Filthy English, page 25
On this New York Wednesday, Lucille decided to take on ‘Shave ’Em Dry’, a suggestive blues that had already scored twice, for a more famous black female singer, ‘Ma’ Rainey and for Papa Charlie Jackson – the ‘Shake That Thing’ man. The song’s title has nothing to with razors or shaving foam. It was contemporary black slang for sex without foreplay. Lucille would record it again, two years later, in her final sessions. This second version would go on to be a hit, a big enough one to be issued on four different labels – something record companies did in those days, as a way of making sure every regional market was covered.
But this day, for whatever reason, she decided she wanted to sing a different version of ‘Shave ’Em Dry’, one that had never been recorded before. She sounds like she’d maybe had a drink. One witness recalled her dancing barefoot in the studio.
The pianist played a little and she sang her first line: ‘I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb.’ Then she sang the line that would cause problems in China all those years later: ‘I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come.’ Next, she sang a bit about shaving and grinding. Then she sang this:
I fucked all night, and all the night before baby,
And I feel just like I wanna fuck some more,
Oh great God, daddy,
Grind me, honey, and shave me dry,
And when you hear me holler, baby, want you to shave it dry.
And this:
Now if fuckin’ was the thing that would take me to heaven,
I’d be fuckin’ in the studio till the clock strike eleven.
And then, laughing loudly, this:
Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell clapper,
And your dick stands up like a steeple,
Your goddam ass-hole stands open like a church door,
And the crabs walks in like people.
And that, it seems, was the first time anyone sang the word ‘fuck’ on a record. Not that hardly anyone knew it at the time. The second, ‘clean’ version of ‘Shave ’Em Dry’ may have been something of a hit but this ‘fucking’ take remained secret. It wasn’t even written down on the studio log sheet. It was noted as a test recording. The only proof that it had even happened was a couple of acetates – discs cut direct as it was being sung.
This pair of acetates were taken away – by whom we don’t know, nor for what reason nor where they were kept hidden for thirty years and more. The first one surfaced in the 1960s, on a muddy-sounding version on a blues compilation album. Even then, its sexual directness meant it wasn’t much talked about. Only dedicated blues collectors knew about it. Then, in 1994, out of nowhere, from an allegedly unacknowledgable source, a spanking clean acetate turned up. Thanks to Okeh’s top-of-the-game recording skills, it sounded as fresh as its lyrics. This historic recording finally became available in all its unequivocal sexuality – with a parental advisory sticker on the album sleeve.
It’s a great fucking record. There’s a sense in it that sex can be playful and fun. There’s no sense of the grim predictability of pornography. Years later, Beserkeley Records (Berkeley, California, 1973–84, home to Jonathan Richman) promoted itself with the slogan ‘The most fun you can have with your clothes on’. Lucille Bogan’s ‘Shave ’Em Dry’ knows just what they were getting at.
So what was going on that day in a New York studio? My guess is that Lucille Bogan was eventually, and a little drunkenly perhaps, recording the version of ‘Shave ’Em Dry’ that she would sing in clubs, particularly after-hours ones. It’s what people wanted. There is, after all, that traditional link between sex and pop music of most kinds. A few years after Lucille Bogan recorded that first fuck, Jelly Roll Morton played just about every song he knew for the Library of Congress. The New Orleans composer and jazz pianist had once been a great star but at this stage in his life he was a mostly-forgotten figure – ‘an ageing, failing dude who had run out of luck’, in the words of the sleevenotes to the Library of Congress recordings. By 1938, he was in Washington DC. He owned a club at 1211 U Street, the black entertainment heart of the city. ‘The only complete dance floor in Washington’, said its flyer. He played there most nights. Regulars included Alistair Cooke – yes, the Letter from America man – and Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun, co-founders of Atlantic Records. Black Americans just weren’t interested in a middle-aged Creole piano-player, though – even if he did have a half-carat diamond in his tooth and claim to have invented jazz. The bar didn’t make money.
Jelly Roll was not a shy man, though. (His name itself gives a hint. It is a sexual reference, both to the act and the vulva/vagina.) As part of President Roosevelt’s resuscitation programme, the Library of Congress made and collected extensive recordings of American ‘folk’ music. Things like Muddy Waters’ first recordings, which capture him playing the blues on the porch of his Mississippi farm shack. Alistair Cooke regularly featured these field recordings on his early radio broadcasts. Jelly Roll believed that, as the man who invented jazz, he belonged in this collection. So he walked on up and asked to be recorded.
The sessions began on 23 May and lasted a month. Jelly Roll played his songs, he stomped a foot in time and he told stories about his life. He told wondrous tales, Joycean and Runyonesque, of New Orleans before the First World War, when jazz was being created in Storyville, the red-light district torn down in 1917 on the orders of the US government. Jelly Roll played piano in the brothels, sometimes behind a curtain, sometimes not. His tales tell of ‘tough babies and sweet mamas’, of a murderer saved from the drop by a little local hoodoo. There are men called Sheep Bite, Toodlum Parker and Chicken Dick. There are women called the Gibson Girl and the Horseless Carriage. There are card-sharps and pimps stepping out in shoes with lights on them – battery and switch in pocket, wire inside trouser leg, bulb in cork shoe-heel.
In all, his music and memories fill seven CDs – which, on account of the language and subject matter, were only finally issued in full nearly six decades later, in 2005. Among the songs Jelly Roll played was ‘Winin’ Boy Blues’, parts one and two, ‘one of my first tunes in the blues line’. Winin’ is a regional pronunciation of ‘winding’ and is often described as referring to a sensuous style of nightclub dancing. That’s an extension, though. Green’s Slang Dictionary defines ‘winding boy’ as ‘a sexual athlete. [He can “wind up” his sexual “machinery”].’ Jelly Roll’s biographers are even more specific, explaining that Winin’ Boy was Mr Morton’s other nickname and that the song was his theme tune. Its title was ‘a reference to a certain pelvic motion at which he had attained particular virtuosity – or at least said he had.’
Jelly Roll also made a commercial recording of the song a few years later. That, though, had quite different lyrics from the private recording – which was the version he would have played to entertain customers in brothels and clubs. No: ‘I fucked her till her pussy stunk.’ No: ‘I’m gonna salivate your pussy till my penis get hard.’† I should imagine that Alistair Cooke heard this version on one of his visits to Jelly Roll’s club but he doesn’t seem to have mentioned it in any of his 2,869 transatlantic missives.
There is quite a history of performers taking regular songs and recording special sexed-up versions of them – sold privately rather than in corner stores. For example, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ became ‘I Saw Mommy Screwing Santa Claus’ – which does, I suppose, merely bring into the light what is the clear innuendo of the original. In 1953, Joe Davis (label owner, producer, all-round music business hustler) had a bright idea for the Blenders, a New York doo-wop group who’d been together since church choir. They’d cut a track called ‘Don’t Mess Around with Love’. He got them to recut it as ‘Don’t Fuck Around with Love’, then slipped this dirty version on the sly to dee-jays so they’d play the original, clean one on their shows. The promo scam didn’t work. ‘Don’t Mess Around with Love’ wasn’t a hit. ‘Don’t Fuck Around with Love’ was, though – in an underground, samizdat way. So Davis, not being a man to miss a trick, issued it himself as a bootleg in 1971, and sold far more of it than all the Blenders’ other records put together.
In 1953, another doo-wop group, the Clovers, turned up for a session at their record label Atlantic’s central Manhattan studio. They told their label boss and producer Ahmet Ertegun that they wanted to record something of their own this time. This was something of a surprise to the urbane, goatee-bearded son of a Turk who’d been deeply and wonderfully involved in black music since even before his nights hanging out in Jelly Roll’s club. Like most R&B acts of the day, the Clovers sang songs that were given to them to sing. Still, they were one of Atlantic’s biggest acts. They’d already had hits with Ertegun’s own ‘Fool, Fool, Fool’ and ‘One Mint Julep’, which was written by Rudy Tombs, one of Ertegun’s favourite arrangers and author of that other drunk classic, ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer’. So he decided to humour their request to record one of their own songs. They stepped up to the mikes. The engineer set the tape rolling. The tune was ‘The Darktown Strutters’ Ball’ – a 1917 song which some claim was the very first jazz recording ever made. The Clovers sang it acappella. Only the words were different. ‘We’re gonna trim them whores in a rockin’ chair. Cha-cha-cha.’ They called it ‘The Dirty Rotten Cocksuckers’ Ball’. It wasn’t released, not officially anyway.
Then there’s the version of ‘Think Twice’ cut in Philadelphia, in 1966, by a pair of R&B singers, Jackie Wilson and Lavern Baker, for Brunswick records – a Mafia-controlled label, as it happens. Lavern Baker had been around the business for nearly twenty years, with a string of hits – bluesy, poppy and jazzy – but never really had the stardom to go with them. Jackie Wilson had been around almost as long as her – with as many hits but a far higher profile. His first major solo hit was, oddly, not in the US but in the UK – 1957’s ‘Reet Petite’.
As with Lucille Bogan, Wilson and Baker cut a clean version of ‘Think Twice’ that hit the charts. A joy-filled, upbeat, driving soul duet in a hurry, it catalogues the mutual recriminations of a break-up. Each singer reminds the other of what they’ll miss if they leave. The ‘unclean’ take is known as Version X†. Maybe it was recorded as a favour for their snub-nosed bosses. In one line, Lavern refers to Nat Tarnopol, Brunswick label owner, a white man, Jewish, a major figure in black music, a notorious non-payer of royalties who’d have his day in court – for bribing dee-jays. Most likely, Tarnopol was in the room that day – or, more likely, evening.
It’s almost as direct as Lucille Bogan’s record but even funnier. There’s a deliciously wry collision between the swear-filled lyrics and the singers’ church-rooted singing styles. They both take a gleeful, childish delight in singing dirty.
‘Think twice before you call me a dirty whore,’ sings Lavern Baker. ‘I got news for you little boy: don’t fuck with me no more.’
Jackie Wilson responds in kind: ‘Now wait a minute, horny bitch. I had just about enough of your shit. Bye, bye, whore, whore-ore-ore.’ He breaks the last word up in classic, melismatic gospel style – the way a Pentecostal preacher might decry the whore of Babylon perhaps.
Lavern Baker comes right back at him. ‘I gave you all the reefer, all the cocaine and you still fuck it up.’ She has the last word, too. ‘I got news for you, little boy, there ain’t another cunt like me. Oh, baby, think twice. Yeah, you dirty bastard, think twice.’
And that, it seems, was the first time anyone sang the word ‘cunt’ on a record. Even Lucille Bogan didn’t do that. Not because she couldn’t or wouldn’t. Rather, because it wasn’t her word for what other blues singers called That Thing. She sings about her thing, too, in ‘Shave ’Em Dry’, but in a way that probably confuses most modern listeners. She sings: ‘My back is made of whalebone. My cock is made of brass.’ She’s not got her words confused, as some have suggested. Nor is it a lesbian thing. To her, what she had between her legs was a ‘cock’ – as it was for other southern women of her age, colour and linguistic directness. She also sang about her cock on another song she cut on that New York Wednesday. In ‘Till The Cows Come Home’, she tells her audience that the hairs on her cock, they could sweep anybody’s floor.
The female cock was a southern US thing. It was the most common slang word for the vagina for a very long time. As late as the 1960s, in the southern states, ‘a piece of cock’ was a woman. An echo of this can still be heard in hip-hop. It’s why black rappers are always singing about their dicks but never their cocks. For black rappers, with their southern roots, cocks are a girl thing, if only in the deepest recesses of their minds – or maybe their mother’s.
But why? In the rest of the Anglophone world, a cock is a penis. Only in the US south is it a vagina. One expert found an explanation for this ‘mysterious use’ in the fact that the south is ‘linguistically conservative’. The suggestion is that it’s a false friend to the male cock. That it’s a relic of a regional English dialect word: those who went to ‘the colonies’ were far more likely to be from the fringes of the British Isles than the metropolitan centre. That, in fact, it’s a descendent of the Middle English ‘cocker’, a Germanic word for the bag for holding arrows – which was replaced in modern English by its French equivalent, quiver. And quiver, in turn, was also a word for the vagina. It’s there in the 1382 English Bible and in a boastful seventeenth-century metaphor: ‘My arrow still found quivers.’
Others seem to think the female cock is just a matter of genitalia making a gender slither – a common enough happening with words, particularly slang ones. An American dick has sometimes been a clitoris, too. In 1330, your tail was your bottom; in 1362, a vagina; in 1386, a penis. Or consider the sexual switching of knockers. At various times and in various places, they have been testicles, breasts and penises.
The female cock also crops up in the collection of English-language graffiti put together by that first great man of dirty words, Allen Walker Read. A philologist born in Minnesota, educated in Iowa and Oxford, Read was an English professor at Columbia University for nearly thirty years. ‘A scholar who climbed real mountains and mountains of knowledge,’ according to an obituary by the American Name Society, of which he was a founder and president. ‘A playful prospector of the American tongue. A distinguished etymologist. A prominent onomastician.’ I looked it up for you: a student of the history of proper names. His thesis was on Iowa place names.
Another of his specialisms was the differences and divergences between English English and American English. Which is how, to a wider public, he came to be known as ‘The OK man’ – on account of his having written the true and complete history of the two-letter phrase that was punned in the name of Lucille Bogan’s record label. He discovered and proved that OK wasn’t Choctaw (okeh) or French (Aux Cayes) or German (Ohne Korrectu) or Greek (Olla Kella) or Finnish (oikea) or telegraphy jargon (Open Key). Read established that OK came to us from a contraction of ‘oll korrect’, a deliberate, playful misspelling of ‘all correct’ created by the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, a ‘lighthearted group of Bostonians in the late 1830s’ who … did that kind of thing. It spread beyond Boston when it became used in the 1840s as an abbreviation of Old Kinderhook which was the nickname of the eighth president, Martin van Buren – who came from a township of that name.
Read lived till ninety-six and 2002 and wrote a great deal but not all of it reached the printers. He started a Dictionary of Briticisms in 1937 but it was unfinished fifty years later when he handed it on to a colleague. Still isn’t finished, either. What he did publish was consistently memorable. Round about the time Lucille Bogan cut her fucking version of ‘Shave ’Em Dry’, he was thinking about the same word, philologically. The results of his investigations were published in the December 1934 edition of the academic journal American Speech, in an article entitled ‘Obscenity Symbol’. It was all about ‘fuck’, its history, its etymology. It’s a detailed, witty, clever and authoritative analysis – in which the word itself doesn’t appear even once. He leaves no doubt as to what he’s writing about, though. In his words, ‘the most disreputable of all English words – the colloquial verb and noun, universally known by speakers of English, designating the sex act’.
His stance – a radical one, then and maybe even now – was clear from his first sentence. ‘The obscene “four-letter words” of the English language are not cant or slang or dialect, but belong to the oldest and best established element in the English vocabulary.’ He pre-empted his antagonists’ arguments. ‘A sociologist does not refuse to study certain criminals on the ground that they are too perverted or too dastardly; surely a student of language is even less warranted in refusing to consider certain four-letter words because they are too “nasty” or too “dirty”.’
He had a clear, almost Freudian view of the line running between nasty, dirty words and the nasty, dirty deeds they stood in for. To him, it is always a matter of repression. ‘A word is obscene not because the thing named is obscene, but because the speaker or hearer regards it, owing to the interference of a taboo, with a sneaking, shame-faced, psychopathic attitude.’
