Red Hot Love in Robert Johnson

 

 The text of the song follows the essay.  This site contains other posts on Delta blues.  For a complete list consult the Index (always the last item in the most recent month at the bottom of the Blog Archive on the right) under section 5D “Songs.”

  

     While Robert Johnson is best-known for his profound and haunting deep Delta blues, he was an entertainer who sought to meet the tastes of his community.   “They’re Red Hot” stands out among Johnson’s songs not only for its use of a street vendor’s cry, but also by the humor and quick tempo,  creating an upbeat, partying sound.  Yet Johnson’s dark side is evident even here in ironic glimmers on the margins of the largely comic “hokum-style” lyrics.

     Though the entire song is tightly knit by the repeated chorus lines that occupy two-thirds of the lyrics, with their insistent, almost hypnotic, repetition, the stanzas are otherwise largely distinct, each presenting a vignette.  These little scenes are each self-justified as a jest or a high-spirited exclamation, but in total, they construct a precise and subtle exploration of erotic relationships, in fact, of appetite in general.  By slow accretion, each stanza adds to the symbolic complexity of the tamale image until, by the song’s end, it is three-dimensional, fleshed out with the complications and contradictions of lived experience.  Johnson’s audience doubtless recognized the street vendor’s cry [1] “Hot tamales and they're red hot."  while for moderns the first associations with tamales and red hots might be Mexican restuarants and a cinnamon candy, in the first half of the twentieth century tamales became a familiar street food in the Mississippi Delta, having migrated eastward from Texas.  This is the realistic base upon which the song builds.

     The initial addition to this fragment of everyday life is the symbolic association linking the heat of capsicum peppers to erotic energy.  A woman enters inconspicuously, as the tamale seller: “she got'em for sale,” but, without warning, she is replaced by a kind of super-woman, not a neighborhood vendor, but an uncanny lover.

 

I got a girl, say she long and tall

She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall

 

This prodigious figure seems to be about to grow out of the house, like Alice in Wonderland, but here her size implies her immense sexual appeal. [2]  Her description is enwrapped in the raucous cry, now appealing to the groin as well as the stomach “hot tamales and they're red hot.”  The tamale is an appropriate image due not only to its piquancy.  Like the more commonly used “jelly roll” its moist tastiness makes it a fitting euphemism for female genitals. [3]  

     The second stanza reinforces the realistic foundation of the image, adding the price: “She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime,” [4] but also undercuts verisimilitude with the mysterious “would sell you more, but they ain't none of mine.”  As no merchant would say such a thing, the listener must question the dramatic situation.  Appetite was already implicated, now the speaker expresses ambivalence., increasing the dramatic tension.

     The hypnotic repetition of the chorus lines leads to the depiction of an erotic gesture.

 

I got a letter from a girl in the room

Now she got something good she got to bring home soon, now

 

The lack of focused definition increases tension by mere suggestion.  What is this Mississippi billet-doux?  What does the message say?  Provocatively vague, it promises  “something good” arriving with the woman who is just on the point of coming “home.”

     The chant then resumes “hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale,”  emphasized further this time by a monitory interjection (“they're too hot boy”).  The dangers of pursuing hot food and hot women are then projected onto another male, a goat.

 

The billy got back in a bumble bee nest

Ever since that he can't take his rest, yeah

 

The woman is figured as the threatening aspect of a hive of bees, though their sweet honey had lured the goat.  This stanza concludes with another explicit warning: “Man don't mess around em hot tamales now 'cause they too black bad.”  This advice is emphasized by the most frightening specifics.

 

If you mess around 'em hot tamales

I'm gonna upset your backbone, put your kidneys to sleep   

I'll due to break away your liver and dare your heart to beat            'bout my

Hot tamales 'cause they red hot, yes they got em for sale, I              mean

 

     The example of the billy goat, the explicit caution (“don’t mess around em”), and the detailed account of the danger to major bodily organs make indulgence in “tamales” seem perilous indeed. 

     In spite of the hazards the tamales have an irresistible allure, their appeal spanning the generations. Since “grandma loves them and grandpa too,” their offspring can only wonder  “what in the world we children gonna do now.” [5]  The tamales are ubiquitous, a dangerous attraction, fraught with joy and peril, presenting the same dilemma, unsolved since time immemorial.

     The might of a roaring V-8 engine is then added to the semiotic elements associated with tamales. 

 

Me and my babe bought a V-8 Ford

Well we wind that thing all on the runnin' board, yes

 

Having sex, which in Troubadour lyrics had been figured as riding a horse (an image abundant in the blues as well), is here expressed in the fast, strong, and hot automobile.  The vulnerability if occupying a speeding car, at once thrilling and frightening, enriches the parallel just as it does in contemporary automobile advertising.

     The penultimate verse recasts the drama of the sexes with the monkey and the baboon, an antagonistic pair that appears in dozens of rhymes, jokes, and songs. [6]  One common form of the old joke, broad humor indeed, and, to judge by the internet, still in active oral circulation,  described the monkey’s anal penetration of the baboon.

 

“Uh… Here’s one. Monkey and a baboon sitting in the grass. Monkey stuck his finger up the baboon’s ass. The baboon said ‘Monkey, damn your soul! Get your finger out of my asshole!’” [7]

In Johnson’s version euphemistic evasion heightens the obscenity by the sudden comic substitution of an advertising phrase for a taboo word. 

 

You know the monkey, now the baboon playin' in the grass

Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old 'Good Gulf Gas', now

 

Yet here the image of an improper simian is superimposed over the song’s pair of human lovers.  Whereas the monkey had meant only a rude gesture, like “goosing,” with the male/female human context the image suggests, in humorous refraction, not merely a general tension between the sexes, but specifically the intimate negotiation over the use of each other’s bodies in which each balances ego or aggression against love and respect. 

     With this culminating image the singer then returns to repeat the first verse, implying that the process of the song has found no solution.  One ends where one began, with the oversize woman and the profound dialectic of sex, with a potential for satisfaction and also for searing pain.  “The Red Hots” come to signify the lure of a dangerous siren, a Circe, a “belle dame sans merci” though she appears here in comic guise.  She need do nothing but lie on the floor while her devotee dances nervously around, chanting obsessively about tamales.  

      The meaning is incrementally constructed, one layer at a time.  The tamale image is introduced in the first stanza and problematized in the second.  The third emphasizes the anticipation of pleasure (“something good” “soon”), only to be met by the cautionary warming of the goat’s experience in the fourth.  The danger is then made to sound potentially lethal in the fifth stanza.  The pendulum swings back in the seventh which suggests the universality of love, and in the seventh where the mighty power of desire is associated with a V-8 Ford.  The monkey and the baboon, with their entanglement, always together yet never harmonious, presents the final elaboration of the depiction of lovers before the poem returns to its first stanza to indicate the persistence of the speaker’s ambivalence. 

     A good-time song, a jocular one, a danceable number with wit and energy, “They’re Red Hot” nonetheless presents a deeply problematized picture of the relations between men and women.  The tamale image expresses at once the fire of passion and the potential pain to which the lover is vulnerable.  The man and the woman can neither separate nor can they achieve perfect accord, rather like the monkey and the baboon.  The song provides a beat and a melody and ample vitality to animate the inevitable dance of dualities: man and woman, selfless love and selfish ego, pleasure and pain, the accumulation and release of sexual energy.  Within the song the opposing elements are harmoniously blended with a taste and poise rarely experienced in life.   The dialectic contradictions among which we live by no means vanish in Johnson’s masterful art, but they are rendered there comely and entertaining.

 

 

 

1.  Street cries had been similarly used in verse in the thirteenth century “Frese Nouvelle,” Guillaume de Villeneuve’s “Crieries de Paris,” John Lydgate’s “London Lyckpeny” (1409), and the Cuban pregón.  “Molly Malone,” which seems to be a music hall song using some lines from folk sources, is a well-known example. 

 2.  This formula, common to so  many songs, surely also pokes fun at the limits of a rural cabin which lacks a bedroom and in which the kitchen is very small.

 3.  Food imagery is common in blues and hokum songs, among them Blind Boy Fuller’s “I Want Some of Your Pie,” Wynonie Harris’s “I Like My Baby’s Pudding,” Bo Carter’s “Your  Biscuits are Big Enough for Me,” as well as others employing sugar bowl, fruit basket, and the like. 

 4.  Apparently the price had been stable for a good while.  In 1928 the Rev. Moses Mason recorded “Molly Man” which includes the same line, adding as well “thirty cents a dozen” (after all, the same rate). 

5.  Among other reflections on love through the generations, compare Ethel Waters “the old folks learn the young ones what to do” (“Shake that Thing”), Memphis Minnie “grandma got something, make grandpa break his pipe” (“Grandpa and Grandma Blues”), and Lightnin’ Hopkins ““grandma told grandpa, lovin' between us is sure true” (“Grandma told Grandpa”).

 6.  The rhyme beginning “The monkey and the baboon were sitting in the grass” is recorded numerous times by folklorists and record companies.  It was performed in recent years by the Hart Brothers, a bluegrass group.  Variations appear in Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs (1925), p.  180; Lucille Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry";  Lonnie Johnson’s “The Monkey and the Baboon” (1930), “The Monkey and the Baboon” collected by Roger Abraham in Deep Down in the Jungle (1964).  Often the pair appears not, as “the monkey and the baboon,” but as “the white man and the nigger.”  It is recorded in this form in Lafcadio Hearn’s “Levee Life” (1876), as well as in Marion Thede’s The Fiddle Book (1967), Tommy McClennan's "Bottle It Up and Go” (1930), and Julius Daniels' "Can't Put the Bridle on that Mule this Morning" (1927).  In many of these the pair are playing the card game Seven Up.  The convention is susceptible to many further tropes.  For instance, it is deracialized in the white string band version by the Georgia Pot Lickers “Up Jumped the Rabbit” (1925) as the “skeeter and the bumble bee.”

 7.  USC Digital Folklore Archives, posted May 18, 2021 by Scott Gilman.  http://folklore.usc.edu/limerick-monkey-and-a-baboon-sitting-in-the-grass/

 

  

They’re Red Hot (Robert Johnson)
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a girl, say she long and tall
She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yeah

 
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime
Would sell you more, but they ain't none of mine
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yes, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a letter from a girl in the room
Now she got something good she got to bring home soon, now
It's hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got em for sale (they're too hot boy)
The billy got back in a bumble bee nest
Ever since that he can't take his rest, yeah
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes you got'em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got'em for sale
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Man don't mess around em hot tamales now 'cause they too black bad,
If you mess around 'em hot tamales
I'm gonna upset your backbone, put your kidneys to sleep
I'll due to break away your liver and dare your heart to beat 'bout my
Hot tamales 'cause they red hot, yes they got em for sale, I mean
Yes, she got em for sale, yeah
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
You know grandma loves them and grandpa too
Well I wonder what in the world we children gonna do now
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale
 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Me and my babe bought a V-8 Ford
Well we wind that thing all on the runnin' board, yes
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale, yeah

 

Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale (they're too hot boy!)
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes, now she got em for sale
You know the monkey, now the baboon playin' in the grass
Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old 'Good Gulf Gas', now
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean

Yes she got'em for sale, yeah
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale
I got a girl, say she long and tall
Sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall, yes
Hot tamales and they're red hot, yes she got'em for sale, I mean
Yes she got'em for sale, yeah

The Poetry of the Blues

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



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



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

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

The Heart of the Blues

The text of "Love in Vain" follows.

     Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” immediately places the listener in the heart of the blues, lamenting in an artful manner and in that way transcending or at any rate accepting the pain of life. The title itself has a certain stately, slightly learned sound, as though it might have been found in a sonnet or a madrigal (an association I find also in “Careless Love” though that song is, I think, unknown prior to Buddy Bolden). “Vain” may well be derived from church usages, perhaps sermons on Ecclesiastes.
     The primary reference is eros; in the first stanza the persona’s lover is departing and he follows hopeless to the station, under her spell but unable to alter the fact of their separation. His feeling of helplessness and confusion is eloquently expressed in the line “Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.” He sounds as though he were dazed from a concussion as well as lovelorn.
     Tension mounts in the second stanza when he establishes a valedictory eye contact in a final attempt to appeal for reconciliation. Yet the gesture only depresses him further: “Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.”
     The song focuses on the lyric moment of the departure of the beloved on a train, yet this precise focus, like the pinhole opening of a camera oscura, provides a much broader view. The pain of love longing is generalized from sexual romance to suggest all suffering but, further, the fundamental anxiety of our species when contemplating the passage of time.
     The third and climactic stanza is most compact of all. The suffering of life has been compressed into the train’s lights, shrinking and shortly disappearing into the void, leaving the singer devastated and yet still singing. The red and blue lights come to signify the phantasmagoric world of everyday phenomenal reality passing as the river of time flows on unstoppable. The most essential formulation of the speaker’s existential woe is not a woman or other specific sources of pain, but rather the constant passage of time. The train’s vanishing lights represent the reality that is constantly slipping away from us, suggesting the same poignant feeling as a train’s distant whistle or, in Yuan drama, the cries of wild geese. In this way each of us will one day see the world itself receding.
     In the song’s coda the lover transcends language itself, adding moans and cries to the name of the beloved and ending by repeating the theme: “all my love’s in vain.” He howls like a beast or a madman. The only articulate utterance he can manage is the name of the loved one.
     Even in this final pit of despair, the tone is mournful but elegiac, implying strength and fortitude. In spite of the persona’s trials, he retains a certain self-possession suggested by the tight poetic form, with its fourteen syllable lines, the first pair of which repeats a concrete Image and the final line stating a subjective mood with uncompromising inevitable iambs. The rhythm insists, “what is, is right,” and the part of wisdom is submission. One may cry, but one may simultaneously sing.
     Thus suffering is transfigured by art, and the singer from Hazlehurst, Mississippi joins with the ancient Hebrew preacher (and the Buddha and a range of sages before and after) who with measured and melodious words look with open eyes and call out “Vanitas, vanitatum! All is vanity!”



LOVE IN VAIN

I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand. (2x)
Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.

(chorus) All my love's in vain.

When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eyes. (2x)
Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.

When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind. (2x)
The blue light was my blues; the red light was my mind.

Hoo-hoo, ooh, Willie Mae
Oh oh hey, hoo, Willie Mae
Hoo-hoo, ooh, eeh, oh woe
All my love's in vain


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.”

Robert Johnson and the Devil

     Robert Johnson’s diabolism is a significant part of his image. Some admirers are fascinated with the story that attributes his genius to a Faustian deal with the devil; others fancy traces of the Yoruba trickster Legba. Such enthusiasts should be given pause by the fact that Johnson’s records were not major hits, and, in his own lifetime, he was an all-but-unknown artist nationally. An aetiological myth explaining his preternatural skills would make no sense at a time when he appeared indistinguishable from a mass of other singers. Though some Delta informants including Son House volunteered to support the story, it never appeared until the Folk Renaissance of the early 60s and Johnson’s subsequent recognition as the paramount bluesman by hip young whites who considered themselves outsiders or outlaws. In this way they are similar to bikers and heavy metal fans who likewise enjoy flirting with satanism primarily in order to annoy others and express disaffection. I do realize that Southern black (and white) culture considers secular and church music to be sharply opposed, and the blues artist is unlikely to be an unconflicted Christian church-goer.
     Still, the definitive answer about the relevance of the story to Johnson’s oeuvre must emerge from the texts. A study of his lyrics indicates no diabolism, only a very conventional, even cautious, use of the Christian devil to serve his lyric ends.
     The central text cited as evidence for Johnson’s deal with the devil is “Crossroad Blues,” yet the song itself simply describes his failing to hitch a ride. Some commentators have linked his rejection by the passing drivers (“didn’t nobody seem to know me”) and anxiety about dark descending with the threat of racist violence, but in the song it simply sets the emotional tone for the singer’s frustration in love. “I haven’t got no lovin’ sweet woman that/ love and feel my care.” His loneliness is only rendered more concrete and poignant by his message to a male friend saying that he is “sinking down.” Far from seeking to deal with satanic powers, the singer “fell down on [his] knees” to pray in ordinary Christian supplication and need.
     Though it has received less attention in this connection, “Me and the Devil Blues” is more suggestive. In this song the devil appears at the singer’s door and they go walking together when these startling lines appear:


I'm going to beat my woman
‘Til I get satisfied


     His excuse for this vicious threat is that she has been “dogging” him, not “doin’ me right.” Both he and his lover seem possessed by that old evil spirit/ So deep down in the ground.” Their mésalliance seems destined to continue: the singer imagines his lover taking care of his funeral arrangement. Only then can he indulge in a dream of liberation when his “old evil” spirit can “get on a Greyhound bus and ride.”
     In this song, the most explicit about the singer’s companionship with the devil, the association seems to relate to the tangle of their relationship rather than to any bargain for blues mastery.
     Hellhounds are known from a great many cultures, both in myth and in folklore. Most commonly the devil-dog is an omen of death, though similar terms are used in African-American religious rhetoric as emblems of temptation. In Johnson’s “Hell Hound On My Trail” they simply embody his suffering. The song opens with a defensive lament:


I got to keep movin’, I've got to keep movin’
Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail.


     This suffering plaint is then repeated in different language.


And the days keeps on worryin' me,
there's a hellhound on my trail,


     Here the hellhound is clearly not moral temptation, but simply the pains and difficulties of life. The singer imagine respite from his woes.


If today was Christmas eve
If today was Christmas eve,
and tomorrow was Christmas day

If today was Christmas eve,
and tomorrow was Christmas day
(spoken: Aow, wouldn't we have a time, baby?)
All I would need my little sweet rider just,
to pass the time away, huh huh, to pass the time away


     This idyll is broken however by the beloved’s betrayal. She is practicing hoodoo rituals, “hot foot powder,” generally used to rid oneself of an unwanted individual, against the singer. This persecution leaves him with a “ramblin’ mind.”
     The song concludes with a lovely lyric stanza reminiscent of troubadour conventions. The “wind risin’” and the “leaves tremblin’ on the tree” signify the vitality of nature which fits uneasily against the singer’s anxious uncertainty in a way similar to the medieval nature introductions. (And, indeed, his “Preaching Blues” is probably the purest and most intense lyrical expression of the blues, rather like Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Non es meravelha s’eu chan”).
     It is a harmful distraction even playfully to displace the drama of Johnson’s powerful and lovely poetry from troubled eroticism and life’s suffering to some sort of diabolism. The move reveals more about the fantasies of the countercultural explorers to whom we owe the rediscovery and celebration of his work than about African, African-American or uniquely Johnsonian myth. When Son House expressed his admiration for Johnson’s rapid technical improvement in a way that gave the tale publicity years after Johnson’s death, he delighted the singer’s new fans even as he misled them. Let us listen to the music.


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.”