School of Humans.
So this episode is very dirty. I mean, I know most of the episodes are dirty, but this one has a lot of very explicit language used in it. And so this is just a fair warning to you know, probably don't listen to this in front of a small child or at work unless you have a cool job.
But let's get into it.
Welcome to American Filth, Hey filth heads, and Happy Valentine's Day.
To really get.
You in the mood for today, you know, this day of love and sensuality and love making. I'm going to read you some lyrics. I'm going to do it in a very dramatic, poetic sort of way. All right, here are the lyrics. I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb. I got something between my legs that I'll make a dead man come. Oh daddy, baby, won't.
You shave him dry? Now?
Draw it out? Want you to grind me, baby, grind me until I cry. This is from a song that came out almost ninety years ago in nineteen thirty five called a Shave Them Dry. And let me tell you this was not the only song like this that came out in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties. There are some folks saying some nasty shit, and we're gonna learn about it today. Cue the theme song. This is
American Filth and I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history in today's episode.
The Dirty, Dirty Blues.
Okay, So that song that we heard was called Shave Him Dry, and it was recorded by Lucille Bogan under her pseudonym Bessie Jackson. And the funny thing about those is those are just the opening lines of the song, you know, like she doesn't even warm you up or like ease you into it. And in the context of this X ray song, it's probably just about getting right to the banging without bothering with all that pesky for play.
And some of y'all might be thinking, right now, Wow, Gabby, it's so fun to hear you recite these lyrics in a very poetic, dramatic sort of way.
But why don't you just play the song. Well, here's the thing.
Songs require licensing, which requires money, and I just can't afford it right now. But I do encourage you go listen to Lucille Bogan, Go listen to her music, it's freaking fantastic. In the meantime, though, let's hear some other lyrics from Shave Them Dry. Say I fuck all night and all the night before baby, and how I feel just like I wanna fuck some more. And here's another excerpt from the song. Now it fucking was the thing that would take me to heaven. I'd be fucking in
the studio till the clock strike eleven. Do you guys remember when uh wop came out and all these conservatives were in a tizzy over the lyrics, Well, imagine if they had heard Lucille Bogan singing this in nineteen thirty five. Another song that Bogan wrote was called Till the Cows Come Home, and it is just as vulgar in its lyrics. The general premise of the song is that Bogan can
fuck until the cows come home. The song opens with Bogan saying that every time she bangs a man, she gives them quote the dogone clap, And here she does not mean the std what she actually means, as she explains in the song.
That's the kind of pussy that they really like. So that's a good one.
You guys could use tonight for Valentine's Day. You know, you'd be like, hey, partner or hey random person, I'm gonna give you the clap tonight, and they'll be like, what are you talking about, Like I don't want the clap. It's like no, it's like you're gonna clap for it. You're gonna give it a standing ovation. Anyway, Later in that song, she says, if you suck my pussy, baby, I'll suck your dick. I'll do it ya, honey till I make you shit. Oh baby, honey, do it all
night long. Do it to me, Papa till tomorrow comes. Look, even tomorrow is coming. In these lyrics amazing and I really respect this because Bogan is not even doing innuendo. She's just going for it, crooning about how much she loves sex so much that I'll make her partner shit. So Lucille Bogan, she's considered the Queen of the Dirty Blues, but these were just a few of the many, many, many songs.
That she wrote and recorded.
So who is this lady just brazenly singing about boning in the nineteen thirties. Well, she was born Lucille Anderson just before the turn of the Century on April first, eighteen ninety seven, and there are conflicting records about where she was born. It was either Mississippi or Alabama. And there's really not a whole lot known about her early years. But when she was seventeen, she married this guy named Nazareth Lee Bogan. He was a railway man who already
had a daughter. But a year or two into their marriage, she gave birth to a son of her own. She and Nazareth later divorced and she remarried, but she kept Bogan as her name, and what is known about her life is mostly about her career as a singer. She's among the first blues musicians to ever be recorded, alongside legends like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. The first tunes Bogan laid on wax were actually vaudeville songs that she recorded in New York in nineteen twenty three, and she
did this with Okay Records. Later that same year, Bogan made music history when Okay's Ralph Pierre came down to the South to record a country, blues, jazz and gospel artists in a converted warehouse in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.
On this trip.
Not only did Pierre record country music's first genuine hit by Fidland John Carson, but this session made Bogan the first black blues singer to be recorded outside of the big cities of New York in Chicago. And here's a very fun fact. The building where they recorded this music where a very significant moment in music history took place. It was actually torn down a few years ago to make room for something even more important, a Margaritaville. Ha ha ha.
History's dumb, don't preserve it anyway.
While coming up in the music scene in the twenties, Bogan is also hanging out and performing in some pretty seedy juke joints, and these kinds of places, well, they welcome the dirty, nasty lyrics Bogan became known for. So heading into the nineteen thirties, a lot of the stuff that Bogan's writing start to take on filthy, risky topics
like drinking and sex and prostitution. You know, she has that song Till the Cows Come Home, but she has other ones called Sloppy Drunk Blues and tricks Ain't walkin no More. And the thing about Bogan is that over the years she was known to have affairs with both men and women. Wow, a bisexual queen and her queerness
starts being reflected in her music. Like she has this one song called b D Woman's Blues, and that b D apparently stands for either bull dagger or bull dyke, both terms that mean butch lesbian.
And here's this.
Song coming a time. Beady women ain't gonna need no men, coming a time. Beady women ain't gonna need no men. Oh the way treat us as a low down and dirty sin. Beaty women, you sure can't understand. Beaty women, you sure can't understand. They got a head like a sweet angel, and they walk just like a natural man. While it may seem that Bogan's just a smutty outlier here, she's actually not alone. There's a whole cohort of blues
singers who were known for being sexually adventurous. I mean, if we're talking about women and sexuality and being pretty bold with your lyrics, we can't leave out Maul Rainey, the mother of the blues. You know, she also, like Bogan, bridged vaudeville and the blues, connecting this new musical style to the earlier sexualized space of the vaudeville houses. I mean, just imagine that there was provocative dancing and suggestive singing.
That was just part of it.
And the thing about mal Rainy is, you know, her sexuality. Some people think she could have been bisexual. Maybe she was a lesbian. She took on many female lovers despite being married to a man. There was even rumors that she had some kind of sexual or romantic relationship with fellow musician and her protege, Bessie Smith. Yeah, Ma Raini, she definitely loved women like In nineteen twenty five, the Chicago police arrested her at her home for hosting a
so called lesbian party. It's records like this arrest that helped support theories that a number of Malrainy songs allude to her lesbian leanings, like these famous lines in nineteen twenty eight's Prove It on Me Blues. I went out last night with a crowd of my friends. It must have been women, because I don't like no men. Wear my clothes just like a fan, talk to the gals just like any old man. And a few years earlier, in nineteen twenty four, Ma Rainey recorded another song that
hence at her queerness. In the lyrics, she describes a woman who is wearing men's shoes, and at the time, you know, there were men's shoes and most women wouldn't be caught dead in them unless she was a cross dressing or be gay. And that nineteen twenty four song that was also Shave Em Dry Blues, that's right, Lucille Bogan's infinous nineteen thirty five recording was actually a modified cover, or at least inspired by Ma Rainey's tune from more
than a decade earlier. And actually, on that day, March fifth, nineteen thirty five, Bogan recorded two versions of Shave Them Dry. There's the super vulgar one you heard earlier, and then there's a cleaned up version that is way more tame and marketable. And that cleaned up version was the song released and distributed by Bogan's record label, The Banner, labeled
of the American Record Corporation. And believe it or not, these naughty, slightly suggestive tunes weren't just some random dirty songs that slipped through the cracks.
No no, no, no, no no.
There was actually a whole genre of sexually suggestive, if not outright explicit blues music that actually, despite its erotic subject matter, held broad commercial appeal. It was called hocum blues. More on that after the soothing advertisements. Welcome back from the soothing advertisements. I'm going to introduce a new person. His name is Thomas A. Dorsey. These days, he's known as the father of gospel music, and he's inducted into
both the Songwriters and the Gospel Hall of Fame. He's been recorded and covered by musicians like bb King to Little Richard, to Aretha Franklin, even Elvis Presley. And that's not necessarily because of his long career in gospel music.
No No. Back in the late nineteen twenties, Thomas A.
Dorsey was known as Georgia Tom and he was a pioneer of the genre known as hokum blues. And by the nineteen twenties, by the way, Dorsey was a well established performer. He was born in Villa Rica, Georgia, but his family moved to Atlanta when he was a child. There he began working part time at a local theater, which is where he learned to play the piano. According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, by the time Dorsey was twelve, he was performing at the barrel houses in
Brothels of Atlanta's Decatur Street. Some years later he moved to Chicago and it was there that he served for at least some time as none other than Ma Rainey's bandleader. He was also a piano player, a ranger, and vocal coach at Paramount Records. He just dove headfirst into Chicago's music scene. Then he meets a guy named Hudson Whittaker
who went by the name of Tampa Red. He was a musician who played parties and did some street performing for money, and the two of them started playing together. While classic blue singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey performed at the vaudeville houses, the majority of blues musicians at the time tended to perform at late night spots like speakeasies, after hours cafes, and parties. And this was pretty cool, but according to Dorsey, it was actually possible
to make a living performing at these parties. You know, when one party ended, the musicians could move on to the next gathering and just keep going. A lot of these places they offered pretty low rents to the people who were moving to the major cities every week. A lot of the people moving were black Southerners who were fleeing the Jim Crow South. This is part of what
would come to be known as the Great Migration. And so since you had all of these black Southerners moving up north, there was a desire for some Southern type music.
You know. So at these parties, the music.
That people wanted to hear was stuff that you might hear at a weekend shin dig in the South. So this music came to be known as city blues.
You know.
It was something you could dance to, but it also had very lol lyrics. And the thing is, you might be wondering, Oh, I didn't think that in the rural South, in the countryside, that people would be singing suggestive songs. But apparently people had been doing that for a long time, in fact, more than a decade before Ma Rainey came up with shaveam Dry. In nineteen twelve. Black vaudeville performer Paul Carter put it this way to a news publication.
He said, smutty sayings and suggestive dancing were already common in black vaudeville, and the audiences loved things with a double meaning.
So yeah, this.
Raunchy art form was already very popular and tons of fun and at night, with lots of drinking and dancing, it made sense to have some smut and vulgarity. But certainly this wasn't something you would record and distribute for money.
Right, No, wrong, because now in.
The twentieth century, with the growth of the music industry, there are a lot of people who were hungry to record music, particularly like when Ralph Pierre came down to Atlanta, he was really focused on what was then known as race records or in general black music. And then when we got to the nineteen twenties, people had record players and this boosted the popularity of genres like jazz, blues and what was then called hillbilly music what we'd call
country today. So you know, some of these record producers they had this idea. They're like, well, if we take the city blues songs that are so popular, take out some of the inappropriate words, maybe have even more secure innuendos, voila, then we can make a hit, which brings us back to Dorsey and Whittaker in nineteen twenty eight. The two of them were trying to make a hit song, but Unfortunately they were having some writer's block. But then one
day they're just hanging out and inspiration strikes. Basically what happened is that they were just sitting around trying to think up a song, and then a boy comes by and he's like, hey, everybody in the street is saying it's tight like that. Maybe you should make a song about that. And then Dorsey and Whitaker were like, that's a great idea. So they wrote a song called It's Tight Like That. Whittaker wrote the lyrics and Dorsey was
in charge of the tune. And yes, the tune is very similar to this nineteen twenty five song called Shake that Thing by Papa Charlie Jackson.
But whatever that was a hit.
Dorsey made some tweaks whatever, and so in Tight Like That, the lyrics are suggestive, but not necessarily outright dirty, filthy gross. They actually use a lot of slang used by black people at the time, so they never directly said any of the bad words taboo topics. One term that you might hear at a late night dance club was beatle um bum, which Dorsey explained was a suggestive phrase that women would sing while dancing with their dudes.
The lyrics are.
Uncle Bill came home about half past ten, put the key in the hole, but he couldn't get in. Oh it's tight like that.
Hmm, what could that mean?
Beat up bum bum? Oh it's tight like that beatle um bum you hear me talking to you.
I mean it's tight like that.
So, you know, suggestive but not explicit, And as many songs in the hok and blues genre would do later, you could further modify it, like you could also just like not say tight instead. Sometimes it would be replaced with it or that thing, And so people who were listening to it, if they weren't good at like innuendo or didn't know the words, you couldn't be offended, like maybe in the song, you know, the key was just literally too fat for that lock. I don't know, And
it's tight like that became a huge hit. By nineteen twenty nine, five hundred thousand records had been sold. The Songwriters Hall of Fame thinks that the song ultimately sold seven million recordings, which was a record for the blues era, and also Whittaker and Dorsey kept recording new versions with different lyrics or a new band name, like they did one version that they recorded with a jug band, and
they called it Tampa Red's Hocum Jug Band. And as for the word hokum, they included it because of the words of roots in vaudeville, it was already a term used to describe a show or performance that bordered on vulgarity, sort of a lowke metic style like double entendre. This basically let their audience, at least the ones who were in the know, understand what.
They were really getting at.
And unsurprisingly, because of this song's success, other groups began recording covers of its tight like that, or just ripped the song off completely, and it was so popular that people were eating this shit up.
They're like, yes, give me more, it's tight like that.
Like even preachers recorded sermons that had similar names.
Like this is crazy, But there was a dude who had.
A sermon that was called these hard Times are tight like that.
So the popularity.
Of this song and others led to a rush of hocum blues hits in the twenties and thirties that had some really excellent titles like what is It that Tastes Like Gravy by Whittaker or Meatballs by Lil Johnson, our Bo Carter's Please Warm My Wiener.
That last one not super subtle.
And while a lot of people love these songs, a lot of people hated them. A lot of the criticism was aimed at the record companies. Like the famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was like, Ah, the record companies quote encouraged their singers to produce cheap novelty blues, the sillier the better, which in his eyes, overshadowed quote the poignant and often profound poetry of the earlier country blues.
But I think this is dumb.
Because obviously vulgar and racy songs can be poetic and have meaning.
Okay, these were very clever songs.
Also, his criticism of the record companies takes away the agency of the black artists who were making the songs. Like the Hoke and Blues and these like dirty blues tunes. They were very subversive, you know, it was going against the white establishment that expected black people to behave a certain way stupid in low Max. And it's also kind of funny because like Thomas Dorsey, who wrote some of these dirty songs, he was actually a Baptist and in
the twenties. While writing these popular blues tracks, he was also becoming involved in music of the church. He coined the term gospel music and would sell sheet music with gospel songs he had written.
But unfortunately this is really sad. But in the nineteen.
Thirties, his wife and his child died within twenty four hours of each other. That inspired him to write his most famous gospel song, which is take my Hand, Precious Lord. And in the decades after he became an influential music publisher and would eventually be recognized as the father of gospel music. And now Lucille Bogan's legacy, though it's taken a longer time to acknowledge, and maybe that's because her music wasn't as marketable, kind of like this show you know another one of her songs.
Here are the lyrics.
I told him, I got a cock, and it's got four damn good names.
Rough top, rough cock, tough cock, cock.
Without a bone. You can fuck my cock, suck my cock, or leave my cock alone. But also it might have taken longer to recognize her because when she first started recording it was under her real name, Lucille Bogan, But in nineteen thirty three, when she went to New York. She began recording as Bessie Jackson, and she managed to lay down over one hundred tracks of just two years. And it was in nineteen thirty five, during her final recording session that she recorded Till the Cows Come Home
and those two takes of Shave Them Dry. Unfortunately, ARC didn't renew her contract, so she didn't record anymore after that.
She died in August nineteen forty eight.
Even though she never achieved the name recognition that she deserves, we got to appreciate her body blues. So at the end of this episode, to really put you in the mood for Valentine's Day, let's have another reading of her lyrics. Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell sapper, and your dick stands up like a steeple, your goddamn asshole stands open like a church door, and the crabs
walk in like people haw shit shucks ooh. And as always we learn a lesson from American filth, and I think the lesson we learned today is that throughout the century, throughout the years, people want to fuck all right. Happy Valentine's Day everyone, American Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. I'm Gabby Watts. This episode was written by Amelia Brock. She's also the senior producer. Ore executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr.
You can follow the podcast on Instagram at American Felt Pod.
Theme song is also by me and Jesse Niswanger. Please leave review give it five stars. I hope you guys have a good day. Have you all find say
Bye School of Humans.