{"id":1499,"date":"2016-06-19T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1499"},"modified":"2024-05-28T04:45:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T08:45:41","slug":"bully-of-the-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bully-of-the-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Bully of the Town (May Irwin and others)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dCkyIcPMzx4\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>[Note: I&#8217;ve learned a lot more about this song since writing this post, and have a long section about it in my book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/jellyrollbook.html\"><em>Jelly Roll Blues<\/em><\/a>.]<\/p>\n<p>I picked this up from the Holy Modal Rounders, presumably in my late teens, since I&#8217;d had enough training from Dave Van Ronk to hear that it included a diminished chord. I don&#8217;t remember what appealed to me about it at the time, but when I got deeper into the history of American popular music, it was unavoidably significant. Depending on one&#8217;s definition, it was arguably the first nationally popular ragtime or &#8220;coon&#8221; song &#8212; an offensive term that became generic in the early 20th century, though the original lyrics of &#8220;The Bully Song&#8221; (as it was originally titled) used a more offensive term.<\/p>\n<p>It was a huge hit in 1895 for a Scots-Canadian singer named<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1501 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bully-Song2.jpeg?resize=273%2C362&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"273\" height=\"362\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bully-Song2.jpeg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bully-Song2.jpeg?resize=226%2C300&amp;ssl=1 226w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 273px) 100vw, 273px\" \/> May Irwin, who performed it in a stage play called <em>The Widow Jones<\/em> &#8212; which is also notable because <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Q690-IexNB4\">a brief scene in which she kisses one of the other actors<\/a> was filmed by Thomas Edison in 1897 and hence is one of the first filmed love scenes. Irwin followed with other songs about African American badmen, generally performed in exaggerated dialect &#8212; though, unlike most white singers who specialized in that sort of material, she did not wear blackface make-up &#8212; and was one of the few pop stars of the late 19th century to record some of her hits, including &#8220;The Bully Song.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>All of which said, the song seems to have predated Irwin&#8217;s involvement. W.C. Handy wrote that he heard it in the early 1890s and its success inspired him to try his own hand at writing &#8220;a ditty fit to go with twanging banjos and yellow shoes&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p><em>Songs of this sort could be tremendous hits sometimes. On the levee at St. Louis I had heard <\/em>Looking for the Bully<em> sung by the roustabouts, which later was adopted and nationally popularized by May Irwin. I had watched the joy-spreaders rarin&#8217; to go when it was played by the band&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The most assiduous researchers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century black popular music, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, have turned up an early mention of the song in the Leavenworth Herald from 1894, which also seems to be the first printed appearance of the word <em>rag<\/em> to mean a kind of music: &#8220;Kansas City girls can&#8217;t play anything on pianos except &#8216;rags&#8217; and the worst &#8216;rags&#8217; at that. &#8216;The Bully&#8217; and &#8216;Forty Drops&#8217; are their favorites.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Like much other black music of that period, this song had mostly fallen out of favor with African American musicians and listeners by the time they began recording in large numbers in the 1920s &#8212; though some fragmentary verses were recorded by significant black performers, including Henry Thomas, Lead Belly, and the Memphis Jug Band &#8212; but remained popular white rural musicians. It was recorded by some two dozen &#8220;hilbilly,&#8221; &#8220;old time&#8221; and &#8220;country&#8221; players and groups (up to and including the Everly Brothers), whence the Holy Modal Rounders, whence me &#8212; and I learned it knowing none of this history, or even that the bully and his antagonistic narrator were originally supposed to be African Americans.<\/p>\n<p>Final note: In the early 1980s I did a six-show weekend at Passim Coffeehouse opening for Norman Blake and the Rising Fawn String Ensemble. The dressing room in<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1509 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Norman-Blake.jpg?resize=200%2C200&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Norman Blake\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Norman-Blake.jpg?w=200&amp;ssl=1 200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Norman-Blake.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/> Passim was tiny, and they were the headliners, but I had to get my guitar in tune and my fingers warmed up, so despite the fact that Norman was sitting two feet away from me, I had to play something. I had been fooling around with this song, and didn&#8217;t remember that he had recorded it, so I started picking it as a warm-up exercise&#8230; and, without saying a word, he picked up his guitar and began backing me, quietly and perfectly, not taking over but just playing back-up and making me sound better, until I nodded to him for a solo, and he played something simple and pretty, then went back to playing rhythm. He had never met me, never heard of me, and it was the nicest thing he could possibly have done, and I&#8217;ll love him forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first huge hit of the ragtime song era, with all sorts of messy background, though I first heard it from the Holy Modal Rounders and didn&#8217;t know that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Bully of the Town (May Irwin and others) - 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Of the few I managed to work out, my favorite was \"Ragtime Millionaire,\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/yazoo-guitar-wizards-e1462841648853.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3313,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/georgia-camp-meeting-kerry-mills\/","url_meta":{"origin":1499,"position":1},"title":"At a Georgia Camp Meeting (Kerry Mills)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By some measures the first major hit of the ragtime era, \"At a Georgia Camp Meeting\" was played by brass bands, mandolin orchestras, banjo virtuosos, pianists, and everyone else who tried their hand at the ragtime style. It was composed in 1897 by the violinist, music teacher, orchestra leader, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/campmeeting1-227x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1541,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tell-old-bill\/","url_meta":{"origin":1499,"position":2},"title":"Tell Old Bill (Bob Gibson, Ben Harney, et al.)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This was one of my regular numbers during that first summer of street singing. I learned it from Dave Van Ronk's second album and, although he'd stopped singing it by the time I knew him, it was one of his big showstoppers back in 1961. His first wife, Terri Thal,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Bob-Gibson-I-Come-to-Sing-LP-cover-e1619022727715.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1176,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/good-old-wagon\/","url_meta":{"origin":1499,"position":3},"title":"You&#8217;ve Been a Good Old Wagon (Bessie Smith\/Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Another of my favorite Dave Van Ronk guitar arrangements, and a perfect example of how he would edit an accompaniment down to its absolute essentials. His model was one of Bessie Smith's greatest records, featuring Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fred Longshaw playing unobtrusive piano. Other guitarists faced with Smith's\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"dave van ronk5","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/dave-van-ronk5.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2784,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/know-means-lonesome\/","url_meta":{"origin":1499,"position":4},"title":"I Know What It Means to be Lonesome (Bill Williams)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I learned this off a lovely album by a little-known guitarist and singer from Kentucky, Bill Williams, who recorded a couple of LPs for the Blue Goose label in the 1970s. Williams was presented as a blues artist, but his music ranged all over American music, from old rural music\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Bill-Williams-LP-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5462,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/doctor-jazz\/","url_meta":{"origin":1499,"position":5},"title":"Doctor Jazz (Jelly Roll Morton)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 9, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know where or when I first heard this song, but I didn't start playing it till I heard Paul Geremia's version. Paul is generally known for playing and singing blues in the tradition of people like Willie McTell and Lemon Jefferson, but he liked to fool around with\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Jellycover-e1710359243890.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1499"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5231,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions\/5231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}