Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad”

 and the Artful Use of Vulgarity

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name