poem resembles Old English riddles, and, as in some of those, the answer is erotic. According to the OED the earliest denotative use of cock in the sense of male genitals is not until 1618, but verbal play with the association existed long before then. It will strike the young as extraordinary that, until a half century ago, scholars read, analyzed, and anthologized this poem with the assumption that it is simply an elegant and affectionate account of a pet bird. [3]

“I haue a gentil cook” is indeed an affectionate lapidary tribute to its subject. Though some have had difficulty in applying certain particulars of the rooster’s appearance to the genitalia, other critics have found every detail apt. The male organs have found few such worshipful tributes between this and Auden’s “A Day for a Lay.” [4] Emphasizing the cock’s “gentility” (mentioned six times in the piece’s twenty lines) and his beauty, described as though it were Cellini’s enameled gold salt cellar, the poet seeks to remove any trepidation or reluctance on the lady’s part. This unthreatening seduction technique is similar to that of Mississippi John Hurt in “Candyman” which includes lines like “His stick candy don't melt away/ It just gets better, so the ladies say,” delivered in a disarmingly sweet and gentle tone.

The listener’s solution of the riddle will dawn with a sense of discovery analogous to that of sexual exploration. Here is no suffering in love, no courtly self-subjugation, simply a celebration of the gift of sexuality. The speaker is secure in the knowledge that the cock has a nightly perch “in myn ladyis chaumbyr.” The verses are pretty and warmly charged with the potential for pleasure. Though male boasting about one’s sexual member or experiences is universal and often coarse, the tone here might even be called decorous.


2

Other late Middle English double entendre poems are not so refined. “May no man slepe in youre halle,” also from a songbook, [5] is far more explicit, The tone is raucous and dirty.




May no man slepe in youre halle
For dogges,
Madame,
For dogges,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv ynche
With twey clogges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such Clogges
That gyuef such bogges
By twyne my lady legges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For rattys,
Madame,
For rattys,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt letheryn knappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.
Iblessyd be suche knappes
That gyveth such swappes
Vnder my lady lappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For flyes,
Madame,
For flyes,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt such byes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such byes
That maketh such suyes
By tuynne my lady thyes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.


Since vermin such as rats and flies, not to mention the notoriously unwanted attention of dogs, flock to the lady’s “hall,” the man’s role is, in the first instance, to drive off all the competition for what is variously called “between her legs,” her “lap,” and her “thighs.” [6] Hints of bestiality, corruption, and illness are here associated with sex.

The scene is essentially comic, low-mimetic. The sexual parts are not compared to precious and beautiful objects but to functional tools of wood and leather. Emphasizing its distance from a love lyric, the persona does not even seek to join the woman himself, rather with ironic mocking graciousness, he expresses the hope that whoever dares take her on will be up to the challenge. Outsize penises are virtually always comic, and, at any rate, the fifteen inch threshold would surely mean that few, if any, could qualify.

Though “I haue a gentil cook” derived its appeal from its polish and tasteful obliqueness and “May no man slepe in youre halle” is coarse, almost rude, glorying in its dubious propriety, both may well have been performed on the same occasion, perhaps along with pious Christian songs. The crudely bawdy and the sublimely erotic are never far apart in Classical literature or the work of the Troubadours. The testimony of literature suggests the same paradoxical mélange in the human mind.


3

The tone is quite different in “I have a newe gardin.” [7] Here the sexuality is high-spirited, wholesome and fresh. Rather than sounding transgressive, this verse is light and sweet, melodious, contrasting with the percussive effects in “May no man slepe in youre halle.”


I have a newe gardin,
And newe is begunne;
Swich another gardin,
Knowe I not under sunne.

In the middis of my gardin
Is a peryr set,
And it wele non per bem
But a per Jenet.

The fairest maide of this towne
Preyed me
For to griffen her a grif
Of min pery tree.

Whan I hadde hem griffed
Alle at her wille,
The win and the ale
She dede in fille.

And I griffed her
Right up in her home;
And be that day twenty wowkes,
It was quik in her womb.

That day twelve month,
That maide I mette;
She said it was a per Robert,
But non per Jonet.



The riddling opening phrase “I have a . . .” introduces the central image of the pear tree in the garden. A playful slipperiness surrounds the associated significations. While the garden makes one think of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, it is also a lovers’ bower, a locus amoenus. The pear tree, clearly phallic, is at the same time identified with the woman. The image of conception as grafting derives straight from medical description, including a passage in Hippocrates. [8] The punning on Jenet/Jonet is perhaps the main gag, and I use the term because this poem seems to me a joke in verse. Jenet, today Janet, is an early fruit as well as a personal name which may be either female or male. The phonological identity of pear and père supports this jeu de mots.

The ambiguity of the conclusion is the punch line. Is the speaker named Robert or John? If Robert, the final two lines mean that, rather than an early pear, the speaker has made him a father. It could be read, however, as revealing that he, John, is not the father, the father is another lover previously unmentioned, named Robert. While the explanation may be ponderous, the actual telling unfolds with a light and natural conversational ease, leaving the listener suspended between the possibilities.

The levity with which the subject is treated is in part derived from the speaker’s apparent youth (a “new” garden, just begun). The woman approaches him “alle at her wille” asking for the “graft.” So pleased was she that they partied with wine and ale. The relationship, whoever may be the father of the baby, seems entirely consensual.


4
Conclusion

Each of these songs entertains the audience with the riddle-like game implicit in every metaphor. The territory shared by the sexual meaning and the non-sexual varies widely to represent different aspects of the erotic, yet in each case the ludic character of the double entendre form emphasizes the positive. In “I haue a gentil cook” sexual vaunting is given an artful form in which what amounts to praise of one’s own body is done so playfully that it verges on self-satire. “May no man slepe in youre halle” is a rowdy, insulting verse of a sort that might have found favor at a modern fraternity stag. In the end high spirits and good humor mask the potential nastiness of the underlying misogyny. Finally, “I have a newe gardin” is a pleasant telling of an old story which at any rate acknowledges the possibility of a child. In this merry version no one seems to suffer. If the poet’s “gardin” is not Eden, it yet may feel for some moments as though it is.






1. The borderline between the pious and the improper was often ill-defined. Apart from the church’s toleration of parody ceremonies such as the Drinkers Mass (Missa Potatorum), the Gamblers Mass (Officium Lusorum) and the Feast of Fools (Festum Fatuorum), one may think of much of Rabelais and, among critics, of Huizinga and Bakhtin.

2. Sloane 2593, ff.10v-11. See Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. The same essay provides overwhelming evidence from parallel passages in English and other languages to support the identification of cock and penis.

3. For the suggestive use of matins, see Ziolkowski p. 123.

4. Auden’s poem includes lines admiring his young friend’s “delicate wrinkles and the neat/ Sutures of the capacious bag.” Written in 1948, Auden’s poem was unpublished until 1965, when Edward Sanders printed it in Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (Vol 5 No 8) in March 1965, with a cover by Andy Warhol. It is sometimes titled "The Platonic Blow" or “The Gobble Poem.” Its publication history can be found in Bloomfield and Mendelson’s W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969.

5. Cambridge University Add. 5943.

6. Bugs in the crotch are, of course, most likely pubic lice.

7. Again, from British Museum Sloane 2593.

8. On the Nature of the Child.