Definin' the Blues

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Definin' the Blues
December 26, 2009
by Terry Teachout
The Wall Street Journal

When I was 12 years old, I found a Count Basie album in my father's record collection that contained a 1941 performance of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Basie band. That was the record that made me fall in love with the blues—though it goes without saying that I couldn't understand all of the lyrics, especially when they touched on what for me was the still-unexplored land of adult relationships. I found the first stanza in particular to be impenetrably puzzling: Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you / There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do. What on earth, I wondered, was a "monkey woman"? Teetering as I was on the edge of puberty, I boggled at the exotic possibilities.

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In time I was to discover that every field of artistic endeavor has its own unique argot, and that many artists get a kick out of mystifying "civilians" by trotting it out in public. Sometimes it's satisfyingly pithy (ballet dancers always refer to George Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments" as "The Four Ts"), sometimes downright gnomic ("Macbeth" is customarily known among actors as "the Scottish play"). But few of these specialized vocabularies are as inaccessible to a middle-class kid as the language of the blues, which abounds with words and phrases that you aren't likely to hear at the dinner table—at least not when your mother is around.

Enter Stephen Calt, a blues historian and amateur linguist whose new book, "Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary," published by the University of Illinois Press, is an impeccably scholarly, irresistibly readable guide to the language heard on the recordings of the great blues singers who were active in the first half of the 20th century. If there was ever a time when you found yourself wondering what it means to get a "stone pony" or "make a panther squall," Mr. Calt is your man. As far back as the late '60s, he was interviewing aging blues singers and sifting through arcane printed sources in the hopes of untangling the verbal mysteries of the music he loved.

“As much as a method of music making, blues were a medium of language. ” Read the full excerpt from 'Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary'

On one notable occasion described in the preface, the author of "Barrelhouse Words" actually dared to accost a fellow customer of a bus-terminal diner who got mad at the counterman and called him a "jambooger." Having heard the word on Barbecue Bob's 1930 recording of "Jambooger Blues," Mr. Calt took decisive action: "The belligerent customer (whom I anxiously followed outside) was willing to indulge my curiosity about the term, though he obviously regarded me as something of a lunatic."

Mr. Calt may well be a lunatic, but he's my kind of lunatic, a fellow obsessive who demands the straight dope and is prepared to get it by any means necessary. Thanks solely to his lunacy—and determination—future generations will know that a "jambooger" is "a derogatory black slang term for a black male." His most significant discovery is that "the most striking expressions found in blues songs were not, as usually depicted, poetic or metaphorical turns of phrase, but rather were slang terms . . . that seemed to belong to the ordinary vocabulary of the singers and their peers." Hence the blues recordings of the '20s and '30s are not only works of popular art but also repositories of vernacular black speech, time capsules whose contents shed light on the way ordinary folks used to talk:

• What does the phrase "dry long so" mean? Answer: For no good reason.

• What was Alcorub, and who drank it? Answer: A brand of rubbing alcohol "imbibed by some derelict alcoholics of the blues era."

• How do you "jump a rattler"? Answer: You board a train without buying a ticket.

All this and much, much more is made manifest in the pages of "Barrelhouse Words," perhaps the only dictionary on my bulging bookshelf that can be read for pure pleasure from cover to cover.

Part of the pleasure arises from Mr. Calt's donnish sense of humor. He must have been smiling quietly to himself when he defined "crying shame" as "an exceedingly lamentable occurrence." No less enjoyable, though, are the examples of contemporary usage that accompany his definitions, all of them drawn from classic blues records. A few are genuinely poetic, while others are drop-dead funny. Look up "business, pork-grindin'," for instance, and you'll be confronted with this stanza from Kokomo Arnold's 1935 recording of "Sissy Man Blues": Lord, I woke up this mornin' with my pork-grindin' business in my hand / Now if you can't send me no woman, please send me a sissy man. This is a family newspaper, so if you can't figure the rest out for yourself, turn to page 42 of "Barrelhouse Words." I haven't laughed so hard while reading a reference book since the last time I consulted H.L. Mencken's "New Dictionary of Quotations."

On top of everything else, Mr. Calt's book answers a question that has vexed me at odd moments for the past four decades. No sooner did I open "Barrelhouse Words" for the first time than I turned to page 164, where I found this admirably concise definition of "monkey woman": "An overly obliging or compliant female." Now I can die happy.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong," just out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.