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.
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!’”
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.
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”).
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
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