Up Jumped the Devil by Bruce Conforth

Author:Bruce Conforth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Alamo Plaza, San Antonio, Texas, 1930s. Bruce Conforth

Robert combined a hokum melody in the song with suggestive lyrics creating an up-tempo happy tale about a woman selling hot tamales.11 “Hokum” was a term that primarily applied to happy, suggestive ditties with double meanings. Not only was it a different style of song for a Delta bluesman, it was an example of how Robert could vary his repertoire however he needed. Lyrically the song was also different for Robert, since most of its lines could be found in dozens of other blues and folk songs. “I got a gal, say she’s long and tall. She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall” was used by Will Shade in 1934 in “Take Your Fingers Off It.” That Robert borrowed a line from Will Shade should come as no surprise—the Memphis Jug Band leader recalled playing with Johnson in a band in West Memphis.12 But Robert borrowed lines for “They’re Red Hot” from many other artists as well. Buddy Boy Hawkins in “How Come Mama Blues” (1929), the Birmingham Jug Band in “Giving It Away” (1930), and Bill Wilbur’s 1935 “Greyhound Blues” all included “She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime. Would sell you more, but they ain’t none of mine.” Walter Taylor in “Thirty Eight and Four” (1930) and Sleepy John Estes’s 1935 “Stop That Thing” used the lyrics: “You know the monkey, now the baboon playin’ in the grass. Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old Good Gulf Gas.” The rest of Robert’s lines seem likely to have also come from either other blues or oral tradition:

I got a letter from a girl in the room

Now, she got somethin’ good she got to bring home soon, now.

The billy goat back in a bumblebee nest

Ever since that he can’t take his rest.

You know Grandma left and now Grandpa too

Well I wonder what in the world we chillum gon’ do.

In fact, the only original lyrics in the piece are probably the refrain: “Hot tamales and they’re red hot, yes, she got ’em for sale.”

The guitar arrangement to “They’re Red Hot” featured rhythm chords played in a fashion normally used by jazz or swing band musicians. But as different as “They’re Red Hot” was from Robert’s other tunes, Law was willing to record whatever he offered. Law left it up to Satherly to decide what songs were placed on which sides of a 78-rpm record, or which were even released.

When he continued recording, Robert depicted his intense sexual conflicts with women on “Dead Shrimp Blues.” Robert painted a masterful image of a young man whose woman has left him for another man: “I got dead shrimp here. Someone’s fishin’ in my pond.” Robert’s line “The hole where I used to fish, you got me posted out” was a southern expression for landowners who posted signs warning against trespassing on private property. But his most poignant plea was simply, “I couldn’t do nothin’ baby, till I got unwound.

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