Derangements of Love in Two Early French Folk Songs

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ma tête est dans le plat

et mon coeur aux chevilles

Mon sang est repandu

par toute la cuisine

Et sur less noirs charbons

mes pauvres os y grillent.

 

(My head is in the dish

and my heart on pegs.

My blood is spilled

throughout the kitchen

And on the black coals

my poor bones are roasting.)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,

Coüte souvent bien des regrets ;

On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraítre.

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

Dès qu’on le prend, il cesse d’ètre,

Et toujours il coüte trop cher.

 

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

 

 

Perrault continues under the title “autre moralité”:

 

 

Pour peu qu'on ait l'esprit sensé,

Et que du Monde on sache le grimoire,

On voit bientôt que cette histoire

Est un conte du temps passé;

II n’est plus d’époux si terrible,

Ni qui demande l’impossible,

Füt-il malcontent et jaloux,

Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux ;

Et de quelque couleur que sa barbe puisse ètre,

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Verbal Dance of the Blues

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


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

Harry McClintock and the Hobo Ethos

The texts of McClintock’s three songs, “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,“ and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” are appended in the form in which he sang them in 1928. I have added as well The Little Red Songbook lyrics of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” the words of Al Jolson’s version of the same song, and a field transcription of “The Apple-Knocker’s Lament” (a variant of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”).


     Hobos are, I suppose, very nearly obsolete nowadays, though the newspapers still sometimes refer to a crime suspect by the sinister name of “drifter,” glad perhaps to make it clear that he is not a local resident. The closest equivalent in America today is the homeless person, an apparition from whom many middle-class people shrink, as though misfortune might be contagious. Yet in the earlier twentieth century America’s cultural attitude toward hobos was more friendly, even at times admiring, and this sympathy was recorded in songs and stories.
     People had been ranging across the country in search of work ever since the construction of the railroads made free if hazardous travel an option. The population of internal migrants seeking work intensified after the demobilizations at the end of the Civil War. Estimates of the number of Americans forced on the road by poverty during the Great Depression range from one to two million, a good share of them children. During the thirties everyone was familiar with vagrants and beggars; their jungles were often large and well-established shantytowns. Enough people were traveling about to generate a culture of their own with laws, songs, and customary practices. Indeed, under the ironic name Tourist Union #63, hobos are reported to have held national conventions as early as 1889. [1]
     Perhaps the most dramatic sign of society’s sometime sympathy for hobos is the Chaplin tramp character which the comedian first assumed in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914). Chaplin rapidly became the biggest star in Hollywood, celebrated around the world. Constantly struggling against bosses and police, Chaplin’s character clearly had a subversive edge to which audiences (and the government) responded. [2] Emmett Kelly conceived the idea of the hobo circus clown years before he realized the character in performance in the late thirties. [3] Apart from his work with Ringling Brothers, Kelly also appeared at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field as mascot of the “Bums.” [4]
     In general sympathetic attention to the poor takes the form of pity and indignation. But the ethos culturally constructed about the figure of the hobo was often positive. Hobos were seen as the embodiment of such American values as freedom and individualism, their lifestyle a matter of choice, not a cruel necessity of an unjust system. Thus, the first of the rules in the suspect document purporting to be the Hobo Ethical Code passed by the Tourist Union #63 in 1889 is sometimes printed as “Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.” [5]
     This attitude on the part of transients or of their admirers suggests at the same time a critique of accepted social values. The happy hobo, looking after himself alone, casts into question the stability and responsibility of the family man. The hobo’s willful refusal to pursue a career flouts the importance of the work ethic and the definition of success by income. More radically, it criticizes the relation of owner and worker under capitalism. The hobo has not “sold out,” and thus remains free of control by those with money.
     These themes are all present in the seminal works of the hobo ethos, a group of three songs recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock. [6] McClintock, also known as “Haywire Mac” and “Radio Mac,” claimed to be the author as well as the performer of “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” McClintock had earned his bona fides as a bum with years of migrant labor as well as activism in the I.W.W., the only left group that sought to organize the homeless proletariat. In the late 1920s he recorded a number of tunes, a mixture of his own compositions, folk, and popular songs including three that were instrumental in shaping the hobo ethos: “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
     “The Bum Song” was popular enough in 1928 that, following McClintock’s release, it was covered that same year by at least six other artists. [7] The song accurately reflects its author’s heroic range. He is truly an epitome of America both geographically and in terms of work experience. “I beat my way from Frisco Bay to the rockbound coast of Maine/ To Canada and Mexico, then wandered back again.” He describes run-ins with police and railroad bulls and rejection by housewives, yet his spirit is irrepressible. His “troubles pale” when he “hit[s] the trail.” Turning down jobs that do not appeal to him, he enjoys a grand camaraderie with others on the road. “For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks/ We have good luck in bummin' our chuck and we never bother to work.” The type of hobo as happy wanderer, here on the grandest of scales, coast to coast, surviving risky encounters and making his way by his wits, is here clearly established.
     While the persona of the “Bum Song” lists a range of employment that reflects McClintock’s own, in a hint of the revolutionary potential of the hobo ethos, it also includes one incident of his refusing work when offered inadequate wages. The element of social protest is far from incidental for McClintock. He was a lifelong member of the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist union the I.W.W. and edited their Little Red Songbook (1909) which included an agit-prop version of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” blaming “the boss” for poverty and envisioning a time when “I get all the money I earn,/ The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.” Yet the notion of a hobo by choice, happily embracing a free lifestyle, persists in the very title and chorus as well as in the verse “when springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;/ We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.”
     In the version of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” McClintock recorded in 1928 the radical content has become comparatively inconspicuous. What had been the opening challenge “How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?” has slipped down to the sixth verse and the vision of a better future is absent altogether. Instead of criticizing capitalism for the misery it produces, the hobo here delights in his chosen lifestyle. “Rejoice and be glad for the Springtime has come/ We can throw down our shovels and go on the bum.” While the lines protesting low wages remain “Why don't you save all the money you earn/ If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn,” the recorded song concludes by blaming the hobo himself for his poverty: “I don't like work and work don't like me/ And that is the reason I am so hungry.”
     Again, the song was so popular that other versions appeared by at least seven artists followed a few years later by a movie of the same name. [8] Each of these emphasized the joy and independence of the hobo life, yet retained a remnant of social critique in the simple rebellion against the routine of work and the lure of that vestige of the American frontier, the open road.
     McClintock’s third contribution to the hobo ethos, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” is at once the most famous of his tunes and in a sense the least understood. The song was recorded many times and topped the Billboard country chart for a time in 1939 in a yodeling rendition by Robert “Tex” Morton. Generally (as in versions by Bing Crosby, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, or the New Christy Minstrels) the song is a high-spirited wish-fulfilment, its comedy heightened in the semi-authentic renderings by the combination of infantile raw appetite with tastes that run to cigarettes and whiskey. The point is further highlighted by the attractions of not only blind railroad bulls, but also open-door jails, and -- best of all -- you never have to change your socks. The linkage of the desires of an eight-year-old with those of an adult is an entertaining twist on the theme of transient as free man.
     This combination is notably more sinister in light of what McClintock claimed to be the original narrative in which the song is a dramatic moment. When he sued to establish his ownership of the song’s copyright, as part of his evidence McClintock quoted lyrics that he had not recorded.


The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, "Sandy,
I've hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I'll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."


The beguiling picture of a land of plenty is then in reality part of a campaign by an older tramp (the jocker) to seduce a young man (the punk). [9] The validity of this view of the song is attested not only by its author but also by other versions including similar sexual language which have been collected by folklorists, both as “The Big Rick Candy Mountain” and as “The Apple-Knocker’s Lament.” In addition, there is ample testimony concerning such predatory relationships from others who spent time on the road beginning with Josiah Flynt, similar to those reported. The song, then, was an in-joke, a hobo’s satiric picture of one type among their number, making his pitch as what some have called a situational homosexual, such as those sometimes found in prisons and on shipboard.
     This treatment of the joys of hobo life not as the choice of a free spirit but rather as a cynical fraud designed to take advantage of naïve youth is a salutary reminder of the actual rigors of homelessness. In fact, make-do sexual arrangements, sometimes involving coercion, while ugly, were hardly more so than the filth, disease, hunger, and danger tramps faced daily.
     For the citizen to whom the hobo is totally Other, he must be either the object of social work and charity or the outcast semi-criminal, yet, at a time when many people felt themselves little above the status of transient workers, these identities played little role in popular culture’s view of such men. The hobo ethos in America has instead two somewhat contradictory elements. On the one hand, the hobo is an emblem of the free man, unattached to job or family, glorying in his autonomy and philosophically scornful of worldly goods. As such he approaches other bohemian ideals, appealing to the romantic impulses of those with more constraining responsibilities, yet attracting as well some who actually lived rough. On the other, he is the victim of selfish capitalists who keep for themselves far more than they can enjoy while others, such as the hobo, must do without. He must suffer hunger, uncertainty, cold, and legal jeopardy while he wishes only for a job that pays a living wage. Here the hobo is the vanguard of the working class whose life clarifies the system that dominates his steady-working brother as well. Somewhere behind both the popular images of the celebrating hobo and the protesting hobo one may seek the nitty-gritty real hobo enduring privations and ignominy, indeed, often risking his freedom and his very life in a struggle for survival that had to be renewed daily.



1. The story is that men with union cards were sometimes treated more decently than others by law enforcement officers who might consider them more likely honest working men. I have found varying facts and little documentary evidence for the hobo organization during the nineteenth century. After the affiliation with the town of Britt, Iowa, which continues to host hobo conventions today, the record is clearer.

2. Chaplin had applauded the Russian Revolution and later wrote admiring accounts of Soviet society. He had been a fellow traveler, closely observed by the F.B.I., for many years before he was blacklisted as a Communist in 1948.

3. Among the most familiar hobo clown performers since are Don Burda’s Homer and Red Skelton's "Freddy the Freeloader." A sort of epigone of the genre is Jackie Gleason’s role in Gigot, directed by Gene Kelly, a sentimental and pretentious fable considered by its star (who had conceived the project) to be great art.

4. The bum nickname originated with a cartoon by Willard Mullin of the New York World Telegram in 1939. The romance of the road was already subject to ironic treatment by 1941 when Preston Sturges made Sullivan’s Travels. Among the belated cultural vestiges of the heroic hobo is Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) in which he plays a tramp comedian. In 1965 Roger Miller had a hit with his “King of the Road.” Even later John Prine’s “The Hobo” (1978), later covered by Johnny Cash, asks where have the hobos gone, lamenting their disappearance as a loss of freedom. Tom Waites and Bob Dylan have both cultivated a hobo history.

5. There are varying texts, usually claiming that the rules were passed in 1889 in St. Louis. I have not seen any documentary evidence supporting these details. The popularity of the rules and their proliferation online makes the investigator suspicious. The existence of hobo courts to which the code makes reference is confirmed by some testimony, irregular and even exceptional as such proceedings may have been. I suspect that the elaborate system of hieroglyphic signs by which hobos are said to have communicated with each other, while it may contain a seed of truth, is largely journalistic invention.

6. in an extraordinary career, McClintock, called “Haywire Mac,” exemplified the itinerant worker. He not only recorded a number of classic American roots songs; he also worked as a miner, on the railroad, as a cowboy, in a circus, as a sailor and in China and the Philippines during wartime. There is some doubt about the extent of McClintock’s originality in these songs, portions of which may have been circulating orally before his versions.

7. Frank Luther, “Lazy" Larry (Frank Marvin), Vernon Dalhart (Marion Try Slaughter), Eddie Kirk (Ed Kirkeby), Jack Kaufman, and "Hobo" Jack Turner (Ernest Hare).

8. Vernon Dalhart, Al Jolson, Jack Kaufman, Frank Luther, Hobo Jack Turner, and Pete Wiggins 1928. In 1933 Lewis Milestone made a film called Hallelujah, I’m a Bum written by Ben Hecht and S. N. Behrman with Al Jolson in which the star sang the song. Doubtless due to the movie, the song enjoyed a revival and a number of recordings by various artists that year. The Al Jolson revision includes topical references to John D. Rockefeller and to Chevrolet and the simile “the moon’s your chandelier” clearly originating in Tin Pan Alley.

9. References in fact predate Flynt’s full discussion in his 1899 volume Tramping with Tramps. Nels Anderson, the leading early sociologist studying hobos says flatly “all studies indicate that homosexual practices among homeless men are widespread.” (The Hobo: the Sociology of the Homeless Man, 1923). Most writers who actually rode the rails, including Hemingway and London, reported scenes of pedophilia and sexual aggression. Finally, rule 13 of the Hobo Code of Conduct reads “Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.”




“The Bum Song” Harry McClintock

Come all you jolly jokers and listen while I hum
A story I'll relate to you of the great American bum
>From the east to west, the north to south, like a swarm of bees they come
They sleep in the dirt and wear a shirt that's dirty and full of crumbs

Oh, it's early in the morning and the dew is off the ground
The bum arises from his nest and gazes all around
>From the boxcar and the haystack he gazes ev'rywhere
He never turns back upon his tracks until he gets a square

I beat my way from Frisco Bay to the rockbound coast of Maine
To Canada and Mexico, then wandered back again
I've met town clowns and harnessed bulls as tough as a cop could be
And I've been in ev'ry calaboose in this land of liberty

I've topped the spruce and worked the sluice and taken a turn at the plough
I've searched for gold in the rain and cold and worked on a river scow
I've dug the clam and built the dam and packed the elusive prune
But my troubles pale when I hit the trail a-packin' my old balloon

Oh, standin' in the railroad yards awaitin' for a train
Waitin' for a westbound freight, but think it's all in vain
Goin' east they're loaded, goin' west sealed tight
I think we'll have to get aboard the fast express tonight

Oh, lady, would you be kind enough to give me something to eat
A piece of bread and butter and a ten foot slice of meat
A piece of pie or custard to tickle me appetite
But really I'm so hungry, I don't know where to sleep tonight

SPOKEN:
BUM: Good morning, mum
LADY: Good morning, bum
BUM: I just got in
LADY: Yes, well you can just get out again
BUM: But lady, I'm trav'lin'
LADY: Well, keep right on travellin', who's keepin' ya?
BUM: Honest, mum, I don't know where me next meal is comin'
LADY: And did ya think this was an information bureau?
BUM: Lady, haven't you a bite to eat in the house?
LADY: I have that, and a six foot Irishman comin' home at five o'clock to eat it. On your way now.
BUM: All right. Goodbye, mum.
LADY: Goodbye, bum.

Oh, sleeping against the station, tra-la-la-la-la-lation
That's our recommendation, hurrah-herree-harrum
For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks
We have good luck in bummin' our chuck and we never bother to work

I met a man the other day I never had met before
He asked me if I wanted a job shovellin' iron ore
I asked him what the wages were and he said, "Ten cents a ton"
I said, "Old fellah, go chase yourself, I'd rather be on the bum"

Oh, sleeping in the pokies, oggie-oggie-oggies
Smokin' snipes and stogies, hurrah-herree-herrum
For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks
We have good luck in bummin' our chuck, God bless the man that works



“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Harry McClintock 1909 Little Red Songbook version

Why don't you work like other folks do?
How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?
Refrain
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.
Oh, why don't you save all the money you earn?
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn.
Whenever I get all the money I earn,
The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.
Oh, I like my boss, he's a good friend of mine,
That's why I am starving out on the bread line.
When springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;
We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.



“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Harry McClintock recorded version

Rejoice and be glad for the Springtime has come
We can throw down our shovels and go on the bum
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

The Springtime has come and I'm just out of jail
Without any money, without any bail
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I went to a house and I rapped on the door
And the lady says, "Bum, bum, you've been here before"
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I like Jim Hill, he's a good friend of mine
That is why I am hiking down Jim Hill's main line
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I went to a house and I asked for some bread
And the lady says, "Bum, bum, the baker is dead"
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

Why don't you work like other men do
Now, how can I work when there's no work to do
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

Why don't you save all the money you earn
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I don't like work and work don't like me
And that is the reason I am so hungry
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again



Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Al Jolson version

Rockefeller's busy giving dough away;
Chevrolet is busy making cars;
Hobo, you keep busy when they throw away
Slightly used cigars.
Hobo, you've no time to shirk.
You're busy keeping far away from work.
The weather' s getting fine.
The coffee tastes like wine.
You happy hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"
Why work away for wealth
When you can travel for your health?
It' s spring, you hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"
Your home is always near.
The moon's your chandelier;
Your ceiling is the sky,
Way up high.
The road is your estate,
The earth your little dinner plate;
It's spring, you hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"

Why don't you work like other folks do?
How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?
[ALTERNATE LAST LINES: How the hell can I work when the sky is so blue?
OR: How can I get a job when you're holding down two?]
CHORUS:
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.
Oh, why don't you save all the money you earn?
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn.
Whenever I get all the money I earn,
The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.
Oh, I like my boss, he's a good friend of mine,
That's why I am starving out on the breadline.
When springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;
We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.



The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Harry McClintock

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
....
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains



The Big Rock Candy Mountain (3) The Apple-knocker’s Lament

On a very fine day in the month of May
A great big bum (big burly) came hiking
And he seated his pratt (himself) 'neath a big green tree
Which was very much to his liking.

On the very same day in the month of May
A farmer's lad came hiking.
Said the bum to the son, "If you will come,
I'll show you some sights to your liking.

"I'll show you the bees in the cigarette trees,
The big rock candy mountains,
The chocolate heights where they give away kites
And the sody-water fountains.

"The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
The marbles made of crystal.
We'll join the band of Dangerous Dan
Who carries a sword and a pistol."

So the bum set out with the lad at his back.
For six long months they travelled,
Then the boy came back on the very same track
And this (sad) tale (he) unravelled.

"There are no bees in the cigarette trees,
No big rock candy mountains,
No chocolate heights where they give away kites,
Or sody-water fountains.

"No lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
No marble made of crystal.
There is no such man as Dangerous Dan
Who carries a sword and a pistol.

"He made me beg and steal his eggs (sit on his peg)
And he called me his jocker.
When I didn't get pies he blacked my eyes
And called me his apple-knocker.

"No more I'll roam from my very fine home.
I'll save my junkerino.
You can bet your lid that this old kid
Won't be no one else's punkerino."

note: A typescript copy of this is No. 377 in the Robert C. Gordon
Inferno in the Library of Congress, sent to Gordon by Wheaton
H. "Skin" Brewer of Lebanon, Oregon, in 1927 under the title of
"The Appleknocker's Lament."

Blind Willie Johnson Preaches

     Gospel is Old English for good news, and the predominant message of much gospel music is indeed joy at an unquestioned salvation. The worshipper delights in every breath, since the future ultimately holds a sure deliverance. This theme and the ecstatic mood it may produce are prominent in the recordings of Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson’s bottleneck slide guitar work and growly intense vocals owe much to the blues, but many of his songs are nonetheless celebratory and optimistic. His vision includes, however, the suffering Christ no less than the risen Lord, and he offers the inspiration of Jesus’ model to believers who may have much to endure in their own lives. Sometimes, Johnson’s songs, whether traditional or original, reach further yet, to suggest an ultimate reality beyond joy and suffering, no less certain for being bound in mystery.
     While the blues are largely concerned with pain, loneliness, and frustration, Johnson sings of his “joy and gladness in “Praise God I’m Satisfied.” Death is welcomed in the almost rollicking easy tones of “Bye And Bye I'm Goin' To See The King”: “And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God.” A variety of ingenious figures of speech reinforce the point. In “It's Nobody's Fault But Mine” Christ appears as a benevolent bail bondsman, freeing the captive soul. “God don’t never change” offers the delightful image of the singer so consumed in divine worship that he can direct even a mountain to “skip around like a lamb.” The magical efficacy of Christ’s blood is affirmed in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole.” [1] Sin and damnation play very little role in Johnson’s ministry, though in “If It Had Not Been For Jesus” the singer notes that Christ ”washed my black heart white” without further details.
     Among the other songs with similar emphasis are “Let your light shine on me” with its claim that luminous “angels in heaven, done write my name,” “Trouble Will Soon Be Over,” “He’s my Bosom Friend,” “Sweeter as the Years Go By,” “Go With Me To That Land,” and “Church I'm Fully Saved Today.”
     Pain and suffering, however, receive their due. The very heart of the Christian myth with its deity mysteriously combining divine and human natures emphasizes Jesus’ passion on the cross, the strongest available image of anguished torture. The believer’s own difficulties are given meaning while at the same time appearing less than his Lord’s. One may safely assume that Johnson’s African-American listeners had sufficient troubles of their own to identify readily with Christ.
     Most profound of Johnson’s songs on this theme is doubtless “Dark was the night.” Johnson takes his opening line from a pre-existing hymn, then follows with a series of novel and powerful images. I am reminded of Crashaw by “his sweat like drops of blood ran down.” These drops are mysteriously present in the Garden to which the sinner is directed. Ultimately the song teaches the imitation of Christ: “Learn of him the cross to bear.” “Jesus Make Up my Dying Bed” is an imaginative tour de force in which Christ is the singer’s spouse and the suffering of worshipper and worshipped are conflated.
     Contemporary afflictions appear: the Titanic disaster in “God Moves On The Water” and WWI and Spanish flu in “Jesus Is Coming Soon.” Probably the most powerful metaphor for suffering, one appearing multiple times in both sacred and secular lyrics is the separation from God as loss of a loving parent in “Mother's Children Have A Hard Time” and “Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying.”
     Thus Johnson’s lyrics, like the Psalms, chart the high and low of experience. There is a numinous glow, however, about Johnson’s religious vision, a sheen of mystery imponderable until the Apocalypse which has little to do with good and evil or pain and pleasure. I think, for instance, of the gloriously minimal miracle of “The Rain Don't Fall On Me,” the understated imagery of “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning,” and the open-mouthed wonder of “The Soul Of A Man.” The culmination of this nearly occult aspect of the poet’s religious experience is surely the haunting “John the Revelator” which invokes the most spectacularly mystifying book of the Bible repeatedly as though its very mention is a magic charm. The song is made of this hypnotic iteration along with a few enigmatic symbols (“Judea’s Lion”) and an account of a theophany to Moses. This song is anticipated by the mention in “I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge” of the “dragon hurled down by the preacher” with its specific scriptural reference.
     Though a musical artist is hardly a theologian, gospel singers have always been inspired and motivated not only by their faith, but also by the approaches that have proven successful in appealing to an audience whose critical judgment is not suspended even in church. Willie Johnson’s oeuvre emphasizes the joy and confidence of salvation, with a darker shadow acknowledging suffering, then ornamented with a bit of mystery and magic. His message reached not only the streets and storefront churches, but into Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, and new versions of his songs by Reverend Gary Davis, folk revival figures like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Fairport Convention, and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as rockers like Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin.


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

Truckin'

This essay is followed by the texts of Blind Boy Fuller’s "She's a Truckin' Little Baby," Ted Koehler’s “Truckin’,” Big Bill Broonzy’s “Truckin’ Little Woman,” Garcia, Lehr, Lesh, and Hunter’s “Truckin’, Hot Tuna’s” Keep On Truckin’,” and Eddie Kendricks’ “Keep on Truckin’.”


     The Symbolist poets realized that images can be strengthened by underdetermination, that is, by giving the reader insufficient information to decode a term precisely, opening a route to associations and connotations that might otherwise be excluded. Furthermore, the implications of every image are conditioned by the tradition, such that a range of earlier usages may suggest allusive reference either strongly or weakly, expanding the semantic field in complex and subtle ways rather than limiting it as a definition would do. In addition, all figures of speech might be said to be imprecise in that the vehicle (in I.A. Richards’ term) applies only in part to the tenor. Paradoxically, what might seem inexactness provides the ability to formulate new significations, far more densely laden with information than ordinary discourse. Meaning becomes considerably more complex once the reader surveys a variety of texts by different authors. The use of the word “trucking” in American popular music indicates the vigor and elasticity of a term that gains in power with each novel turn in usage.
     Thanks to R. Crumb and, in his wake, the Grateful Dead, “truckin’” has entered common vernacular usage, yet long before the fame of Mr. Natural and Jerry Garcia, the expression had a place in American song lyrics. In "She's a Truckin' Little Baby," recorded in 1936 by Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen), [1] the word is nothing more than rhyming slang, a euphemism for fucking (like both “jazz” and “rock and roll”). The singer warns rivals, “Catch you truckin' with her, I'm gonna sure shoot you down,” and celebrates his beloved in familiar hyperbole.


Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away, yeah
Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
Make a lame man run, make a blind man see
Sure gets good when she truckin' with me.


     This usage is not surprising from Fuller, a Piedmont street musician whose repertoire included a number of outrageous hokum songs such as “I Want Some of Your Pie,” “ What’s That Smell like Fish,” and “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon.” The genre, reveling in double entendre, arose from minstrel show comedy to popularity on “race” (black) and sometimes on “old-time” (white country) recordings as well in the 1930s.
     A number of other artists further exploited this vein, including John Jackson, another Piedmont musician, who performed in the 1940s but never recorded until the 60s. Jackson’s “Trucking Little Baby” opens with the words, “That little girl, she's a-named Irene./ Got good jelly but she's stingy with me.” Bill Bill Broonzy recorded “Trucking Little Woman” in 1938 which notes that “She can look up as long as you can look down.” Decades later John Hammond used the same sort of ribald lyrics in his “Trucking Little Boy” as did Hot Tuna for their version of “Keep on Truckin’” on the Splashdown album in 1984.
     The term trucking, however, doubtless due to an extension of the same euphemistic usage, was also familiar to Fuller’s audience as a dance step popular since the late 1920s. [2] Though much couple dancing may be seen as formalized sexual intercourse, and some dance moves are clearly erotic, this one is instead descended from the struts or cake-walks, conventionalized moves indicating confidence and ebullient joy. Considered by some a decorative elaboration on the Lindy Hop, the dancers lift and lower their shoulders while waggling a pointing forefinger in the air. The program of the 1935 Cotton Club Parade show includes a number titled “Truckin’” credited to Ted Koehler which is free from sexual innuendo. Like many other dance craze lyrics, the words simply announce the new vogue, saying everyone’s doing it.
     From the dance usage, perhaps via marathon dance competitions, the term came to have the more common contemporary meaning of persisting or carrying on despite difficulties. The phrase “Keep on trucking” seems to have been unrecorded until Crumb’s images to accompany Fuller’s words in 1967, though some trace it plausibly to usage decades earlier among Pullman car porters or long-haul truckers. It can hardly surprise one that the phrase emerged in African-American vernacular to indicate persistence, “keeping on keeping on,” in a hostile racist world. In the three word phrase the erotic implications are often subdued though not out of place. Love-making was always a recreation and solace available to the poor as well as the rich.
     In the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’,” an account of the band’s road trips, the sense of restless traveling, of moving forward predominates. Against a background of poker imagery (a modern version of the wheel of fortune) and the evocation of Crumb’s “do-dah man” [4] The song opens with a collage of various cities, though to the singer they seem “all on the same street.” The theme of love is included in passing with these lines.


Most of the cast that you meet on the streets speak of true love,
Most of the time they're sittin' and cryin' at home.
One of these days they know they better get goin'
Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.


     Eddie Kendricks, once of the Temptations, had a number one solo hit with “Keep On Truckin’.” Here the sexual metaphor returns with fierce intensity, while the propulsive, “traveling,” implications of the word are also exploited. With his incoherent moans and exclamations, the singer enacts sexual pleasure. His “love jones” has set him “on fire.” Though saying it’s a “double shame” to be so helplessly enraptured, he continues to “keep trucking” toward “good loving.” Kendricks then explicitly evokes the image of a truck on the highway with his references to “diesel-powered” and the “red ball express.” [3] Lines such as “Ain't nothin' holdin' me back nothin'/ I'll keep right on, right on truckin'” might refer equally to love-making or to life in general.
     As T. S Eliot said in his immensely influential “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” tradition involves far more than “blind or timid adherence” to earlier models. According to Eliot the appreciation of any writer necessarily involves “the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” Thus the addition of every new work requires the alteration “of the whole existing order.” The meaning of Kendricks’ song includes the previous meanings, not only of the word trucking, but indeed of every word in his lyrics. He depends as do all poets, on the competence of the reader (or listener) to understand his language in the context of his tradition. For the word trucking, this includes well-established implications of sexual desire and dogged determination, both associated with the energy of a fully loaded semi barreling down the road. In his song’s final word, “truckin’,” the listener can hear a symphony of allusions to generations of earlier poets.



1. Fuller also recorded “Long Time Trucker” which adds little to my analysis. The song is more concerned with his concern about his lover’s black cat bone.

2. The dance has been variously attributed to Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham and to Cora LaRedd of the Cotton Club, but most authorities agree that it was largely a renaming of previously existing moves, some of which had been featured in nineteenth century minstrel shows.

3. Soldiers on the historic Red Ball Express convoys following D-Day were mainly African-American.

4. Do-dah (or its variations) most readily alludes to the chorus of Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” though baby boomers will think also of Disney’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Song of the South. In fact the syllables occur as far back as the minstrel show favorite “Ole Zip Coon.” In Thomas Birch’s 1834 version the chorus is “O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.” In fact, due to its jocular nonsense sound, doo-dah has been used as a slang term with such varied referents as cocaine, breasts, penis, and the city of Wichita as well, I suspect, as others of which I am unaware.


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


"She's a Truckin' Little Baby" Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen)

I got a gal here in this town, she's the best lookin' brown around
I got a gal in this town, best lookin' brown around
She's a-strictly tailor-made, she ain't no hand-me-down
Catch you truckin' with her, I'm gonna sure shoot you down
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
Truckin' my blues away

Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
Keep on truckin' mama, girl you truck my blues away
I got a gal she's little and neat
When she's starts to truckin', man it's so sweet
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
Truckin' my blues away

Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away, yeah
Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
I know a gal she's long and tall
When she starts to truckin' make a little man squall
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
I mean, truckin' my blues away, yeah

do be dee be da....zee za za etc.

Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
She has a dance she call biddle-um-bum
Sure missin' somethin' if you don't truck some
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away
Truckin' my blues away

Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away, yeah
You don't have to hurry, don't have to go
Wait a little while you might wanna truck some more
Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
Truckin' my blues away

Keep on truckin' mama, truckin' my blues away, yeah
Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away
Make a lame man run, make a blind man see
Sure gets good when she truckin' with me
Keep on truckin' baby, truckin' my blues away


“Truckin’” Ted Koehler

Listen you rhythm rounders,
Harlem is talking now
You know the truck bug got you,
But you never knew just how.

That’s what I want to tell you,
I’ve got it figured out.
Now if you want the lowdown,
Here’s how it came about.

We had to have something new,
a dance to do up here in Harlem,
so someone started Truckin’
as soon as the news got round.

The folks downtown came up to Harlem.
Everybody Truckin’. It didn’t take long
Before the High Hats were doin’ it,
Park Avenue nuin’ it, All over town,
You’ll see them Scufflin’, Shufflin’, Truckin’ along.
It spread like a forest blaze, became a craze
and thanks to Harlem now everybody’s Truckin’.


"Trucking Little Woman" William Lee Conley Broonzy (Big Bill Broonzy)

See that woman, her hands up over her head?
Did you hear me, what I said?

She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, here from Tennessee.

Wake up, boys. Don't you be no fool.
This little gal here, she's just from school.
She got plenty sense. She ain't no fool.
Got big eyes 'cause she's stubborn as a mule, but

She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, here from Tennessee.

This little gal that I'm singin' about
Is strictly tailor-made and it ain't no doubt.
She's built up round, right on the ground.
She can look up as long as you can look down, 'cause

She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, here from Tennessee.

I's just wonderin' what's that Annie got?
Where does she keep it, an' in what drawer?
Where did she get it? How much it cost?
Eyes like a big motor with a double exhaust, 'cause

She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, don't you know.
She's a truckin' little woman, here from Tennessee.

See that woman goin' down the road,
Jumpin' an' jackin' like a model-T Fo'd.

She's a truckin' mother for you, don't you know.
She's a truckin' mother for you, don't you know.
She's a truckin' mother for you, here from Tennessee.


"Truckin'" Grateful Dead (Garcia,Weir, Lesh, and Hunter)

Truckin' got my chips cashed in. Keep truckin', like the do-dah man
Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin' on.

Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.

Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans;
New York's got the ways and means; but just won't let you be, oh no.

Most of the cast that you meet on the streets speak of true love,
Most of the time they're sittin' and cryin' at home.
One of these days they know they better get goin'
Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.

Truckin', like the do-dah man. Once told me "You've got to play your hand"
Sometimes your cards ain't worth a dime, if you don't lay'em down,

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me What a long, strange trip it's been.

What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,
All a friend can say is "Ain't it a shame?"

Truckin', up to Buffalo. Been thinkin', you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin' on.

Sittin' and starin' out of the hotel window.
Got a tip they're gonna kick the door in again
I'd like to get some sleep before I travel,
But if you got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in.

Busted, down on Bourbon Street, Set up, like a bowlin' pin.
Knocked down, it gets to wearin' thin. They just won't let you be, oh no.

You're sick of hangin' around and you'd like to travel;
Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down.
I guess they can't revoke your soul for tryin',
Get out of the door and light out and look all around.

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me What a long, strange trip it's been.

Truckin', I'm a goin' home. Whoa whoa baby, back where I belong,
Back home, sit down and patch my bones, and get back truckin' on.
Hey now get back truckin' home.


“Keep on Truckin’” Hot Tuna

Well, now keep on truckin' mama
Truck my blues away

Well I say, keep on truckin' mama
Truck my blues away

Here you come baby big as sin
Tell what you been doin' by the shape you're in

So keep on truckin' mama
Now truck my blues away

If you been doin' like I think you been doin'
I can't do that 'round here
I said, you been doin' like I think you been doin'
I can't do that 'round here

Here you come mama big as hell
Tell you knew by way you smell

So keep on truckin' mama
Truck my blues away

Now what's that smell like fish oh babe
I really would like to know
And tell me, what's that smell like fish pretty mama
I really would like to know

That ain't puddin' baby, that ain't no pie
It's the stuff that I got you by

So keep on truckin' mama
Truck my blues away

Now yes you gotta leave my house this mornin'
Get your yas yas outta my door
Well I said, yes you gotta leave my house this mornin'
Get your yas yas outta my door

Ashes to ashes baby, dust to dust
Whatcha gonna do when that damn thing rusts

So keep on truckin' mama
Truck my blues away


“Keep on Truckin’” Eddie Kendricks

Ooh...
Ooh...
Ooh...

Keep on truckin', baby
I got to keep on truckin'
Got to get to your good lovin'
Huh...huh...huh...huh...huh...

Shame
A double shame on me, yeah
Love
Love, I let it control me, yeah

From just one kiss I am inspired
To lovers in time there's a fire

And I'll keep on truckin', baby
I got to keep on truckin'
I got to get to your good lovin'
Huh...huh...huh...huh...

Baby, its bad
It's so hard to bear
Yes, babe
You're hard to bear

I've got a fever rising with desire
It's my love jones and I feel like I'm on fire

And I'll keep on keep on truckin', baby
I got to keep on truckin'
Got to get to your good lovin'
Huh...huh...huh...huh...

Feelin' good
No, you can't stop the feelin'
No, you can't stop the feelin'
No, not now

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

Keep on truckin' on
Keep on truckin' on
Keep on truckin'

Keep on truckin' on
Keep on truckin'

Yes, I've got a fever rising with desire
It's my love jones and I feel like I'm on fire

And I'll keep on keep on truckin', baby

I'm the red ball express of lovin'
Diesel-powered straight to you, I'm truckin'
In old Temptation's rain, I'm duckin'
For your love through sleet and snow, I'm truckin', ooh

I'm the red ball express of lovin'
Diesel-powered straight to you, I'm truckin'
In old Temptation's rain, I'm duckin'
For your love through sleet and snow, I'm truckin'

Ain't nothin' holdin' me back nothin'
I'll keep right on, right on truckin'
Ain't nothin' holdin' me back nothin'
I'll keep right on, right on truckin'

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, truckin'
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, truckin'

Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song]

Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota (Powers)

     William Powers’ book, though a scholarly anthropological work, engages the poet and the literary theorist as well. The author, who is fluent in Lakota, had, at the time of the book’s publication, spent thirty-six years in field work on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
     His primary focus is the special language used for sacred discourse, both among the group’s spiritual leaders and between an individual “medicine man” and supernatural entities. (The term may sound out-dated, but it seems it is a direct translation from Lakota.) Other Lakota maintain that the language of such utterances is wholly unintelligible to them, though this is not literally true. Reaching the spirit realm is certainly an ambitious task for words, but even the secular poet generally strives for some level of discourse set apart, lexically, rhythmically, and formally from other uses of language. He covers as well the extreme case of verses in vocables without any ordinary words, rather like scat singing or Dada sound poetry.
     Powers provides a good number of song texts to demonstrate the character of this poetry, though the words seem weak isolated from the performance situation. In addition he comments on the significance of numerological patterns to the community and on a variety of other fascinating topics, among them the complex and dynamic interplay between Christian and indigenous religious thought, the relationship of ritual to song, and the role of the cross-dressers often (misleadingly) called berdaches. His exposition of each of these topics is supported by precise and convincing evidence. He is explicit about his debts to Lévy-Bruhl, often disregarded now, on the one hand and the still-fashionable Lévi-Strauss on the other.


Cloud Gate Song (Zhang Ji, trans. Jonathan Chaves)

     Impressed as are many other Westerners with the great Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets, I read with interest Chaves’ versions of this Confucian, the first book-length presentation of the poet in a European language. Much of the poetic sensibility is familiar: the pleasure in retirement, in observation of nature, and in friends. Here the lens is more worldly, less mystical, than in the Buddhist Wang Wei, for instance. Zhang was known for “Music Bureau” poems mimicking folk forms which purport to express popular sentiments. A good number of poems comment on contemporary history, in particular the wars resulting from Tibetan incursions.
     Chaves’ book is valuable not merely because it allows a glimpse of a significant Chinese poet. His introductory remarks defend his choice here to preserve the rhyme schemes of the original texts in his translations. He ably discusses the issue in general, noting the overwhelming choice of free verse among European translators of Chinese in spite of the fact that, as he notes, all classic Chinese poetry is rhymed. His thoughtful work should be welcomed by all who love Chinese poetry, even those who lack Chaves’ apparent sympathy for the New Formalists among American poets.
(Zhang Ji, the Tang Dynasty poet from Jiangnan whose work Chaves translated, should not be confused with the poet of the same name from Hubei who lived a few decades earlier.)


Ca Dao Viet Nam (trans. Balaban)

     John Balaban did alternative service in Vietnam and later returned to collect the folk songs of the countryside. He provides an adequate introduction to place his texts in context, but the reader is left wanting far more literary and anthropological information as well as notes on the individual songs. As it is, Balaban is a competent poet in English who provides a heterogeneous collection of material of a sort that had not at the time been published even in Vietnam. His simple, easy, direct language seems appropriate for a book whose range encompasses the proverbial saying, the wistful lament, the evocative image, the love-note, and a variety of other sorts of utterance. Readable though he is, I feel I have little sense of the style of the originals or the characteristics of the genre. Creditable as Balaban’s story is, very likely only a specialist scholar could provide such information. Still, one can only thank him for going out into the villages in the midst of war to preserve an art threatened by modern mass media even more than by armed conflict. It seems almost a golden age when every laborer had a favorite poem.

The Three Ravens

     “The Three Ravens” is one of the most well-known ballads in English tradition. The oldest text was published in 1611 in Melismata, Thomas Ravenscroft’s collection that preserved many otherwise ephemeral songs, where it is included in the “Country Pastimes” section next to a version of “Froggy Went A’Courtin’.” [1] The song is doubtless far older, however, and includes patently non-Christian elements. Its age is not its only mystery. One can only guess to what extent Ravenscroft may have, like Burns and Grimm, altered his informant’s text. The haunting charm the poem elicits in listeners and readers is in part due to a calculated semantic indeterminacy.

There were three rauens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
with a downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be.
With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.

The one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we our breakfast take?

Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,

His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their Master keepe,

His Hawkes they flie so eagerly,
There's no fowle dare him come nie

Downe there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with yong as she might goe,

She lift up his bloudy head,
And kist his wounds that were so red,

She got him up upon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake,

She buried him before the prime,
She was dead her self ere euen-song time.

God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman.


     The ravens loom darkly over the opening scene. Though crows and ravens have acquired various associations, they belong most commonly and intimately to the battlefield and to death. The opening words of the Iliad evoke the horror of human suffering through the birds that feed on corpses. The Hindu Shani whose vehicle is a raven is younger brother of Yama, god of death. The birds are a momento mori, reminding all of a common end in dissolution, yet in this song they are unable to eat the flesh of the fallen knight. His hounds and hawks act as protective spirits, guarding his body until it can be safely removed [2] by the principal agent of his salvation, the faithful, pregnant doe. A good deal of discussion has centered on whether the doe, hounds, and hawks are pre-Christian deities, enchanted humans, or simply symbolic representation of a man’s lover and friends or underlings, but the question is immaterial. The poem is a poignant wish-fulfillment which presents ideals of love and devotion, suggesting that these ideals may ameliorate or even – as in Christian readings – transfigure the hard facts of mortality with which the scene opened. The closing lines imply both the desirability of such a victory over death and its uncertainty. Within the brief compass of the aesthetic text, the order of nature, the necessary linkage of death with life, of being eaten with eating, is suspended. The diner’s pleasure and satisfaction require the prey’s fear and horror, but within the poem the reader, in a simple instance of sympathetic magic, can feel, like the knight, exempted from death’s horrors, particularly if the song is done to a fetching melody.
     Scott, in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, reprints “The Three Ravens” noting as “a singular circumstance, that it should coincide so very nearly” with a song he had collected in his own day called “The Twa Corbies.” He describes it as, not a “copy,” but a “counterpart” of the older song.

The Twa Corbies
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
“Where sall we gang and dine to-day?”
“In behint yon auld fail dyke,
“I wot there lies a new slain knight;
“And nae body kens that he lies there,
“But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
“His hound is to the hunting gane,
“His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
“His lady's ta'en another mate,
“So we may mak our dinner sweet.
“Ye'll sit on his white hause bane,
“And I'll pike out his bonny blue een:
"Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair,
“We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
“Mony a one for him makes mane,
“But nane sall ken whare he is gane:
“O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
“The wind sall blaw for evermair.”

     “The Twa Corbies” clearly plays on the expectations created by “The Three Ravens.” The knight’s allies – hound, hawk, and lover – have abandoned his body, allowing access for the birds to enjoy a “dinner sweet.” While his life may be over, they are busy with their own domestic arrangements, and anticipate ornamenting their nest with his blond hair. Whereas the knight in the earlier poem was laid to rest in a reassuring ceremony, this one will lie alone, unknown, the wind whistling through his skeleton.
     This cynical, ironic puncturing of the sweet solace delivered in the “Ravens” version suggests an entirely harsh and materialistic world with no saving grace whatsoever. The mention of “hause bane,” a survival in dialect of the Old English banhus, evokes that earlier era’s stern stoicism in facing straight-on the all-but-unendurable facts of life. As Bryhtnoth says in the "Battle of Maldon," “Resolve be the firmer, heart more ardent, and spirit stronger, as our strength fails!” Here it is fortitude and a wry acceptance that redeems the human in the face of the ultimate certainty of defeat.
     Such a reversal is, however, by no means the only possible variation spawned by the song. In 1930 in Avery County, North Carolina Mellinger Edward Henry recorded Mary Franklin singing “The Three Black Crows.” [3]

There were three crows sat on a tree, Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as crows could be,
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“What shall we have for bread to eat?” Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“On yonders hill there lies a horse.”
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“We'll perch ourselves on his backbone,
And pick his eyes out one by one;"
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”

     In this song the motif has become burlesque. [4] Though the birds still perch on the bones and pick out the eyes, the knight and his aides are absent. With their repeated caws and their manic wing-flapping, they seem slightly absurd. If the scene is still somewhat macabre, it is in the ridiculous manner of Addams or Gorey, more Bride of Frankenstein than the original. Mockery and laughter and averting the gaze from the more painful eventualities here provide relief from life’s pain. Considered in connection to the two earlier texts, the knight might be thought to be more powerfully present by being unmentioned, as though a human casualty would be too painful an image to evoke. In a sense, the knight’s disappearance is the most potent sign of how disturbing a specter he is. The silly nonsense song may bear the heaviest emotional freight. Is there not something chilling about that final “caw”?
     All these songs in their different ways testify to the human yearning for a peace all-but-unattainable in this world. Each with a distinctive tone and theme represents an aesthetic strategy to salve the psychic sores while providing entertainment to beguile the hour. Each employs the same conventional representation of the tragedy of mortality: a knight cut down in his prime, lying exposed and helpless in the first two, and conspicuously missing in the third.




1. “Three Blind Mice” may also owe its survival to its inclusion in this section of Ravenscroft’s book.

2. Similar to, for instance, the torngak of the Greenland Inuit.

3. Later published in Henry’s Folk Songs of the Southern Highlands.

4. Albert B. Friedman in his The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World attributes this song to the minstrel stage, but gives no details.

Moon Goin' Down [Charley Patton]

     Ellipsis is a device characteristic of folk song. Narrative, for instance, is omitted between exchanges of dialogue in classic English balladry. Sometimes the transmission process edits a song, with the audience assuming deleted information, though over time such changes can render the words obscure or alter their basic significance. Such decentering may enhance or enfeeble the lyric’s effect. Charley Patton’s “Moon Goin’ Down” [1] well illustrates the successful use of this elliptical style in the Delta blues.

Oh well, where were you now, baby,
Clarksdale mill burned down.
Oh well, where were you now, baby,
Clarksdale mill burned down.
I were way down Sunflower,
With my face all fulla frowns.

Lord, I think I heard the Helena whistle,
Helena whistle,
Helena whistle blow.
Lord, I ain’t gonna stop walkin’
Till I get in my rider’s door.

     After summoning his audience with an introductory “well,” Patton’s song begins with the fundamental blues note, a cry of unsatisfied desire. The singer is looking for his lady, calling out to her. Her absence is amplified by association with a catastrophic fire in Clarksdale. Perhaps she was in the doomed factory and is no longer alive. The mixture of tenses, while very likely a dialect usage, expresses anxiety and frustration as well as projecting the lovers’ separation from the past into the present in an almost cinematic way.
     Her answer seems for a moment cheerful. She was far from the deadly fire in a place called Sunflower, a name with the most positive associations. Only a moment later, however, she describes her face as “all fulla frowns.” Though we know nothing specific of her frustrations, they seem to mirror those of the singer.
     In the next verse the “Helena whistle” sounds a plaintive note of need, similar to the distant sound of wild geese in Chinese poetry. The whistle blows three times, with each repetition increasing the tone of tense melancholy. The singer declares that he will keep walking, evoking the image of life as a pilgrimage or a journey. Resolution arrives with the destination rhyme balancing “whistle blow”: viz. “my rider’s door.” This metaphor neatly invokes a world of experience through the implied term “easy rider,” [3] an illicit lover (as the courtly love couple too must be adulterous according the Andreas Capellanus). The lewd implication of his lover’s “door” jostles with fainter suggestions of the grave, the earth’s lid, and a final end of “walking.” On the realistic level, the words very naturally denote simple relief at returning home after a time on the road.
     The progress of images resembles what Pound through Fenollosa thought happened in Chinese poetry. After the initial statement of longing, the reader encounters the burned mill. The reader must connect the two even if it takes a challenging leap. Then follow the huge sunflower and the unhappy grimace. In the second stanza the sonic image of the whistle is succeeded by the walker and the arrival at the threshold. The relation between the parts is never explicit. The telegraphic lyrical style is, of course, reinforced by music and the artist’s powerful performing style, though these elements must remain untreated here.
     The moon of the title never appears in the lyric, yet it sets the tone precisely. The setting of the moon will plunge the world, already ill-lit, into deeper darkness. In Patton’s other recording with the same title, the “moon going’ down” is directly juxtaposed with a scene of the singer’s lover telling him “Lord, I don't want you hangin’ ‘round.” In the darkness of night the wayfarer may lose the road or be set upon, though in this alternative text he has the blessing of the North Star, a central image of freedom in spirituals. With this remnant of hope, unmentioned in the text above, the singer summons the spirit to make art of his pain and to imagine a better future once arrived in his “rider’s door” or in the equivalent “green house” of the second version.
     The use of a well-established corpus of phrases, lines, and songs in the Delta blues tradition, like similar material in more thoroughly oral cultures, allowed the poet to create more subtle and sophisticated works. Through sideways allusion, implication, and ellipsis, through signifying in fact, these poets created some of the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century.

1. Patton recorded another version using the same title. The text follows.

Aw, that moon has gone down, baby, North Star 'bout to shine
Aw, the moon goin' down, baby, North Star 'bout to shine
Rosetta Henry told me, "Lord, I don't want you hangin' 'round"

Oh well, where were you now, baby, Clarksdale mill burned down1?
Oh well, where were you now, babe, Clarksdale mill burned down?
(spoken: Boy, you know where I were)
"I were way down Sunflower with my face all full-a frowns"

They's a house over yonder, painted all over green
They's a house over yonder, painted all over green
(spoken: Boy, you know I know it's over there!)


2. This association existed as far back as the Shijing. Cf. also Du Fu’s “Climbing the Yue Yang Tower with Xia Shi-er,” Yuan dynasty play lyrics, and a great many other texts.

3. The significance of the term is suggested by Big Bill Broonzy’s claim to have heard early blues from a songster named See See Rider in 1908. Though the song of that title (with all its variations) has been done by a long list of singers, Ma Rainey’s 1924 recording is one of the most beautiful.


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