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Black Annie/Old Black Annie/Poor Black Annie/Black Annie II
Note: Several different songs use this title, some are related. Some fiddle, banjo and guitar versions are related to Keep the Skillet Good And Greasy.
Fiddle Breakdown/Old-time Song/Guitar and banjo solo
ARTIST: Joe and Odell Thompson
Listen: Carolina Chocolate Drops
Listen: Hobart Smith (instrumental banjo solo)
Listen: Poor Black Annie (Instrumental- Clayton Horsely)
Listen: Black Annie (II) Georgia Yellow Hammers
Listen: Black Annie- Dink Roberts
CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes;
DATE: 1800s- Early 1900s; An unrelated version tiled "Black Annie" was written by Hillman and Perrin, 1897.
RECORDING INFO: Black Annie [Me II-Z33]
Georgia Yellow Hammers. Moonshine Hollow Band, Rounder 1032, LP (1979), trk# B.08 [1928/10/18]
Hart and Blech. Build Me a Boat, Voyager VRCD 354, CD (2001), trk# 20
Roberts, Dink. Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia, Smithsonian SF 40079, CD (1998), trk# 17
Smith, Hobart. Hobart Smith, Folk Legacy FSA 017, LP (1964), trk# 4
Smith, Hobart. Southern Journey. Vol. 2: Ballads and Breakdowns, Rounder 1702, CD (1997), trk# 22 [1959/08/25]
Smith, Hobart. In Sacred Trust. 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes, Smithsonian SFWCD 40141, CD (2005), trk# 32 [1963/10]
Thompson, Joe; and Odell Thompson. Oldtime Music from the North Carolina Piedmont, Global Village C 217, Cas (1989), trk# 10
OTHER NAMES: “Old Black Annie”; "Poor Black Annie,"
RELATED TO: "You May Leave But this will Bring you back" Black Annie II- Georgia Yellow Jackets
SOURCES: Mudcat; Folk Index; Virginai Traditions (liner Notes); Bob Coltman; Jim Dixon; JOAFL; Stephen Wade (Folkways notes)
NOTES: Joe and Odel Thompson's version has been done by the excellent old-time group, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, who learned the song from Joe Thompson. The Chocolate Drops version (Listen: Carolina Chocolate Drops) has slightly different lyrics (See below).
A related guitar solo version "Poor Black Annie" by Virginia guitarist Clayton Horsely (listen: Poor Black Annie (Instrumental- Clayton Horsely) is similar to the melody of "Keep Your skillet Good And Greasy". Horsely learned his fingerstyle Piedmont blues version from local banjo pickers. Banjoist Dink Roberts (see Version 2), another piedmont area musician, played a related version.
According to Willie Trice, the song was in the repertoire of his Uncle Willie (died 1933) under the title "Old Black Annie." Uncle Willie also "Coo Coo was a fine bird," "Reuban," and "John Henry."
A number of songs, some unrelated, use the title Black Annie. Here's some information from Bob Coltman, who has examined the song:
Bob Coltman: "There are Hobart Smith recordings of the banjo "Black Annie" is a title that's been used for at least two different songs/tunes, one an old banjo lyric, the other a completely unrelated Georgia Yellowhammers song.
My source for the banjo song is Dink Roberts. (Listen: Black Annie- Dink Roberts)
It seems to be a murder ballad about a woman who was killed by her man for drinking on her own. Cece Conway in her notes to Black Banjo Songsters says Roberts learned it from his "blood brother" Mince Phillips of Burlington, NC, some nine years older, "who he believed made the song." The tune is related to the "Skillet Good and Greasy"/"Nobody's But Mine" family.
Saltville, VA's Hobart Smith, who was well acquainted with African American as well as white banjo tunes, does "Black Annie" as part of an instrumental medley on Folk Legacy FSA17 (Listen: Hobart Smith) , which seems to indicate the tune spread more widely and may not originate solely with Phillips and Roberts. And as I'll post later, the title also graces a most puzzling song by the Georgia Yellowhammers that seems wildly unrelated.
It's clear this is a real rarity. Roberts claimed Black Annie was a real person: "the man killed her, he cut her light out." (as in "my liver and my lights, my lungs and my head" etc.
Black Annie is a piece on Rounder's second volume of the Alan Lomax Southern Journey series, and a very different version on the Smithsonian/Folkways Hobart Smith CD, In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes."
Here are Stephen Wade's notes on the song from the Folkways CD:
32. BLACK ANNIE
Though Hobart credits his father for this instrumental, he admitted to the Old Town School students that he had “pepped it up a little more.” More recent banjo recordings of Dink Roberts and Joe and Odell Thompson, a fiddle and banjo team, reveal it to be an entire song. In both their versions, it tells of a woman named Black Annie getting shot to death. I asked Joe Thompson about the lyric, and he said of the song's narrator, "He shot the door and and hit her next. He just run into the wrong lady. Related songs, like the Thompsons' “Georgia Buck” and “Wish to Lord I'd Never Been Born" played by Irvin Cook and Leonard Bowles (also a Black fiddle and banjo duet), likewise include a verse about Black Annie. Stemming from a different musical tradition, James "Kokomo" Arnold's 1935 slide blues recording of "Black Annie" also conveys forboding and gun play.
Bob Coltman: "Even without the benefit of a commercial recording to disseminate it, the tune has kept an essentially stable form, showing a melodic connection to “Old Reuben.” But the difference between Hobart’s approach to “Black Annie” and these other recordings reveals just how developed his intense, rapid-fire banjo style was.
Another usage of the name “Black Annie,” related to this piece perhaps only by my own sense of the song’s underlying mood, came from a visit I made to Mississippi’s Parchman prison in January 1997. While I drove around the 22,000-acre facility with a retired guard who had been born there, the elderly sergeant told me “when an in mate got out of line” they fetched “Black Annie,” a six-foot whip, five inches wide and attached to a wooden handle. The superintendent would sign a disciplinary slip, and the man would get ten lashes. “Back then,” the guard added, “they had no kind of disciplinary problems.”
"Black Annie" by The Georgia Yellowhammers, which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the above. Listen: Black Annie (II) Georgia Yellow Hammers
The Yellowhammers were mainly Bill Chitwood and Bud Landress with various other musicians, including sometimes the fine black fiddle/guitar duo Andrew and Jim Baxter. The Yellowhammers were steeped in rags and blues, and some of their records are masterpieces of down-home swing and syncopation.
However, what they meant by titling their 1928 record "Black Annie" isn't clear. Annie is never mentioned by name in the song, and it's not clear the song is about her at all. It's of the "coon song" variety popular in the 1890s, already long in decline by the time this was recorded.
This song is of the "You May Go, But This Is Gonna Bring You Back" family, but it's a wild ride that may include more than one song, such as a "Kill 'Em Kid" passage (a jazz interjection that goes way back) some years before Blind Willie McTell first recorded his "Kill It Kid Rag" (1940). Nevertheless its story is very coherent throughout. Its tune also varies quite a bit from verse to verse.
So the question is, did they just cop the title, perhaps from some unrecorded instrumental by the Baxters? Or is "Black Annie" really the name of this song, and if so, can it be traced to any original, or did they compose it?
You can see that the whole Black Annie business is confusion compounded."
Guthrie Meade points out that The Georgia Yellow Hammers 1928 version (see version 3- Listen: Black Annie (II) Georgia Yellow Hammers) is related to White's American Negro Folk song p.147 Section II #16 and Memphis Jug band's (as the Carolina Peanut Boys) song, "You May Leave But this will Bring you back." Bob Coltman calls this the "You May Go, But This Is Gonna Bring You Back" family of songs (see above). I used some of the lyrics in the 1980s to write a song titled, "Satisfied" by the Matteson Blues.
The earliest version I know was published in 1911 JOAFL:
FOLK-SONG AND FOLK-POETRY AS FOUND IN THE SECULAR SONGS OF THE SOUTHERN NEGROES —BY HOWARD W. ODUM
62. YOU MAY LEAVE, BUT THIS WILL BRING YOU BACK
It will be seen that the negro loves to sing of trials in court, arrests,; idleness, crime, and bravado. The tramp and the "rounder," the "Eastman" and the " creeper," are but typical extremes. The notorious characters sung are the objective specimens of the common spirit of self-feeling. Now comes the song with the personal boast and the reckless brag. Mixed with it all is the happy-go-lucky sense of don't-care and humor. It is a great philosophy of life the negro has.
Satisfied, tickled to death,
Got a bottle o' whiskey on my shelf,
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
Satisfied, satisfied,
Got my honey by my side,
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
An' I'm jus' frum the country come to town,
A too-loo-shaker from my head on down,
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
YOU MAY LEAVE, BUT THIS WILL BRING YOU BACK- Memphis Jug Band
(Listen: Memphis Jug Band)
My father was a jockey, learned me to ride behind.
You know by that, I got a job any time.
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
I walked around the corner to the peanut stand.
My gal got stuck on the peanut man.
You may go, but this will bring you back.
You quit me, pretty mama, 'cause you couldn't be my boss,
But a rolling stone don't gather no moss.
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
Just a nickel's worth of meal, a dime's worth of lard
Will feed everything in Jeff Berk's yard.
You may leave, but this will bring you back.
I'm satisfied, satisfied.
My tote-load shaker by my side.
You may leave, but this will bring you back, back, bring you back.
[Additional verse found at the St. Louis Zipper web site, but not in the Memphis Jug Band's recording:]
I'm built like a tadpole, shaped like a frog.
When I go with your woman, she'll holler, "Hot dog!"
You may leave but this will bring you back.
[As recorded by the Memphis Jug Band, 1930, Charlie Nickerson, vocalist. Tote-loader shaker seems to have been someone employed in a mill who would shake the "tote-box", presumably to empty it. This may have been the origin of the ragtime "todalo dance." The refrain (and not much else) is apparently taken from a popular 1898 late 1800s song in which "this" obviously means "money."]
YOU MAY GO, BUT THIS WILL BRING YOU BACK (Ben Harney, 1898)
CHO: "You may go, but this here will bring you back.
You'll be sorry you ever gave me the sack."
It worked her up and got her flurred
She heard these words as out she stirred:
"You may go, but money will bring you back.
BLACK ANNIE- As performed by Carolina Chocolate Drops
Listen: Carolina Chocolate Drops
Old Black Annie got shot
Old Black Annie got shot
Old Black Annie got shot
In the middle of the barroom door.
Old Black Annie got away
Old Black Annie got away
Old Black Annie got away
In the middle of the barroom door.
BLACK ANNIE- As performed by Joe and Odell Thompson
Oh, yeah, Black Annie,
Black Annie,
Black Annie got shot
Right in the middle of the barroom door.
Black Annie got shot,
Black Annie got shot,
Black Annie got shot,
In the middle of the barroom door.
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