This new recurring feature looks at odd footnotes in musical history. It's called Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship because I decided to call it that. For the first installment, I shine a (flesh)light on this filthy 1935 blues number by Lucille Bogan.
People were as dirty-minded in the 1930s are they are now - it was just harder to get away with it in public. The pre-war blues singers would record innuendo-laden come-ons in the studio, but these would turn into bawdy single-intendres in the clubs at night. These were the sort of rowdy places where, legend has it, people would regularly try to beat up Memphis Minnie and she'd break a bottle over the bar and give them what for.
For this song and some others Lucille Bogan just said "fuck it" and jettisoned any commercial pretense. It exceeds the 3 minutes typical of pre-war blues songs in case it takes you that much longer to see what she's getting at. Indeed, whatever she was trying to communicate through such abstruse lyrics as "I fucked last night and the night before, and I feel like a wanna fuck some more" is lost to the ages. It also includes the line "I've got something between my legs that'll make a dead man cum", imagery that would show up in 1976 on Tom Waits' "Pasties and a G-String" and then again in 1981 on The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Bogan
No comments:
Post a Comment