As I said before, some lines in the old songs seem to just keep ringing on and on in my head, providing hours of pleasurable work.
Take “K. C. Moan” from 1929, by the Memphis Jug Band. You have to hear it for yourself — the sound they achieve is sweet and relaxed and floating, but also very down-homey, mournful, and weighty.
“K.C.” refers to a train on the Kansas City train line. I think it’s a prison song, maybe a convict worksong. The first stanza goes:
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
She blowed like my woman’s on board
The singer is not hearing the sound of the Kansas City train whistle. He is remembering a time in the past when he mistakenly thought he heard that train whistle. This imagined train did not have the woman he loves aboard — the sound he remembers having thought he heard was the sound a train might have made if it did carry the woman he loves.
Love, pleasure, freedom are removed from the here-and-now on one level after another, after another — deferred into desire, imagination, and memory.
Listening to this recording always reinvigorates that maybe too-familiar poem Langston Hughes wrote, I think in 1950:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?