Fela’s Pidgin English Eloquence

 

 

 

     Fela tended always toward extravagance.  His oeuvre is very large, amounting to at least sixty-four albums, many of which I have not heard.  Ignorant of Yoruba and imperfect in my understanding even of pidgin, I can here do no more than encourage others with even less acquaintance with Fela to listen to this remarkable artist who expressed the thoughts of millions in his country and elsewhere and recorded songs that speak to even a bourgeois American suburbanite.

 

 

     Slightly less than fifty years ago, Patricia and I embarked on a study of West Arican history and culture in contemplation of teaching in Nigeria.  We read about Nok terra cottas and Benin bronzes, about the Middle Passage and the Berlin Congo Conference of 1885.  We got an inkling at least of the complex and, I think, comprehensive pantheon of Yoruba orishas well as some sense of the contemporary meaning of juju and witches.  We investigated Nigerian cuisine, as well as one might when limited by the resources of a 1970s American supermarket. 

     And we listened to music popular in Nigeria: King Sunny Adé, the Juju master, Prince Nico Mbarga  (who was actually Cameroonian), and, of course, Fela.  The musician Fela Kuti was born Ransome-Kuti, and for a time used the name Anikulapo, Yoruba for “one who has death in his purse,” though he is most often called simply Fela.  He died in 1997, having established himself as the preeminent figure in Nigeria’s musical scene during the second half of the twentieth century.

     During the last century, the significance and, at times, the beauty of popular culture has been recognized.  Since the term popular implies acceptance by the masses, largely independent of the trends occurring among the elite, one might argue that it registers specific moments in social history more precisely than high art.  Once in Mumbai I watched a film at a gigantic cinema palace, grander than any movie theater I know in America, where every seat was occupied by boisterous expressive fans, cheering, laughing, singing, and gasping while balancing trays of snacks.  The experience of watching a Bollywood musical in that setting surely revealed more about India today than visiting a museum or reading a novel by Arundhati Roy.  Similarly, acquaintance with anime characters, the haunting melodies of Um Kulthum, or the comedy of George Formby can reveal the taste and received ideas of a given place and time [1].  This is emphatically true in the case of Fela who constantly engaged topical themes. 

     The musician, whose birth name was Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, grew up in an affluent and influential family.  His parents had been leaders in the struggle for independence, his mother as a leading feminist and socialist organizer and his father as head of the teachers’ union.  Nobel-winning writer Wole Soyinka is his cousin.  Though himself a relatively privileged member of his country’s small educated middle class, he was brought up to fight for progressive causes, a tendency that accelerated after his visit to the United States in 1969 when he became acquainted with Black Panther Sandra Smith who gave him a copy of Malcolm X’s Autobiography.

     His American influences were musical as well as political.  When young he had performed with trumpeter Victor Abimbola Olaiya who had in turn been influenced by James Brown, but Fela’s own musical style came to be called Afrobeat.  His distinctive arrangements include elements of highlife and Yoruba folk music, but also blues, jazz, and funk, often featuring lengthy repetitious jams with strong horn sections and frequent call and response passages.  He sang sometimes in Yoruba, but quite often used pidgin English [2] in order to seek a mass audience across tribal groups.

     Those fond of Fela’s music, even those most sympathetic to the singer’s anti-imperialist stance, might be given pause by other elements of his politics.  Though he died of complications from AIDS, he considered the condition a “white man’s disease.”  In 1978 he married twenty-seven women in a single ceremony.  His Afrocentrism considered ethnicity (rather than power or wealth) the most essential and definitive characteristic in social relations.  His cultural nationalism was evident as well in his use of Yoruba ritual.  Still Fela was a significant voice of protest against post-colonial oppression and domestic authoritarianism and his frequent use of pidgin, a dialect most used by the powerless, underlines his advocacy for the poor and working class.

     He began, however, with the group Koola Lobitos doing love songs like “My Lady Frustration” (1968): “Everybody knows how much he meant to you, baby/ But you still insist that your heart's alright.”  Other tracks are dance music and focus on the night club scene, such as “Its Highlife Time” (1968):

Jump for joy

At this freaky club

He’s brand new craze

that makes me craze

 

      From 1969 on, however, his dominant themes were regularly political and cultural.  His Nigerian and international antagonists are identified in his “yab” (ridicule) of Moshood Abiola, “I. T. T. (International Thief Thief” (1980) and his political ally Olusegun Obasanjo.  As Abiola had been appointed a vice-president of I. T. T. he might represent multinational corporations as well as oppressive forces within the country.  Identifying such exploiters as stealing the people’s money, he blames them for “oppression,” “inflation,” “confusion, and  “corruption.”  

     Asking “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” (1986) his answer is clear.

 

Our riches them take away to their land

In return them give us their colony

Them take our culture away from us

Them give us them culture we no understand

Black people we no know ourselves

We no know our ancestral heritage

We dey fight each other everyday

We are never together, we are never together at all

 

     Just as the British colonialists had practiced “indirect rule,” selecting local traditional leaders who would collaborate with the European program, today’s ruling class rewards a few Nigerians to ensure their support.  These Africans then reinforce outside domination by building their own support by passing some monies down the line.

 

Them get one style wey them dey use

Them go pick one African man

A man with low mentality

Them go give am million naira breads

To become of high position here

Him go bribe some thousand naira bread

 

     Similarly, in  “Colonial Mentality” (1977) he notes that some Africans have adopted the European view as superior, leading them to look down on their own people.

 

De ting wey black no good

Na foreign things them dey like

 

E be so them dey do, them dey think

Dey say dem better pass them brothers

 

In “Underground System” (1992) he praises Nkrumah but attacks Obasanjo. 

 

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Bad leaders dey go wan finish am o

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Useless people dey go wan finish am o

 

     Fela’s attitude toward the Nigerian government, always critical, was brought to a head with his creation of the Kalakuta Republic, a commune of his family and entourage in Lagos which he declared to be an independent nation [3].  He complained of the military and police authority’s frequent raids in “Zombie” (1976): "Zombie no go walk unless you tell am to walk."  The following year the compound was destroyed by the military in an attack during which the singer’s mother was thrown from  a second story window ultimately dying from  her injuries.  It is unsurprising, then, that for Fela the security forces bring only “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” (1977). 

     Fela had meanwhile changed his group’s name from Nigeria 70 first to Africa 70 and then to Africa 80 reflecting his Nkrumahism, pan- Africanism, and socialism.  In 1979 he founded a political party, the Movement of the People supporting the artist himself as a presidential candidate, but the organization soon folded under heavy political repression [4].

     Fela’s Afrocentrism is consistent.  Rejecting European culture, he declares in “I no be gentleman at all o/ I be Africa man original” (“Gentlemen,” 1973).  During the Biafran War in 1970, Fela released “Viva Nigeria” which pleads “Lets join hands Africa, we have nothing to lose but a lot to gain.”  In “Expensive Shit” (1975) he declares “Me I be Fela, I be Black Power man”  “I no go agree make my brother hungry.”  In “Mr. Grammarticalogylisatitionalism Is the Boss” (1976) he criticizes the emphasis on English language proficiency in the educational system.  Even in the matter of toilet etiquette he prefers the traditional practice. 

 

Don't worry about my nyash ooh

I dey use water to clean my nyash when I shit finish

Yes, I dey use water because anytime way I use

Toilet paper, my nyash still dey smell, ahhhhh

My fore Father's teach me for Africa the correct way

                           “Don’t Worry About my Mouth-o” (1977)

 

     He is equally hostile to all organized religion [5], denouncing priests and imams alike as exploiters tied to the ruling class. 

 

Na the best friend to Bishop na him be director

 

Pastor's house na him dey fine pass

My people them dey stay for poor surroundings

 

           “Coffin for Head of State”

 

My people them go dey follow Bishop

Them go follow Pope

Them go follow Imam

Them go go for London

Them go go for Rome

Them go go for Mecca

Them go carry all the money

 

put your minds into any goddamn church

Any goddamn mosque

Any goddamn Celestical

Including Seraphoom and Cheruboom

 

We now have to carry our minds

Out of those goddamn places

               

                                “Shuffering and Shmiling”

 

      Apart from resisting authoritarian action by the state, Fela protests class stratification.  In “Alagbon Close” (1974) he speaks for the poor, including those called agbepo, who, in a country where most areas (even in Lagos and Abuja) lack sewage systems, carry human waste away from residential areas.   

 

I dey do my part

I be human being like you like you

 

     Using similar imagery in “Expensive Shit” (1975) he combines his own arrest for possession of cannabis when he swallowed his joint and was detained and his excrement regularly searched (though he managed to substitute another prisoner’s) with a general image of citizens who prefer to walk away from the shit, i. e. the corruption and repression of the rulers.

 

Him go bend the yash, him go shit

Him go comot away from him shit

Him shit go be the last thing wey him go like to see

Because why, oh? (Because the shit dey smell)

 

     He comments on issues other than repression from the point of view of the general population, the availability of safe water, for instance, in “Water No Get Enemy” (1976).  In “Opposite People” (1977) he complains about those who act contrary to the people’s interests. 

 

Everyone dey dance, him go push

Everyone dey talk, him go shout

Everyone dey hear, him go sleep

Everyone dey think, him go drink

 

In “Go Slow” (1972) the traffic jams of Lagos, then the capital, become an image for the country’s stagnation under selfish and tyrannical leadership.  He insists that the country should belong to the common people, saying “Man must be man for him land o.”

     Fela became the leading entertainer of his country while maintaining a vigorously adversarial attitude toward its rulers.  The listener to his recordings is overwhelmed by the full orchestrations and spellbound by his hypnotic repetitions.  His music remained primarily dance music (as the stage show emphasizes).  Fela is always hosting a party, however serious the theme of his lyrics.  Like the blues, his oeuvre indicates that art can transmute suffering, redeeming human experience by recasting it in aesthetically pleasing, even celebrative, forms without denying the pains it may describe.  His unstoppable plucky defiance, his art, renders his opponents fatuous and often ludicrous in spite of their holding the stronger hand.  Whereas the fans of artists like Victor Jara from Chile, José Afonso in Portugal, or Woody Guthrie in America were likely to be engagé even before encountering the music, many of Fela’s listeners were drawn first by his sound even before discovering that the man strutting on stage was not simply a romantic but remote show business idol, but rather was speaking their language and representing their interests, creating a body of work that found admirers far beyond West Africa.

 

 

 

 

1.  Some works are sufficiently admired by critics to be considered simultaneously popular and “high” art.  Among them are Homer, Dickens, Mark Twain, George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Dylan. 

2.  The low prestige associated with pidgin is implied by the common term “broken English.”  Of course, blues, jazz, reggae, rebetiko, and fado all developed not in concert halls but in the low dives of the lumpenproletariat.

3.  When I arrived in Lagos in 1979 with my wife and five-year-old daughter, I wanted to attend a show at his compound, but in the end did not venture there, having been told that the music would not begin until after midnight and that audience members had to strip to their underwear.  As I did not go there, I cannot confirm if these conditions were real. 

4.  It was revived by Kuti’s youngest son Seun Kuti in 2020. 

5.  Fela makes no distinction, for instance, between the British and thus colonial Anglican church and the indigenous Christian cult of the Cherubim and Seraphim. 

The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber

 

I believe I here mention every Leiber song recorded from 1952-1956 but among the later songs, I discuss only those that strike me as useful to emphasize a point.  Mike Stoller is marginal here as I discuss only the texts of the songs without comment on the music.

 

 

     Rock and roll, though the genre has always tolerated a significant element of schlock and  corn, cultivates its rebellious image.  With its roots in the subculture of Black blues and, to a lesser extent, that of the white working class, rock and roll a was born with a bit of an attitude.  The very name, like jazz, is a euphemism for the sexual act, and the music is thus transgressive from the start.  Jerry Leiber, one of the greatest rock and rhythm and blues lyricists, excelled at witty, subversive lyrics, clever and pointed like the songs of Noel Coward, but from the point of view not of glittering high society, but of ordinary American Blacks and youth.  Though his songs were unabashedly commercial, he managed to skewer many sacred cows, in most of his work maintaining a richly comic ironic tone.

     Leiber’s popularity and his counter-cultural satire go uneasily together.  While much popular culture tends to emphatically reinforce received ideas, creating social coherence by reassuring people with a set of shared beliefs, some pockets of commodified art designed for the marketplace suggest contrary attitudes.  Subversive songs often find an enthusiastic audience among subcultures whether ethnic or sexual minorities, drug users, criminals, or, in the nineteen-fifties, teenagers who, for the first time, were viewed as a distinct group, likely to resist their parents’ values.

     By the time of his own teenage years Jerry Leiber had assimilated Black language and attitudes so well that he could produce songs that played on pre-existing conventions and gave them novel, often amusing, twists. [1]  His first recorded song, "That's What the Good Book Says," tropes on gospel themes to imagine Biblical times as a dance party when even the devils are having a high time drinking wine. 

 

Well back in the days of old King Saul

Every night was a crazy ball

The cats smoked hay through a rubber hose

And the women, they wore transparent clothes

 

The song was recorded by Bobby Nunn [2] and the Robins establishing Leiber’s career as a rhythm and blues lyricist, writing songs for a very nearly entirely Black audience.  The humorous tone that led many of his compositions to be devalued as “novelty” numbers animates his professional debut.

     Leiber’s second recorded song, "Real Ugly Woman" (1950) sung by Jimmy Witherspoon, proved as humorous and considerably more popular.  The singer turns upside-down the expected praise of his beloved’s beauties, saying instead that the lady in question “runs all my friends away.”  She is a “female Frankenstein” with “big feet” [3].  Apart from what Fats Waller called in another song “her pedal extremities,” she weighs three hundred pounds. [4]

 

She ain’t built for power,

she ain’t built for speed,

but that woman built for comfort

and that’s what every man need

 

In spite of her bulk the singer affirms “Yes, I love that woman, and she’s ugly as can be.” 

     Having played with attitudes associated with religious devotion and romantic love conventions, Leiber then turned to social inequity with  “Hard Times” (1952), a belated Depression lament recorded by Charles Brown.  Recalling songs with similar titles by Ida Cox, John Lee Hooker, and others, the singer protests the hardships of the life of the poor.

 

When I had to pawn my clothes

Just to pay my rent

Talkin' about hard times

Hard time oh yeah, yeah

 

As sincere-sounding as Tennessee Ernie Ford’s retooling of Merle Travis’ coal-mining songs “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” also popular in the ‘fifties, after Ford had adopted an exaggerated hillbilly persona, Leiber’s lyrics deliver a message of protest the more poignant by being here passed down from mother to son.  The singer expects suffering to be relieved only by death.

 

There'll be no more sorrow

When I pass away

And no more hard times

 

     In the next two of Leiber’s songs to be released “Kansas City” and “Hound Dog,” Leiber displayed the fluency of his appropriation of American Black idiom, a skill which would propel him, willy-nilly, to the center of early rock and roll.  The same year that “Hard Times” came out, Little Willie Littlefield recorded Leiber’s “Kansas City” (at first titled "K. C. Lovin'"), a driving song which so perfectly conforms to blues conventions that it is often taken to be traditional.  The narrative of the song is a typical blues scenario: the speaker leaves an unsatisfactory lover (“Now if I stay with that woman/ I know I'm gonna die”) and heads for the  sensual paradise of Kansas City, known as a party town.  In this urban version of Eden, he is “standin' on the corner” drinking “a bottle of Kansas City wine” with “my Kansas City baby,” presumably one of those adepts in the “crazy way of loving” practiced there.  The propulsive rhythms convey the excitement of erotic anticipation. 

     Leiber’s next tune was far more down home and even more familiar.  “Hound Dog” (“Big Mama” Thornton, 1952) is Southern slang for a man who is dependent on his lover.  The spare lyrics blend a bit of current slang (“You ain't no real cool cat”) with a hokum-like double entendre in the repeated lines “You can wag your tail/  But I ain't gonna feed you no more.”  The song’s conclusion, punctuated by Thornton’s  cries, mimics the howls of frustration from a dog deprived of his object of desire. 

     Though he had written the words specifically with “Big Mama” Thornton in mind, Leiber found her daunting at the recording session.  She was, indeed, “big,” and her hard-driving, tough-woman sound ideal, he thought, for the suggestive complaint of a woman saddled with a no-good man.   When she at first “crooned” the words like a ballad, and Leiber suggested she “attack” it with more energy, she grabbed her crotch, telling the nineteen-year-old he could “attack this!” [5]  After he demonstrated the effect he was after with his own voice, though, the recording was completed, and the record turned out to Thornton’s biggest hit, selling a half million copies.

     “Hound Dog” was so successful that it was recorded by ten other artists even before Elvis ever heard of it.  Though Elvis had heard and admired Black musicians, it was a sanitized version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a white group that played a number of rhythm and blues songs and performed at the Sands in Las Vegas, that caused him to sing it himself.  The suggestive line about tail-wagging had been changed to “you never caught a rabbit” and the specifically Black vernacular terms “daddy” and “cool cat” vanished.  More importantly, the singer, originally a woman complaining about her good-for-nothing lover, became a man, apparently, as Leiber complained, actually singing about a dog. [6]  

     Despite his disgruntlement about the changes to his song, Leiber realized that, though he and Stoller had considered Big Mama’s version to be definitive – it went, after all, to the top of the R and B charts, selling over a half a million copies and inspiring not only covers but response songs  all based on the excitement generated  by Thornton’s powerful performance  -- pop music might bring even more lucrative success.  The rise of rock and roll, much of it based on blues and rhythm and blues material,  eased the transition from the thoroughly bluesy, “brusque and badass” [6] effrontery of “Hound Dog” to thr lighter and more digestible form he and his partner Mike Stoller were to perfect.  Though they had started out “looking to write songs for black artists with black feelings rendered in black vernacular” [7], they had stumbled into a new genre which required new forms. 

     Leiber’s genius for playing with listeners’ expectations emerged in a series of songs that sparkle with comic irony and satirical analysis of the pillars of society as though written by an incarnation of Cole Porter who had gleefully shed his sophistication.  The songs’ satirical elements were not always noticed by their listeners, but that mattered little.  For instance, Leiber’s “Love Me” (1954), first recorded by Willy and Ruth and rerecorded by nine other artists (including Billy Eckstine) before Elvis’s version, was originally conceived by Leiber as “a parody of a corny hillbilly ballad” [8] with its absurdly lugubrious melancholy.

 

Treat me like a fool

Treat me mean and cruel

But love me

Break my faithful heart

Tear it all apart

But love me (Won't you love me)

 

The song, of course, succeeded when understood straight and has since become a familiar sentimental pop standard.

     Some of his songs experimented with other genres, but these were rarely as effective as the hits which either maintained strong blues roots or allowed free play to his comic inventiveness. For instance “Jack O’ Diamonds,” which was recorded by Jacki Fontaine (1954), plays with formulas in several older traditions [9].  Some of his work, whether produced with Black or white artists was unexceptional.  “Bazoom, I Need Your Loving” (1954) is an anodyne bit of love-longing in which the odd word in the title lurks like a code for suppressed lust, the most exciting moment of the tune.   Among his more pedestrian compositions are "I Want to Do More" (recorded by Ruth Brown in 1955) and “Ruby Baby” (The Drifters, 1956).  Even the most well-crafted of his straightforward love songs such as “Lovin’ You” (Elvis, 1957), fail to spotlight Leiber’s unique talent.

     Sometimes his touch is a light one.  In “Dancin’” (1957) the couple “keep on dancing” after the band has stopped playing.  The continue to dance down the street, past an erotic landscape in which “couples parked in cars were romancin',” and “when we reached your door,” “we kept right in dancin’,” conflating, as songs often do, dancing with more intimate contact.

     Whereas people had before conceptualized life as a passage from an incompetent childhood to responsible adulthood, during the ‘fifties, teen-agers came to regard themselves as a unique group, not only in a vulnerability to tragic or frustrated love, but also as adversarial to social control.  The problem of “juvenile delinquency” was publicized in films like Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause.  Just as he had identified with the Black American experience, Leiber, by now a man in his twenties, learned to effectively express the social ferment of the new rock and roll demographic.  He paid tribute to the clothing fetishism of the young with  "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" (1955) [10] which gave Leiber his first hit in the pop chart’s top ten [13].  “Hipness,” the subcultural assertion that one is more enlightened than others, melts in the face of romantic heat in "(You’re so Square) Baby I Don’t Care" (Elvis, 1958). 

     Leiber began exploring a different model for his songs, small comic vignettes he was later to call “playlets.” [11]  In 1954 he wrote “Framed” for the Robins, a highly entertaining song which by the way indicts the racist American justice system.  The singer objects that “I never knew nothing but I always get framed.” [12]  The humor succeeds because of its irony.  A comic take on judicial injustice, the song is funny rather than angry as the singer protests too much, and the listener supposes he may not be entirely innocent. In a lighter teenage variant, Leiber featured a similar protagonist later in “Charlie Brown,” the high school cut-up who “calls the English teacher Daddy-O” (1959) [14].  

     In the scenario of “Smokey Joe’s Café” (The Robins, 1955), a short story in slightly under three minutes, the diner is struck with a “chick” who has entered, but others, and then Smokey Joe himself, caution him that she is taken.  “The Chicken and the Hawk" (Big Joe Turner, 1956) in which the chicken is seized and carried off by a hawk [15] only to be challenged by a “bald-headed eagle” sounds like a slightly sinister folk-tale.

     The most successful “playlets” were performed by the Coasters, a group organized around two of the Robins with whom Leiber had earlier worked.  Their first release was “Down in Mexico” (1956), an atmospheric tune about a Mexicali “honky-tonk” run by “a cat named Joe” (is the venue Smokey Joe’s again?) who plays blues.  Suddenly he is dazzled by the sudden appearance of a “chick” clad in fishnets.  The location, of course, is arbitrary, signifying, as border towns often have, the pleasures of the senses.  The few words of Spanish and Carl Gardner’s synthetic accent in the spoken part only serve to emphasize the point that this is a place where you can “get your kicks.” 

     That same year the Coasters recorded "One Kiss Led to Another,"  a masterpiece of suggestive narration in which the persona brings “soda pop” and “sandwich meat” which they never quite get around to eating when he visits with his girlfriend who is babysitting (and thus unchaperoned).   Listeners had no difficulty understanding all sorts of love-making concealed behind the final words of the song.

 

One kiss led to another

And another and another

And another and another

And another and another

And another and another

 

     Similarly, a mother predicts a life of loving for her son whose “Lucky Lips” (1957) mean, she tells him, that “you’ll always have a baby in your arms,” an ambiguous expression that allows the listener to infer a settled domesticity as well as the preceding pleasures of love-making.  While blues songs, rhythm and blues, and country all appealed to audiences of all ages, the songwriter, now approaching his mid-twenties, maintained a sharp focus on the target demographic of teen-agers.  Thus, in “Fools Fall in Love,” when not making fun of the love song genre (“Just play them two bars of Stardust/ Just hang out one silly moon”), the couple, who “should be back in school,” are clearly on the verge of dropping out to get married.  “Searchin’” (Coasters 1957) also playfully alludes to Larry Stock and Al Lewis’s song, made a hit by Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill” before cataloguing pop culture sleuths familiar to the young: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Sergeant Friday, Charlie Chan, and Boston Blackie.  In “Young Blood” (Coasters, 1957) the singer suffers love-longing and follows his beloved to her home, only to be rejected by her father with stern words, “You better leave my daughter alone.” 

     Leiber’s wit is on full display in “Jailhouse Rock” (Elvis, 1957).  Whereas “Framed”: had been comic at the same time as it exposed social inequity, incarceration in “Jailhouse Rock” is a pure frolic.  In the carnival spirit of the rock and roll dance party, the contradictions of society vanish, homoeroticism emerges (“You the cutest jailbird I ever  did see”), and the prisoners voluntarily remain incarcerated.  “Shifty Henry” and “Bugs” are harmless and colorful characters like the people in Damon Runyon and the Purple Gang, who brought violence to Detroit for years, is merely part of the colorful background.  

     In "Idol with the Golden Head" (1957) the lover consults a magic fetish in his search for his beloved “big foot May,” [16] only to find her by a creek among empty beer cans dancing  “hopping and a-bopping and a-bumping and a-jumping” to rock and roll music.  “Feeling so blue,” he again consults his oracle, who advises him that he, too, must learn to “boogie.”  Again the music promises entry to a paradise of the celebration of the senses.

     The obstacles to such unrestrained pleasure appear in the form of super-ego parental authority in what is surely one of the greatest Leiber “playlets” of teen-age life, “Yakety Yak” (Coasters, 1958).  There the singer is told that, if he fails to do his household chores, “You ain't gonna rock and roll no more.”  The nonsense phrase of the title indicates how absurd the youth finds these limitations, but it is always immediately answered by the stern mandate “don't talk back,” all the sterner since it seems that the parents in their time may have seen enough of life for them to know what risks their child may run: “Your father's hip, he knows what cooks.”  To the parents their son’s friend is a “hoodlum,” one of the “juvenile delinquents” so much in the news.  No clearer delineation of the “generation gap” appeared until “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (Dylan, 1964). 

     Apart from ambivalent relations with the older generation, Leiber eloquently wrote of the dangers of love.  In “Poison Ivy” (Coasters, 1959), a tune which Leiber flatly called a warning against sexually transmitted disease [17], the woman’s beauty is paired with warnings that she offers a threat worse than whooping cough or smallpox or any number of other diseases.  The repeated lines “Late at night while you're sleepin'/ Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around” suggests the frighteningly involuntary character of desire, and the concluding section which four times repeats “La da la da la da” employs Leiber strategy of using nonsense syllables to signify a sexual experience so extraordinary as to be beyond words.  Yet, at the same time, it is poison ivy.

     Far more amusing and equally haunting “Love Potion No. 9” (Coasters, 1959) in which the singer, who  complains that he has been “a flop with chicks” since 1956, and enlists the aid of a gypsy who provides him with the title preparation.  The effect, however, is not to improve his dating life, but instead to bring him into an erotic delirium in which he “started kissin' everything in sight,” including, in the punch line, the  “cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine.”  The song caricatures with exaggeration both the young person’s romantic self-consciousness and the titanic force of libido under the surface. 

     Leiber’s partner Mike Stoller said that in his opinion their best “playlet” was “Little Egypt” (Coasters, 1961) [18] about a “hoochie coochie” dancer who so captivates the singer that he periodically dissolves into a yammering and helpless “ying ying ying ying.”  In place of anatomical features, he mentions studying her tattoos, reminding the listener of Groucho Marx’s “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” and the song on the same theme in the style of the music hall that was a hit for the Kingston Trio.  After all the “ying ying” and sexual objectification, the punch line is that he marries her and has seven children, obliging her to retire from her dance career as “She's too busy mopping and a-takin' care of shopping.”

    Just as Leiber had mastered the language practices of Black Americans and of teenagers, he wrote a country music classic in “Jackson” (1963), co-written with Billy Edd Wheeler and originally recorded by the Kingston Trio, which became a hit four years later sung by Johnny Cash and June Carter.  The man’s sexual assertiveness meets effective ridicule from his wife who predicts that before long he will have his “tail tucked between your legs.”  

     Leiber’s lyric sensibility dwelled in the borderland between the kind of simple alienation that could even emerge in an Elvis’s tunes such as “Trouble” (1958) as “I'm evil, evil, evil, as can be” and the hokey sentiment of narratives like “The Reverend Mr. Black” (Kingston Trio, 1962) in which the Christian protagonist resembles nothing so much as a cowboy hero [19].  The most successful and characteristic songs feature a trenchant wit criticizing received ideas about race, justice, and propriety from a perspective that privileges the joy of sexuality.  Thus, even such an inoffensive song as “Girls, Girls, Girls” (Elvis, 1961) ends with the word “girls” repeated fifteen times, punctuated by a few inarticulate utterances, indicating that the singer is all but disabled by passion.  Even lust may be satirized, however, as in (Coasters, 1958) in which the singer, dizzy with desire, declares, “This little piggy's coming over your house/ I'm gonna rock you all night long.”  The ecstasy of passion is associated with the pleasures of rock and roll dancing.  Again, even in a schlocky song like King Creole (Elvis, 1958)  expresses the liberating effect of rock music in which the performer so absorbs himself that he (and presumably his audience) is “gone, gone, gone.”

     In his combination of mischievous humor and sensual extravagance, Leiber’s lyric persona resembles the high-spirited songs of hokum, calypso, and the English music hall as well as recalling comedians like Chaplin and Harpo Marx.  The closest analogue, though, is found in the trickster figures of world mythology.  Perhaps the most relevant to Leiber’s genius is the signifying monkey of African-American lore who tells the truth obliquely and dodges the more powerful but slower-witted beasts. [20]

     While suggesting that oceans of delight await the lover (whether the bed is directly implied or only the dance-floor), Leiber mocked many  conventions of romantic love, though conceding the strength of others and thus keeping his audience guessing.  The titanic power of eros is spoofed in the “tail-wagging” of “Hound Dog,” the intoxicated frenzy of “Love Potion No. 9,” and the “piggies” of “I’m a Hog for You.”  The love object in “Little Egypt” begins as an overpowering obsession, but ends as a harried housewife, while the husband in “Jackson” strives to break free from  his marriage.  In “The Chicken and the Hawk" the beloved is figured as a prey caught by one predator and fancied by another.  He even played with homoerotic humor in “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9.”

     Meanwhile, his songs expressed criticism of religion ("That's What the Good Book Says") and social equity (“Hard Times” and “Framed”) while expressing a general social nonconformity ("Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots") with particular resistance to the demands of parents (“Yakety Yak”) and school (“Charlie Brown”).  The opposition between an imagined unlimited pleasure and the obstacles to experiencing it forms the heart of much of Leiber’s oeuvre.

     With the possible exception of Dylan, Leiber is the most significant lyricist of rock and roll.  His enthusiasm for its parent, the blues, brought Black rhythms and, in part, attitudes to young white Americans in eloquent and entertaining lyrics.  His work not only contributed substantially to the dominance of the rock and roll genre in world popular music, it presaged the folk revival that followed in the early sixties, the blues emphasis of groups like the Rolling Stone and the Yardbirds, and the psychedelic era that followed.  Janis Joplin was doubtless influenced by some of the same old blues records that had inspired the young Jerry Leiber as well as by Leiber’s own songs.

     This historic contribution is undeniable, but Leiber’s real achievement is the delight that his play of wit, his clever rhymes, and his subversive narratives bring to listeners now no less than when the songs were new.  Writing for a genre that at the time lacked artistic pretensions and prestige, he created a body of work as memorable as any in popular music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  In his devotion to Black culture he resembled other Jewish artists like al Jolson, Benny Goodman, and Mezz Mezzrow.  Of course, white people have played a creative role in jazz and blues ever since the days of Bix Beiderbecke. 

2.  The singer was Ulysses B. Nunn, not to be confused with an unrelated Bobby Nunn who recorded for Motown in the eighties.

3.  A venerable figure that appears most prominently in "Your Feet's Too Big" (1936) by Ada Benson recorded by Fats Waller and many others.

4.  Cf. “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” (1963) written by Willie Dixon and made famous by Howlin’ Wolf.

5.  Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, Hound Dog, p. 63.

6.  Richard Crouse, Who Wrote the Book of Love, p. 13

7.  Hound Dog, p. 94-5.

8.  p. 105.

9.  Songs of the same title or using some of the same lines were sung by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mance Lipscomb, but also by white singers as “Rye Whiskey” and “O Mollie, O Mollie, it is for your sake alone.”  Ruth Brown did an up-tempo version of Leiber’s song in 1959.

10.  Cf. “Shoppin’ for Clothes (Coasters 1960) or Carl Perkins “Blue Suede Shoes.” 

11.  See Hound Dog, 96, et al.

12.  The same year Chuck Berry released his “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” who, in a brilliant and concise line, protests that he was “arrested on charges of unemployment.”

13.  One indication of the song’s appeal is that is was also recorded by Edith Piaf as "L'Homme à la Moto."  Shortly after the song’s release James Dean died in an auto accident, helping to inspire the trend of teen tragedy car crash songs.

14.  Cf. Chuck Berry’s “School Days” (1957)

15.  Cf. the slang usage of “chicken hawk” for a gay man with a preference for much younger partners.

16.  The usage derives from the many blues songs in which the woman’s “big feet” in “Caldonia” or “Your Feets Too Big” sometimes suggest a comic disproportion and sometimes her outsized appeal, if not both at once. 

17.  Hound Dog, 141.

 18.  Hound Dog, 141.

19.  Similarly, “Along Came Jones” (Coasters, 1959) features an exaggerated and thus satirical account of a rescuer of ladies in distress with the characteristics of a Western  star.  He is “slow-talkin'” as well as “long, lean, lanky.”

20.  In “Run Red Run” (Coasters, 1959) a late incarnation of such a monkey is the principal actor.  Cf. m y essay “The Signifying Monkeys Talk Literature” (posted at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/04/signifying-monkey-talks-literature.html) as well as Prof. Gates’  The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.

Polka

     I just heard an eighteen-time Grammy winner perform. Despite his immense popularity, due to the structures of American cultural life, it is very unlikely that the reader of this essay would recognize his name: Jimmy Sturr. His band plays polka music, which, until recently enjoyed its own Grammy category (doubtless reflecting significant sales). Polka has now been folded in to ethnic music (reflecting a decline), so he must compete with African and Indian musicians.  Lamentable or inevitable, the fact is that the number of polka fans who read (literary) poetry is as small as that of litterateurs who listen (and dance) to music like Sturr’s. The cultural divide is not imaginary.       When I was a young lad, newly interested in classical music, and asked if I might resume piano lessons, my Czech Uncle Bill told me a bit confidentially, as though he were letting me know my fly was open, that “Girls study piano, Bill. If you really want to play music, it would be just fine if you took up accordion.” It was, of course, of polkas that he was thinking.
     A consumer of a broad variety of music from Tibetan to African pop, I eventually (through Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter family) gained some appreciation for country music, but polkas continued to strike me as mindless and shallow in spite of polka-based works by Smetana, Strauss, and even Stravinsky
     Unlike such genres as blues and country music, which engage issues like alcohol with gravity as well as relish, to the polka dancer the barrel of beer is an unambiguous blessing: “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” Of this world the same song testifies, “Only happy faces bloom there/ And there's never any room there/ For a worry or a gloom there.” At Sturr’s concert, his aides redefined red plastic beer cups as fetish objects, distributing them before singing a paean to “my red Solo cup.”
     In spite of the alcohol, in this happy land, there is no infidelity. Love songs do exist, but unlike most of the world’s poetry on the theme, love in Polkaland is as uncomplicated and enthusiastic as everything else. Radio shows featuring the genre are always sending out fortieth and fiftieth anniversary greetings to listeners to whom the very notion of an affair would be unmentionable (though not in every case undoable). Likewise, polka fans tend to be religious and patriotic to a fault.
     All received ideas are not only welcome; they are celebrated with manic intensity. Doubtless reassuring to an audience uneasy with modern uncertainties, the constant fast tempos allow no second thoughts. The wall of sound from the horn section is insistent, uncompromising. Indeed, the dancers at Sturr’s appearance appeared without delay, charmed by that powerful sound. They began hop-stepping rapidly about the floor, doing the half-step from which some would trace the name of the dance. Virtually all of retirement age, they skipped about the floor and were always ready to go again when the next number started up. It was as though I stood in the middle of the abandon of a festive Breughel scene. Where else could the energy and devotion to each other of these happy couples find expression?
     These polka people need not be Polish or Czech. Sturr sings in no Slavic tongue, and he is liable to stray from polka proper into country and popular material that shares its infectious, almost mindless beat and ideological conservatism. One recognized genre of American polka music is in fact the Native American Papago-Pima “chicken scratch” music. The urban factory worker and the small farmer may share with the native American a sense that the world is passing them by, that they have little control over the terms of their daily life, and that, as a result, the best strategy is to make one’s way doggedly through the week determined to have a good time on Saturday night. Once the band strikes up a tune, the greatest social problem is who stole the kischka.
     Sturr works the crowd infecting others with his wild exuberance. Yet he is a celebrity with whom the audience feels a connection. He steps among them, shaking hands and greeting people. He mentions many individuals known to the local crowd. Small and slim, with styled hair, he calls for “hallelujahs” from his people as though he were at a Pentecostal meeting (and, indeed, the last half century has seen a good many polka masses).
     They certainly have no need of the approbation of the aging half-Czech critic who cannot do the dance, but only stands by the sidelines, albeit with one foot tapping.