Those Transgressive Blues

Paramount ad for Ma Rainey's lesbian anthem, "Prove It On Me Blues," 1928

Our story begins with a B side, specifically the B side of a 1925 record of a blues banjo player, Papa Charlie Jackson. The song was called “Shake That Thing” (nobody remembers the A side) and became a surprise hit, covered in that year and the next by eight different recording artists, including Ethel Waters. Waters’ star was rising, and her version, recorded for Paramount, bid fair to become the company’s best selling side up to that point.

This occasioned some hand-wringing from the editors of The Chicago Bee, a newspaper that set itself up as a competitor – and more refined news source – to the Chicago Defender. In an editorial entitled “The Triumph of Vulgarity,” the impassioned Jeremiah wrote, “[T]his popular song is about the most vulgar, sordidly suggestive, indecent in connotation which any company has put upon the market. Devoid of richness of rhythm, lacking in beautiful music, unspeakably low in language–this song is a tawdry, musically cheap and linguistically common composition …”

When you look at the lyrics, you have to wonder what the fuss was about:

Down in Georgia, got a dance that's new

Ain't nothin' to it, it's easy to do

Called "Shake that thing", ah, shake that thing

I'm gettin' sick and tired of telling you to shake that thing

Now, Grandpapa Johnson grabbed Sister Kate

He shook her like you shake jelly on a plate

How he shook that thing, ah, he shook that thing

I'm gettin' sick and tired of telling you to shake that thing.

Now, what might “that thing” refer to? The lyrics aren’t explicit, but we all know they’re naughty. But what could you expect from a genre that sprang from the subsoil of the Black experience? Did white folks go on at such lengths about cheatin’ men, faithless women, bathtub gin, and vulgar dances? Still, there seemed to be a moral basement below which even the blues would not descend.

“Shake That Thing” blew past that barrier. Waters’ version was only the most prominent. Even Louis Armstrong growled out a variant, "Georgia Grind,” in 1926. Sex was on the table, and everybody pulled up a chair. Both Ethel Waters and Victoria Spivey praised “My Handy Man" ("Up before dawn/Trimmin' the rough edges off my lawn.") Blind Lemon Jefferson stole “That Black Snake Moan” from Victoria Spivey.

Queer sensibility was quick to surface in this salacious soup. Ma Rainey, herself bisexual, offered the first serving of “Sissy Blues” in 1926, sung from the perspective of a broken-hearted woman. (“Now all the people ask me why I’m so alone./A sissy shook that thing and took my man from home.”) This was followed two years later by the now-famous “Prove It On Me Blues.” (Went out last night with a bunch of my friends./They must’ve been women ‘cause I don’t like no men.”) Paramount promoted the record with an advertisement of reckless candor: Ma, depicted in a man’s suit and tie, chats up a pair of women while a police officer eyes the scene from a distance. In case you missed the point, the ad copy asks: “What’s all this? “Scandal?” “Maybe so, but you wouldn't have thought it of 'Ma' Rainey."

Ma’s accompanist on that song, Thomas A. Dorsey, teamed up with another member of her backing band, Hudson Whittaker (aka Tampa Red), to form the successful recording duo, The Famous Hokum Boys, whose first recording, “It’s Tight Like That,” (1928), launched a hokum blues craze that lasted into the mid-1930s. Bo Carter pleaded “Please Warm My Weiner” in 1935; Lil Johnson rhapsodized about “Sam, The Hot Dog Man” the following year. (“Sam makes a-plenty of money and spends it fast. Women don't do nothin' but sit on their yas, yas, yas. And wait for Sam's hot dog.”)

Within the growing permissiveness of the blues, queer sensibility barely disguised its “perverted” pleasures. George Hannah confessed that hanging around "funny people" might have made him "strange" in “Freakish Man Blues” (1930) and followed that up with a song about women-only parties and described the clitoris as “The Boy in The Boat” (1931). In 1935 Kokomo Arnold scored a hit with “Sissy Man Blues.” (“If you can’t send no woman,/bring me a sissy man.”) Lucille Bogan, never one to mince words – or body parts – sang a paean to butch lesbians (“bulldykers” or “bull daggers” in the slang of the day) in “BD Woman’s Blues” (1935).

In the 30s, Bogan, recording under the name Bessie Jackson, moved the blues from hokum to outright filth. Don’t believe me? Check out “Til the Cows Come Home” (1935) and “Shave ‘Em Dry” (1936).

“Where were the gatekeepers of morality?” you might ask. They were mostly white and not paying attention. With the unexpected and explosive success of “Crazy Blues” in 1920, OKeh Records discovered that Black Americans would buy records in enormous numbers if the music was made for them. Columbia, Paramount, and Victor scrambled to stake out their share, setting up “race” catalogs with separate numbering series, separate advertisements in the Black press, and separate distribution chains – a commercial ghetto that, whatever its indignities, gave artists a market that neither knew nor cared what the Chicago Bee thought. All that mattered to the suits was, did the record make money? Besides, everybody “knew” that the blues was a degraded form a degraded people. Proper Negroes would have nothing to do with it.

Besides the pleasure (and frequently, laughter) provided by these low-down numbers, there was also the subterranean frisson of sticking it to The Man and to the tight-ass pretensions of the Black bourgeoisie. “If you gots the name, you may as well gots the game.”

As America entered the new decade of the 40s, dominated by World War II and musically enthralled by swing and jump blues, the hokum craze died out. Its principal exponent, Thomas Dorsey – a complex and troubled figure -- definitively threw his lot in with the Black church in 1932 and, as “the father of gospel music,” went on to write “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” The dissemination of popular music via the jukebox brought double entendre lyrics under new public scrutiny. As for “traditional blues,” the young white fans who were now rewriting its history and influencing its marketability had no interest in preserving hokum’s legacy or championing its principal artists.

It’s worth noting, however, that no blues criticizing segregation or white oppression made it on shellac until Lead Belly’s 1939 “Bourgeois Blues.”

Even transgression had its limits.

— Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Washington, DC in the 80s: An Eviscerated Queer Populace Confronts AIDS.

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