Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth

 

drawing by Woody Guthrie

 

 

     Amid the Betty Crocker cookbooks and bestsellers from past decades on the shelves of the local Salvation Army store, I was surprised to come across a novel called House of Earth by Woody Guthrie.  As a teenager during the folk song revival I sought out Pete Seeger in a Skokie synagogue and Skip James in a Cambridge coffee house, and became familiar with Woody Guthrie through Folkways records.  I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in the Dolphin paperback with its quirky offhand drawings by the author and felt a moment of melancholy when now and then I saw a story about the singer’s physical decline and eventual death.  Yet I was entirely unaware of House of Earth which remained unpublished until 2013 [1].  

     I had known that Guthrie was a prolific writer, author not only of several thousand songs, but of a regular column in the People’s World, the West Coast sister publication of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, but House of Earth was a surprise to me. Unlikely as it seems, the book was published by Johnny Depp, who has convinced Harper Collins to make him editor of a new line named Infinitum Nihil after the actor’s production company [2].

     For more than fifty years Bound for Glory has taken a place on my shelves, not with twentieth century American literature, but in the folk/political area of the music books, near the Little Red Songbook of the I.W.W. and The Oxford Book of Ballads.  Guthrie’s importance in American popular music, his influence spreading though Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, and others to the present day, seemed to me to outweigh his literary credentials.  His role in American politics, too, while righteous, was irrelevant to his admission to the slopes of Parnassus.  

     He did take some pains with his literary style.  Though he cultivated the image of a dispossessed and penniless Okie naïf, Guthrie had in fact been raised in a solidly middle-class home.  His father, rather like Ella May’s father, cast as a villain in House of Earth, was a successful businessman who bought distressed properties, owning at one time thirty pieces of land.  A power in local politics, he served as district county clerk and was said to have purchased the first automobile in Okemah.  He was, in addition, a racist and Ku Klux Klansman who participated in at least one lynching [3].  Furthermore, by the time he wrote Bound for Glory and, later, House of Earth, Guthrie had the aid of Marjorie Mazia, his wife from 1945-1953 and a principal dancer with Martha Graham’s company, a woman at home in New York City artistic circles.  So Woody, no less than his disciple Bob Dylan, cultivated a stage persona of a penniless and rootless wandering troubadour.

     The most prominent element of the character he played and, doubtless, paradoxically the most cultivated aspect of his writing style, is his use of dialect.  Guthrie himself embraced folk expressions and irregular usages as signs of authenticity indicating his membership in an idealized proletariat.  While the non-standard language of a writer like the Nigerian Amos Tutuola is natural, the reader has reason to suspect Guthrie of being self-consciously folksy to create his persona.  He criticized Steinbeck’s Okie speech in Grapes of Wrath [4], yet the reader from another time and place is hardly in a position to judge.  For both writers dialect builds an environment in which the rhetoric of the “uneducated” comes to seem standard and, instead of ignorance, is associated with experience, knowledge, and truth. 

     The second most prominent aspect of Guthrie’s style is its ebullience, extravagance, and plenitude.  He is given to catalogues and lists and what the Middle Ages would have called amplificatio, creating a sense of teeming life, carnivalesque richness of life celebrating itself.  The pattern was set already in Bound for Glory.

 

The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats, whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money . . . Kids of all three colors, and an occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens, took in after cur dogs, clumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped down on the sidewalk with a brand new pair of shoes on.  Ice cream cones was waving up and down the street.

                                (Bound for Glory Ch. V) 

 

In this passage the discussion topics are multiplied until all sense of a given focus is lost; the children are doing so many things that they are doing nothing in particular.  Rather than a concrete and specific scene, the reader is left with a vague impression of a maelstrom of action.  As here, though, while the world may seem a bit out of control, the predominant mood is clearly joyful affirmation.  The expenditure of energy even in privation, whether in work, struggle, or love-making, is redemptive, the only route to full humanity and an abundant experience of life.

     The extravagant rhetoric of Bound for Glory fills House of Earth as well. 

 

“Let it be rotten, Lady . . . Guess it’s got a right to be rotten is it wants to be rotten, Lady.  Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!  Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups.  I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-one years.  Let it \rot!  Rot!  Fall down!  Sway in!  Keel over!  You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you!  Fall!” (13)

 

Here the six descriptive terms beginning with “rickety” puff up the passage without adding new information.  They do, however, convey Tike’s prodigious élan vital, his impatient ambition, his delight in food and sex and life.  The reader will little care whether anybody had ever actually said “Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!”  Such an expression is, perhaps, more effective for those who cannot judge its faithfulness to the actual spoken dialect.

     In several passages Guthrie lists brief phrases or single words to build a scene. 

 

Belly band.  Back band.  Neck yoke and collar.  Buckle it up.  Snap it down.  Carry it off and hang it up.  Smokehouse.  Woodshed.  Cow stall.  Manger.  Henhouse.  Big house.  Backhouse.  Cellar.  Tap.  Bolt.  Nut and screw.  Skinned knuckle.  Cut finger.  Burned arm.  Scalded shinbone.  Wheels.  Hubs.  Spokes.  Seat.  Brogans.  Clodhoppers.  Tit squeezers.  (106-107)

 

This passage ends with an elemental sexual image: “The penis of the stud slipping into the mare, and the sweaty hot open womb of the cow as she waited for the bull” (107), but the book’s erotic incidents are by no means limited to livestock.  An extended and explicit scene of joyful marital sexuality, of the sort that the author surely knew could not be published in 1947, occupies nearly half of the book’s first section “Dry Rosin.”  Love-making is a solace available to the poor without charge as well as a powerful way to give assent to life. 

     Why, then, am I placing House of Earth next to Bound for Glory instead of in the neighborhood of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Black Boy?  Because his subcultural vernacular seems more designed to bear the simple significance of uneducated country speech more than it casts new light though its folk poetry on what is being described and the lists of adjectives he piles upon each other never mean much more than the first one, Guthrie’s writing rarely escapes a sameness of tone.  It is an encouraging, inspiriting, optimistic tone, indeed, redolent of vitality and a joyful embrace of lived experience, but it is always much the same.  Indeed, for all his stress on hard times, Guthrie’s music and his prose are both quickened with a tireless optimism that turns a bit flat due to its unchanging tone, its being so insistently positive.  His friend Pete Seeger similarly could not open his mouth without seeming so cheery he approached dangerously close to sounding corny.  He and Woody both could sound child-like and funny and ever sanguine, they could manage to be a bit sentimental, but neither could approach tragedy, ambivalence, or complexity.  Perhaps this simplicity arose as a reflection of a dualistic political vision pitting virtuous workers against wicked capitalists, but what well serves a socio-political polemic is likely to fall short as art. 

     Woody Guthrie wrote our alternative national anthem in “This Land is Your Land” and national anthems have quite properly no place for ambiguity.  Apart from its reductive vision, which, while striving to capture lived experience in a torrent of words, in fact leaves out the difficult questions, the book has other faults.  While the child’s birth that ends the narrative appropriately marks a climax foregrounding the renewal and continuance of the cycle of life, it leaves unresolved other important issues of Tike and Ella May’s life: will they build an adobe house?  Will they ever manage to save some money?  Will they realize why they are exploited?  Furthermore, the repeated earlier references to a pain in Ella May’s breast are clearly meant to foreshadow a cancer diagnosis which never arrives.  Hod the book been publishable, an editor would never have permitted it to stand as it does.

     Yet we must be glad to have it, now available after decades in  manuscript.  Guthrie’s descriptions of nature, owing surely some debt to Steinbeck’s alternating chapters in Grapes of Wrath, are often lyrical and closely observed.  The book is largely dialogue and makes a very speedy read.  Guthrie manages in include as ornaments fragments of bluesy songs he loved.  I will thank Johnny Depp and Prof. Brinkley for bringing those who love Guthrie’s music and admire his politics another artifact of his fertile imagination.  For over fifty years KXQR in New York City has presented a folk music show called Woody’s Children, and, in a real sense, we are all Woody’s children.  With House of Earth many will come to know a bit more about the roots of contemporary American culture.

 

 

 

1.  Guthrie also wrote Seeds of Man which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1976.

 

2.  House of Earth is the imprint’s second publication, following The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.  Brinkley worked on House of Earth as well, and the laudatory introduction is credited to both Depp and Brinkley. 

 

3.  The 1911 murder of Laura and L. D. Nelson.

 

4.   Introduction to House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, p. xxxi.

 

Note on another Dust Bowl novel

     I have only just learned of Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, another treatment of the Depression era Dust Bowl by a native of the region with more reason even than Guthrie to know hard times there.  Like House of Earth, Babb’s novel was not published for decades.  According to Ed Vulliamy’s essay “The Vindication of Sanora Babb” in The New York Review of Books for August 19, 2021  Babb, like Guthrie, thought her depiction of the Okies was more realistic than Grapes of Wrath.  She also thought herself a “better writer” than Steinbeck, a claim Vulliamy finds dubious, though his comments on her work are generally laudatory.  For those interested in the era’s writing, Babb’s work (including her memoir An Owl on Every Post) seems required reading.

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

Smokestack Lightning

 

     Texts of the songs discussed, including a transcription of Howlin’ Wolf’s recording that represents the non-word sounds in his performance, are appended. 

     

 

     Apart from the striking repeated title image Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” [1], consists largely a of collage of blues formulae mixed with more significant and effective inarticulate moans and cries.  The song, with its elemental emotional appeal, made number eleven on the R & B charts and has since been covered by countless bands, including significantly the Yardbirds who brought Wolf’s lyrics a huge white audience.

     Musically the performance could hardly be more focused with its driving relentless vamp on a single chord.  The song contains some of the most familiar language in blues literature; set phrases of complaint that define the genre.

 

 

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

What's the, matter with you

 

Where did ya, stay last night?

 

Whoa-oh, fare ya well

Never see, a you no more

 

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since,

I-I been gone

 

     This web of lament is then intensified by the non-linguistic utterances so prominent in Wolf’s oeuvre, indeed the basis for his name.  Here the singer bursts beyond the capacity of words, as in scatting, field hollers, and gospel screams, and the yodeling Wolf admired, a kind of eloquent speaking in tongues, giving voice to the suffering of human life expressed also in everyday life at times as wordless sighs or weeping. 

     Against a background of highly conventionalized set phrases, the title image stands out dramatically.  “Smokestack lightning” had appeared earlier in songs by the Charlie Patton and Mississippi Sheiks as well as by Wolf himself. [2]  In spite of this small place in tradition, the expression reportedly puzzled bassist Willie Dixon. [3]  Though discussion continues, Wolf provided a simple and convincing comment on the origin of the image: "We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning." [4] 

    In Howlin’ Wolf’s song, the image accumulates all the more signification due to its underdetermination.  A semiotic map of “smokestack lightning” would begin with the direct reference to a steam railway locomotive smokestack which triggers associations common to the blues in which trains suggest most often loss and love longing but sometimes escape and liberation.  The trains were a dramatic intrusion of the outside world for the farm worker, representing specifically the exit from local life, the route to the cities and the North.  The train as an agent of change was often the herald of suffering and its mechanical might seemed all but supernatural.  Countless songs refer to the train separating one-time lovers. [5]  In the song’s immediate predecessors the train’s stack is associated with loss.  Patton sang that the train’s appearance “give me the blues” because the singer is “'fraid she's gettin' on board.”  The railroad association is more tenuous though the separation is more final in the Mississippi Sheiks usage in which the singer is “cryin'” due to finding “my baby/ Layin' on the coolin' floor.”  The melancholy connotations of the train cling to it even when there is no question of anyone riding out of town, when, in fact, the train is reduced to pure symbol.

     The suggestive potency of the striking image of “smokestack lightning” is not limited to the mournful associations of its sound at night, a use reminiscent of the role of the calls of wild geese in Chinese poetry.  The fiery combustion of the engine, its titanic pressures and terrific heat, represent as well the strength of libido that drives all creatures always forward.  The great clouds of steam and smoke generated by a steam locomotive provide a glimpse into the churning heart of life itself.  The glowing sparks seem animated germs of existence.

     Convention is often opposed to innovation and denigrated by critics, though in fact a discerning use of convention allows the economical expression of themes of great complexity.  In Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” both musical and verbal resources are restricted to the bare minimum, and one single “floating image,” that of “smokestack lightning,” governs the entire song like that single insistent chord against a tissue of blues commonplaces and even more universal non-verbal utterances.  The image is the richer and the deeper for its measure of indeterminacy.  The songc is a classic not of complexity, but of fierce single-minded intensity, both in feeling and in structure.  Beginning and then periodically dissolving in inarticulate vocalizations, against a collage of floating phrases with great elliptical gaps the listener must complete, the song unforgettably portrays the suffering of the singer as the driving music indicates the unfailing energy to persist in the face of pain and loss. 

 

 1.  “Smoke Stack Lightning” was released in 1956.  In subsequent recording and most covers the song is called “Smokestack Lightning.”  The band consisted of Howlin' Wolf singing and playing harmonica, Hosea Lee Kennard on piano, Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin on guitars, Willie Dixon on bass, and Earl Phillips on drums.

 2.  Patton’s “Moon Going Down” (1929) contains the line: “Lord, the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like, bell it shine like, bell it shine like gold/ Oh the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like gold.”  The Mississippi Sheiks’ “Stop and Listen Blues” (1930) contains the lines “Cryin', smokestack lightning/ That bell that shine like gold.”  In 1951 Wolf had released "Crying at Daybreak" which uses the same image: “Smokestack lightnin', shining just like gold/ Honey do you hear me crying?”

3. According to James Segrest.  See his The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf. 

4.  This line is quoted hundreds of times, including in the “Smokestack Lightning” entry in Rolling Stone’s list of “500 Greatest Rock and Roll Songs, but I have not located its first appearance in print. 

5.  The range of train references in rural songs is suggested by a few examples: “Railroad Blues” by Sam McGee, a white country singer, who says he “went to the depot, looked up on the board/ It read "Good times here, but better down the road."  In “Dixie Flyer Blues” by Bessie Smith the female speaker is leaving, while in Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” she’s likewise on her way, but the persona is male.  In Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” it is unclear who is taking the train.  Many songs (such as Henry Thomas’ “Railroadin’” refer to travel by freight train, while in others such as Leadbelly’s “Midnight Special” (and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”) the train is simply the emblem of freedom.  In Big Bill Broonzy’s “Too Too Train” the engine is a dynamo outdone by a lover’s energy.

 

And she do a little of this

And mama and she do a little of that

And when she put on full steam

Make a freight train jump a track

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smokestack Lightning {Howlin’ Wolf] 1956

 

 

Ah oh, smokestack lightnin'

Shinin', just like gold

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

What's the, matter with you?

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa oh, tell me, baby

Where did ya stay last night?

A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, stop your train

Let her, go for a ride

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, fare ya well

Never see, a you no more

A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since,

I-I been gone, a little, bitty boy

Girl, be on

 

Whoo hoo

Whoo hoo

Whoo

 

Whoa, smokestack lightnin'

Shinin' just like gold

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

A-whoo-hoo, a-whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby

What's the matter here?

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby

Where did you stay last night?

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, stop your train

Let a poor boy ride

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, fare-you-well

Never see a you no more

Why don't you hear me cryin'?

Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

Whoa-oh, who been here baby since

I, I been gone a little bitty boy?

Girl, be on        [heard by some as “derby on”]

A-whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo

 

 

 

 

Crying At Daybreak [Howlin’ Wolf] 1951

 

 

Tell me baby, what's done matter now

Today been a long and lonesome day

Lonesome day

 

Smokestack lightnin', shining just like gold

Honey do you hear me crying?

 

Today been a long and sad old day

Don't you hear me crying

 

Tell me baby what you got on your mind

Why don't you hear me crying

 

Ain't gonna marry, ain't gonna settle down

Why don't you hear me crying

 

 

 

 

Big Road Blues [Tommy Johnson] 1928

 

 

Cryin', ain't goin' down this big road by myself

Now don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, ain't goin' down this big road by myself

If I don't carry you, gon' carry somebody else

Cryin', sun gonna shine in my back door someday

Now, don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, sun gon' shine in my back door someday

And the wind gon' change, gon' blow my blues away

Baby, what makes you do me like you do do do, like you do do do?

Don't you hear me now?

What makes you do me like you do do do?

Now you think you gon' do me like you done poor Cherry Red

Taken the poor boy's money now, sure, Lord, won't take mine

Now don't you hear me talkin' pretty mama?

Taken the poor boy's money; sure, Lord, won't take mine

Taken the poor boy's money now; sure, Lord, won't take mine

Cryin', ain't goin' down this big road by myself

Now, don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, ain't goin' down this big road by myself

If I don't carry you, gon' carry somebody else

Cryin', sun gon' shine, Lord, my back door someday

Now don't you hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Lord, sun gon' shine in my back door someday

And the wind gon' change, blow my blues away

 

 

 

 

Stop and Listen Blues [Mississippi Sheiks] 1930

 

 

Ev'r day have been there

Long old lonesome day

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ev'r day have been

Long old lonesome day

Cry, it seem like you-ooo would

Be there ooo-ooo, same old way

 

Cryin', smokestack lightning

That bell that shine like gold

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ooh, smokestack lightning

Bells that shine like gold

Cryin', I found my baby

Layin' on the coolin' floor

 

Don't a hearse look lonesome, mama

Rollin' for yo' do'?

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Don't a hearse look lonesome

 

Rollin' for yo' do'?

Cryin' she's gone, tell you-ooo, Lord

Won't be-ee-ee back no mo'

 

Ooh, stop and listen

Hear how those bells in toll

Now don't ya a-hear me talkin', pretty mama?

Ooh, stop and listen

Hear the bell it tolls

I had a sweet little faror

But she's dead and gone

 

 

 

 

Moon Going Down [Charlie Patton] 1930 

 

 

Aw, the moon is going down baby, sun's about to shine

Aw, the moon's going down baby, sun's about to shine

Rosetta Henry told me, "Lord, I don't want you hangin' round"

Oh well, where were you now baby, Clarksdale mill burned down?

Oh well, where were you now babe, Clarksdale mill burned down?

(Boy, you know where I were)

I were way down'n Sunflower with my face all full of frown

There's a house over yonder, painted all over green

There's a house over yonder, painted all over green

(Boy, you know I know it's over there)

Lord, the finest young women, Lord, a man most ever seen

Lord, I think I heard that Taylor whistle, Taylor whistle, Taylor whistle blow

Lord, I think I heard that Taylor whistle

(Well now I hear it blowin')

Lord, I ain't gonna stop walkin' 'til I get in my rider's door

Lord, the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like, bell it shine like, bell it shine like gold

Oh the smokestack is black and the bell it shine like gold.

(Cover me boy, you know it looks good to me)

Lord, I ain't gonna walk there, ah, babe ain't 'round no more

Aw, I evil was at midnight, 'til I heard the local blow

I was evil out at night, when I heard the local blow

(Boy it give me the blues...)

I got to see my rider, 'fraid she's gettin' on board

 

Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad”

 and the Artful Use of Vulgarity

 

The text of the lyrics of “The Murder Ballad” is available at both http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/locspeech3.html#locaafs3 (which also includes transcriptions of Morton’s comments) and https://louismaistros.livejournal.com/47509.html.

 

 

     During 1938 recordings of Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax inquired about the musician’s early days playing in Storyville brothels.   Morton was initially reluctant to sing vulgar lyrics, but aided by whiskey and Lomax’s encouragement, Morton performed that day a version of “The Dirty Dozen,” an extraordinarily explicit “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” and a thirty minute long song titled “The Murder Ballad.”  Because of its obscene language, the recording was not released (nor the lyrics printed) until 2005.  The musician’s position as an innovator present at the birth of jazz and the replication of the sensibility of a licentious atmosphere already in the past make this recording significant historically.  The loose, improvisatory lyrics are a model of oral composition.

     The generic title “The Murder Ballad” sounds like a chapter heading in a folksong book likely because it was added by Lomax after Morton provided none.  Songs on the theme of homicide had, of course, made up a significant portion of the traditional English ballad repertory well before similar songs were recorded among African-Americans.  Most often, the killer’s motive on both sides of the Atlantic is sexual, either a lover killing a rival or a faithless man doing away with a cast-off partner.  The popularity of such stories is hardly surprising given that they combine the deepest human fears and desires centering around love and sex as well as aggression and death.

     The title is also apposite in that Morton seems to be improvising from the start.  Having just finished the playfully transgressive “The Dirty Dozen,” Morton continued his high-spirited violation of verbal taboos.  Using the formulae available in the tradition, he composed a story conventional in that it describes the crime in sensational and lurid detail before eventually arriving at a moralizing ending and integrating conventional phrases into a dramatic narrative with a multiplicity of voices.

     Even while Lomax kept refilling his glass, Morton was experienced enough to not only tell the story in an effective and artful manner, but to couch his narration in a well-structured and effective pattern (the sort of planning the ancient rhetoricians called dispositio).  He accommodated this process to the technical strictures of the session.  Cutting aluminum discs which had a maximum length of a little over four minutes, Morton had to stop singing (though he kept vamping on the piano) until Lomax had set up the next – the whole song took seven records, each a separate lyric with a clear internal unity.

     In the first the female persona threatens her rival with flaming language.    The extravagance of the rhetoric signifies passionate intensity but it also is entertaining in itself, particularly when expressed in words ordinarily tabooed.  These may be witty, amounting almost to a riddle: “If you don’t leave my man alone they’ll find you every Decoration Day” or intensely fierce: “Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking throat and drink your blood like wine.”  In the Storyville brothels such wild energies were recognized, respected, and incorporated into art.

     The second record, labeled by Lomax “The Murder Ballad, part 2” narrates the defiance of the rival lover who declares, in the first variation of the persona’s voice, “This ain’t no slavery time, and I’m sure that I’m free” and then the murder. The act of killing is described once realistically and once with the passion of mad jealousy: “She said, ‘Open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between your thighs.’”

     The variation in speakers continues in part 3 where other inmates, the prosecutor, jury, and judge are quoted as well as the protagonist who unapologetically admits her crime.  The performance circumstances are evident as Morton pauses in this section to note “Oh, that’s good whisky, makes me moan.”

     A conventional murder ballad would have likely concluded at this point, but Morton goes on in part 4 to detail the prisoner’s resort to masturbation and lesbianism in prison: “Time is comin’ a woman won’t need no man,/ You can get it all with your beautiful hand.”  While it may be true that while incarcerated many might think, “I can’t have a man, so a woman is my next bet,” but Morton dramatizes the aggressive tone of some such jailhouse relationships: “I’m goin’ to get some of this cunt, you bitch, I said.”  The listener is now in the realm of a sort of carnivalesque eroticism characteristic of obscenity, an infantile polymorphous perversity where anything goes, but with the harsh reminder of exploitation and selfishness.  The ideal of a monogamous relationship implied by “my man” has been abandoned, but the sexual energy is undiminished.

     The celebration of their opportunistic sex continues in the 5^th section

 

I want you to screw me, screw me like a dog

Screw me behind, sweet bitch, screw me like a dog

When it gets good, I want to holler out like a hog

 

We are here in the chaotic orgiastic atmosphere of the toast called “The Freaks’ Ball” (or ”The Bull-daggers’ Ball”).  The passage concludes, however, with a fond reminiscence of her male lover and the punning realization that, while she may still have a bed partner, her life is harshly compromised.  “Now I’m screwed, I’m behind the walls for a long time.”

     This leads directly to the moralizing conclusion of the 6^th and 7^th sections of the song, telling listeners “please don’t be like me.”  Realizing that she is in prison ”for my natural life, she reflects on the conundrum of romantic love.  Immediately after saying “I’m sorry, babe, sorry to my heart/  I’m sorry that that argument ever did start,” she calls him “a dirty rotten son of a bitch.”  Faced with the contradiction, all she can do is “pray and pray and pray and pray and pray.”  The final section is a lament for mortality, intensified by the isolation of imprisonment.  The very last lines repeat the ethical theme, while with the very last words retain a memory of worldly desire, a mere phantom in the mind of a prisoner of the state: “try to be a good girl/  That’s the only way you gonna wear your diamonds and pearls.”

     In the closest thematic register Morton’s poem recreates the self-consciously libertine atmosphere of the New Orleans brothels where he had entertained.  Its physicality, hyperbole, and braggadocio shape a narrative that foregrounds the most potent and elemental forms of desire, eros and thanatos, love and aggression.  At the same time this story, which is set in the demi-monde where such raw passions are undisguised and originally performed in whorehouses where few idealistic illusions can survive, is a poignant testament to the spirit.  The female persona Morton adopts for the song, though battered by life and facing death, can yet formulate an artfully shaped aesthetic object, not to change the harsh conditions of existence, but to gain some sense of mastery while facing the impossible odds of life.  Surely every human has experienced (though in widely varying forms and degrees) the impetuous appetitive lust, the helpless and vulnerable romanticism of a mutual love relationship.  Morton and his audience responded in the language of their own time and place, no less than the seventeenth century Cantabrigian who wrote that, at the best, we “tear our pleasures with rough strife/  Through the iron gates of life.” 

 

The Poetry of the Blues

This essay seeks to use the wider society’s first glimpse of the blues in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues as an image to sketch the character of the genre. I wrote it as the introductory chapter to a book of my essays on blues lyrics as poetry, many of which are posted on this site.



     Some of the finest twentieth century American poetry appeared neither in little magazines nor in books from literary or academic presses. The poetry of the blues was sung on front porches and in juke joints in some of the poorest and least educated regions of the country. In fact, it was specifically in such areas that the blues could flourish as could other traditional forms of oral poetry such as Appalachian ballads and Cajun song.
     In the Mississippi Delta gifted poet-musicians created a body of work that continues to move listeners both through recordings of the original artists and the countless others whom they influenced. The power of their poetry is best experienced in performance, but the strength of their lyrics as poetry emerges more dramatically in transcriptions on the page. Close readings of classic blues songs depend on a sophisticated system of conventions which the artist may observe or flout, but which have the precision and expressive power of troubadour cansos or Elizabethan sonnets.
     The subtlety and complexity of this signifying system allowed the singers to express the themes most central to the psyche in profound and beautiful verses. The primary topic of the blues is sexual love, the most powerful human desire, though the songs also engage alienation and mortality. The emotional range of the blues is wide. Though the melancholy heart’s cry predominates, some blues songs are high-spirited, even rollicking, which others have a tone of confidence or contentment.
     The orthodox origin myth of the blues is well-known. In his autobiography in 1941, W. C. Handy describes hearing a ragged man in the train station at Tutwiler, Mississippi who played slide guitar and made the “weirdest” music he had ever heard while singing the repeated line: “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” Handy understood the phrase to refer simply to the man’s destination, the town of Moorhead, at the intersection of the Southern Railroad and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley line sometimes called the Yazoo Delta or the “Yellow Dog.” The reference to such a crossroad has the functional purpose of using a landmark rare in a flat agricultural district, but that literal meaning is simply the foundation for a more significant complex of connotation from which may be spun a characterization of the blues themselves.
     The energy, the passion, even the “weirdness” of the song Handy heard suggest semantic trajectories beyond the simply geographical. In Handy’s own “Yellow Dog Blues” the poem expresses love-longing as the singer finds her lover has fled and has “gone where the Southern cross' the Yellow Dog.” [1] Here the intersection is less a specific location than simply indicating a place inaccessibly far away. Indeed, in most of the songs that later use the same phrase it signifies the distance distant between the singer and the love-object, and thus the phrase bears commonly a plaintive edge of lament. The utterance of the original singer in Tutwiler is obscure given the scarcity of data, but it is clear that he is expressing some heartfelt suffering associated with separation. In Handy’s usage the pangs of love-longing are explicit and foregrounded.
     Loneliness, though, is not always the inverse of romance. A feeling of lost desolation may be existential as well as situational and the bereft tones of blues songs have long spoken to listeners in a wide variety of suffering. If many blues songs are, in fact, laments or complaints, this is because the world is, as Christians say, a “vale of tears,” or, in the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths, life is suffering.
     Though the singer looked like a vagrant (probably especially so to the fastidious Handy), he was far from aping popular white musical styles as a great many black entertainers have done in all periods. His song sounded strange because it was a creole form using African elements of which the artist was well aware. He was in a sense an underground rebel, impudently asserting his own music in the center of a hostile Jim Crow culture. Local railroad slang -- “Yellow Dog,” “North Dog,” “Cannonball,” “Peavine” – was primarily used by the black workers, so the lexical choice as well is assertively African-American.
     The steam locomotives were spectacles and the railroad company’s properties reflected that industrial sector’s great strength, both mechanical and financial. The intersection of two rail lines, an intensification of a highway crossroad, seemed a nexus of power. Any such point suggests a point of decision, a choice of routes in life as in the motif of Herakles at the crossroads of virtue and vice. More broadly in many traditions including the New World belief systems derived from Yoruba, crossroads suggest a point of contact between human and divine realms. [2] In the context of blues history one cannot avoid the supernatural associations that lend such power to Robert Johnson’s prayer at the crossroads in “Cross Road Blues.”
     Though Handy was, by his own declaration, ignorant of the blues, and his experience was not only fragmentary but also accidental, these terms together construct the distinctive semantic field that characterizes the blues. They are often focused on the theme of suffering, alienation, and a consciousness of mortality, and on a dramatic enactment of the power of Eros. The songs are expressed in a purely American creolized form that mixes African and European musical conventions and employs subcultural slang. At times a scent of the divine or of the diabolic lingers in the air.
     The generic development over a period of time generated a rich inventory of conventions and thus an equal number of ways to negate or twist or develop those conventions, leading to increased signifying potential. The code was rendered denser yet by the African-American perspective which lent it a hip DuBoisian “double consciousness.” The signifying monkey, though a figure in toasts rather than blues songs, is an apt emblem for the cunning indirections of African-American poetry and, indeed, of all artful use of language.
     Since adolescence I have been as captivated by the sound of the blues as W. C. Handy was upon hearing the anonymous musician. I am convinced that listeners’ appreciation of the lyrics of singers like Son House and Charlie Patton would benefit from close critical reading no less than sonnets by Spenser and Sidney. I, like any reader of blues songs on the printed page, will return to the recorded performances, of course, in which the addition of expressive music, phrasing, and tone contribute to the uniquely American beauty of these extraordinary poems. Anyone who has ever felt abandoned and lost, or altogether in love, or simply lusty has experienced the blues. Anyone susceptible to poetry can feel the power of the blues in these masterful American songs.



1. See W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues. With only this snatch of the anonymous singer’s song, his meaning remains unknown. In their general narrative outline, Handy’s later lyrics are a reply to Shelton Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” (1913) which uses racetrack imagery and makes no reference to trains. The versions of “Yellow Dog Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith follow Handy closely.

2. Crossroads are associated with Odin, Hekate, Hermes, and other deities. In late medieval and early modern times, suicides and sometimes murderers as well were buried at crossroads.

"Nottamun Town"

     “Nottamun Town” is a song of undoubted antiquity, dating at least from the late Middle Ages. With explicitly self-contradictory content, the lyrics challenge listeners’ assumptions in the most fundamental way. The surface it constructs, a shimmering blend of reality and unreality, is mirrored in the song’s elusive transformations over time. The available evidence suggests that the song had all but vanished in England by the eighteenth century, but it had crossed the Atlantic in the century before where it become established in a half dozen Southern states. Several broadside versions were published in New York in the nineteenth century, but the tune was not recorded until Cecil Sharp collected it from Jean Ritchie’s sister Una and cousin Sabrina in 1917. Ritchie later sang the song on many albums and through her renditions and those of other performers who had learned it through her (notably the Fairport Convention) it became reestablished in the U.K. Those influenced included some who deviated from the folk tradition. Dylan used Ritchie’s tune for “Masters of War.” Furthermore, on the holograph of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” just below the line “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” Dylan wrote “Nottamun Town,” a clear reference to the line in Ritchie’s song “Ten thousand stood round me but I was alone.” [1] Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter recalled that the song’s underdetermination inspired them to use similarly mysterious imagery. [2]
     Just what does that imagery signify? “Nottamun Town” may easily be characterized as nonsense poetry, but the term is imprecise. What is called nonsense poetry may be of three types. The words may follow the phonological and syntactic rules of a language yet introduce new, more or less suggestive, coinages in a generally intelligible setting. This is the sort well-known from “Jabberwocky” or “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Further dislocation from linguistic norms leads to a more radical form of nonsense verse that may approach gibberish such as one sees in magical formulae, Sioux lyric, scat-singing, and speaking in tongues. Some texts, however, including this song, include no neologisms, but rather employ ordinary language to subvert everyday logic. [3]
     The theme of “Nottamun Town” is neither love nor death, but rather the nature of reality itself, or, at any rate, the capacity of language to describe it adequately. The paradoxical content of the song has struck many listeners as puzzling in spite of its resemblance to “O! Susannah,” Stephen Foster’s composed song, and nineteenth century children’s poems such as those by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
     The sociological bias common to folklorists has led many critics, baffled by the song’s illogic, to suggest the relevance of a variety of historical circumstances. Among the ingenious proposals are the conventions of mummers’ performances, the turmoil of the English Civil War, and outbreaks of plague or ergotism. The very breadth of these suggestions indicates the slender evidence for any. The fact is that even if some social cataclysm accompanied the song’s composition, that event would shed little light on its continuing popularity over centuries in the American colonies among people lacking contact with Great Britain.
     The theory concerning the song’s meaning that I find most useful is, oddly, the least likely of all. Charles Upton, a poet associated with the Beats who became a Sufi, maintains [3] that the song is a coded guide to the spiritual path he regards as sophia perennis. For him each of the specific figures is allegorical, each color is meaningful, and the whole is coherent and complete. This excerpt will be sufficient to direct those who, like me, find Upton’s hermeneutics provocative and ingenious though far from compelling as a whole.


“Nottamun” or “Nottingham” Town is the place of “naughting,” the town where we travel to become “not.” It thus corresponds with the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the town of the dead—not necessarily the physically dead, but those who are dead in this life—who, in the words of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) have “died before they are made to die.” As Omar Khayyam said, “Dawn is breaking and the caravan/ Starts for the Dawn of Nothing —O make haste!” But it is also, on the negative side, the land of those who are dead to the Spirit, the living dead who make up sense-bound “normal” humanity, now seen as they really are from the vantage point of that other world: hylic (material) man as witnessed from a psychic and potentially pneumatic standpoint.

Each of the seven stations of the spiritual Path is rendered, in “Nottamun Town,” as a polar opposition, whose synthesis opens the door to the next level. . .


     I follow Upton only in part. Though his elaborate gloss on a simple song is admirably clever and almost justifiable, it is far too specific, tailored in detail to fit Upton’s largely preconceived vision. While it is true that the song triggers questions about fundamental assumptions taken for granted in everyday thought (for instance, it implies suspicion of dualism), only the enthusiast will find a detailed and specific spiritual ladder for the aspirant to ascend.
     The song in fact belongs to a considerable tradition of nonsense literature, once directed toward a general audience, but which, in recent times has become associated in particular with children’s poetry. In “Farai un vers de dreit nien,” for example, William IX explicitly declares he will write about “nothing.” He explodes dualities by insisting he is neither happy nor sad, neither stranger nor native.
     One function of such texts is to affirm the fundamentally irrational, ambiguous, or mysterious character of human thought processes, in William’s lyric illustrated by his love dilemma. There is a frisson of delight felt often by the very young in seeing self-contradictions and impossibilities boldly set forth; a similar pleasure, I suspect, underlies the popularity of magicians and, in American culture, special effects in films. Apart from this function as entertainment on the thematic level such celebration of paradox reminds the listener of how fragile the human cause-and-effect understanding of our lives can seem in the light of such consciousness-altering catalysts as art (including religion). Just as the viewer of a suspense film or a Greek tragedy enjoys imagining being in peril while safely enjoying an entertaining narrative (while knowing in the back of the mind that one is at all times in mortal peril) [4], the audience for “Nottamun Town” enjoys playing with epistemological doubt while to some degree recognizing its reality.



1. https://newtonexcelbach.com/2016/06/10/various-routes-to-and-from-nottamun-town/

2. See Blair Jackson's "An Interview About Songwriting and Inspiration," in Goin' Down The Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, 208-209.

3. I would not consider nonsense statements that seem to ignore natural law, such as one finds in myth, fairy tales, science fiction, “magic realism,” and elsewhere. The worlds imagined in such texts operate by laws, though they may differ from those of everyday lived reality.

3. In Folk Metaphysics. The relevant passage is available as well at www.sophiaperennis.com/discussion-forums/traditionalism-and-folklore/fair-nottamun-town-mystical-and-alchemical-symbolism-in-an-appalachian-folk-song/.

4. Behind this fear is the likelihood that the more or less enlightened viewer of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Silence of the Lambs realizes that in the end all is well because, in Pope’s words “Whatever is, is right.”



Nottamun Town as sung by Jean Ritchie

In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
I rode a grey horse, a mule roany mare,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
There wa'nt a hair on her be-what was coal black.
She stood so still, she threw me to the dirt,
She tore -a my hide and she bruised my shirt.
From saddle to stirrup I mounted again,
And on my ten toes I rode over the plain.
Met the King and the Queen and a company more,
A-riding behind and a-marching before
Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along.
They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay,
They talked all the while, not a word they did say,
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day.
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.