I have to start this post with a Dave Van Ronk story: As he told it, he was playing on a blues festival someplace and arrived late, not knowing who else was on the bill. He rushed onstage and did his show, ending with a romping, stomping, macho version of “Hoochie Coochie Man…” and walked off to find that Muddy Waters had been watching from the wings.

Dave was consumed with embarrassment, but recalled, “Muddy was very gentlemanly, as always. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That was nice, son… but you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.'”

I’ve never been entirely sure I believe that story, but I took it to heart. It’s the same point John Hammond made about how people miss the humor in Robert Johnson’s lyrics: like, “You can bury my body by the highway side/ So my old restless spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” A lot of blues lyrics are funny — not only funny, but also funny. Like NWA’s lyrics; a lot of people who thought “Fuck the Police” was scary were surprised when Ice Cube started writing comedies, but if you actually listen to it, that record was as funny as it was angry.

Willie Dixon wrote this one and gave it to Muddy, and it changed Muddy’s career. It was by far his biggest hit, but that wasn’t the only thing; it was fundamentally different from the deep Delta blues style that originally put him on the map in Chicago. For one thing, his early hits featured his ferociously amplified slide guitar, but he didn’t play on this one. For another thing, it was clever, and funny.

When it hit, the R&B audience picked up on that. Within a few years, there were lots of other songs that used the trademark “Hoochie Coochie Man” riff, and virtually all of them were funny: Ray Charles’s “It Wasn’t Me,” Ruth Brown’s “I Can’t Hear a Word You Say,” Johnny Guitar Watson’s “Gangster of Love…” and three that I’ve already posted about: Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” and The Coasters’ “Riot In Cell Block Number Nine” and “Framed.”

I’ve rarely performed this one, because frankly I felt ill-equipped and silly singing the big, scary, macho lyric… but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t have to pretend to be Muddy Waters, or even Dave Van Ronk. So I started fooling around with it, playing with the lyric rather than trying to puff myself up to fit it, and discovered that it was fun. Like it was supposed to be.

Not incidentally, Willie Dixon started out doing funny recitations — he recalled that as a teenager in Mississippi he printed up a dirty version of the “Signifying Monkey” toast to sell to his schoolmates, and when he moved to Chicago and went professional he bowdlerized it, added a chorus, and made a hit recording with the Big Three Trio that was covered by Cab Calloway and Count Basie as “The Jungle King.” And there were lots of others: “Wang Dang Doodle,” for example, which reworks an older toast, “The Dance of the Freaks.” (I get into some of this in my book Jelly Roll Blues.)