Be quiet the doctor's wife said gently, let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood.
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The Blues
Posts about The Blues
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
So I'm pretty mystified by this Lightnin' Hopkins lyric. Leaving aside the obsession with women who wear wigs, what's up with the rats? Am I hearing this wrong?
(I am definitely hearing at least some of it wrong -- "ain't her own line", "all over mine", "I went to swing out" are all approximations.)
Update: I found a more authoritative version of the lyrics at the African-American Registry. "Rats" is correct. (The verse starting "I woke up this morning" is not present in the recording I've been listening to, from Hello Central.)
Update: Aha! Just figured it out! Thanks, unknown browser who came to this site by searching for "are wigs made of rat hair?" -- This is obviously what Hopkins meant by "rats": "wigs (putatively) made from rat hair."
Update III: Another idea comes by way of Martha M. -- "rats" are the structures used to support outlandish early-20th-C hairdos. The OED says,
5. Something resembling a rat in shape.
a. U.S. A hair-pad with tapering ends.
1869 Mrs. WhitneyWe Girls v. (1874) 98 She can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats. 1888Century Mag. 769 The crescent shaped pillows on which it [hair] was put up, the startling names of which were 'rats' and 'mice'.
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't longer'n mine
I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying wigs all the time
Yes, you know I carried my woman to the hair dresser
And this is what the hair dresser said
I stuck that straightener in, and
Wig fell off her head
I told her no!
Boy, if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
(Wigs and rats 'll get you killed)
Yes, you know I woke up this morning, peoples, poor Sam
'Bout the break of day
You know I even found a rat
On the pillow where she used to lay
You know I don't want no woman
If her hair ain't no longer'n mine
Yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
She'll keep you buying rats all the time
You know I went to get on the good side of my woman
Said Come and let's go and have some fun
You know I went to make a swing out when a rat fell from her head
Like one from a burning barn
But I just told her, I don't want no woman
if her hair ain't no longer'n mine
yes, you know she ain't good for nothing but trouble
she'll keep you buying rats all the time.....
Cut the rats out, rat, caught you buyin' wigs now, play it a long time.
↻...done
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Music
The BBC documentaries about Stax records which Chris mentioned yesterday are not available to US web surfers; but you can watch the the Stax '67 tour of Norway on YouTube, albeit broken up into ten-minute chunks and subject to slow downloading. Use the playlist to watch all 6 in order.
Excellent news: Allan Evans of Arbiter Records has just released a new disc of old blues: Lifting the Veil: the First Bluesmen (1926 - 1956). It features newly remastered tracks from Davis, Leadbelly, Broonzy and more; and in the liner notes is a previously unpublished 1951 interview of Davis by Alan Lomax's wife, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold.
I would like everyone to know the music of Mississippi John Hurt. It's a little silly but I get hassled by the fact that whenever the Blues comes up in conversation, people think about electric music recorded in the 70s and later, or possibly about electric music recorded in the 50s. Plus I want everyone to know this music because it's so good.
I would like everyone to know American Splendor by Harvey Pekar, and the graphic art of R. Crumb. I think productive conversations would be possible if I could just refer to Crumb's vision of sexual inadequacy and everybody knew what I was talking about without any explication. This also goes for Pekar's work ethic.
I was googling around today and thought I would look for the sentence "I got a girl long and tall, sweet as she could be", which I believe is the first line of a Big Bill Broonzy song I was listening to last night and enjoying. No results... but!!! "long and tall" + "sweet as she could be" brings up only one result, and it is Michael Taft's Pre-War Blues Lyrics Concordance!!! This is huge! I haven't even begun looking at it yet but I'm completely psyched that such a thing should exist and be online.
posted morning of June 13th, 2005: Respond ➳ More posts about Guitar
Wednesday, October 15th, 2003
I've been listening to a CD over and over again for the past few days; it is "Dark was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson. Every time I listen to it I like it a little better -- and I did not dislike it to begin with! If anything could persuade me to believe, it would be good gospel music like this.
Last week I bought a portable CD player, which I had been meaning to do for a while now. My thinking is that I will listen to music on the train to and from work and that, with repetition, I will come to a deeper understanding of the songs. This is certainly happening with Johnson -- I had thought his songs were quite simple, with few lyrics and not much happening on guitar, and that his main attribute was his awesome voice; but in reality there is quite a bit of musical complexity under the surface, and the lyrics have some pretty insightful bits that you don't catch until the third or fourth repetition.
Jim came over last night and we played blues for a couple of hours. He is really into Leo Kottke and is showing me some neat stuff. We played a really long set of songs in D (I was using dropped-D tuning and he was using open-D), jamming from one into the next; I discovered that it is hugely confusing to jam from "C.C. Rider" into "Stagger Lee" (and probably vice versa) because the songs are quite similar in certain ways -- in mid-verse I will forget which one I am playing and slip into the other one.
The BBC documentaries about Stax records which Chris 
