{"id":880,"date":"2016-04-27T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=880"},"modified":"2022-03-29T22:55:01","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T02:55:01","slug":"beedle-um-bum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/beedle-um-bum\/","title":{"rendered":"Beedle Um Bum (Kweskin Jug Band)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Beedle Um Bum\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ErtMKzfSPAw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>There are some songs I learned back in my youth that make me wonder, in retrospect, what I was thinking when I sang them. I&#8217;m sure I knew &#8220;Beedle Um Bum&#8221; was a euphemism, and had some sense of what the song was about, but I&#8217;m also sure I missed some of its juicier implications. In any case, my main interest was having fun and playing the kazoo, for which I&#8217;m sure my parents cursed the Kweskin gang occasionally, since I played it with far more exuberance than expertise <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-882 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Kweskin-first-LP-shot.jpg?resize=250%2C244&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Kweskin first LP shot\" width=\"250\" height=\"244\" \/> &#8212; and yes, there are more and less expert kazoo players, just as there are more and less expert scat singers&#8230; and I was well down on the list, though hard to beat for exuberance.<\/p>\n<p>The Kweskin Jug Band was even harder to beat for exuberance, and is fondly remembered today by a lot of people, but even its fans are often unaware of quite how great and influential it was. I don&#8217;t think I fully appreciated it myself until I was in Memphis, talking with Jim Dickinson, who was a seriously heavyweight and knowledgeable musician with deep links to a lot of classic local blues artists (and father to Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars). When he learned I was from Cambridge, he immediately proceeded to wax rhapsodic about the Kweskin band, saying he&#8217;d had his own jug band in Memphis around the same time and couldn&#8217;t believe how great the Kweskin group sounded: &#8220;We&#8217;d learned directly from all the old guys, we <em>knew<\/em> Will Shade and Gus Cannon, and Furry Lewis, and we thought we really had that sound down, but they blew us away &#8212; we couldn&#8217;t figure out how a bunch of guys from Boston could sound like that!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Part of it was that although the Kweskinites loved the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon&#8217;s Jug Stompers and learned a lot by listening to them, they also listened to a lot of other groups from other places, and a lot of other styles of music, and fed everything they heard through their own musical tastes and skills, and really didn&#8217;t sound like any previous group. &#8220;Beedle Um Bum,&#8221; for example, was not a jug band song &#8212; it had been done by one of the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-883 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/tampa-red-and-georgia-tom.jpg?resize=152%2C151&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"152\" height=\"151\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/tampa-red-and-georgia-tom.jpg?w=152&amp;ssl=1 152w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/tampa-red-and-georgia-tom.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 152px) 100vw, 152px\" \/>various Chicago studio aggregations dubbed the Hokum Boys, in this case consisting of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, who were riding the crest of a wave of upbeat double-entendre numbers they had started a couple of months earlier under their own names with their huge hit, &#8220;It&#8217;s Tight Like That.&#8221; I&#8217;m assuming they wrote this one as well, which would mean its lyrical vivacity is due to the nimble pen of Thomas A. Dorsey, remembered as the Father of Gospel Music for composing &#8220;Precious Lord,&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;m Gonna Live the Live I Sing About,&#8221; and &#8220;Peace in the Valley,&#8221; among many Christian favorites, and also for being an early mentor to Mahalia Jackson.<\/p>\n<p>It seems only fair to note that the Kweskin group made a couple of changes to this lyric, including the reference to &#8220;southern eel,&#8221; but only a couple, and this was far from Dorsey&#8217;s raunchiest number. Dorsey lived to be 93 years old and although he did not sing any of this sort of material after he became established as a gospel composer, he was always happy to talk about his days playing piano for Ma Rainey and writing naughty hokum hits, and apparently had no regrets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are some songs I learned back in my youth that make me wonder, in retrospect, what I was thinking when I sang them. I&#8217;m sure I knew &#8220;Beedle Um Bum&#8221; was a euphemism, and had some sense of what the song was about, but I&#8217;m also sure I missed some of its juicier implications. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/beedle-um-bum\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Beedle Um Bum (Kweskin Jug Band)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/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-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - 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It was silly and rowdy and fun -- or at least those were the songs I liked best, Jim's goofy features rather than\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Kweskin greatest hits","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Kweskin-greatest-hits.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":886,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/memphis\/","url_meta":{"origin":880,"position":2},"title":"Memphis (Chuck Berry)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 28, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Probably the first Chuck Berry song I learned to play, thanks to the Kweskin Jug Band... which really is not the way it should have been, but I was young.","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\/04\/Chuck-Berry.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4552,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-stole\/","url_meta":{"origin":880,"position":3},"title":"Somebody Stole My Gal\/All of Me","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've written before about my father, who was an indefatigable singer of pop songs from his youth in the 1920s, and also about Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, who were my source for \"Somebody Stole My Gal\" and over a dozen other songs. I learned this by ear off\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\/2021\/12\/somebody-stole-my-gal-230x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":814,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/stealin-stealin\/","url_meta":{"origin":880,"position":4},"title":"Stealin&#8217;, Stealin&#8217; (Sam Charters&#8217; reissues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A canonical jug band song from the canonical Memphis Jug Band, learned from Sam Charters's canonical blues reissue LP, \"The Country Blues.\"","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"The Country Blues","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/The-Country-Blues.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2703,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/any-old-time\/","url_meta":{"origin":880,"position":5},"title":"Any Old Time (Jimmie Rodgers)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 1, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Living with the vagaries of the folk scene, I came late to Jimmie Rodgers -- not because he was obscure, but on the contrary because his albums were available on a major label, RCA, at a time when I was buying reissue records on labels like Folkways, Yazoo, and Arhoolie.\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\/03\/Maria-Muldaur-300x298.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","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=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}