Like most poets, I understand the world in forms. In this multipart essay, I hone in on the form that most typifies my understanding of the world. That form is the blues.
A brilliant, complex, multifaceted network of musical and poetic structures, the blues are black Americans' gift to the country that enslaved us or our ancestors and that often continues to deny many of us economic, racial, and gender justice. Given the form's often under-recognized proliferation within many country's contemporary music and rhetoric, the blues are one of black Americans' greatest and most intelligent gifts to the world. At the same time that the blues chronicle everyday struggles, they also describe resilience, ingenuity, and a remarkable capacity to slyly bend circumstances for the better, critique problems, and structure elements with winsome intricacy.
I remember when I first heard the blues. For a brief time when she was a teenager, my mother moonlighted as a chorus girl and a wardrobe attendant on “Black Broadway,” as the singer Pearl Bailey called it, a section of Washington, D.C. around U Street where Duke Ellington was raised and where the Howard Theatre and the Lincoln Theatre still sit. I did not learn about this part of my mother’s hidden history until the months before she died when she explained many things to me, including why she pushed some of her children into the entertainment business (she was trying to capture her lost dreams). From her involvement in entertainment, my mother knew scores of performers, producers, managers, agents, poets, and musicians. One of these was a black Native American jazz musician and smalltime D.C. impresario named Cherokee Honi. Ms. Honi’s Logan Circle house was filled from floor to ceiling with memorabilia and knick knacks from black music history: records, costumes, programs, and instruments. When my mother went to visit, Ms. Honi always had music on her old record player.
The first time I accompanied my mother to a visit to Ms. Honi’s house was around the bicentennial year in the 1970s. As soon as I entered I heard a song that Ms. Honi was playing on the record player. I marveled at its almost hieroglyphic, bawdy jauntiness. When I inquired what the music was, Ms. Honi replied, “Oh, honey, that’s the blues!”
Turns out that the song was a 1933 blues lyric by the incredible black husband-and-wife blues team of Wesley Wilson (aka Kid Wilson, Sox Wilson or Socks Wilson) and Coot Grant made popular by the equally brilliant black blues singer Bessie Smith called "Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)."
Click here to listen to the original November 24, 1933 recording of the song.
This blues lyric exemplifies the formal hallmarks that I will reflect on later in this essay. Before we examine the lyric itself, let's discuss the writers, composers, and the entertainer who made the song popular. Coot Grant and Kid Wilson. Much has been written about Bessie Smith, a sensational musician, so bear with me while I focus on less well-known persons.
Grant was a woefully now-overlooked, pioneering blues entertainer whose artistry overlapped with the older Ma Rainey (a giant herself of the blues) and presaged Bessie Smith's invention. Grant and Wilson wrote over 400 songs together, toured all over the world (including Africa), and their composing and performing form a much-neglected bedrock of the urban turn in the blues. The duo's compositions and their versatility as songwriters, poets, and musicians touched the lives of countless entertainers in vaudeville during the Harlem Renaissance, and they recorded with giants like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson.
At their height, during the same year that they composed "Gimmie a Pigfoot," Wilson and Grant appeared together in Paul Robeson's 1933 film The Emperor Jones. Alas, sexism within the industry frequently gave Kid Wilson top billing in their stage performances.
You can examine surviving memorabilia like programs and posters to track how these entertainers were billed and read accounts of their artistry in the press that documented vaudeville to understand how they were promoted and valued within their times. That's the historical sleuthing that leads ethnographic journalists like me to claim sexism, and I don't use such words lightly.
After 1948, from press reports, we know only that she retired due to ill health while her husband continued to perform and compose songs throughout the 1950s. I record this history here because I want readers to understand the collective creation within blues. Each song, each poem, each dance is the work of multiple creators and only emphasizing Bessie Smith's interpretation of Grant and Wilson's song would tell little of the story.
Coot Grant (left) and Wesley "Kid" Wilson (right at the piano)
Now, let's encounter the language in full:
Up in Harlem every Saturday night
When the highbrows get together it's just so right
They all congregate at an all night hop
And what they do is Oo Bop Bee Dap
Oh Hannah Brown from way cross town
Gets full of coin and starts breaking 'em down
And at the break of day
You can hear ol' Hannah say
'Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me again.I don't care.
I feel just like I wanna clown.
Give the piano player a drink because he's bringing me down!
He's gotta rhyme, yeah!When he stomps his feet.
He sends me right off to sleep.
Check all your razors and your guns.
We gonna be arrested when the wagon comes.
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me cause I don't care.
Blame me cause I don't care.
Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me again, I don't care.
I feel just like I wanna clown.
Give the piano player a drink because he's bringing me down.
He's got rhyme, Yeah, when he stomps his feet.
He sends me right off to sleep.
Check all your razors and your guns.
Do the Shim-Sham Shimmy 'til the rising sun.
Give me a reaper and a gang of gin.
Play me cause I'm in my sin.
Blame me cause I'm full of gin.
How does this blues song exemplify six formal attributes endemic to the blues—provocative participation; counterfactual progression; shifting vocality; ironic juxtaposition; fractious allusion; ad improvisation as composition? Well, let me try to answer.
The pigs’ feet invoked in the title and refrain of this blues song invites provocative participation. Pigs' feet are a still-prevalent delicacy for many black Americans derived from rural Southern life. In the over 150 years since blacks were emancipated from enslavement, our foodways have come to represent stereotypes of deprivation. The accursed online “Urban Dictionary” (imprecated because it often sensationalizes the very same stereotypes that it exposes) defines pigs' feet as “a semi-offensive way for a white person to refer to a stereotypical black person, or to express just how stereotypically black a situation is.”
In fact, the deprivation symbolized by pigs' feet comes from the historical fact that often enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States were consigned the worse possible foodstuffs. This bigoted, systemic tradition continues even today in predominately black rural and urban neighborhoods where grocery store chains refuse to open stores leaving black residents to rely on the cut-rate wares of bodegas and sundry shops or travel distances just to obtain quality, healthy food.
When I think of pigs’ feet I think of my tap dance classes with James “Buster” Brown when I was a kindergartener. He would teach us how to “pat Juba,” or hambone—a very old, black-created, enslavement-era musical and dance tradition often relied upon to teach child dancers and musicians how to coordinate hand claps with foot stomps (or upper body gestures with lower body actions). That's how I learned to pat juba—Dr. Brown, as everybody called my tap teacher, wanted us to coordinate and syncopate. Patting juba was made famous in the 19th century by a black transatlantic entertainer who I consider to be the grandfather of tap dance, William Henry Lane aka Master Juba (1825-1853), a man widely credited with all-but inventing the roots of tap dance and, through his tours in North American and the United Kingdom, spreading the ingenuity of African-descended, black-adapted vernacular dancing. The first verse of the centuries-old traditional lyrics that accompany patting juba (sometimes called “Juba This, Juba That”) go like this:
Juba dis and Juba dat,
and Juba killed da yellow cat,
You sift the meal and ya gimme the husk,
you bake the bread and ya gimme the crust,
you eat the meat and ya gimme the skin,
and that's the way,
my mama's troubles begin
The lyrics invoke a terrible lot: even though blacks made the cuisine (“sift the meal”) they were given the “husk”—the worse parts—and that's where "my mama's troubles begin." Pigs’ feet are not the prime cut of the pig, to say the least. Yet, when seasoned and pickled they acquire a taste made even more provocative by the history of oppression inscribed in their still lingering culinary existence.
For the singer of "Gimmie a Pigfoot" to say give it to me is, then, a very provocative act because it announces a bold preference for the very same thing that has been so complexly and symbolically repudiated and marginalized in the history of black life in the United States.
[continuing soon]
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