Derangements of Love in Two Early French Folk Songs

 

    These poems are most readily available in the Geoffrey Brereton’s Penguin Book of French Verse, vol. 2.  The texts appended to the essay are from that source.  The English here is my own, meant (like the glosses provided by Brereton) only to facilitate reference to the French originals.

 

     The drama of human sexual love is subject to endless variation in expressions of the immense power of the human erotic dynamo.  Every individual probably experiences a great variety of identities and relations with a single beloved over a course of time. In general, perversions and fetishes develop from a single-minded concentration on what might engage an ordinary lover for a moment every now and then.  For instance, while exclusive BDSM tastes are rare, doubtless everyone has momentarily experienced the wish to overmaster another, to gratify a drive for power rather than sensual pleasure, to indulge a selfish rather than a thoughtful impulse.  By the dictate of nature herself, the boundary of such play is death. 

     Such an extreme dialectic between love and death, today the stuff of tabloids and films, was often expressed in ballad-type songs.  Two early French folk songs, first recorded from the fifteenth century, may be juxtaposed to form a diptych illustrating variations of the theme that might be called love gone awry, distinguished from such harmonious conflations of love and death as Wagner’s Liebestod in which to die is called höchste Lust (highest desire or delight).  This mystical transport was associated by Wagner, who had been led by Schopenhauer to India, with a longing for nirvana. [1]  In “La Blanche Biche” (“The White Doe”) and in “Renaud le tuer des femmes” (“Renaud the Killer of Women”) love and death are joined in more sinister fashion.  In the first, the woman proves a victim, while in the second she triumphs over her would-be attacker.

     The lady in “La Blanche Biche” at times becomes a white doe and in that form is hunted and killed by her brother Renaud.  The story is akin to countless tales of human to animal transformation, many of which feature a magic deer.  These include the white deer upon which Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty rode and the thousand-years-old animal of Emperor Xuanzong.   Lenape, Chickasaw, and other native American groups told stories of supernatural white deer.  Yet today in the Ozarks people speak of Snawfus, the ominous white deer.  Among contemporary evocations of the power of such animals, I am just now thirty miles from a shopping center called White Deer Plaza [2] and I understand that the character of Gus on the Netflix series Sweet Tooth, is a deer-human hybrid, though not white.

     Celtic analogies are far closer to the song’s French roots.  The Celtic god Cernunnos was depicted as a man with the antlers of a deer; indeed, his very named derives from “the horned one.”  Oisin’s mother Sadhbh was transformed into a doe by Fer Doirich for refusing his advances.  Oisin’s own name means little deer.  According to Chretien De Troyes' Erec et Enide, King Arthur’s court conducted an annual hunt after a white stag.  David I of Scotland, while violating taboo by hunting on the feast of the Holy Cross, has a vision of that same cross between a white stag’s antlers seen by Sts. Eustace and Hubert.  In Marie de France’s Guigemar the knight of the title kills a white doe and is placed under a spell which may be undone only when he as entered an unselfish love relationship. 

     The beauty of white deer and the rarity of their appearance suggested that such animals signaled an intersection of human and divine realms, and these contacts are depicted as dangerous as often as they are exalting.  “La Blanche Biche” ends with a horrible display of the lady literally turned inside out, dismembered and displayed in the kitchen and described in a macabre manner by the victim herself. 

 

Ma tête est dans le plat

et mon coeur aux chevilles

Mon sang est repandu

par toute la cuisine

Et sur less noirs charbons

mes pauvres os y grillent.

 

(My head is in the dish

and my heart on pegs.

My blood is spilled

throughout the kitchen

And on the black coals

my poor bones are roasting.)

 

      Underlying this hideous spectacle is very likely a coded horror story of incest.  In danger from the hunt the woman would be naturally frightened, but she describes herself rather as “angry” and apparently deeply ashamed: "J'ai bien grande ire en moi, et n'ose vous le dire." (“I am filled with anger and dare not tell you why.”)  She complains that her brother Renaud is “le pire” (“the worst”).  His assault on her is not inadvertent.  The implied incestuous rape is symbolically enacted as his hunting and butchering of her body. 

     This implication is reinforced by numerous parallels in other songs, particularly those from Scotland.  Thus in “The Bonnie Hind” a young man, long away at sea, unknowingly has sex with his sister who, when she discovers their relationship, commits suicide, causing him to laments the loss of his “bonnie hind.”  The man’s name is even Randal, corresponding to the French Renaud. [3]  Just as in the ancient story of Oedipus, this song of the people depicts the most monstrous transgression imaginable, and the oblique ballad dialogue of “La Blanche Biche” makes the crime seem so very dreadful that it may only be  only suggested. 

     The representation of the woman’s sexuality as a white doe implies a quasi-divine character but at the same time a vulnerability.  The song is in a way like a sensational pulp fiction story with the popular appeal of its sex and violence, ultimately resembling Grand Guignol or a contemporary horror movie in the extremely graphic final stanza.  Listeners [4] or readers might be in turn thrilled by the image of the doe’s beauty, moved by her defenselessness, and shocked by her death.

     In “Renaud le tuer des femmes” another Renaud, as wicked as the first, meets quite a different end.  The handsome but sinister lover carries off the fair lady and, when she says she is hungry, shocks her by saying that she may eat her own hand and drink her own blood.  He threatens her with death, saying he has already done away with thirteen women.  Preparing it seems to die, she, asks him for the sake of propriety to turn away as she disrobes, and he, with a delicacy surprising in a killer, does, allowing her to turn the tables, catch him unawares, and toss him into the pond to his death.

     The song is one of a large family of very similar narratives, distributed across Europe [5].   In “May Colvin” and some versions of “the Outlandish Knight” the woman escapes by the same ruse as in “Renaud le tuer des femmes,” while in “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” and “The Gowans Sae Gae” she convinces him to “sit down a while, lay your head on my knee” and then employs a sleep charm.  “The Water o Wearie's Well” has her asking for a kiss and then grabbing him, while in “The Outlandish Knight” she asks him to cut down the shoreside nettles for fear they would sully her body.  In some Danish variants she strategically distracts her antagonist by asking him to remove his mantle to avoid spattering it with blood or offers to delouse him. [6] 

     In each of these it is the lady’s own wit and courage that save her life, while in Perrault’s version of “Blue Beard” the wife’s siblings rescue her.  This retelling is thought to be influenced by accounts of Breton king Conomor the Accursed [7] whose wife and victim Tryphine requires the aid of St. Gildas to return to life.  This denial of agency to the woman is hardly incidental.  While the contemporary reader will doubtless see the narrative as a heroic story of a strong and wily woman, Perrault extracted quite a different “moralité,” helpfully appended for the reader’s edification.

 

 

La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,

Coüte souvent bien des regrets ;

On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraítre.

C’est, n’en déplaise au sexe, un plaisir bien léger;

Dès qu’on le prend, il cesse d’ètre,

Et toujours il coüte trop cher.

 

(Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, very often brings regret.  One sees a thousand examples every day.  It is, with all due respect to the sex, a very slight pleasure which, when one takes it, ceases to be, and costs too much every time.) 

 

 

Perrault continues under the title “autre moralité”:

 

 

Pour peu qu'on ait l'esprit sensé,

Et que du Monde on sache le grimoire,

On voit bientôt que cette histoire

Est un conte du temps passé;

II n’est plus d’époux si terrible,

Ni qui demande l’impossible,

Füt-il malcontent et jaloux,

Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux ;

Et de quelque couleur que sa barbe puisse ètre,

On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maítre.

 

(If one looks at this grim story with a sensible attitude, you will instantly see that it is a story of days gone by.   There is no spouse who would ask the impossible of his wife, nor would he be so jealous and malcontent.  Whatever color his beard may be, it is hard to tell who is the master between the two.) 

 

 

     For Perrault the lesson of the story is not that a young woman must look beyond wealth in selecting a lover and must respond to danger with energy and enterprise, but rather that “curiosity” and, presumably, disobedience, to which women are particularly inclined, leads to problems.  Unsatisfied with the statement of this surprising inference, Perrault then enlarges upon it by implying disapproval of the lessening of patriarchal authority in marriage.  The terrible beard, the symbol of maleness, has lost its power. [8]  

     Yet more than three hundred years later the monster of sexism has retained disproportionate, even murderous, force.  While lacking both the playful farce of fabliaux and the earnest aspirations of courtly love, these songs depict a far darker erotic derangement in which sensuality has become lethal aggression.  Both narratives might remind a modern reader of newspaper headlines, since domestic violence remains commonplace world-wide.  The immense libidinal energy, when blocked, does not vanish, but rather surges with new and sometimes violent expression.  Stories in song of brutal attacks on women occasioned by incest, rape, adultery, or simply an extra-marital affair are not only entertaining for their sensationalism; they are also based on lived experience.  These early French folk songs represent two possible outcomes: in one the woman is consumed, while in the other she survives.  In each the explosive destructive force of machismo provides a dramatic and sinister antagonist. 

 

 

 

1.  Peter Bassett, “The Use of Buddhist and Hindu Concepts in Wagner's Stage Works,” The Wagnerian,  January 1, 2014.

 

2.  Mme. d’Aulnoy included a version of the white hind story with a happier ending in her book of fairy tales.  The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, dating from the eleventh century, is an extraordinary survival in which villagers yet today dance brandishing reindeer antlers along with a number of other characters including Maid Marian, a fool, and a hobby horse.  St Nicholas, of course, drives a team of reindeer.  

 

3.  Other Scots songs on the theme of incest include “Lizie Wan,” “Babylon,” “The King's Dochter Lady Jean,” and “Sheath and Knife.”

 

4.  The song has often been recorded by French (by Tri Yann, for instance) and Canadian performers (including Michel Faubert). 

 

 5.  The story is classified as 312 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.

6.  See Holger Olof Nygard, “Narrative Change in the European Tradition of the ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight’," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, No. 255 (Jan. - Mar., 1952) for a survey of Scandinavian variants.  Among the many other variations of the story are “Tam Lin” where the man threatens extortion or rape but not murder, he turns out to be an enchanted man whom the lady frees from  his thralldom to the fairy queen.   “Johnny Sands” is a late comic epigone in which the trick leading to death is played by a long-suffering husband ridding himself of a termagant wife.

7.  The story appears in Alain Bouchard, Grands Chroniques de Bretaigne (1532).

8.  Unlikely as it seems, this interpretation remained dominant.  In 1808 an anonymous retelling was published as Bluebeard, or the Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience.

Red Hot Love in Robert Johnson

 

 The text of the song follows the essay.  This site contains other posts on Delta blues.  For a complete list consult the Index (always the last item in the most recent month at the bottom of the Blog Archive on the right) under section 5D “Songs.”

  

     While Robert Johnson is best-known for his profound and haunting deep Delta blues, he was an entertainer who sought to meet the tastes of his community.   “They’re Red Hot” stands out among Johnson’s songs not only for its use of a street vendor’s cry, but also by the humor and quick tempo,  creating an upbeat, partying sound.  Yet Johnson’s dark side is evident even here in ironic glimmers on the margins of the largely comic “hokum-style” lyrics.

     Though the entire song is tightly knit by the repeated chorus lines that occupy two-thirds of the lyrics, with their insistent, almost hypnotic, repetition, the stanzas are otherwise largely distinct, each presenting a vignette.  These little scenes are each self-justified as a jest or a high-spirited exclamation, but in total, they construct a precise and subtle exploration of erotic relationships, in fact, of appetite in general.  By slow accretion, each stanza adds to the symbolic complexity of the tamale image until, by the song’s end, it is three-dimensional, fleshed out with the complications and contradictions of lived experience.  Johnson’s audience doubtless recognized the street vendor’s cry [1] “Hot tamales and they're red hot."  while for moderns the first associations with tamales and red hots might be Mexican restuarants and a cinnamon candy, in the first half of the twentieth century tamales became a familiar street food in the Mississippi Delta, having migrated eastward from Texas.  This is the realistic base upon which the song builds.

     The initial addition to this fragment of everyday life is the symbolic association linking the heat of capsicum peppers to erotic energy.  A woman enters inconspicuously, as the tamale seller: “she got'em for sale,” but, without warning, she is replaced by a kind of super-woman, not a neighborhood vendor, but an uncanny lover.

 

I got a girl, say she long and tall

She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall

 

This prodigious figure seems to be about to grow out of the house, like Alice in Wonderland, but here her size implies her immense sexual appeal. [2]  Her description is enwrapped in the raucous cry, now appealing to the groin as well as the stomach “hot tamales and they're red hot.”  The tamale is an appropriate image due not only to its piquancy.  Like the more commonly used “jelly roll” its moist tastiness makes it a fitting euphemism for female genitals. [3]  

     The second stanza reinforces the realistic foundation of the image, adding the price: “She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime,” [4] but also undercuts verisimilitude with the mysterious “would sell you more, but they ain't none of mine.”  As no merchant would say such a thing, the listener must question the dramatic situation.  Appetite was already implicated, now the speaker expresses ambivalence., increasing the dramatic tension.

     The hypnotic repetition of the chorus lines leads to the depiction of an erotic gesture.

 

I got a letter from a girl in the room

Now she got something good she got to bring home soon, now

 

The lack of focused definition increases tension by mere suggestion.  What is this Mississippi billet-doux?  What does the message say?  Provocatively vague, it promises  “something good” arriving with the woman who is just on the point of coming “home.”

     The chant then resumes “hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale,”  emphasized further this time by a monitory interjection (“they're too hot boy”).  The dangers of pursuing hot food and hot women are then projected onto another male, a goat.

 

The billy got back in a bumble bee nest

Ever since that he can't take his rest, yeah

 

The woman is figured as the threatening aspect of a hive of bees, though their sweet honey had lured the goat.  This stanza concludes with another explicit warning: “Man don't mess around em hot tamales now 'cause they too black bad.”  This advice is emphasized by the most frightening specifics.

 

If you mess around 'em hot tamales

I'm gonna upset your backbone, put your kidneys to sleep   

I'll due to break away your liver and dare your heart to beat            'bout my

Hot tamales 'cause they red hot, yes they got em for sale, I              mean

 

     The example of the billy goat, the explicit caution (“don’t mess around em”), and the detailed account of the danger to major bodily organs make indulgence in “tamales” seem perilous indeed. 

     In spite of the hazards the tamales have an irresistible allure, their appeal spanning the generations. Since “grandma loves them and grandpa too,” their offspring can only wonder  “what in the world we children gonna do now.” [5]  The tamales are ubiquitous, a dangerous attraction, fraught with joy and peril, presenting the same dilemma, unsolved since time immemorial.

     The might of a roaring V-8 engine is then added to the semiotic elements associated with tamales. 

 

Me and my babe bought a V-8 Ford

Well we wind that thing all on the runnin' board, yes

 

Having sex, which in Troubadour lyrics had been figured as riding a horse (an image abundant in the blues as well), is here expressed in the fast, strong, and hot automobile.  The vulnerability if occupying a speeding car, at once thrilling and frightening, enriches the parallel just as it does in contemporary automobile advertising.

     The penultimate verse recasts the drama of the sexes with the monkey and the baboon, an antagonistic pair that appears in dozens of rhymes, jokes, and songs. [6]  One common form of the old joke, broad humor indeed, and, to judge by the internet, still in active oral circulation,  described the monkey’s anal penetration of the baboon.

 

“Uh… Here’s one. Monkey and a baboon sitting in the grass. Monkey stuck his finger up the baboon’s ass. The baboon said ‘Monkey, damn your soul! Get your finger out of my asshole!’” [7]

In Johnson’s version euphemistic evasion heightens the obscenity by the sudden comic substitution of an advertising phrase for a taboo word. 

 

You know the monkey, now the baboon playin' in the grass

Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old 'Good Gulf Gas', now

 

Yet here the image of an improper simian is superimposed over the song’s pair of human lovers.  Whereas the monkey had meant only a rude gesture, like “goosing,” with the male/female human context the image suggests, in humorous refraction, not merely a general tension between the sexes, but specifically the intimate negotiation over the use of each other’s bodies in which each balances ego or aggression against love and respect. 

     With this culminating image the singer then returns to repeat the first verse, implying that the process of the song has found no solution.  One ends where one began, with the oversize woman and the profound dialectic of sex, with a potential for satisfaction and also for searing pain.  “The Red Hots” come to signify the lure of a dangerous siren, a Circe, a “belle dame sans merci” though she appears here in comic guise.  She need do nothing but lie on the floor while her devotee dances nervously around, chanting obsessively about tamales.  

      The meaning is incrementally constructed, one layer at a time.  The tamale image is introduced in the first stanza and problematized in the second.  The third emphasizes the anticipation of pleasure (“something good” “soon”), only to be met by the cautionary warming of the goat’s experience in the fourth.  The danger is then made to sound potentially lethal in the fifth stanza.  The pendulum swings back in the seventh which suggests the universality of love, and in the seventh where the mighty power of desire is associated with a V-8 Ford.  The monkey and the baboon, with their entanglement, always together yet never harmonious, presents the final elaboration of the depiction of lovers before the poem returns to its first stanza to indicate the persistence of the speaker’s ambivalence. 

     A good-time song, a jocular one, a danceable number with wit and energy, “They’re Red Hot” nonetheless presents a deeply problematized picture of the relations between men and women.  The tamale image expresses at once the fire of passion and the potential pain to which the lover is vulnerable.  The man and the woman can neither separate nor can they achieve perfect accord, rather like the monkey and the baboon.  The song provides a beat and a melody and ample vitality to animate the inevitable dance of dualities: man and woman, selfless love and selfish ego, pleasure and pain, the accumulation and release of sexual energy.  Within the song the opposing elements are harmoniously blended with a taste and poise rarely experienced in life.   The dialectic contradictions among which we live by no means vanish in Johnson’s masterful art, but they are rendered there comely and entertaining.

 

 

 

1.  Street cries had been similarly used in verse in the thirteenth century “Frese Nouvelle,” Guillaume de Villeneuve’s “Crieries de Paris,” John Lydgate’s “London Lyckpeny” (1409), and the Cuban pregón.  “Molly Malone,” which seems to be a music hall song using some lines from folk sources, is a well-known example. 

 2.  This formula, common to so  many songs, surely also pokes fun at the limits of a rural cabin which lacks a bedroom and in which the kitchen is very small.

 3.  Food imagery is common in blues and hokum songs, among them Blind Boy Fuller’s “I Want Some of Your Pie,” Wynonie Harris’s “I Like My Baby’s Pudding,” Bo Carter’s “Your  Biscuits are Big Enough for Me,” as well as others employing sugar bowl, fruit basket, and the like. 

 4.  Apparently the price had been stable for a good while.  In 1928 the Rev. Moses Mason recorded “Molly Man” which includes the same line, adding as well “thirty cents a dozen” (after all, the same rate). 

5.  Among other reflections on love through the generations, compare Ethel Waters “the old folks learn the young ones what to do” (“Shake that Thing”), Memphis Minnie “grandma got something, make grandpa break his pipe” (“Grandpa and Grandma Blues”), and Lightnin’ Hopkins ““grandma told grandpa, lovin' between us is sure true” (“Grandma told Grandpa”).

 6.  The rhyme beginning “The monkey and the baboon were sitting in the grass” is recorded numerous times by folklorists and record companies.  It was performed in recent years by the Hart Brothers, a bluegrass group.  Variations appear in Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs (1925), p.  180; Lucille Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry";  Lonnie Johnson’s “The Monkey and the Baboon” (1930), “The Monkey and the Baboon” collected by Roger Abraham in Deep Down in the Jungle (1964).  Often the pair appears not, as “the monkey and the baboon,” but as “the white man and the nigger.”  It is recorded in this form in Lafcadio Hearn’s “Levee Life” (1876), as well as in Marion Thede’s The Fiddle Book (1967), Tommy McClennan's "Bottle It Up and Go” (1930), and Julius Daniels' "Can't Put the Bridle on that Mule this Morning" (1927).  In many of these the pair are playing the card game Seven Up.  The convention is susceptible to many further tropes.  For instance, it is deracialized in the white string band version by the Georgia Pot Lickers “Up Jumped the Rabbit” (1925) as the “skeeter and the bumble bee.”

 7.  USC Digital Folklore Archives, posted May 18, 2021 by Scott Gilman.  http://folklore.usc.edu/limerick-monkey-and-a-baboon-sitting-in-the-grass/

 

  

They’re Red Hot (Robert Johnson)
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a girl, say she long and tall
She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yeah

 
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime
Would sell you more, but they ain't none of mine
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yes, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a letter from a girl in the room
Now she got something good she got to bring home soon, now
It's hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale (they're too hot boy)
The billy got back in a bumble bee nest
Ever since that he can't take his rest, yeah
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes you got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Man don't mess around em hot tamales now 'cause they too black bad,
If you mess around 'em hot tamales
I'm gonna upset your backbone, put your kidneys to sleep
I'll due to break away your liver and dare your heart to beat 'bout my
Hot tamales 'cause they red hot, yes they got em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got em for sale, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
You know grandma loves them and grandpa too
Well I wonder what in the world we children gonna do now
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Me and my babe bought a V-8 Ford
Well we wind that thing all on the runnin' board, yes
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale, yeah

 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale (they're too hot boy!)
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes, now she got em for sale
You know the monkey, now the baboon playin' in the grass
Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old 'Good Gulf Gas', now
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean

Yes she got'em for sale, yeah
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a girl, say she long and tall
Sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall, yes
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale, yeah

The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.

Conservatism and Popular Art

     Popular art, which belongs to the masses either as oral literature and folklore or as mass commodified culture such as movies and television shows, might seem likely, to one who has not studied such work, to suggest progressive themes, voicing social protest and proposing reforms that would benefit most people. This is hardly the case. Indeed, popular art is most often quite conservative, siding with the status quo or with reactionary alternatives.
     Indeed, literature can sometimes encourage critical thinking about one’s preconceptions and can introduce or spread new ideas. To some the artist is thought even to occupy a privileged viewpoint, from which literary works may enrich their consumers’ knowledge of any subject, be it psychology, politics, indeed even theology. Yet surely the only field in which writers excel others is in the use of words. Further, when poems or stories do foreground their themes, by which I mean what they suggest is true about lived reality, they seek to reinforce the views readers already hold more often than they introduce new ones.
     Unsurprisingly the works that reinforce preexisting prejudices are in general not only more common but more popular (which comes to much the same thing) than those which challenge them. Traditional oral literature and modern works directed at a mass audience teach for the most part what is already accepted in a given culture while those which emphasize new ideas, ambiguity, and mystery, those which violate conventional thought, are characteristic of elite art consumed by only a few. This distinction by no means implies a value judgement. Beautiful poems and stories occur at either extreme of the spectrum and at any point along it, and the same may be said of failures.
     While it may be impractical as to provide adequate definitive support for such a grand generalization, evidence is ample. In the first place in traditional societies, in which all art is “popular,” which is to say, consumed by all people alike, the role of song and story is primarily and explicitly dogmatic. Rituals, folk-tales, indeed all genres, tend to transmit the assumptions of the past to each generation. The young are systematically taught how a man should behave, or a woman, or a child, what priests are capable of, what the animals have to tell people, and the secret meaning of the stars. Each young person learns the culture’s cosmology and ethics, not systematically but anecdotally, as it were, through the accumulation of lyrics and stories, forming in the end a coherent pattern.
     It is only in belated societies like our own that the artist is seen as a rebellious outsider, and people look to works of art for new ideas rather than those which have been accepted and validated over a long period of use.
     What is true of oral literature is largely duplicated by recent mass culture. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart were quite right to label Donald Duck a tool of imperialism. [1] Plots of the family situation comedies of the nineteen-fifties, shows such as Make Room for Daddy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, are regularly based on minor conflicts or misunderstandings that test the strength of connubial love, parental authority, or other accepted norms, only to be resolved after twenty-two minutes of action with an emphatic reinforcement of social convention. In very much the same way, police and detective stories always concluded with retributive justice that reassures the viewer that all is basically right, the police do what they should, malefactors are punished, and, though a few bodies of the upright may fall in sacrifice along the way, the most important good people prosper in the end.
     With widespread literacy and the rise of middle-class leisure and lending libraries, Victorian fiction provides a useful field of data. Among those who enjoyed genuine popularity as well as critical acclaim during this period were Scott, Dickens, and Trollope. Each was prolific enough to record a detailed image of the society of his day. (It matters little that Scott wrote about earlier periods. The politics in his novels is always far more reflective of his own present time.) Each is profoundly conservative. While they were able to perceive social injustices in their own times, and to urge some measure of relief, none was able to imagine a systematic response to the evils of early capitalism.
     Sir Walter Scott was clear and consistent about his support for the status quo and his opposition to the reform movements of his day. He endorsed what E. P. Thompson called the myth of paternalism, trusting in the landed gentry to be the most wise and secure governing class. These would, due to their upbringing, recognize their obligations under the principle of noblesse oblige. Though more often in financial straits than comfortable affluence, he as a baronet was an active participant in local government as well as serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. To him the country gentleman is, as a part of the order of nature, "the natural protector and referee of the farmer and the peasant." [1] He considered that the Scots suffered less privation because of their benevolent landlords looked after them than laborers in the south where “accursed poor-rates” in fact oppressed those they aimed to assist. He blamed poverty and want not on an exploitative economic system, just then shifting from a feudal land-based aristocracy to an urban capitalist one, but rather to the loss of old ideals in a welter of “reforming mania.” [2]
     When his Toryism conflicted with his Scots nationalism, he chose conservatism over regional pride. In Old Mortality, for instance, the struggle of the Covenanters is represented as in part justified by the high-handed actions of rogue dragoons and by the claims of religious conscience, but he satirizes mercilessly the more militant leaders such as the fanatic preacher Habbakuk Mucklewraith and the violent John Balfour. Henry Morton is depicted as the reasonable moderate whose good will and common sense is far preferable to the extremists’ ideology and zeal. In fact, Morton has no quarrel with the better representatives of the crown. Conflict appears to be generated not by the order of society, but by its abuse, caused by bad actors in both parties.
     Scott’s most explicit comments on current events are perhaps in the anonymous pieces titled The Visionary (1819) in which he calls for a sort of reactionary popular front in which all patriots belong, all Britishers, in fact, but the wicked radicals. “All must unite now . . .in support of our existing laws and constitution, or all will be swallowed up in a ruthless despotism – a despotism that would soon crush all useful spirit.” He calls for all people of good will to “put a bridle on the jaws of the Leviathan multitude.” Rob Radical appears in a dream to destroy a noble house which, admittedly imperfect, was, like the system, yet grand and well worth preserving. To Scott radicals are “the wildest of untamed animals,” their representative a “half naked ruffian,” “rather brutal than human.” Though the poor are kindly offered makework by their benevolent betters, they remain ungrateful and unsatisfied until they have entirely ruined economic production through agrarian reform. The result is that “we have stirred up the cauldron so efficiently, that the dregs are now uppermost,” and the ignorant masses end by crowning an emperor.” Raising the specter of Napoleon seals Scott’s case.
     Dickens, the only one of the three who could be said to have endured at least some of the trials of the underclass, is generous with charitable feeling, to the deserving poor, at least. In fiction the convention of retributive justice guarantees that all will come out right in the end. Yet he portrays a revolution as a terrifying mob in Tale of Two Cities and the opportunities that magically open up for long-suffering lads such as Pip in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield come by way of private charity: from Magwitch, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie, and Betsey Trotwood. While well aware of the horrors of the life of the poor in Victorian England, he was never receptive toward any of the numerous schemes to uplift them other than the benevolence attentions of the comfortable. The novel that most directly engages the working class movement is Hard Times in which all Dickens’ sympathy for the exploited workers, exemplified by the upright but tragically doomed Stephen Blackpool [3], does not lead to his sympathy for their cause. Blackpool’s antagonist in fact is the mendacious union organizer Slackbridge.
     Though never in danger of the factory work in which Dickens found himself at the age of twelve, Trollope, descended from landed gentry with a title of baronet descending to his cousins, felt himself in straitened circumstances until elevated by his popular success as an author. Yet never a hint enters his novels, many of them directly concerned with politics, that society would be well-served by fundamental changes. His model for social intervention in his own private practice of charity was Urania House, a “Home for Homeless Women” funded by heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Though the institution, in which Dickens took a direct management role, was certainly more humane than the alternatives offered by the church and the state to assist “fallen women,” it today seems fatally paternalistic, with its emphasis on sewing and laundering, system of points and demerits, and the ultimate goal of the women’s emigration and marriage abroad. Urania House sought to ameliorate the harshest conditions for the most virtuous but never otherwise challenged society’s assumptions.
     When he stood for Parliament, it was as a Liberal, but in a district in which corruption so governed the outcome that he had no hope of winning, but only of proving his opponents’ criminality. Perhaps the clearest expression of Trollope’s political views is to be found in his account of this political foray in his Autobiography.in which, while conceding what he calls “terrible inequalities,” he still fears any “sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness.” He is obliged to take shelter behind the unassailable walls of religion, which one might here call the very last refuge of a scoundrel, saying that, while certain “enthusiastic but unbalanced minds” have been so bold as to imagine equality, they prove only by their efforts “how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator.” Trollope’s conscientious Conservative, “being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them.” After all “We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom” and are thus unable to understand “why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand.” [4] Radical social reform was to him tantamount to blasphemy, and this conviction justifies his resistance to change while admitting the evils of pocket boroughs and all the other defenses of the old ruling class.
     It is precisely this sort of certainty that defines an ideal allowing popular writers to note the extent of people’s falling short. Often such a model rests more securely in the imagined past than a hypothetical future. Further, a work is more like to reach a mass audience if it may be rapidly understood with unambiguous meaning; such themes typically rely on fully formed codes of conduct. Because of the privileging of innovation, not to say idiosyncrasy, since the Romantics, it is necessary again to stress that popularity does not imply lesser value. The business of literature has always been equally to affirm preconceptions and to challenge them, often simultaneously.
     Such affinity of art with ambiguity reminds the critic that the rule associating popularity with conservative views is by no means absolute. Exceptions abound, in particular those cases in which what is accepted by a subculture is rejected by a majority. Thus bebop, rap music and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg may be both transgressive and “popular” with a well-defined audience. The ambivalence so frequently highlighted by art may at times make judgements less than straightforward. What effect do the words of the deceased Achilles in the Odyssey have on the valor of the hero in the Iliad when alive? Does Falstaff’s dismissive “there’s honour for you” make the honor of Hotspur and Henry IV (and the V) meaningless? Though popular art may be in intention conservative its reception and use may point in the opposite direction.
     The fact remains, however, that, though the more sophisticated of our own era make a hero of the rebel and the outsider, every society prescribes, indeed, enforces norms of behavior. The works which appeal to the greatest number will be quite naturally those representing a common denominator of belief, by definition then “conservative” in the fundamental sense of seeking to preserve and transmit standards. The system would be static, however, were it not that inscribed within every conclusion is a nagging doubt and within every daring proposal a warning against change.



1. See How to Read Donald Duck. Compare Shaan Amin’s “The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism” s in The Atlantic for Dec. 30, 2017. Amin details the racist and classist Hindu nationalism taught by popular Indian comic books.

2. Life of Napoleon.

3. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, 68.

4. See in particular the chapter titled “Men and Brothers.”

5. Chapter XVI “Beverley.”

Song Lyrics as Poetry

This is a draft of my thoughts on the subject to be presented December 9, 2018 as part of a Megaphone Series program on the topic at the Seligmann Center.


     Over the chronological and geographic span of our species, poetry has far more often been consumed as sounds in the air than as signs on a two dimensional surface. In this sense the youth listening to pop songs on an iPod is more traditional than the Wordsworth scholar reading silently in the library. The fact is that until the Renaissance, most poetry was performed: lyric forms were sung and epics chanted often to musical accompaniment. Ancient Greek and medieval English poems alike were sung; not infrequently, the authors of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems and troubadours from the south of France titled poems with the name of the well-known song their rhythms recalled. Blues lyrics and some from the Great American Songbook may be among the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century. And, of course, Dylan, who decades ago was praised by Christopher Ricks, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, has now received the Nobel prize.
     The assumption that poems are more beautiful and meaningful than song lyrics is today clearly less widespread than it once was, though it has not disappeared entirely. There is, indeed, no formula nor can there be proof of literary excellence. Value can only appear in one’s consumption of art. Beauty is manifested in widely differing forms depending on the genre of the work in question.
     One sort of art might seem superior to another, more likely to elicit sensations of beauty and sublimity, and the most theoretically compelling is perhaps the Gesamtkunstwerk. If a reader is moved by a written text, how much stronger might the impact be when the text is sung? Add a striking set design, costumes that transform the actors, and dance to add yet another layer of signifiers, and one arrives at the concept, at least, of what might be defended as the very most effective work of art. Yet of course, its advantage is illusory. Quantity of signifiers is not equivalent to their quality. A simple piece may be more powerful than a complex one. Bollywood movies as well as Wagnerian operas employ multiple arts for effect.
     In practice the desirable integration of words and music is elusive. When poetic lyrics are sung, it is very difficult to maintain a balance between the musical and verbal elements. In general, when poetry is read with jazz, for instance, the musicians will follow the poet, accompanying the words with appropriate sounds. On Steve Allen’s television performance with Jack Kerouac , Allen provides no more than frames and decorations for Kerouac’s reading. Often music functions as a movie soundtrack often does, seeking to reinforce the primary element – image or word – while never taking the spotlight.
     On the other hand, Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” is primarily musical with the simple, direct words making their impression through their apparent sincerity and transgressive hip radicalism. Many thirteenth century comments on troubadours critique their melodies as though the poems were incidental. Who remembers such librettists as Francesco Maria Piave or even Lorenzo Da Ponte as significant poets? How many opera-goers, while knowing the story, even follow the words of each passage? For unity the pitch and timbre of the abstract sounds must equally support and be supported by the language. Yet if this demanding goal is even partially met, the result can be enchanting.
     The general dialectic of performed and written texts is exemplified by the comparison of sung versus read poems. Out loud, the effect is different every time but fixed for the individual performance; on the page it is set as in stone yet subject to ever-new readings. Whereas the sung lyric is animated and immediate though evanescent and caught in the unrolling of time, on the page it stands still, palpably concrete. The exact symmetry of these relations indicates that neither is superior; the excitement of music in the air is balanced against the richness of possibility retained on the page.
     Song lyrics, as they are designed for musical accompaniment, do differ from lines meant to be read, either aloud or silently. The song must be understood in passing, processed by the consumer as it happens like a film or a symphony, while the reader may return at liberty to reread a written text. Therefore printed lyrics may be knotty and resistant to interpretation while sung ones tend toward transparent lucidity. The first is more likely to challenge assumptions and introduce new ideas whereas the latter will tend to confirm pre-existing attitudes.
     Further, the social situation in which singing occurs reinforces the unanimity of response. Often songs are addressed to a more specific audience. Warriors liked heroic epics, a cabaret audience is likely to value sophistication and polish, a heavy metal crowd will like dark and edgy imagery. Jazz clubs appeal to the hip, polka dances to those hip to a different beat altogether. While an individual poem in a book may likewise suggest a certain taste, the next poem may be quite different and the character of the readership is comparatively unpredictable.
     Ordinarily songs have a set stanza form with very little variation from one verse to the next. While a written poem may be structured in the same way, it has as well countless other possible forms. The song usually sticks to a single rhythmic pattern, though variation is always possible within limits, but a poet contemplating publication can use or ignore rhythm and rhyme much more freely. Many songs employ repeated content, whether a refrain or a key phrase, perhaps the song’s title, while poems in a book are less apt to do so.
     Singing, especially to accompaniment, adds elements of volume, stress, pitch and timbre which may either reinforce and enrich or distract from the piece as a whole. Just as the compelling vocalism of a great singer can make mediocre lyrics moving, shallow pop stylings can enervate even strong songs.
     Printed lyrics are generically different from sung ones, and a poem read out loud from a book or a song printed without music will be somewhere between. Each genre has unique challenges; neither is inherently more artful or beautiful. Indeed, each generic distinction opens certain possibilities while narrowing others.


• The addition of signifiers in music, phrasing, etc. increases expressive potential if all elements are mutually supportive. There is a risk of their not fitting and thus generating aesthetic dissonance that is absent in the silent reading of the printed page.

• Due to the social nature of performance thematic elements in songs more likely reinforce the already existing ideas of the audience. Thus they are less likely to challenge preconceptions or introduce new ideas.

• The formal reflection of the comparative thematic predictability of song is their adherence to a repeated metrical and rhyme pattern, adding melody and ingenuity while sacrificing the possibilities available to irregular and free verse.

• Songs have the immediacy of live performance yet lack the rich potential for leisurely contemplation offered by the page. Songs cannot in general afford tangled obscurity but aim rather at clarity and transparence. Sometimes the most direct, seemingly heartfelt lines are strongest, sometimes the ironic, oblique, and allusive.

The Mule in Blues Imagery

     Poetry typically contains a far greater concentration of rhetorical figures than prose. Figures of speech, thought, and sound regularly heighten the reader’s pleasure as well as refining the theme and tone. Each metaphor is a tiny riddle, the sudden solution of which provides a pleasure similar to that of many jokes. A sense of an exhilarated dance of ideas may be created by systematic image systems. But such figures are not mere ornamental decoration. They also allow the expression of new ideas and subtle shades of familiar ones. Rather than obscuring content, they render it precise.
     Since the Romantic era, critics have celebrated “innovation” to the disadvantage of tradition. The use of such conventional images has been criticized as unimaginative, but a close study indicates that even when frequently used, a good poet will find the potential in such convention not only for considerable latitude, but even for eloquence.
      One rhetorical device is allusion. Within every body of poetry, be it ancient Greek epic, troubadour lyric, or Elizabethan sonnets, certain poetic figures recur, building an ever-greater matrix of meaning. In the country blues tradition, one of the most beautiful and powerful bodies of American lyric in the first half of the twentieth century, a good many metaphors reflect the rural setting in which the songs were composed. With loving affection women are sometimes described as cows, while men may be compared to roosters. Another beast that occurs in a substantial number of early blues songs is the mule, the common work animal of the South. In a broad, though not inclusive, sample mules, which the listener might expect to be something of a cliché with a set, decodable meaning, in fact occupy a broad semantic field with a variety of implications. [1] Sometimes, indeed, they are the basis for set formulae which correspond more closely to popular ideas of a literary convention, while other uses are anomalous or unique.
     In general the image of a mule is employed by the musician-poets of the genre with rich flexibility. One finds characteristics associated with the animal that are familiar to even contemporary urbanites such as stubbornness, industriousness, and a powerful kick, but even these are far from identical in context.
     One dramatic evidence for the image’s versatility is its near equal use to describe men and women. [2] In the songs in which the mule is identified with a man, the singer may refer to the mule's stubbornness as when Barefoot Bill in “From Now On” sings “I’m going to “act just like a doggone mule.” A number of songs note the mule’s untiring capacity for labor. For instance, Blind Blake in his “Good-Bye Mama Moan” claims to his credit that ““I been your hard-working mule,” and Washboard Sam promises “I’ll work like a doggone mule” in “Save It for Me.”
     In the regular structure of the poetic transformation of convention, [3] any association can be inverted, denied, or altered in a variety of other ways. For instance, whereas the two references just cited are positive, asserting the speaker’s qualifications as a partner, others are negative. Big Bill Broonzy in “Big Bill Blues” refuses to take orders from his beloved, saying, “cinch I ain’t going to be your mule,” and Sonny Boy Williamson indignantly objects, “You want Sonny Boy to be your mule.” (“Low Down Ways“). [4]
     But the changes the poet can ring on the theme of the mule do not cease there. With a phrase very little different from those already cited, the physical power of the animal can also exemplify the singer’s sexual energy and endurance as in Will Weldon’s enthusiastic “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule.”
     The mules may equally suggest the woman’s sexual energy as in Huddie Ledbetter’s “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” with its unmistakably erotic lines: “Wouldn't mind a jug : honey on the mule's behind/Yes a brownskin woman : make a preacher lay his Bible down.” In Texas Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues” the mule is simply decodable as a lover: “Lord I couldn't find a mule” and the virtues of a country girl are said to make her a “jewel brown mule” (Walter Vincon and the Mississippi Sheiks, “She Ain’t No Good”). Her mule-like power is praised by Ed Bell whose lover is “strong as a mule” in “She’s a Fool Gal.”
     The mule’s connotations may, however, be negative for women as well as men. For instance, Blind Lemon Jefferson says his beloved was acting “just like a balky mule.” (“Balky Mule Blues“ ) and Willie Baker in “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” says “Mama you been just like : says a farmer's mule/longer I live with you : harder you is to rule.” [5]
     A good share of the references to women as mules employ the set formula familiar to all blues lovers in a long list of variations all including the phrase “left me a mule to ride.” [6] In each of these songs, the singer notes the departure of his lover, often on a train, leaving him only a mule to ride. Ride, of course, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse, so the formula simply states the love-longing of the singer, though sometimes including such subtle variations as David King’s lament in his “Sweet Potato Blues” that “the mule laid down and died.”
     The other most common set formula is one in which the mule is again male: the complaint that the lover has been two-timed, that there is “another mule kicking in my stall.” Here the mule is again masculine with the stall representing the feminine. Very often the formula is simple as in Tampa Red’s “It’s Tight Like That”: “Found another mule : kicking in my stall.” [7] Variations include Kokomo Arnold’s reversal in “Your Ways and Actions”: “my mule is kicking in your stall” and the inclusion of the phrase in the old song “Seven Drunken Nights” [8] by Coley Jones in his “Drunkard’s Special” which includes the lines “I went home drunk as I could be/There's another mule in the stable : where my mule ought to be.”
     There remain a number of usages of mule imagery that fit none of the patterns I have described. Several singers refer to actual mules with no apparent other meaning. For instance, Robert Wilkins’ “New Stock Yard Blues” speaks of actual stockyards and livestock purchasing and Sleepy John Estes’ “Tell Me About It” complains about a rural boss insisting that sharecroppers share a mule. [9] The effects of hard liquor are associated with the kick of a mule by Kid Prince Moore in “Bug Juice Blues” and by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) in “Blind Pig Blues.” Blind Lemon Jefferson in “Long Lonesome Blues” declares “Well the blues come to Texas : loping like a mule,” though he might as well have said a rabbit or a deer. The endless variety of other potential uses for mule imagery is suggested by the miscellany of lines I have not yet mentioned. [10]
     The use of poetic conventions, such as the mule image in American blues, is, like all figures of speech, not a code in which one word is simply substituted for another. It is a complex system of association and connotation that generates an ever-widening semantic field. Both through the calculated imprecision of the correspondence between tenor and vehicle and the additional enrichment of meaning through allusion, image clusters and other figures distinguish poetic from non-aesthetic uses of language. They enable the writer to express precise shades of thought as well as inviting delight from the receptive consumer.





1. My database is the excellent “Michael Taft’s Pre=War Blues Lyrics Concordance” available at http://dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm. I have appended a complete list of songs from his catalogue that mention mules. In my essay songs and artists are cited by name, making them simple to locate on the list, whereas in endnotes I use sometimes the titles and sometimes only the numbers assigned to each. In the few cases in which several versions of a song were released in the same year, the texts differ enough that the reader may have to check each to find the relevant material.

2. In fourteen songs the mule is identified with a man and in seventeen with a woman. References to men occur is 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 24, 26, 30, 43, 44, and 47. Those to women are in 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 20, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 48

3. For the general concept see my “Transformation of Convention” on this site. For specific applications in practical criticism, see, among other essays available here “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Early English Carol,” or “William IX.”

4. See also the similar complaint in Richard Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues”: “she want to drive me like a mule.”

5. Similarly Roosevelt Sykes in “No Good Woman Blues” says, “I won't try no mule : that don't know gee from haw/I don't want no woman : she just soon as say yes as to say no”

6. The formula appears in 13, 20, 34, 39, and 48.

7. The formula appears also in 4, 11, 16, 18, 32, 33, 41, and 49.

8. “Seven Drunken Nights” is the usual Irish title. This popular, slightly ribald song is a variation of the Scottish one collected by Child “Our Goodman.” It is related as well to the English broadside "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife."

9. In a similar vein Sleepy John Estes in “Working Man Blues” inveighs against automation, saying “white folks you ought to work/ More mules and men.”

10. For Blind Willie McTell a mule’s tail suggests public hair. (“Kind Mama”) In Blind Bogus Ben Covington’s “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” “scared my mule away” refers to the singer’s dope selling being disturbed. For Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “son just don't lead a doggone mule” means to look out for number one. (“Me, Myself, and I”) In Big Bill Broonzy’s “Grandma’s Farm” “got a note my black mule died” means a change of lovers. Finally Charlie Bozo Nickerson’s line in “Move that Thing,” while obscure, is doubtless obscene: “The mules backed up : in my face.”


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”



1. Texas Alexander “Awful Moaning Blues. Pt. 2” 1929
2. Texas Alexander “Levee Camp Moan Blues 1927 (two versions)
3. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1925
4. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1935
5. Kokomo Arnold “Your Ways and Actions” 1938
6. Willie Baker “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” 1929
7. Barefoot Bill (Ed Bell) “From Now On” 1929
8. Ed Bell “She’s a Fool Gal” 1930
9. Blind Blake “Bootleg Rum Dum Blues” 1928
10. Blind Blake “Goodbye Mama Moan” 1928
11. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Big Bill Blues” 1932 (two versions)
12. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Grandma’s Farm” (two versions) 1920
13. Richard Rabbit Brown “James Alley Blues” 1927
14. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Lowland Blues” 1937
15. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Save It for Me” 1938
16. Charlie Campbell “Goin’ Away Blues” 1937
17. Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “Me, Myself, and I” 1941
18. Kid Cole “Niagara Fall Blues” 1928
19. Blind Bogus Ben Covington “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” 1928
20. Walter Davis “Travelin’ this Lonesome Road” 1935
21. Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas) “He’s in the Ring” 1935
22. Sleepy John Estes “Tell Me About It” 1940
23. Sleepy John Estes “Working Man Blues” 1941
24. Hound Head Henry “Low Down Hound Blues” 1928
25. Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) “Blind Pig Blues” 1928
26. Son House “My Black Mama, Part 1” 1930
27. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Balky Mule Blues“ 1929
28. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Lemon’s Worried Blues” 1928
29. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Long Lonesome Blues” 1926
30. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Rabbit Foot Blues” 1926
31. Coley Jones “Drunkard’s Special” 1929 (five recordings)
32. Maggie Jones “You May Go But You’ll Come Back Some Day” 1924
33. Stovepipe No. 1 (Sam Jones) “Bed Slats” 1927
34. David King “Sweet Potato Blues” 1930 (two versions)
35. Huddie Ledbetter “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” 1925
36. Blind Willie McTell “Kind Mama” 1929
37. Kid Prince Moore “Bug Juice Blues” 1936
38. Charlie Bozo Nickerson “Move that Thing” 1920
39. Bessie Smith “J.C. Holmes Blues” 1925
40. Roosevelt Sykes “No Good Woman Blues” 1930 (two versions)
41. Henry Thomas “Texas Easy Street Blues” 1928
42. Walter Vincon (Mississippi Sheiks) “She Ain’t No Good” 1930
43. Will Weldon (Casey Bill) “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule” 1927
44. Peetie Wheatstraw “When a Man Gets Down” 1936
45. Tampa Red (Hudson Whitaker) “It’s Tight Like That” 1928
46. Robert Wilkins “New Stock Yard Blues” 1935
47. Sonny Boy Williamson “Low Down Ways“ 1938
48. Sonny Boy Williamson “Shotgun Blues” 1941 (two versions)
49. Leola B. Wilson “Back-Biting Bee Blues” 1926

Lady Maisry

     In language, theme, and style, “Lady Maisry” is representative of the ballad tradition. Though much literary criticism, even of oral materials, privileges innovation and individuality while minimizing the value of similarities between a text and others, such common elements may be centrally important, particularly in the case of popular genres. This may be exemplified by a consideration of this classic song, in many ways a typical border ballad.
     Since the text was first transcribed from oral performance in 1799 “for his own amusement” by a Greek professor with antiquarian tastes, it has proven quite popular. It appears not only as Childs ballad 65 and in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1910 Oxford Book of Ballads, but in such non-scholarly journals as Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. [1] In academic circles it has acquired variations, sources, and influences while, ever since the sixties, it has never lacked interpreters among modern folk-style performers. [2]
     The emotional focus is one of the most popular world-wide, evoking an exceedingly old gender stereotype: the persecuted lady, familiar from Greek tragedy, Yuan dynasty plays, and The Perils of Pauline. Just as the favorite theme of lyric is romantic love, commonly obstructed or unrequited, in the sentimental and melodramatic ballad genre, love frequently inspires a tragedy marked by a loss of sexual purity. In the classic dodge used by Andreas Capellanus and the Pearl-Poet (in Cleanness) as well as by many exploitation filmmakers, one can describe every sort of immorality if one simply concludes by drawing a cautionary moral. Thus the listener is free to savor Lady Maisry’s grand affair and then to shiver in horror at the violence that follows.
     A certain ambiguity is established at the outset as the Lady spurns the honorable suits of her fellow-countrymen who approached in a respectable manner through her family and gave her gifts. While her rejection of the “young lords o’ the north country” could signify arrogance, it might also be construed as indicating the purity of her love, independent of family or local ties. It is, at any rate, tempting fate, as the sequel demonstrates.
     Indeed, she not only has chosen an English lover; she openly declares as much to the local lads, and this ill-advised candor sets the narrative in motion. A low menial, a “kitchy-boy,” relays the information that she is pregnant to her brother to whom the news is an intolerable disgrace requiring immediate and extreme action, an “honor killing” much like that expected of families in some contemporary Muslim cultures. He confronts his sister, threatening her with death unless she forsakes her lover.
     In this dilemma, she calls on the aid of her lover Lord William through the agency of a loyal servant, but he arrives too late. She has been burned to death, and he resolves to burn her kin in revenge, and finally, unable to go on without her, to cast himself into the flames. The song ends with a thrill of horror and this vision of general conflagration.
     The thematic emphasis falls heavily on the competing demands of the morality of love, where the lady and her William defy social convention yet behave in a romantically noble fashion, sacrificing all for passion. A possible patriotic theme vanishes as the English lord acquits himself well, sealing his tragic valor with a pledge of suicide. The representative of traditional values, the brother, concerned for the honor of the family, is portrayed in a wholly unattractive way, so harsh and unfeeling that his moral position is undermined. He threatens her with immediate death the moment he confronts her. [3] Similarly, the class issue is raised by the low status of the treacherous kitchen worker, ignoble in deeds as in birth, only to be canceled by the readiness of the “bonny boy,” certainly a servant or dependent, who carries her message to her champion. With these bipolar oppositions nicely balanced, the story of star-crossed love may play out.
     The song thus insists on the primacy of desire – there is no denying the lady’s willful love-death. The issues of nationalism, morality, and class do not vanish but are subsumed in the ungovernable passion that drives the story. Received ideas govern: ladies are passive (if stubborn), males active to the point of violence. The manor-house setting raises interest in the story, as people today take a lively interest in the affairs of British royalty and Hollywood celebrities. Like viewers of many a modern movie, the listener to “Lady Maisry” can enjoy the second-hand experience of what must be understood as a story of sexual misconduct – after all, the lady’s liaison is secret and violates her obligations to Christian morality, family and community – without violating any norms. In fact, the song could pass for an object lesson in the damage potential of unloosed sexuality.
     The charm of this particular song, I think, is that it provides all the reassuring affirmation of popular art while retaining knots of ambiguity. The simpler art will portray one hundred per cent heroes and villains. Here one can only react with some ambivalence to each of the three main characters. The lady who loves so well might seem a trifle stand-offish to her local suitors, what the troubadours called daungereux (not far from what a more modern idiom would condemn as “hincty”), while engaging in a secret and forbidden premarital liaison. The brother who represents the conventional morality that governs most listeners’ lives is cold and brutal. The lordly lover, while valiant and loyal, having failed to sweep her off to safety at his own estate, comes, in the end, only tardily to her aid. In spite of the formulaic plot, the song hints at the complexities of lived experience.
     Further, while acknowledging the contradictions of gender, ethnicity, and class, the song spotlights desire as the primary motive force for life, the principal cause of conflict and drama. The governing opposition of the song is the lady’s reckless search for love and her brother’s conviction that he must control eros in the name of honor, however harsh the means. In the world of the ballad as in the Eden story and the real world, people suffer because if desire. The individual who has experienced this in life may, upon hearing the song, enjoy the role of spectator, relishing like the viewer of tragedy the fact that it is others who suffer this time while knowing that similar, if less lurid, calamities occur regularly.
     While, like other popular and oral texts, “Lady Maisry” reinforces received ideas and accepted behavior, it also illustrates literature’s particular ability to reflect the contradiction, ambivalence, and mystery of lived experience. The listener is able at once to take pleasure in the sensationalism of an illicit affair and a gruesome denouement while feeling some kinship with the passionate lady, the moralistic brother, and the lover who fails to save his lady. Issues of gender, class, nationalism, family, and sexual purity fade, leaving the listener to reflect on the turbulence stirred by irresistible desire.


1. For January 1845.

2. John Jacob Niles collected it in 1934 in the Appalachians and vividly recreates the scene in his Ballad Book. A contemporary U.K. group not only recorded the song but calls itself Lady Maisery.

3. In an odd detail, he threatens to kill the messenger if the bad news he brings be a lie, yet also promises a “malison” or curse should the information be accurate.


I

THE YOUNG lords o’ the north country
Have all a-wooing gone,
To win the love of Lady Maisry,
But o’ them she wou’d hae none.

II

O they hae courted Lady Maisry 5
Wi’ a’ kin kind of things;
An’ they hae sought her Lady Maisry
Wi’ brooches an’ wi’ rings.

III

An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae father and frae mother; 10
An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae sister an’ frae brother.

IV

An’ they ha’ follow’d her Lady Maisry
Thro’ chamber an’ thro’ ha’;
But a’ that they cou’d say to her, 15
Her answer still was Na.

V

‘O haud your tongues, young men,’ she says,
‘An’ think nae mair o’ me;
For I’ve gi’en my love to an English lord,
An’ think nae mair o’ me.’ 20

VI

Her father’s kitchy-boy heard that,
An ill death may he dee!
An’ he is on to her brother,
As fast as gang cou’d he.

VII

‘O is my father an’ my mother well, 25
But an’ my brothers three?
Gin my sister Lady Maisry be well,
There’s naething can ail me.’—

VIII

‘Your father an’ your mother is well,
But an’ your brothers three; 30
Your sister Lady Maisry ’s well,
So big wi’ bairn gangs she.’

IX

‘Gin this be true you tell to me,
My malison light on thee!
But gin it be a lie you tell, 35
You sal be hangit hie.’

X

He ’s done him to his sister’s bow’r,
Wi’ meikle doole an’ care;
An’ there he saw her Lady Maisry
Kaiming her yellow hair. 40

XI

‘O wha is aught that bairn,’ he says,
‘That ye sae big are wi’?
And gin ye winna own the truth,
This moment ye sall dee.’

XII

She turn’d her right and roun’ about, 45
An’ the kame fell frae her han’;
A trembling seiz’d her fair body,
An’ her rosy cheek grew wan.

XIII

‘O pardon me, my brother dear,
An’ the truth I’ll tell to thee; 50
My bairn it is to Lord William,
An’ he is betroth’d to me.’—

XIV

‘O cou’d na ye gotten dukes, or lords,
Intill your ain country,
That ye draw up wi’ an English dog, 55
To bring this shame on me?

XV

‘But ye maun gi’ up the English lord,
Whan your young babe is born;
For, gin you keep by him an hour langer,
Your life sall be forlorn.’— 60

XVI

‘I will gi’ up this English blood,
Till my young babe be born;
But the never a day nor hour langer,
Tho’ my life should be forlorn.’—

XVII

‘O whare is a’ my merry young men, 65
Whom I gi’ meat and fee,
To pu’ the thistle and the thorn,
To burn this woman wi’?’—

XVIII

She turn’d her head on her left shoulder,
Saw her girdle hang on a tree; 70
‘O God bless them wha gave me that,
They’ll never give more to me.

XIX

‘O whare will I get a bonny boy,
To help me in my need,
To rin wi’ haste to Lord William, 75
And bid him come wi’ speed?’—

XX

O out it spake a bonny boy,
Stood by her brother’s side:
‘O I would run your errand, lady,
O’er a’ the world sae wide. 80

XXI

‘Aft have I run your errands, lady,
Whan blawn baith win’ and weet;
But now I’ll rin your errand, lady,
Wi’ saut tears on my cheek.’

XXII

O whan he came to broken briggs, 85
He bent his bow and swam,
An’ whan he came to the green grass growin
He slack’d his shoone and ran.

XXIII

O whan he came to Lord William’s gates,
He baed na to chap or ca’, 90
But set his bent bow till his breast,
An’ lightly lap’ the wa’;
An’, or the porter was at the gate,
The boy was i’ the ha’.

XXIV

‘O is my biggins broken, boy? 95
Or is my towers won?
Or is my lady lighter yet,
Of a dear daughter or son?’—

XXV

‘Your biggin is na broken, sir,
Nor is your towers won; 100
But the fairest lady in a’ the land
For you this day maun burn.’—

XXVI

‘O saddle me the black, the black,
Or saddle me the brown;
O saddle me the swiftest steed 105
That ever rade frae a town!’

XXVII

Or he was near a mile awa’,
She heard his wild horse sneeze:
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s na come to my knees.’ 110

XXVIII

O whan he lighted at the gate,
She heard his bridle ring;
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s far yet frae my chin.

XXIX

‘Mend up the fire to me, brother, 115
Mend up the fire to me;
For I see him comin’ hard an’ fast,
Will soon mend it up to thee.

XXX

‘O gin my hands had been loose, Willy,
Sae hard as they are boun’, 120
I would have turn’d me frae the gleed,
And casten out your young son.’—

XXXI

‘O I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
Your father an’ your mother;
An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry, 125
Your sister an’ your brother.

XXXII

‘An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
The chief of a’ your kin;
An’ the last bonfire that I come to,
Mysel’ I will cast in.’ 130