Big Sound Saturdays: Pussy Cat Rag

Say fellers, I lost my little pussycat! Can you help me find it?

Thus spake Zarathustra, and the Lord saw It, and he said that It was good. This week’s mix is all about pussy! I do love a thinly veiled innuendo. Even though slant-songs like these do abound in old-time music, songs that are plain and simple About The V are a much smaller sub-genre. And lieu of a full-blown write up—I don’t want you to feel jet-lagged before you soak in every word of these goofy ass tunes—I’ll leave you with a few fun facts and, this time, a playlist. These titles are too good to hide.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Valentine’s Day Blues

 

What’s everyone doing this weekend? I, personally, spent Friday night in The Pit trying to figure out how to make a condensed and an expanded version of blues Valentine’s Day that captures the elation, the bummer, the prickliness, and the hilarity that is this made-up holiday. On Sunday, I’ll play the longer version on the radio and potentially get one of the phone calls I used to get in my New York radio days when I had a V-Day show, a mouth-breather asking if he could pick me up from the studio and take me out to dinner. See what I’m talking about? Alone, together?

Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo Vol. 2!

One very great thing about crafting a “sonic zoo” of old-time Americana is the unpredictable ways that animal songs flit between hyper-realism, innuendo, religiosity, and symbology—so convoluted that you can’t even begin to pull the song apart. O what a tangled web we weave:

Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo pt. 1

When the Beach Boys recorded the dense, meticulous, and perpetually indefinable Pet Sounds in the period between July of 1965 and April of 1966, recording technicians captured front man and musical ingénue Brian Wilson asking studio engineer Chuck Britz to add to the dog-whistles, organs, double-cellos, and coca-cola cans, a horse:

“Hey, Chuck, is it possible we can bring a horse in here without…if we don’t screw everything up?…Honest to God, now, the horse is tame and everything!”

Brian Wilson’s startling request is set, amongst other surviving clips from the now colloquially-named “Dog Barking Sessions,” to the tune of his two dogs, Banana and Louie, barking excitedly. His request didn’t make the cut on Pet Sounds, but the same two dogs did make it onto the end of “Caroline, No,” one of two singles released before the album itself.

Incorporating the incidental aura of his soundscape into his music is par for the course in Brian Wilson’s oeuvre, but the dogs themselves are specific for their expert ears—lyricist, singer, and Beach Boys co-founder Mike Love, in fact, was said to call Wilson “dog-ears” for their shocking sensitivity. We might consider, with this relationship of happy accident in mind, what the relationship between our “pets” and our “sounds” actually is.

Animals have been imitated in musical compositions for years. I think immediately of Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals from 1886, though I’m sure that in vaudeville, minstrelsy, and other popular entertainments, the tradition is much older. Catalyzed at least in part by John Cage’s “4’33” (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of any combination of instruments resting, silent, while the intended audience listens to the ambient noise of their surroundings), the inclusion of animal sounds in rock and roll might similarly serve to blur the distinction between art and the everyday, drawing attention to the textured sounds of the recording environment.

It might also, a la Donna Haraway, query the foundational relationship between human and animal. Since A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway has expanded her conversation about the intersection of human and technology in this, our technofuture, to one that considers our inter-species relationship with dogs. Understanding our relationship to dogs, for Haraway, helps us to understand our ethical relationship to our natural environment. How, then, do we listen to, and hear, this nature, and how does it talk back?

Obviously, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ rapturous “Alligator Wine” isn’t an intentional contribution to zoomusicology (an entire discipline about inter-species musical collaboration!). The endless stream of musical innuendo—rep’d here most overtly by Hasil Adkins’ nasty proto-punk “Chicken Walk” (an innuendo I started to explore in C-H-I-C-K-E-N, Vol. 1), PJ Harvey’s “Snake,” and the Cramps’ “Swing the Big Eyed Rabbit”—is similarly irreverent. Still, the sheer breadth of songs about animals does point to our fascination with animal soundings and symbologies. What is that freaky, low-down “Camel Walk”? What makes the “Milk Cow Blues,” recorded live, here, by the Kinks for their BBC Sessions in 1965, so persistently coverable? How amazing is it that Bikini Kill wrote a song about female self-sufficiency called “Star Fish”?

I’m very into all the tunes on this, the first volume of Sonic Zoo. It’s a loud, weirdo Noah’s Ark, and each song treats its animals differently. Come for Moondog, Daniel Johnston, King Kahn & BBQ and Fred Neil, leave with the dogs, cats, star fish, regular fish, cow, chicken, rabbit, camel, alligator, snake, rat, duck, dolphin. All with Wayne Coyne signing us off: “I thought I’d free the animals all locked up at the zoo.” An ongoing series of animals unchained! 

Big Sound Saturdays: Blues Innuendo (Where’s His Hot Dog?)

The innuendo song has a particular infectious, indefatigable kind of cool when performed, and mastered, by a woman. Where contemporary popular music tends towards the explicit—there are precedents in the blues for that, too (see Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry”)—the blues (country, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and hokum) scenes were once overrun by cloying gestures and near-overt sexual propositions. And for every Blind Boy Fuller crooning for “pig meat,” there was a Lil Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Georgia White craving “hot nuts.”

From “jelly roll” and “sugar” to train rides and elevator shafts, innuendo singers are fanciful and strange, hilarious and, occasionally, heart-rending. Keeping it light and jive-y, Leola B. and Kid Wesley Wilson’s 1929 “Uncle Joe” tropes the call-and-response chit-chat common to early American slapstick theater that becomes an even weirder, sexier repartee between the classic vaudeville duet Butterbeans and Susie, whose song-fight is especially biting in “Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama.” A peripatetic love song about a man who just can’t please his woman, Butter bemoans Susie’s “bad connection:” “You’s one operator that’s hard to get. I worked at your receiver til I’m all upset!,” to which, “What! Before you use your lever, you should close the door! With me, you always get stuck between the floors.”

Just as common as praise for the “candy man,” “hot nuts,” and the “handy man” (let it be known, Ethel Waters’ “My Handy Man” is a literal catalogue of innuendos)—is their refutation. Instead of repudiating their sexuality, blueswomen reaffirm it by trashing their male counterparts. When, in 1931, Bo Carter asks to “put my banana in your fruit basket,” Memphis Minnie responds to him three years later that she “don’t want that thing / I wouldn’t have it hangin’ around my floor” in “Banana Man Blues.” In the classic “Mama Don’t Allow,” we’re never really sure what Mama “wants,” but it’s clear that it’s her call being responded to, not vice versa. I admit that it’s cheating to throw female impersonator, vaudevillian costume designer, and classic blues accompanist Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon into the female innuendo mix, but playing a woman playing a man into “her” clutches is irresistible. This genre bends and bends but never really breaks.

Off-kilter misconnections and oft-strained puns characterize most of these tunes, but there’s an underbelly whose mere proximity to all these light-hearted vaudevillian skits implicates the “genre” in a bigger, and darker, female sexuality. Take, for example, Lillian Glinn’s morphologic and devilish “Packing House Blues:”

A bucket of blood, a butcher knife is what I crave

A bucket of blood, a butcher knife is what I crave

Let me work in your packing house,

Daddy while I am your slave.

Sexuality and murder come, explicitly, together, where the pleasure of penetration and of “petite mort” both assume the cloak of death without being subsumed by it and toying, for better or for worse, with a history of domination where the “slave” isn’t usually the one yielding the knife.

Susan Bordo does well to remind us that one signal of racism is the cultural construction of black women as “more bodily than the white ‘races’,” and Deborah McDowell answers that the body is “a malleable plastic surface” and “a battleground.” In the innuendo song, I see these blueswomen refusing re-inscription from the outside and refiguring themselves powerfully from within. These songs don’t have to be protest songs, but they do undeniably celebrate and subvert sexuality, be it with the cloying horn of the Candy Man or the strange, buoyant sadness of the Tuba Lady Blues.

Big Sound Saturdays: C-H-I-C-K-E-N vol. 1 {Old-Time}

Today, S.A. brings us the chicken playlist we never knew we needed (until now!) and takes us on a rollicking ride through the history of the term and its ties to blues music (and more!). Tune in. 

Where to begin with this prehistoric prince, the loud and disoriented and long-consumed chicken? In contemporary parlance, being “chicken” is akin to being neurotic, cowardly or wracked with anxiety (see, for example, the Magnetic Fields’ apt “Chicken With Its Head Cut Off ). In the past, the figure of the hen connoted an old maid, where “old hen cackle” manifests an ageing woman with a fringe-hysterical, hacking cough. Chicken can’t escape the delicious, fleshy innuendo held also by “pigmeat,” where a “big fat mama with her meat hanging off the bone” isn’t far from Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” battle cry, “yeah, I got a big fat ass, come on!”

The chicken actually still looms large in popular music—Redman has a memorable skit, “Chicken Head Convention,” on his 1996 album Muddy Waters (a throwback to the blues great and, really, the blues history of chicken songs), and Minaj raps “don’t fuck with them chickens / unless they last name’s cutlet” on her latest hit, “Only.” In the fifth grade, I slapped a boy for yelling “all girls are chickenheads!” during group work, figuring that my female teacher would understand (she didn’t). “Chickenhead” is almost as diffuse as “chicken,” connoting anything from a woman giving oral sex to a woman who’ll fall for anything, head bobbing up and down in either case. If this sounds gross, that’s because it is—calling a woman a “chicken” or “hen,” changing flesh for flesh and brain for bulk, is historically and contemporaneously icky. Singing about chickens and hens almost requires a man to loll and swagger, “shooing that chicken” like “balling the jack.”

But the chicken is also notoriously slippery, and not always feminine. I think, first, of my favorite line from Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (published in his seminal Interpretation of Cultures), which plays “cock” against “cock” and the bloody chicken fight against the mutable male psyche:

In identifying with his cock, the Balinese man is identifying not just with his ideal self, or even his penis, but also, and at the same time, with what he most fears, hates, and, ambivalence being what it is, is fascinated by—“The Powers of Darkness.”[1]

The Powers of Darkness! The deep-seated masculine anxiety and the cock-pointing death drive! Roosters were actually bred, originally, for cockfighting—it wasn’t until much later that they were embraced as, among other things, the national emblem of comfort food, fried, baked, or stewed.

Cock as erection and potentiate violence is writ large on these tunes: Chicken-king Hasil Adkins’ “Chicken Walk,” covered here by the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Hubby Jenkins and New York musician Jessy Carolina as the Square Struts, hones in on the chicken’s quivering walk with the sexy, delirious imperative to “push in and push out.” Bo Carter—for food innuendo, there’s nobody better—sings an evocative and disorienting “Shoo That Bird,” where chicken is a rooster is a cock, plain and simple:

Yeh, Shoo that chicken off your leg,

He gonna spoil up ya shortnin’ bread—

All I want is my lovin’ at night.

In the cloying “Chicken You Can Roost Behind the Moon,” Frank Stokes brags that he can “steal a chicken from anywhere,” but the chicken slips often into the masculine pronoun, “he don’t roost to high for me.” And of course, my favorite—Algia Mae Hinton, an admirable buck-dancer and masterful blueswoman—blows the whole thing open, singing some next-level chicken ontology with death displaced: “When you kill the chicken, save me the head.”

Chicken has a long-standing home in the American imaginary, and as with most “old-time” American songs, its musical roots are of the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Frank Stokes, Gus Cannon, Bo Carter, and Peg Leg Howell all engage with the vaudeville, minstrel, hokum, and medicine show circuits directly, while Stovepipe No. 1, Eck Robertson, and the Tune Wranglers were absolutely inured in the melodies and lyrical fragments of the genres. Hokum—joke blues, “nonsense,” performed by Stokes, Cannon, Carter, Howell—is rife with innuendo, performed by black musicians as a riff off of the slapstick racism of the 19^th century minstrel show. Dom Flemons did some excellent research and graceful analytic legwork on Canon’s subversive tune, “Can You Blame the Colored Man,” for the Oxford American, which starts to get at the many-stranded texture of American sound:

“In his music I heard minstrelsy, but I could also hear a novel, legitimate black art form developed from minstrel roots. And not only that. Cannon’s music was linked to both popular music and traditional blues and folk—he played country songs, he played popular songs, and he incorporated traditional music into his repertoire before there were any copyright or industry standards for codifying song ownership. He played what he liked, it seems, though that’s not to suggest that he wasn’t influenced by a popular demand for minstrelsy entertainment. He was a professional musician, after all.”

Fitting, in a multitudinous genre of riffs and agential repetitions, that the fleshy and mutable chicken looms large.

Where Cannon’s “tired of chicken…tired of steak,” Peg Leg Howell absents the “turkey buzzard” from the narrative completely, filling the sexual scavenging role, implicitly, himself. “Turkey Buzzard Blues,” sung to the old minstrel tune of “Turkey in the Straw,” ties itself together with “sugar in the gourd,” a reference to the custom of hanging sugar-filled gourds around a dance floor to smooth the floor with its rough texture, to sex (think of Bessie Smith’s infamous “I Need A Little Sugar in my Bowl”) and to the drinking gourd, the folkloric symbol for the North Star and symbolic stretch towards freedom.

Over at the Smithsonian Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler give a compelling intersectional history of the chicken, with a taste of its mythical status as “the mascot of globalization,” the “worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility,” and “a universal signifier for virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light.” “The rooster plays a small but crucial role,” they remind us, “in the Gospels in helping to fulfill the prophecy that Peter would deny Jesus “before the cock crows.” In Eck Robertson’s standard “Hawk Got the Chicken,” chicken is Icarus potentiate, the stuff of myth, boy-steals-girl and both are imperiled, another great American love story.

Run, old man, and get your gun

The hawk’s got a chicken and he’s on the run—

Hawked his wings and he batted his eyes

And carried that chicken to the sky.

Long live the chicken, the chicken sees!

*Special thanks to Dave Rogers (or, as we call him over at WTJU-FM, Professor Bebop), for his help with this and the forthcoming C-H-I-C-K-E-N playlist.