Dirty Red: Mother Fuyer (1947)

 |   |  <1 min read

Dirty Red: Mother Fuyer (1947)

Blues and jazz artists often used coded language to get their lyrics past record companies and radio programmers, so you would get a song like When I'm In My Tea (by Jo-Jo Adams, 1946) about marijuana or Dope Head Blues by Victoria Spivey about cocaine.

Coded sex was everywhere . . . although there is no mistaking the meaning of songs like Poon Tang (by the Treniers), Big Long Slidin' Thing (Dinah Washington) or Somebody Else was Suckin' My Dick Last Night (the Fred Wolff Combo).

Chicago's Nelson Wilborn also didn't feel the need to get oblique on this track from 1947 under the appropriate nom de disque Dirty Red. Described as "an amiable alcoholic" who was born in Mississippi but mostly sang in Chicago clubs, Wilborn went on to work briefly with Muddy Waters in the Sixties but just seemed to disappear after that. There seems to be no known photographs of the man.

No matter, among his legacy recordings is this little gem where he effectively mumbles the Oedipal expletive but his intention is increasingly clear. It comes from a collection of blues on the Aladdin label, The Aladdin Records Story.

One for those who thought gangsta rappers invented the word.

For more one-offs, oddities or songs with an interesting backstory see From the Vaults

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   From the Vaults articles index

Stephanie Dosen: Within You Without You (2007)

Stephanie Dosen: Within You Without You (2007)

For centuries a wide strain of folk music existed without the appellation “drone folk”, a convenience label which seemed to emerge some time in the Nineties. There was always an... > Read more

Chuck Berry: La Juanda (Espanol) (1957)

Chuck Berry: La Juanda (Espanol) (1957)

Long before Paul McCartney wrote his slightly twee ballad Michelle for the album Rubber Soul, Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry were also addressing the problems across langauge barriers. But while... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Samoa: A stranger in paradise (2001)

Samoa: A stranger in paradise (2001)

As a tourist carrying stress into Samoa you notice things by their absence. Ordinary, boring stuff like clocks and timetables, cellphones and power-dressers in black, graffiti and rubbish, and... > Read more

Hallelujah Picassos: Rewind the Hateman (HP/Rhythmethod)

Hallelujah Picassos: Rewind the Hateman (HP/Rhythmethod)

In one of the liner note essays here Ross Cunningham says when he first got a copy of Auckland band Hallelujah Picassos debut album Hateman in Love he kept playing it because "it sounded like... > Read more