|
Pretty Polly/Ain't Gonna Do It No More
Old-time; bluesy bluegrass song, not widely known; England and US
ARTIST: Pretty Polly as Sung by Mrs. M.M.
Springfield MO Aug. 27, 1938; She learned the song in the 1890's
CATEGORY: Blues and Jazz Songs DATE: 1931 (Earliest version by John Barnett as "Sally my Dear" collected by Sharp 1906)
RECORDING INFO: Ain't Gonna Do It No More (Carter and Dorsey); James "Iron Head" Baker, "Crawling and Creeping" (AFS 717 A1, 1936); Harry Cox, "The Knife in the Window" (on FSB2CD); A. L. Lloyd, "Pretty Polly" (on BirdBush1, BirdBush2)
Asa Martin, "Crawling and Creeping" (Oriole 8452, 1935) Jim Garland's "Nancy and Johnny";
RELATED TO: Sally, My Dear; Nancy and Johnny; The Young Doctor; The Snoring Maid;
OTHER NAMES: Creeping and Crawling; The Knife in the Window; Pretty Polly; Lay Your Leg over Me Do; Hallelu!
SOURCES: Time Magazine article; Traditional Ballad index;
NOTES: This bawdy song, Roud #12590, has a similar tune but different plot as the English song "Hares on the Mountain." The usual title is "Creeping and Crawling" and also "A-Creeping and A-Crawling." The English song portrays a young man, creeping and crawling, who seduces the maid, then takes a knife to cut the tie on her drawers. He leaves her to lament nine months later. The Lloyd recording provocatively contains the chorus "Lay your leg over me, over me, do" And at least one recorded version of "Sally, My Dear" -- an American one -- contains the "cutting the trousers" motif.
The Tobacco Tags (Three 'Baccer Tags) are the Stapleton Brothers. Their 1931 version which can be heard on http://www.juneberry78s.com/otmsampler/otmsampta.html preceeds Asa Martin's 1934 version, heard at Honking Duck.
The song, titled "Hallelu," was also in the repertoire of Ironhead Baker, an African-American convict discovered by Alan Lomax. Here's an Time Magazine article about Ironhead Baker from 1936:
Music: After Lead Belly, Ironhead
Monday, Apr. 06, 1936 Time Magazine article: Early last year John Avery Lomax, crack compiler of U. S. folk songs, arrived in Manhattan with a big, wild-eyed Negro known as Lead Belly (real name: Huddie Ledbetter). John Lomax' protègé was a murderer, but he was also a natural-born minstrel. From a Texas jail he won his pardon by singing a petition to onetime Governor Pat Neff. In the Louisiana swamplands his knife made more trouble. Again he was imprisoned, again got out with a song when John Lomax made a phonograph record of it, submitted it personally to the late Governor Allen.
Lead Belly was in Manhattan last week about to appear in a Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress.
To Governor Allred Convict Baker explained his nickname: "Wal, Guv'nor, when I first landed in de pen, I was chopping wood one day when we cut down an oak tree and a big limb hit me in de head. Dat limb broke, but I went right on workin'. So de boys call me Ironhead."
More Notes (Liner Notes from New World Records- Asa Martin recording): Whatever bawdy songs and stories were known to the earliest white folk musicians to record their lore have already been lost: little more than double-entendre (such as the Carolina Tar Heels’“My Sweet Farm Girl”) or severely displaced (Cliff Carlisle’s “Tom Cat Blues”) bawdy songs—largely modeled on black “hokum” or “party blues”—found its way into the hillbilly record market.
A rare exception is Asa Martin’s “Crawling and Creeping,” a highly expurgated version of a genuine Anglo-American bawdy song that provides an oblique view of the sexual lore known to country musicians but apparently rigorously excluded from the recording studios.
Unexpurgated texts of “Crawling and Creeping” (known in England as “Nancy and Johnny”: see Harry Cox’s recording on the English Folk Dance and Song Society LP 1004) depict a familiar sexual theme. The protagonist poses as a sexual fool who must pretend to be dreaming or ignorant while he tricks his target into helping him seduce her. Pregnancy is the inevitable result of the seduction (other texts read, “In about nine months she fell to weepin’/ Along come a bastard acrawlin’ and a-creepin’”), and punishment by castration is inflicted by the father/authority figure—often a doctor, whose sole function in sexual folklore, according to the folklorist Gershon Legman, is to punish by purgation or castration (as in the ancient “Doctor Krankheit” burlesque routine:“Oh my God, nurse, I told you to slip off his spectacles!”).
Asa Martin, of Winchester, Kentucky, one of the more sophisticated performers to record folk songs commercially, has a long background in vaudeville and medicine shows. Apparently familiar with the unexpurgated “Crawling and Creeping,” Martin cleverly suggests the motifs of the original while remaining in commercially acceptable taste: the length of the jail sentence suggests the pregnancy, the authority figure is the judge, and the nature of the punishment remains clear (“This crawlin’ and creepin’s
gonna be your last”). In Martin’s performance the usual refrain (in England,“With his long fol-de-diggydi- do right down to his knees”; in America, “Lay your leg over mine once more”) has been suppressed in favor of hot guitar breaks, among the first of their kind on hillbilly records.
Martin performed in the Winchester area. His career has been ably documented by Mark Wilson in an LP, Dr. Ginger Blue (Rounder 0034), which focuses on Martin’s medicine-show entertainments.
No More Notes: The earliest version is "The Snoring Maid," found in The New Academy of Complements (London, 1669). There are multiple versions and detailed song notes found in "Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume I. Pretty Polly
as sung by Mrs. M.M. of Springfield MO on Aug. 27, 1938, has a similar verse as the ballad Pretty Polly:
Here are the lyrics to “Pretty Polly/Ain’t Gonna Do It No More”
PRETTY POLLY
Sung by Mrs. M.M. of Springfield MO Aug. 27, 1938
She learned the song in the 1890's
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly
Oh won't you come to me?
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly
Oh won't you come to me?
Oh no, my young man,
I'm afraid you'll undo me
Just lie your leg over me, do!
Her drawers they was tied
An' he couldn't undo them
Her drawers they was tied
An' he couldn't undo them
She snorted and cied,
Just take your knife to them
Just lie your leg over me, do!
An' then they began,
Like lightnin' an' thunder
An' then they began,
Like lightnin' an' thunder
On the green green grass,
Pretty Polly layin' under.
Just lie your leg over me, do!
In about nine months
Polly went to weepin',
In about nine months
Polly went to weepin',
An' then she remembered
That crawlin' an' creepin'
Just lie your leg over me, do!
|