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

Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Love Will Tear Us Apart (2006)

Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Love Will Tear Us Apart (2006)

The Susanna here is Norway's Susanna Wallumrod and the Magical Orchestra is keyboard player Morten Qvenild . . . and this Joy Division classic is right in their frame of reference because her... > Read more

The Off-Set: You're a Drag (1966)

The Off-Set: You're a Drag (1966)

When it came to forming groups in the Sixties, Don Sallah was a serial offender. Mostly studio-based, Sallah started the decade in Little Moose and the Hunters (he was the wee moose), recorded... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

ALL APOLOGIES: The insincerities of saying sorry

ALL APOLOGIES: The insincerities of saying sorry

An apology means nothing if you do it on Facebook or You Tube. Or Twitter or e-mail or txt. Or a talk show. An apology by an actor who cries probably doesn’t mean much. These... > Read more

LENNON, THE MOBSTER AND THE LAWYER: THE UNTOLD STORY by JAY BERGEN

LENNON, THE MOBSTER AND THE LAWYER: THE UNTOLD STORY by JAY BERGEN

Although the author seems to possess that uncanny and unlikely ability to recall and quote lengthy conversations many decades after the events, this is still a fascinating account of the courtroom... > Read more