Yellow Dog Blues

#66 / May 6 Podcast

It’s not every song that has an historical marker devoted to it. But then, it’s not every song that has the privilege of being composed by the great W.C. Handy.

It’s hard to imagine what the early days of jazz would have been like without the songs of William Christopher Handy.

“Beale Street Blues,” “Careless Love” and, of course, the immortal “St. Louis Blues.” The Flood does all those songs, and lately we’ve been drawn to one of Handy’s earliest compositions.

In 1915 Handy wrote “Yellow Dog Blues,” which ends with the line reporting that an easy rider has “gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” Those are railroad references. It was talking about the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, known thereabouts as The Yellow Dog. And to this day, down in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, that bronze plate shown above stands at the very spot memorialized in the classic line.

The Song’s History

The story of how this song came into being is a curious one. Handy once said that in 1903 he heard a lean, raggedy guitarist in a railroad depot in Tutwiler, Mississippi, singing of going to “where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” But it was a dozen years later before he incorporated those words in a song. And when he did, it was an “answer” to someone else’s tune.

In 1913, a writer named Shelton Brooks released a hokum ragtimey blues called “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone?” His tune — first popularized on the vaudeville stage by Sophie Tucker, but perhaps best known much later by Mae West’s sultry performance of it in her 1933 movie “She Done Him Wrong” — was all about a woman named Susan Johnson who was grieving the mysterious disappearance of her long-lost lover, that “easy riding kid they call Jockey Lee.” When Brooks’ song opens, Lee has already left town.

Handy’s answer to it — first called “Yellow Dog Rag,” then renamed as a blues — was released two years later and tries to explain to Sue what became of her young Jockey Lee. Citing a letter that Miss Johnson receives from Tennessee, the lyric tells Sue her “easy rider struck this burg today,” then goes on with a tale of Lee’s tramping from town to town and hopping many a freight train.

Translating the Slang

Part of the fun of Handy’s tune, most famously recorded by Bessie Smith in 1925, is deciphering the lyrics’ early 20th century slang, most of it early railroad talk. We’ve already addressed the big one, of course. “The Southern” is the Southern Railway line and “the Yellow Dog” refers the Yazoo railroad. (Note too that “dog” itself — often related as “short-dog” — is railway slang for a local or branch line.)

The slangy fun really gets going in the second line of the chorus, which reports that Susan’s easy rider arrived in town “on a southbound rattler side-door Pullman car.” Uh, say what?

— a southbound rattler — that’s a rocking and rolling freight train (as opposed to a passenger train or car, which was “the cushions.”)

— side door Pullman car, dating back to at least the late 1880s, it means a boxcar, referring to the the side-opening doors of the freight wagon. It’s satire; the real Pullman, of course, was luxury passenger coach.

— on the hog. (Says the song, “I seen him there and he was on the hog”). This is railroad lingo for living as a tramp or a hobo. Dating back at least to the 1890s, it sometimes appeared as “on the hog train,” possibly meaning someone was reduced to hitching rides on livestock trains, but also on cow-catchers and in the crevices of lumber cars.

— vamp it. The song says “he had to vamp it, but the hike ain’t far.” While the term “vamp” has evolved in many ways over the years (from a noun for a seductive woman to a verb for ad-libbing), back in 1915, it just meant walking (possibly because as a noun “vamp” meant the top front part of a shoe or boot).

Our Take on the Tune

Doctor Flood made a house call earlier this week. Our tribal elder, Doug Chaffin, has had a rough 2022 so far. Despite being double-vaxxed and boosted, Doug fought a rugged few rounds with Covid over the winter and he’s still recovering, so the Family Flood rode into Ashland last Tuesday night to visit him and Donna.

The mission was to perk up their spirits, and, hey, we think the magic worked. Now, Doug has always liked this tune ever since we started doing it about a year ago, so it was only fitting to make it the centerpiece of our jam. Listen to Doug, Veezy and Danny just rocking the solos. Click here to hear this week’s wailing at the Chaffin house.

Video Extra

As noted, we started doing “Yellow Dog Blues” in 2021. In fact, our first public performance of it was on a sunny Sunday afternoon a year ago this week, when we popped into Ashland’s Central Park for happy little public jam. Pamela happened to video the performance, which you see below in this YouTube video: