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

 

The Mule in Blues Imagery

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

Fishing Blues

Song texts follow the essay.

     Filmmaker, doper, and record collector Harry Smith chose to conclude his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music with Henry Thomas’ “Fishing Blues” [1] a song of surpassing sweetness and coy flirtatious sexual play. The lyrics have delicacy and grace reminiscent in formal elegance and frothy wit of the Cavalier poets; Thomas’ tone is altogether different from the assertive joyful rudeness of hokum songs or the cathartic and profound longing of many classic blues. [2] The singer wryly acknowledges the universality of desire and engages in playful competition with an interlocutor representing the listener. Love is here a pleasant game, allowing the singer to celebrate human sexuality as a quiet and absorbing pastime comparable to fishing.
     Thomas was born in 1874 and is thought by some to represent a largely lost “pre-blues” body of African-American music, but the folk process (unlike some of its enthusiasts) cares little for purity, and critics have seen influences of minstrelsy and parlor poetry in the verses of “Fishing Blues.” To Mack McCormick the song is “pure minstrel show material” derived from “Gumbo Chaff,” [3] though I find virtually no common ground with the earlier song apart from the mention of catching catfish. More certain is Thomas’ debt to James Whitcomb Riley, the author of “Shortnin’ Bread” (itself sometimes taken for a folk verse). (See below.) Yet these influences seem accidental, irrelevant to the primary design of the song. On the other hand, the text has significant and pervasive parallels to other blues.
     The analogy of fishing with sexual relationships combines the widespread blues imagery systems associating love with appetite and food and with animals. Fishing of course occupied a prominent place in the rural Southern lifestyle and offers many relevant associations with romance, not merely the uncertainty of outcome and the sensual pleasure of success, but a tempting verbal element: the rhyme pair hole and pole. [4] Apart from the broad analogy expressed in expressions like “there are plenty of fish in the sea” and “I think this one’s a keeper,” fish have often carried obscene associations of various sorts. The mere mention of “big fish little fish : playing in the water” follows a reference to the singer’s kissing another man’s wife in Kokomo Arnold’s 1937 version of “Salty Dog.”
     The fishing topos appears in a great many lyrics before and after Thomas, and the convention takes numerous forms: the lover may be male or female, fisher or fish, successful or unsuccessful. The angler is a woman in 1926 Ma Rainey’s 1926 “Don’t Fish in My Sea,” complaining about a wandering lover and asking somewhat illogically “If you don't like my ocean, don't fish in my sea.“ The man is an enthusiastic prey in William Harris’ 1929 version of “Kansas City Blues” which is the earliest use of which I am aware of the couplet, later used by dozens of artists: “I wished I was a catfish in the deep blue sea/ I'd have all these women just fishin' after me.” [5] On the other hand, the man is fishing in Tampa Red’s 1934 “Kingfishing Blues” which boats “I’m a kingfishin’ poppa, I know what kind of bait to choose./That’s why so many women cryin’ those ‘Kingfish Blues’” Man and woman seem both to be fishing in Freddie Spruell’s “ Let’s Go Riding” (1925): “Now if you got the line : I got the pole/ Now tell me dear : don't you know/ We can go out for a good time.”
     Just as in Greek Anthology lyrics, troubadour songs, and Elizabethan sonnets, a single motif undergoes endless transformation in this dynamic tradition. A subcategory of the form of the figure in which the fisherman is male and the fish the female object of his hunt is built around the idea of poaching. Bo Chatman, though not the source of the convention, presents a simple metaphor in “Old Devil” (1928) with his complaint, “Some lowdown scoundrel/ been fishing in my pond.” While other singers were taking this notion in other directions, Johnnie Temple elaborated and intensified this particular concept, adding an excruciating final phrase in the “Louise Louise Blues” (1936): “somebody baby is fishing in my pond/ They catching all my perches : grinding up the bone.” Then further, more baroque, play appears in Robert Johnson’s “Dead Shrimp Blues” (1936):

Someone's fishing in my pond
Catching my goggle-eyed perches :
and they barbecuing the bones
Now you taken my shrimp baby.

     The first verse of Thomas’ “Fishin Blues” simply establishes the topic as the poem’s persona gathers his gear without suggesting any broader implications. The listener will be aware, however of such usages as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lament “I won't go to fishing : mama I done broke my pole” in his“Southern Woman Blues” (1929) and Tommy McClennan’s faux naif reminder “Now when you go to fishing : now don't forget the pole.” (“Crosscut Saw Blues” 1941)
     The refrain line is repeated throughout with such regularity as to sound like a general principle, aided by the sexual associations, of the universality of desire.

Says you've been a-fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' fishin' too.

     The sudden introduction of the second person may seem enigmatic in this initial occurrence, but its naturalistic explanation would be simply that the singer, having seen another person fishing is inspired with the desire to do the same. The second person usage allows the singer to engage the listener directly, involving the outside world in the scene and allowing the singer to address his pointed banter through the individual audience member to people in general.
     The second verse lets the cat out of the bag with its opening lines:

I bet your life, your lovin' wife.
Can catch more fish than you. [6]

     There are now three people fishing, and the speaker is teasing “you” that your “lovin’” wife is likely to be more successful. This might seem still to be simple good-natured competitive joshing among friends, but the succeeding verses emphasize that “any fish bite, you've got good bait.” This presumably indicates why the wife will “catch more fish.” Here is an example of the arch and pointed figurative language called “signifying.’”[7] Should the listener be slow to recognize that the phrase demands particular attention, it is introduced with the phrase “here's a little somethin' I would like to relate” indicating that some significant insight will follow. The “bait” in romantic encounters is most obviously good looks. The speaker is ragging on the unidentified man while slyly complimenting the other’s lady.
     The song goes on to imply the joyful consummation of dinner or love-making.

Put on your skillet, don't never mind your lead.
Mama gonna cook 'em with the short'nin' bread.
Here the poet clearly alters James Whitcomb Riley’s line.

Fotch dat dough fum the kitchin-shed—
Rake de coals out hot an' red—
Putt on de oven an' putt on de led,—
Mammy's gwineter cook som short'nin' bread. [8]

     To Greil Marcus, always eager to be extravagantly enthusiastic, the singer’s accompaniment of himself on the “quills” (panpipes) “goes back to the end of the Palaeolithic.” To him the song’s line about “any fish bite if you got good bait” is delivered “as if it held all the secrets of the universe.” In the critic’s next line the conditional has diminished, and he declares that “there is an almost absolute liberation in ‘Fishing Blues,’ a liberation that is impossible not to feel and easy to understand.” [9]
      One need not impute such vague sublimity to the text to relish the song’s charm. Indeed, its casual amiable tone embodies the old formula ars est celare artem. Many of Thomas’ twenty-three recorded songs exhibit similar formal beauty, wit, and dancing vitality. In “Fishing Blues” it is as though a slender stream of pure unapologetic eros is spun like cotton candy into a warm, reassuring, good-natured affirmation of physicality. It may not strike all listeners as a source of absolute liberation, but it will do as well today as it did in 1928 as a celebration of human nature, temporarily free from real conflict, suffering, and fear, very similar to an afternoon that passes like a pleasant dream on the banks of a small Southern stream, a idyll in the life of one whose daily experience may be fraught with anxiety, which is to say any of us. To create a few moments of such serenity is no small artistic achievement. In fact, I suppose it just may be about all that we ever know, or at least all we need to know, of the cosmic mysteries.




1. The song, called “Fishin Blues” on the record, was originally recorded for Vocalion in Chicago in 1928. Smith’s inclusion of Thomas is the source of the modern popular versions such as those by the Loving Spoonful (1965), Taj Mahal (1969), and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (2002). Groups including Canned Heat and the Grateful Dead have performed other songs from Thomas’ repertoire. A few later recordings have some material in common with Thomas’ song, including “Gone to Fishin” (Leroy Williams, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Willie Martin, 1941), “I’m Going Fishing Too” (Alice Moore, 1936) and “Everybody’s Fishing’” (Bumble Bee Slim, 1935) which includes the lines:

I woke up this mornin’ an’ I grabbed my pole
Can’t catch the fish to save my soul.”
Everybody’s fishin’ – yes, Everybody’s fishin’;
Everybody’s fishin’, I’m gon’ fish some too.
Every little fish like this bait I got,
My babe home got her skillet hot.

2. Mississippi John Hurt was capable of bringing a similar warmth even to such potentially raunchy songs as “Candy Man Blues” or “Coffee Blues.”

3. See his admirable liner notes to Henry Thomas Texas Worried Blues: Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929 titled “Henry Thomas: Our Deepest Look at the Roots.”

4. In fact Thomas demonstrates his classic restraint and does not use this rhyme. In my opinion it is hovering in the background even though unspoken.

5. Robert Petway’s more popular “Catfish Blues” (1941) is more ambivalent with its reference to “poor” me.

Well, if I were a catfish, mama
I says, swimmin' deep down in the blue sea
Have these girls now, sweet mama
Settin' out, settin' out hooks for po' me

Tommy McClennan’s “Deep Blue Sea Fishing Blues” (1941) is similar: “Lord I would have all these good-looking women now now now : fishing after me”

6. Note how the singer slyly bets the other’s life and not his own!

7. Cf. Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking“ which says

I'm gonna break up this signifyin'
'cause somebody gotta go.

8. The verse entered the folk process rapidly and was recorded by E. C. Perrow on page 142 of his Songs and Rhymes from the South (1912) as sung by “Tennessee mountain whites.” Another equally unlikely adaptation from Riley’s “Shortnin’ Bread – Pieced Out” is “thought I hearn a chickin sneeze” used by Woody Guthrie in “Talking Blues” and Hank Snow in “Trouble Trouble Trouble.”

9. In what seems more likely carelessness and haste than conscious paradox, Marcus a few lines later says “this liberation or absolute is not easy to comprehend, but, just for that reason, it is here.” See his essay “The Old, Weird America” in Democracy and the Arts, edited by Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 123.



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.”


Fishing Blues by Henry Thomas

Went up on the hill about twelve o'clock.
Reached right back and got me a pole.
Went to the hardware and got me a hook.
Attached that line right on that hook.
Says you've been a-fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' fishin' too.

I bet your life, your lovin'wife.
Can catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite if you've got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm a-goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.

Looked down the river about one o'clock.
Spied this catfish swimmin' around.
I've got so hungry, didn't know what to do.
I'm gonna get me a catfish too.

Yes, you've been fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.
I bet your life your lovin' wife.
Catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite, got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.

Put on your skillet, don't never mind your lead.
Mama gonna cook 'em with the short'nin' bread.
Says you been fishin' all the time.
I'm a-goin a-fishin' too.
I bet your life, your lovin' wife.
Can catch more fish than you.
Any fish bite, if you've got good bait.
Here's a little somethin' I would like to relate.
Any fish bite, you've got good bait.
I'm a-goin' a-fishin', yes, I'm goin' a-fishin',
I'm a-goin' a-fishin' too.




Fishing Blues by Taj Mahal
I betcha' goin' fishin' all o' the time
Baby goin' fishin' too
Bet you life, your sweet wife
Is gonna catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I went on down my favorite fishin' hole
Baby got myself a pole an' line
Caught a nine poun' catfish
On the bottom, yes I got him
And I brought him home to my mom about supper time
Singin' many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
Many fish bites if you got good bait
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
Baby brother 'bout to run me up outta my mind
Sayin', "Can I go fishin' with you?"
So I took him on down to the favorite fishin' hole
Now what do you think that brother of mine did do?
Caught a seven poun' catfish
On the bottom yes he got him
Took him home to mama he was real gone
With his pole and his line
He was goin' fishin', yes he goin' fishin'
And baby goin' fishin' too
Put him in the pot, baby put him in the pan
Mama cook him till he nice an' brown
Get yourself a batch o' buttermilk, whole cakes mama
An' you put that sucker on the table and eat it on down
Singin' many fish bites if you got good bait
Well here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
My baby gone fishin' too
I betcha' goin' fishin' all o' the time
Mama goin' fishin' too
Bet you life, your sweet life
I gonna catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if you got good bait
Here's a little tip that I would like to relate
With my pole and my line
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too
I'm a goin' fishin', yes I'm goin' fishin'
And my baby goin' fishin' too

The Imagery of Hokum Blues Songs

I do not aim here at a comprehensive or accurate history. The songs mentioned below are an arbitrary selection generated by my own acquaintance and supplemented by some information readily available online. Apart from the patchiness of my field of data, there are doubtless errors. Very likely not every artist credited was the composer or even the first to record a given song, and a few dates are missing but such details have little relevance to my interest in the texts as poetry and my focus on the investigation of image systems and the nature of popular culture.


     Literature is particularly effective in elucidating the irrational, ambivalences, paradoxes, and mysteries. Most prominent in this last category are those of love, death, and the divine. And art properly expresses the broad range of human response. Thus love songs may idealize the beloved or may describe the pains of separation; they may also express pure lust. The hokum genre of blues songs popular in the twenties and thirties which developed out of minstrel and tent shows specializes, like similar calypso and British music hall songs, in witty double entendres and high-spirited enthusiasm for sex with no place for romance or any emotion other than physical desire.
     A great deal of popular music, indeed of all poetry, is concerned with love, including its physical side. Both “jazz” and “rock and roll” originally referred to the sexual act. The image systems deployed in hokum songs are specialized, emphasizing the mechanical, bestial, comic aspect of desire, what Frye would have called the low mimetic mode. Though a few songs such as Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘em Dry” (1935) are outrightly obscene, most hokum songs depend for their effect on the playful elaboration of transparent metaphors in which the images reinforce the jocular, self-mocking, good-time tone of these party songs.
     The assertive physicality of hokum songs is evident in the early classic “It’s Tight Like That” recorded in 1928 by Georgia Tom who formed a group called the Hokum Boys with Tampa Red,. [1] The song, very likely using scraps of earlier songs and covered by many later artists including Louis Armstrong and Leadbelly, opens with a wry apologia for its off-color content.

Listen here folks, gonna sing a little song
Don’t get mad, we don’t mean no harm [2]

     A veritable compendium of hokum motifs, the lyrics pass through a range of references, including to roosters, mules, and dogs, while food references include separate uses of bread and jelly. The singers make clever use of the mechanics of the sexual act: “Uncle Bill came home about a half past ten/ Put the key in the hole but he couldn't get in.”
     The euphemistic use of “it” appears in many other songs such as Papa Charlie Jackson’s “You Put It In, I‘ll Take It Out” (1934), "If It Don't Fit (Don't Force It)" by Lil Johnson (1937), “Take Your Hand Off It” (1937), “Wet It” by Freddie “Half-Pint” Jaxon (1937), and “She Done Sold It Out” by the Memphis Jug Band (1934). Nonsense words can serve the same purpose as in Blind Blake’s “Diddie Wa Diddie” (1929) or King Solomon Hill’s “Whoopee Blues” (1932).
     The bestial aspect of hokum sexuality is emphasized by songs using animal imagery. Perhaps best expressed in the impudent tone of James "Stump" Johnson’s 1928 "The Duck Yas-Yas-Yas" with its insistently physical “put him on the table with his legs stickin' up” (as well as automotive references). Tampa Red in a 1941 recording pleads “Let Me Play With Your Poodle.” A great many songs feature phallic snakes, among them Blind Boy Fuller’s 1935 “I’m A Rattlesnakin’ Daddy” in which Fuller makes extravagant boasts about his ability to “rattle” “all the time.” Memphis Minnie’s 1934 “Stinging Snake Blues” declares “I got a stinging snake, I love sometimes better than I do myself.”
     Hokum clearly contrasts with other uses of similar imagery. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan,” for example, is entirely different in its mysterious insect imagery and its deep and plaintive tone, a real cri de coeur. The meaning of the black snake is here problematized in a way that does occur in hokum songs in which the coded meaning of the animal is perfectly clear, and the tune light-hearted, recreational music.
     Likewise Slim Harpo’s classic “I’m a King Bee” (1957) (covered by the Rolling Stones and many other bands) is too intensely driving and dramatically boastful to sound like hokum, while Robert Hills’s “I Had a Gal for the Last Fifteen Years” (1936) fits the genre with its series of interchangeable images (hen and rooster, groundhog and hole, pork chops “to grease your fat lips”).
     The purely appetitive aspect of sexuality is also highlighted by the use of food imagery in which the object of desire is not merely objectified, but actually consumed. Probably the most widespread food image in blues is jelly and jelly roll, associated with female genitals since the early 17th century. [3] When, at the very dawn of jazz, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton adopted his sobriquet and released the "Original Jelly Roll Blues" as his first recording, he meant to associate his music unmistakably with more fleshly pleasures. [4] This term, however, perhaps because if its very ubiquity, rarely appears in true hokum in which part of the appeal is solving the implied riddle. A song like “Fogyism” by Ida Cox (1928) lacks the ebullience of hokum. In it the point is the plaintive lack of love that leads some to seek supernatural signs instead of learning from the obvious.

When your man comes home evil, tells you you are getting old,
When your man come home evil, tells you you are getting old;
That's a true sign he's got someone else baking his jelly roll.

     On the other hand George Carter’s “Hot Jelly Roll Blues” (1929) has the levity of a hokum tune. Here jellyroll represents a woman but also female desire: “it make a deaf woman hear” and even “made grandma marry her youngest grandson.” It expands to indicate vitality itself with the power to make “a little baby talk.” Clifford Gibson’s “She Rolls it Slow” (1931) also participates in the hokum spirit. Though indicating possessiveness by saying “I got a little woman” who “can bake good jellyroll,” he has no difficulty with a rival “She roll it for Uncle Bill, he like to lost his mind/ He want her to keep rolling it : all the time.” Lil Johnson in her “You Never Miss Your Jelly Roll Till Your Jelly Roller’s Gone” (1929) says she has been “whooping” all night long before proclaiming her love-longing.
     “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” by Louis Armstrong had been an instrumental and the music remained the focus even after Don Raye added lyrics in 1941. Nonetheless the definition for “barbecue” in Cab Calloway’s “Hepster’s Dictionary” as “a girl friend, a beauty” was doubtless always part of the song’s meaning. Here the declaration “I’m most wile about ma jelly roll” is imbedded in a lengthy and moving lyrical lament quite distant from the playful hokum songs. (Many of the same lines including the jelly roll reference occur in versions of “St. Louis Blues” by Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and others.) Similarly, in “Jelly Jelly” Earl Hines (1941) the music is paramount. Even in the Louis Armstrong "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None o' this Jelly Roll" relies more on music and scatting than on its use of “jelly roll,” here repeated like a mantra.
     Sausages are the food of choice for Bessie Smith (“Hot Dog Man” 1927), Butterbeans and Susie (“I Wanna Hot Dog for my Roll” 1927), Bo Carter (“Please Warm My Weiner” 1935), and Lil Johnson (“Sam the Hot Dog Man” 1936). Lil Johnson’s "Press My Button (Ring My Bell)" (1936) includes the lines "Come on baby, let's have some fun / Just put your hot dog in my bun." The implications of bananas are equally obvious in songs by Memphis Minnie (“Banana Man Blues” 1934) and Bo Carter ("Banana In Your Fruit Basket" 1931). (The song also uses images of a tub and washboard, a churn and dasher, cloth and needle, and meat and knife). Further variations are legion from Maggie Jones’ “Anybody Here Want To Try My Cabbage?” (1924) (with Louis Armstong and Fletcher Henderson accompanying) to Lil Johnson’s “Hot Nuts (Get ‘em from the Peanut Man)” (1936) and Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl” (1931). Smith sings, “I need a little sugar in my bowl/ I need a little hot dog on my roll . . . I need a little steam-heat on my floor . . . It's dark down there looks like a snake!” Finally, there are no less than thirty-five songs using the term “pigmeat” in Michael Taft’s compendious anthology. [5]
     In the sly insinuations of hokum, virtually every profession has a sexual implication. The locus classicus for vocational double entendre is Bo Carter’s “All Round Man” (1931). He begins with the relatively oblique line “I ain’t no butcher . . . but I can do your cutting ‘till the butcher-man come,” then proceeds to more outlandish and direct figures. Though no plumber, he can do “your screwing”; no miller, he can do “grinding,” no milkman, yet can “pull your titties,” no spring-man, but can “bounce your springs, and finally no auger-man, but he can “bore your hole.” Whistling Bob Howe & Frankie Griggs sing, “I’m the ice man, call me when you get hot” [6] in "The Coldest Stuff in Town" (1935). Among Memphis Minnie’s contributions to the topos are “My Butcher Man” (1933) and “Me and my Chauffeur” 1941.
     These characteristics of hokum imagery are to a large extent true as well for related genres such as ribald songs from the English music hall such as “My Girl’s Pussy” by Harry Roy and His Bat Club Boys (1931). Doubtless the best-known song of this sort to Americans is Billy Cotton’s “The Marrow Song” (1952) which Tim Curry performed in an immensely entertaining version on Saturday Night Live as “The Zucchini Song” in 1981. The calypso tradition is rich and wide, including such tunes as Calypso Mama’s “Don’t Touch Me Tomato,” The Mighty Panther’s “The Big Bamboo”(1963), and Lord Kitchener’s delightful “Muriel and de Bug” (1953).
     It was in calypso in fact that the great double entendre songs of the fifties are to be found. In American popular music the genre faded, though Dave Bartholomew recorded "My Ding-a-Ling" in 1952 (covered by Chuck Berry in 1972). The song featured as well in the repertoire of Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts who maintained a lively career without the aid of radio doing songs such as “Hot Nuts,” “Big Jugs,” and “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box.” Indeed the band plays on fourteen years after its founder’s demise.
     In these songs one finds nothing of the psychological depth of other blues, no clue of the actual tangles of relations between the sexes, of profound loss or longing or of guilt or recrimination. Indeed the songs convey little except enthusiastic lust. The image systems reinforce this view of sex which, partial though it be, reflects universal experience. Like flirtation, the playful deployment of a sizable battery of analogies is all in fun. Yet the fact is that euphemism, joking, and displacement occur around topics about which people are uneasy or anxious. Just as Stick McGhee’s “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee” (1947) [7] celebrates alcohol for an audience surely familiar with the ugly side of drink, Bessie Smith’s “Take Me for a Buggy Ride” (1922) expresses only enthusiasm and delight, mounting even to jouissance. Though not everything, that is surely enough.

Daddy you really knows your stuff : when you take me for a buggy ride
I like you when you got your habits on : you can shift a gear with so much pride
I gets a funny feeling : when you gaze into my eyes
You give me such a thrill : you make my thermometer rise
Daddy you as sweet as you can be : when you take me for a buggy ride.






1. Remarkably, Georgia Tom (also known as Barrelhouse Tom) who wrote dozens of risqué songs, following his conversion in 1933, became Thomas A. Dorsey, the seminal gospel composer who wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and many other religious standards. Dorsey much later claimed that the title phrase “It’s Tight Like That” had no sexual meaning (see Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 247). This is altogether implausible given the nature of the song and other lyric uses of the phrase. (It is quite possible of course that a sexual term might undergo semantic generalization and come to signify approval in general.) “Beedle Um Bum” is also consistently suggestive.

Oh, my beedle um bum
Come and see me if you ain't had none
It makes a dumb man speak, makes a lame man run
You'll miss something if you don't get none

The Hokum Boys, "Beedle Um Bum," 1928.

2. Compare with the opening of Tampa Red’s “Let Me Play With Your Poodle” (1942): “Lookee here baby, listen to my song/ Don't get mad, because it ain't no harm.”

3. Cf. "Give her cold jelly to take up her belly, And once a day swinge her again" John Fletcher, The Begger's Bush (1622). The OED lists use of “jelly” meaning simply “good, worthy, excellent” from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

4. The nickname was adopted by others such as Jelly Thomson and Jelly Williams. For these names and the unlikely proposal of an African origin for the term see David Dalby, “The African Element in American English” in Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

5. See Michael Taft Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology and Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983). Though these books are absurdly expensive, anyone may use the site http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm.

6. At a time when many deliveries were made to the home, the daytime visits of tradesmen became a subject for gossip and for liaisons.

7. The nonsense syllables of the title replaced the original version’s “goddamn” and motherfucker.”


Afternote I: A Case of Early White Hokum

While hokum surfaces in early African-American blues music most frequently, there was some significant cultural crossover. When the white Chattanooga-based "brother duet" The Allen Brothers recorded a hit version of "Salty Dog Blues" refashioned as "Bow Wow Blues" in 1927 in which lovers are compared to cars in the manner of Bessie Smith: "he's like an old worn out Ford" in "Put It Right Here (or Keep It Out There).” (1928)
In fact, the Allen Brothers were so adept at performing white blues that in 1927, Columbia mistakenly released their "Laughin' and Cryin' Blues" in the "race" series instead of the "old-time" series. (Not seeing the humor in it, the Allens sued and promptly moved to the Victor label.)


Afternote II: Additional Titles

Below are listed other songs using similar imagery yet not mentioned above. More exhaustive and authoritative lists are available in books and online. This is meant merely for the convenience of those who might like to browse a few more titles.

Archia, Tom & His All Stars. “Fishin‘ Pole” (1947)
Carter, Bo. “Don't Mash My Digger So Deep” (1936)
Carter, Bo. "Let Me Roll Your Lemon" (1935)
Carter, Bo. "My Pencil Won't Write No More" (1931)
Carter, Bo. “Pin In Your Cushion" (1931)
Carter, Bo. “Your Biscuits are Big Enough for Me” (1936)
Chatman, Bo. “My Baby” (1940)
Churchill, Savanah, written by Irene Higginbotham. “Fat Meat is Good Meat” (1942)
Cox, Ida. “Southern Woman's Blues” (1925)
The Dominoes. "Sixty Minute Man" (1951)
The "5" Royales. "Laundromat Blues" (1953)
The Four Clefs. “I Like Pie, I Like Cake” (1941).
Harris, Wynonie. "I Like My Baby's Pudding” (1950)
Harris, Wynonie. "Keep On Churnin’” (1952)
The Hokum Boys. "I Had to Give Up Gym" (1929)
Jackson, Bull Moose. “Big 10-Inch Record” (1952)
Jackson, Jim. "Hesitation Blues" (1930)
Johnson, Edith North. “Honeydripper Blues” (1929)
Johnson, Lil. "Meat Balls" (1937)
McTell, Blind Willie. “Georgia Rag” (1931)
McTell, Blind Willie. "Let Me Play with Your Yo-Yo" (1933)
Memphis Minnie. “Bumble Bee” (1930)
Moore, Kid Prince. “Honey Dripping Papa” (1936)
Rhodes, Todd & Connie Allen. "Rocket 69" (1951)
The Sultans. "Lemon Squeezing Daddy" (1951)
Waller, Fats and Ed Kirkeby. “All That Meat and No Potatoes”(1941)
Washington, Dinah. “Big Long Slidin' Thing” (1954)
Williams, Joe. “Little Leg Woman” (1935)
Williamson, Sonny Boy. “Honey Bee Blues” (1938)
Wilson, Leola B. “Back Biting Bee Blues” (1926)


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.”

Skip James’ Blues Imagery

Texts of all songs discussed are appended to the essay.


     During the summer of 1964 I traveled with a friend east from Chicago without stopping until we reached Greenwich Village where we attended a show at the Gaslight hard by Izzy Young’s Folklore Center and the Kettle of Fish. Sleeping in his parents’ car, we toured the Northeast visiting folk clubs as we went. In a coffee house one evening in Cambridge Massachusetts with perhaps a half dozen people in the audience we heard Skip James perform, his wife by his side. As reluctant a performer at the end of his life as he had been when young, [1] James has nonetheless produced a powerful oeuvre which has exercised a strong influence through the fifty years since I heard him including versions by Jimi Hendrix, the Cream, and others.
     His distinctive fingerpicking with open D minor tuning (which he called “cross-note”) to accompany his falsetto voice produced a unique sound often described as spooky, otherworldly, or ethereal. His repertoire helped shape the expressive and beautiful system of images in the Delta blues. Quintessentially poetic in that their significations provide rich detailed information that could not be encoded without metaphor, they shed light on the techniques of all poetry. The body of classic blues songs, like the comparable systems in Troubadour lyric or the Elizabethan sonnet, is particularly revealing about convention. Frequently misunderstood as clichéd or automatized expressions characteristic of second-rate writers, convention is, in fact, a dynamic process in which every occurrence is unique and the meaning of which deepens and transforms through intertextuality. The understanding of American readers of Chinese poetry is often limited by their lack of familiarity with the image conventions of Chinese poetry. The blues aficionado, however, is in a position to see the often complex and revealing interrelations of text to text.
     As a rural Southern genre, the blues made use of the imagery people knew best including the barnyard rooster, the catfish, and the cow. As a source of milk cows are female (as authors of children’s books know) and singers developed a complex of ideas in which the beloved is represented as a cow. [2] A milk cow was a relatively expensive investment and require substantial care, yet she might provide rich cream and butter, a striking analogy for the delights of love. The most common use of such bovine imagery is to signify the longing the owner feels when a cow has been lost. [3] Among the more familiar lines in the blues are the following.


If you see my milk cow, please, drive her on home
'Cause I ain't had no milk and butter
Since my cow's been gone.


     In James’ “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” (see song 1 appended) James is primarily the cow itself, searching for love as the animal whose offspring is missing would devote all her efforts to “just tryin' to find, my calf, again,” paralleling his own search for his “used-to-be.” With the same poignant attachment of so much ancient Greek poetry to love and sex, only heightened by recognition of the evanescence of pleasure, James notes that all potential affective relationships are conditioned by mortality. “Every cow and calf, I believe was born to die,” and “I ain't gonna be here long.” Thus the listener to his song, if competent in the signifying codes of the blues, will respond first at the mere mention of a cow with a train of associations with the elements of voluptuous pleasure and well-being which simultaneously involves the opposite, the fear of painful loss. Since the speaker would ordinarily be the cow’s owner, the altered perspective here, the trope or twisting of the convention adds wit and ingenuity while recalling to the mind the costly loss of livestock, lovers, money, happiness, and health, and life itself. By loving one always puts oneself at risk of suffering. The entire figure resembles the Wheel of Fortune in which success prefigures failure.
     Another term that recurs repeatedly in the blues is the “killing floor.” Though the popularity of the expression has been identified with the slaughterhouses of Chicago’s stockyards, [4] James used it in his 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor,” (see song 2) one of the rare blues songs that directly comments on politics. The song, which often burst through intelligibility into moans and sighs, depicts life itself as enacted on a killing floor. The Depression is the immediate cause of suffering (“Hard time's is here.”) so great as to be all but lethal (“these hard times gon' kill you”), but the song’s continuous appeal suggests that life itself is a killing floor. The infernal stink and blood and suffering that characterizes the abattoir might serve a medieval monk as an apt picture of life here below and it seems equally apposite to the Southern sharecropper or farm laborer. The suggestions of joy and fulfilment, even luxury, inherent in the dairy cow image is absent; the vision could hardly be bleaker.
     James’ “Devil Got my Woman”(song 3) is a complaint against the woman’s fickleness. Surely the devil has led her, after she had left another to be with the singer, to then change her mind and returned to the original lover. In the approximate center of this straightforward, if mellifluous and eloquent, lament is a striking image, placed like a jewel on a necklace. “But my mind got to rambling/ Like a wild geese from the west.” It is not the woman who “rambles,” though this particular word is often used for free-wheeling sexual habits; it is the speaker’s own unruly mind. The image of wild geese is common in Chinese poetry where it connotes sadness, exile, loss, and separation, [5] though James’ listeners would hardly have known this. It occurs only rarely in blues songs and with different associations. [6] The restless wandering character of the birds and their piercing cries are parallel to a train in the distance with its “lonely” whistle. Perhaps they are “from the west” primarily for the sake of the rhyme, but the phrase can only contribute to their air of wildness as they appear over a bleak landscape. The goose image is an example of the growth of the inventory of images available to the singer, as some are added and others fall away over the years.
     James may seem to deliver a dubious compliment when he says of his woman in “Lorenzo Blues,” (song 4) “You know, she's stutters in her speech/ An she wiggle and she wobble,” but the image has many precedents both out and in the blues idiom. The scintillating movement of a body in motion ravishes the singer just as it had dazzled Robert Herrick (who in “Upon Julia’s Clothes” had noted the “liquefaction” and “brave vibration, each way free”) and Theodore Roethke (who wrote “I'm martyr to a motion not my own “ in “I knew a woman lovely in her bones”). The classic statement in the blues is


I got a big fat woman, meat shakin' on her bone
I say, hey, hey, meat shakin' on her bone [7]


     The whole poem in fact is a systematically constructed string of compliments rather like the convention of the blason, common in the Middle Ages but never thereafter vanishing altogether. The woman oddly named Lorenzo has a Coke bottle shape and “a likeness” that’s “outta this world,” and apparently her speech impediment only intensifies the dizzying impact of her charm.
     In a song titled “Forty Four” included in Thomas W. Talley's 1922 collection Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise & Otherwise the number refers first to a handgun and then to a Bible verse. Roosevelt Sykes' popular “.44 Blues" in 1929 elaborates this process of wit by cleverly using the same number to refer first to a gun, then to a train, and finally to a home address (presumably in prison). James, however, in his 1931 “22-20 Blues” (song 5) accompanied by his excellent piano playing ignores such ingenuity and focuses (as Robert Johnson was later to do in his “32-20 Blues”) on pure aggression. The weapon, and such shocking lines as “I cut that woman half in two,” express in the strongest terms the speaker’s distress at his “unruly” lover.
     Simple though the situation may seem, it is presented with considerable ambiguity. Who is the mysterious “Mr. Crest” who appears at the outset? Has violence been done, or is it merely threatened? At the end the singer pictures himself out on the highway, on the pilgrimage of this life, as one might say, holding the gun that he has said is “burnin’ hell,” but declaring that he has harmed no one yet, though he says he means to “raise some sand” (start a fight) before heading on down the line. Experts seem to disagree on just what gun is meant, but the speaker makes it clear that he is weighing all options and selecting the one that reflects his despair. This indeterminacy contrasts sharply with the fatalistic directness in murder ballads such as “Little Sadie,” for James’ song is not narrative, but is primarily lyrical, defining through concrete terms the persona’s state of mind. The audience would here the song, even in its earliest versions, in a context of others’ use of similar imagery, against which the singer/poet seeks to define a new turn to the familiar convention.
     In each of these cases the listener responds to a whole complex of images. I have elsewhere explained [8] that every recognizable convention immediately spawns a host of variations which require competence in the tradition to perceive. In Skip James’ beautiful and expressive lyrics the strands of intertextuality may take a number of forms. In “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” the singer provides an original twist to a familiar image, keeping the word fresh and the meaning original. In “Hard Time Killing Floor” a formula is used in a very standardized way, but signifying an intense and upsetting reality. The goose image in “Devil Got my Woman” is nonetheless suggestive for being innovative, but neither is it for that reason superior. Though the song concerns a missing lover, the image on which I focused in “Lorenzo Blues” celebrates women’s beauty. Equally intense, the weapon image of “22-20 Blues” takes its place among a lineage of songs referring to specific models.
     One may note significant patterns in the artist’s oeuvre as his reality is organized in a set of ever-changing symbolic forms. For Skip James the texts surveyed here emphasize the delights of love (in the cow and the wiggling), the feeling of love-longing (in the geese), and the terrible truths of aggression and suffering (in the killing floor and the gun). In every case the only amelioration or (temporary) elimination of pain is through fulfilled love. The images themselves portray a world-view more accurately (including emotional tone) than prose would be likely to do. These rural American songs deploy the stratagems of image usage in ways as artful (and artificial) as any sonneteer or mandarin.


1. James (born Nehemiah Curtis) had refused to record for Okeh in 1927, perhaps because his illegal activities, notably dealing in moonshine, seemed at once more lucrative and a good reason not to draw attention to himself. After he began performing again after his rediscovery by John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine he felt constrained both by failing health and his commitment to church music. James told a biographer that, while he was willing to play blues with his “thinkin' faculties,” he refused to “put my heart in it.” See Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues.

2. Compare the standard Homeric epithet “ox-eyed Hera.” My wife tells me that, while growing up in North Carolina, her sister was told by a high school boyfriend that she “had pretty eyes, like a cow.”

3. Among the very numerous occurrences of this topos in work by Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley and others, two are of particular, if passing interest here. In Sara Martin’s 1928 recording “Mean Tight Mama” she sings “the cow that black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk.” In Sleepy John Estes 1930 “Milk Cow Blues” the convention is well enough established that a cow is never mentioned except in the title. The tone of yearning loneliness is evoked in a narrative of fleeing love snatched while the “slow consumption” does her in “by degrees.”

4. Hubert Sumlin says that for Howlin’ Wolf the term had particular reference to an incident in which he was shot by a jealous woman and, when downed, saw himself as on the killing floor according to Debra Devi. See her The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.

5. As far back as the Confucian Classic of Poetry (the Shijing) geese symbolize the suffering people in the poem Hong Yan. Geese appear prominently as emblems of what might be called the blues often connoting longing for an absent friend or lover in many later poets including Du Fu and Su Shi.

6. See “Wild Goose Blues” and “Blue Goose Blues.” “Cry of the Wild Goose” by the folk-style singer/composer Terry Gilkyson who recorded with the Weavers was a hit for first Frankie Laine and then Tennessee Ernie Ford.

7. From Blind Boy Fuller “Meat Shakin’ Woman,” but see many others including Ida Cox’s “Four Day Creep” and Tommy Johnson’s “Big Fat Mama Blues.”

8. See my “Transformation of Convention” article posted in August of 2013 for the most general statement of this idea.


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.”


Song 1

Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die

I'm a-milk my heifer, milk her in a churn
I'll milk my heifer, I'll milk her in a churn
If you see my rider, tell her it ain't a darn thing doin'

I wringed my hands, baby, and I wanted to scream
I wringed my hands, honey, and I wanted to scream
And when I woke up I thought it was all a dream

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die
Hey hey-hey, I ain't gonna be here long
Hey hey-hey, pretty mama, I ain't gonna be here long
That's the reason why you hear me singin' my old lonesome song

Hey, hey-hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
And every cow's calf, honey, got to be dyin'

I walked the levee from end to end
I walked the levee, honey, from end to end
I was just tryin' to find, my calf, again

I'm feelin' back to my used-to...
I feel a notion, back to my used-to-be
I have a pretty mama, she don't care for me


Song 2

Hard Time Killing Floor

Hard time's is here
An ev'rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th'ever been befo'

Um, hm-hm
Um-hm
Um, hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

You know that people
They are driftin' from do' to do'
But they can't find no heaven
I don't care where they go

Um, hm-hm
Um-uh-hm
Mm-hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin' flo'
Lord, I'll never get down
This low no mo'

Um, hm-hm-hm
Hm, um-hm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Well, you hear me singin'
This old lonesome song
People, you know these hard times
Can't last us so long

Hm, hm-hm
Hmm, hmm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm, oh Lord

You know, you'll say you had money
You better be sho'
But these hard times gon' kill you
Just drive a lonely soul

Um, hm-hm
Umm, hmm
Umm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Umm-hm
Hmm-hm-hm
Umm-hm
Hm-hm-hm
Hmm, hm-hm-hm


Song 3

Devil Got my Woman

You know, I'd rather be the ol' devil
Well, I'd rather be the devil
Then to be that woman' man
You know, rather be the devil
Than to be that woman' man
You know, I'm so sorry
You know, so sorry
That I ever fell in love wit' you-ooo-hoo-oo
Because you know you don't treat me
Baby, like you used ta do-hoo
You know, I laid down last night
You know, I laid down last night
And I thought to take me some rest
But my mind got to rambling
Like a wild geese from the west
You know the woman that I love
The woman that I love
I stol't her from my best friend
But you know he done got lucky
An he done got her back, again
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
Baby, then I made you some fire
Then I would tote all your water
Way, way, way, from the bogy brier
You know, my baby she don't drink whiskey
My baby, she don't drink no whiskey
An I know she ain't crazy about wine
Now, it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done changed my baby's mind
You know, I could be right
You know, I could be right
Then again, I could be wrong
But it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done got my baby
Now he done gone


Song 4

Lorenzo Blues

I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
You know, we had a nice time Christmas
But she left me on New Year's Day

Oh, you got to know her
When you see her
'Cause she's so different
From any other girl
Oh, you've got to know her
When you see her
From any other girl
Because she's made up
Like a Coke-Cola bottle
An she got a likeness
It's outta this world, alright

You know, she's stutters in her speech
An she wiggle and she wobble
When she walk
She's stuttered in her speech
An she wiggle an a-wobble
When she walk
Yes, an she got three gold teeth
An she got deep dimples in her jaw, yeah

I say, 'Hello, Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
I say, 'Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
Darling, you know that you was gonna leave me
But you didn't tell me you was goin' to stay

Now, if I can make a half a million
I declare, I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
I declare, if I can make a half a million
I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
Just after he promise me that he will
Bring my lovin' Lorenzo, back home to me, again
An I want her back ho-oh-ome, to me again.


Song 5

22-20 Blues

Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
You've got my 22-20
Layin' up across my breast

Oh, if I send for my baby
An she act a fool
An she don't never come
If I send for my baby
She act a fool
An she don't never come
All the doctors in New York City
I declare, they can't help her none

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev'rything, alright

Ah-or, your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
Your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
But my .22-20
I declare you, it's a-burnin' hell

I was stranded on the highway-hi
With my 22-20 in my
I was standin' on the highway
With my 22-20 in my
They got me 'cused for murder
I declare, I never have harmed a man

Lord, oh I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right arm
I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right
I'm gon' raise me some sand
And back down the road, I declare.