Published 1840s Writer(s) Traditional | Genre Minstrel, folk | |
"Jimmy Crack Corn" or "Blue Tail Fly" is an American song which first became popular during the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the 1840s through performances by the Virginia Minstrels. It regained currency as a folk song in the 1940s at the beginning of the American folk music revival and has since become a popular children's song. Over the years, several variants have appeared.
Contents
Most versions include some idiomatic African English, although sanitized General American versions now predominate. The basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his white master's death in a horseriding accident. The song, however, can be—and is—interpreted as having a subtext of celebration about that death and of the slaves having contributed to it through deliberate negligence or even deniable action.
Melody
The melody is similar to "Miss Lucy Long" and was originally set for piano accompaniment, although "De Blue Tail Fly" was marketed in Boston as one of "Emmett's Banjo Melodies". The four-part chorus favors a single bass and three tenors: the first and third tenors harmonize in thirds with the second completes the triads or doubles the root, sometimes crossing the melody line. The versions published in 1846 differed rather markedly: "De Blue Tail Fly" is modal (although Lhamar emends its B♭ notation to C minor) and hexatonic; "Jim Crack Corn", meanwhile, is in G major and more easily singable. Its simplicity has made it a common beginner's tune for acoustic guitar. The melody is a chain of thirds (G-B, F♯-A, G-B, [A]-C, B-D, C-E) harmonized a third above and below in the manner of the choruses in Italian opera.
Meaning
The first verses usually establish that the singer was initially a house slave. He is then charged with protecting the master out of doors—and his horse as well—from the "blue-tailed fly". This is possibly the blue-bottle fly (Calliphora vomitoria or Protophormia terraenovae), but probably the mourning horsefly (Tabanus atratus), a bloodsucking pest with a blue-black abdomen found throughout the American South. In this, the singer, ultimately, is unsuccessful; the horse goes wild, and the master is thrown and killed. A coroner's jury is convened to investigate the master's death, or the singer is criminally charged with that death, but owing to the "blue-tail fly," the slave escapes culpability.
The chorus can be mystifying to modern listeners, but its straightforward meaning is that someone is roughly milling ("cracking") the old master's corn in preparation for turning it into hominy or liquor. There has been much debate, however, over the subtext. In the 19th century, the singer was often considered mournful and despondent at his master's death; in the 20th, celebratory: "Jimmy Crack Corn" has been called "the baldest, most loving account of the master's demise" in American song.
The debate has been further muddled by changes to the refrain over time. Throughout the 19th century, the lines referred to "Jim", "Jim Crack", or "Jim Crack Corn" and lacked any conjunction across the line's caesura; following the rise of highly-syncopated musical genres such as ragtime and jazz, anaptyxis converted the name to "Jimmy" or "Jimmie" and the "and" appeared, both putting more stress on their measures' backbeat. This has obscured some of the possible original meanings: some have argued that—as "Jim" was a generic name for slaves in minstrel songs—the song's "Jim" was the same person as its blackface narrator: Speaking about himself in the 3rd person or repeating his new masters' commands in apostrophe, he has no concern with his demotion to a field hand now that his old master is dead. Another now-obscured possible meaning derives from jim crack being eye dialect for gimcrack ("worthless"): The narrator is so overcome with emotion (be it pleasure or sorrow) that he has no concern at all about his gimcrack cracked corn, his substandard rations. Since "corn" was also a common rural American ellipsis and euphemism for "corn whiskey", it could also refer to the slave being so overcome that he has no concern about his rotgut alcohol.
Other suppositions include that "cracking" or "cracking corn" referred to the now-obsolete English and Appalachian slang meaning "to gossip" or "to sit around chitchatting"; that the singer is resting from his oversight duties and allowing Jim to steal corn or corn liquor; that "Jim Crack" is simply a synonym for "Jim Crow" by means of the dialectical "crack" to reference the crake; or that it is all code for the old master "Jim" cracking his "corn" (skull) open during his fall. The 1847 version of the song published in London singularly has the lyrics "Jim Crack com’", which could refer to a poor Southern cracker (presumably an overseer or new owner) or a minced oath for Jesus Christ (thus referencing indifference at the Judgment Day); the same version explicitly makes the fly's name a wordplay on the earlier minstrel hit "Long Tail Blue", about a horse. A number of racehorses have been named "Jim Crack" or "Blue Tail Fly" and, in at least one early-20th century variant of the song, it's given as the name of the horse that killed the master, but that is not a common element of the song. (Another uncommon variant appeared in the 1847 Songs of Ireland published in New York: it has the slave being given away by the master.)
Explanations of the song based upon "jimmy" or "jimmie" being slaves' slang for crows or mules (here being allowed into the old master's corn fields instead of being chased away) or deriving "jimmy" from "gimme" are unsupported by the existing records. Pete Seeger, for instance, is said to have maintained that the original lyrics were "gimme cracked corn" and referred to a punishment in which a slave's bacon rations were curtailed, leaving him chickenfeed; the same lines could also just be asking for the whiskey jug to be passed around. The idea that Jim or Jimmy is "cracking open" a jug of whiskey is similarly unsupported: that phrasal verb is attested at least as early as 1803 but initially applied to literal ruptures; its application to opening the cap or cork of a bottle of alcohol was a later development.
History
The present song is generally credited to Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels, whose shows in New York City in the mid-1840s helped raise minstrelsy to national attention. Along with "Old Dan Tucker", the tune was one of the breakout hits of the genre and continued to headline Emmett's acts with Bryant's Minstrels into the 1860s. It was also a common song of Tom Rice's. The song was first published (with two distinct sets of lyrics) in Baltimore and Boston in 1846, although it is sometimes mistakenly dated to 1844. However, as with later rockabilly hits, it is quite possible Emmett simply received credit for arranging and publishing an existing African-American song. The song was certainly picked up by slaves and became widely popular among them. The chorus of the song not uncommonly appeared in the middle of other African-American folk songs, one of which may have been its original source. The song differed from other minstrel tunes in long remaining popular among African Americans: it was recorded by both Big Bill Broonzy and Lead Belly after World War II.
Abraham Lincoln was an admirer of the tune, calling it "that buzzing song". Throughout the 19th century, it was usually accompanied by the harmonica or by humming which mimicked the buzzing of the fly (which on at least one occasion was noted disrupting the parliament of Victoria, Australia.). Lincoln would ask his friend Ward Lamon to sing and play it on his banjo and likely played along on his harmonica. It is said that he asked for it to be played as the lead-in to his address at Gettysburg.
Following World War II, the "Blue Tail Fly" was repopularized by the Andrews Sisters' 1947 recording with the folk singer Burl Ives. It then became part of the general Folk Revival through the '50s and early '60s before losing favor to more politically-charged fare, as parodied by Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army". A 1963 Time article averred that "instead of... chronicling the life cycle of the blue-tailed fly", the "most sought-after folk singers in the business"—including Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Bob Dylan—were "singing with hot-eyed fervor about police dogs and racial murder". All the same, Seeger claimed to have been present when Alan Lomax first taught the song to Burl Ives for a CBS radio show and their duet at the 92nd Street Y in New York in 1993 was Ives' last public performance.
An instrumental rock version of the song, titled "Beatnik Fly", was recorded by Johnny and the Hurricanes in 1960, and released on Warwick Records, catalog number M-520. It charted Billboard number 15 in the US and number 8 in the UK.
Seeger maintained that the song's subtext gave it a social justice element but began (with 1953's American Folksongs for Children) to perform and market the work as a children's sing-along. Usually under the name "Jimmy Crack Corn", it remains common at campfires and summer camps. It is also sampled in a number of rap songs—including Tuff Crew and Eminem's compositions (both titled "Jimmy Crack Corn")—playing on the present usage of "crack".