When I first started hitting the old stuff hard, I mostly listened to blues from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. And some of my favorite recordings were things like Memphis Minnie’s “Keep On Eating”:
Every time I cook, looks like you can’t get enough
Fix you a pot of soup and make you drink it up[chorus]
So keep on a-eating
Oh, keep on a-eating
Keep on eating
Baby till you get enoughI know you’re crazy about your oysters and your shrimps and crabs
Take you round the corner and give you a chance to grabI’ve cooked and cooked till I done got tired
Can’t fill you up of my fried apple pieI know you got a bad cold and you can’t smell
I ain’t gonna give you something that I can’t sell
And then there was another favorite, Sonny Terry’s spirited rendition of “Custard Pie”:
I’m gunna tell you something, baby, ain’t gunna to tell no lie
I want some of your custard pie.[chorus]
Well, I want some of it
Yes, I want some of it
You gotta give me some of it
Before you give it all away.Well, I don’t care if you live across the street
When you cut your pie please save me a piece
Now, when you listen to such songs metaphorically and creatively, if you read between the lines and against the grain, as it were, if you try to catch their double meaning … it’s almost as if these songs could also be about FOOD! And actually, they’re kind of sweet as food songs. Maybe it’s me.
Of course, my joke here is how these raunchy blues tunes supposedly fooled somebody at some point (who or when, I don’t know) into thinking they were only about food (or deep sea divers, or horse jockeys), when in fact they were also “secretly” about sex. Today, anyway, most of us have to use our imagination and concentrate to hear them literally. The literal and figurative meanings have switched places — the “vehicle” has become the “tenor,” as I’m supposed to say, sitting here with my masters degree staring down at me.
There’s some old songs about sex that are on the other extreme. They do such a good job of hiding their meanings that the metaphors barely take place at all. The literal (non-sexual, tenor) images and the figurative (sexual, vehicle) meanings are connected by gossamer threads so tenuous, thin, and indirect that they almost snap. You’re left with a set of nearly free-floating, abstracted images with little particular connection to anything — you’re left with something like modern poetry:
The Old Man At The Mill
Down set an owl with his head so white
Lonesome day and a lonesome night
Thought I heard some pretty girls say
Court all night and sleep next day[chorus]
Well, the same old man sittin’ at the mill
Mill turns around of its own free will
One hand in the hopper and the other in the sack
Ladies step forward and the gents fall backI spied a woodpecker sittin on a fence
Once I courted a handsome wench
She got saucy and she from me fled
Ever since then, well, my head’s been red“Well,” said the raven as he flew,
“If I was a young man I’d have two.
One for to get and the other for to sew
I’d get another string for my bow, bow, bow.”Well, my old man’s from Kalamazoo
He don’t wear no yes-I-do
First to the left and then to the right
This old mill grinds day and night
Like a lot of other 20th Century modern art, Bob Dylan’s poetics were inspired by “primitive” folk sources. Just as Picasso and T. S. Elliot and Brancusi and Stravinsky were inspired by folk art around the world (African masks, etc.), Dylan figured out the trick of modernism from folk music. He cracked the case of how to make a popular music (I mean music very large numbers of people wanted to hear) that was also modernist art — abstract, with unstable and open-ended, shared meanings. Set the raunchy “Old Man At The Mill” beside Dylan’s raunchy “Temporarily Like Achilles,” for example:
Well, I rush into your hallway
And lean against your velvet door
I watch upon your scorpion
Who crawls across your circus floor
Just what do you think you have to guard?
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, but you’re so hard.
But to give credit where credit is due, the idea really settled itself into my head while I was thinking about John Prine’s “Forbidden Jimmy.” It’s a bawdy song in which the sexual symbols are so unattached to their literal meanings that they’re free-floating, they operate as modern poetry:
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got a mighty sore tooth
From biting too many dimes in a telephone booth
He’s got half of his bootlace tied to the dial
Thank you, operator, for getting Jimmy to smile
…
“Call out the Coast Guard,” screamed the police
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got three water-skis
He put two on his wavelength and gave one to his girl
She’s a mighty fine person, it’s a mighty fine world
…
I got caught cooking popcorn and calling it hail
They wanna stick my head inside a watering pail
Ya know, they’re gonna be sorry, they’re gonna pay for it too
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s coming straight at you
John Prine and Tom Waits were from that first generation of songwriters to learn the trick of modernism from Dylan. Of course, both have also reached around Dylan … let me rephrase that … both have gone directly to the same source Dylan did, by listening to and responding to the old American blues and country.
Editor’s Note: This is the sixteenth installment of my frenzied attempt to post something or other to The Celestial Monochord every day for the entire month of February without winding up like Katerina Ivanovna. This thing is more than half done! It’s supposed to get up above 10°F in Minneapolis this weekend! There is light at the end of the tunnel! Go towards the light, Celestial Monochord!