Chicken wid a preacher don’t stand no show,
When the preacher is about chicken gotta go.
Went over to fishin’ on a little stream,
All I got is a nod and dream.
Catch Miss Catfish by the snout,
Led Miss Catfish all about.
CHAPTER VIII
MAN’S SONG OF WOMAN
There is probably no theme which comes nearer being common to all types of Negro songs than the theme of the relation of man and woman. It is the heart and soul of the blues. The Negro bad man is often pictured as being bad because of a woman. The jail and chain gang songs abound in plaintive references to woman and sweetheart, and the worker in railroad gang and construction camp often sings to his “cap’n” about his woman. Likewise, in the songs of woman, man plays the leading rôle. These man and woman songs are of such significance that special attention must be given to them as a type of Negro song in order to round out the picture of Negro workaday life which this volume is trying to present. In this chapter and the one following, therefore, there have been brought together examples of songs which deal primarily with the relation of the sexes.
Conflicts, disagreements, jealousies and disappointments in the love relation have ever been productive of song. They are the chief source of “hard luck” songs or blues, and the Negro’s naïve way of singing of his failure and disappointments in love is what has made the blues famous. Sometimes his songs portray vividly, often with a sort of martyr-like satisfaction, his difficulties with women. At times his song is defiant. At other times it is merely a complaint. Again, it is despondent, in which case he is going “to jump in the rivuh an’ drown” or “drink some pizen down” or do something else calculated to make the woman sorry that she mistreated him. Some of the “hard luck” stories of the Negro man are told in the following group of songs.
Lawd, She Keep on Worryin’ Me