Long Time Leaving (15 page)

O
ver the last few years, I have collected, on ninety-seven cassettes, 2,961 songs (by 1,760 different artists) prominently featuring food.
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These include thirty-four versions of “Honeysuckle Rose,” twenty-three of “Jambalaya,” twelve of “Roly Poly,” and nine each of “Diggin’ My Potatoes,” “[I] Ain't Gon’ Give Anybody [Nobody] None of This [My] Jelly Roll” and “Saturday Night Fish Fry.”

About sex, most of them. But America's most-recorded food song, at least in my collection, is about a lot more. I have thirty-five versions of “Short'nin’ Bread.”

Everybody knows the song, I assume, but how many people have asked themselves, what exactly
is
short'nin’ bread? “When I asked myself, I realized I didn't know. Neither did several of my Southern friends—
nor their mothers.
I decided I had better get to the bottom of this.

You don't use shortening with cornmeal, only with wheat flour, which was scarce in the antebellum South. “What is this delicacy that Mammy's gonna make, in a skillet with a lid (“de led”), for her sick-in-bed chillun? Can this fabled restorative be just white bread?

In American Ballads and Folk Songs,
Alan Lomax quotes an ex-slave's reminiscence:

“I was a house gal, and Mistress would tell me, ‘Go an’ pick up some chips for Aunt Fan to put on the lid.’ I would break out an’ run to get the chips because I was crazy about white bread, and when I got back there, Mistress would give me some…. I liked that because Mammy and them didn't get white bread but once a week, on Sunday. The rest of the time
they had cornbread. I was so foolish. When Mistress died I just cried and cried, and Mammy say, ‘What is the matter with you, gal?’ I said, ‘Ol’ Missy is dead, and I won't get no more white bread.’ I thought when she died she carried all that white bread with her.”

Today the best African American rib places serve white bread, for sopping purposes. When I asked the great Alabama black outsider artist Thornton Dial what first inspired him to be a painter, he said, “It was when I was a little boy, first time I saw somebody with a whole loaf of white bread, sliced. I said I'm gonna do
something
so I can afford that.”

In his autobiography,
The World Don't Owe Me Nothing,
the blues singer David “Honeyboy” Edwards recalls from his twenties childhood in the Mississippi Delta: “The light bread man, Wonder Bread man, used to come through there. We used to get bread from him, and that bread was so sweet. It was a dime a loaf. We'd be out in the field and Daddy would look up and quit, saying, ‘Yonder bread man.’ And we'd go across the field and meet the bread man on the gravel road. And eat that dry bread, it was so sweet. Just a solid loaf, wasn't no sliced.”

Shortening, however, doesn't make bread fluffy and pale, it makes it darker, richer, more crumbly. Biscuits?

I called John Egerton, author of
Southern Food,
and eminent Southern cookbook authors Elizabeth Terry, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and Ruth Bronz. None of them had an exact definition of short'nin’ bread off the top of his or her head. But after checking Bill Neal's book on bread-making, and historical Charleston and Savannah cookbooks, the experts agreed that you combine brown sugar, flour, a pinch of salt,
lots
of butter for shortening (in the slave quarters it would probably have been lard); you roll it out thin; you bake it on top of the stove; and you cut it into squares.

In other words, short'nin’ bread is, and presumably was, Scottish shortbread. Crumbly, even sandy, tan cookies.

Now, how about the song? It became a pop hit in 1928, along with “Makin Whoopee,” “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Stouthearted Men,” and “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” It was introduced by Lawrence Tib-bett, the operatic baritone who developed a sideline in what was called
la manière negre.
When George Gershwin settled on Todd Duncan as the right African American to play Porgy in the first production of
Porgy and Bess,
it was because Duncan was, in Gershwin's words, “the closest to a colored Lawrence Tibbett.” I haven't been able to find Tibbett's “Short'nin Bread,” but I do have his “Old Black Joe.” It gets down, in an operatic sort of way. The old boy could sing.

Who
wrote
“Short'nin’ Bread”? In his 1966 book
American Popular
Song,
David Ewen calls it “an art song, in the style of a Negro spiritual, that entered the popular repertory by virtue of repeated performances by baritones in vaudeville and other popular media. It is possible that this number is a transcription rather than an original composition, since a number of Negro composers have come forward with the claim of having written it. One of them is Reese d'Pree, who insisted he had written the melody in 1905.”

Certainly credit for the words and music of the 1928 hit were taken by, respectively, Clement Wood and Jacques Wolfe. The latter composed a number of tunes
à la manière negre,
but Alan Lomax claims to have collected “Short'nin’ Bread” in the field (he doesn't say when) as “a genuine plantation song.” The latest scholarship, in
Popular Music,
edited by Nat Shapiro, concludes that “Short'nin Bread” is “an adaptation of a folk song first published in the
Journal of American Folklore,
under the title ‘Shortened Bread,’ and noted as a musical adaptation of a song entitled ‘Run, Nigger, Run!’”

Woops.

Did Wood's lyrics include the N-word? Is that why I can't find Tib-bett's version? Wood was a white Tuscaloosan who moved to New York and authored more than a hundred books. One was a 1922 novel entitled
Nigger.
Another was for many years the standard rhyming dictionary. It includes what Christopher Darden in the O. J. Simpson trial called “the dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest word in the English language” as a rhyme for
bigger, chigger, digger,
and
snigger.
Later rhyming dictionaries, quite properly, don't.

I'll say this: I've thumbed through that novel enough to know that I want to read it. It follows an enslaved young man named Jake through Emancipation up to 1919. It doesn't seem to be condescending toward blacks nor soft on whites, and the frogs in the swamp where Jake has to hide from a lynch mob say, “Knee deep.” That's some pretty good frog sound.

The Skillet Lickers, a rousing bunch of hillbilly fiddlers and whoop-ers from Georgia, recorded “Short'nin’ Bread” in 1927. Before recording
it, apparently, Tibbett sang the song on a concert tour through the South. Did the Lickers hear it then? Theirs is the only version I have with the N-word in it. It is also the only one that starts out (as best I can tell), “Hoecake and a mackerel's head, everything looks like short'nin’ bread.” Can “mackerel's head” be right? If so, some kind of double entendre? At one point in the accompanying banter, someone seems to be hollering, “Hand me that microfiche there!” Or …“mackerel fish”? It beats me.

Another leading popularizer of the song was Paul Robeson. The version he recorded in 1933 is the most straightforward one I have—also the only black one with “Mammy” and “gwine” instead of “Mama” and “gonna.” Robeson is powerfully tasty singing “Ol’ Man River” and “Ah Still Suits Me” as Joe in the 1936 movie of
Showboat,
but as himself on records—well, on “St. Louis Blues” he ain't no Bessie Smith. Dignity is the keynote. You can't discount the pressure on Robeson as a race man-he was the Muhammad Ali of the thirties, only more cultured and less humorous—but the gravity of his tone doesn't befit “Short'nin Bread.”

The overstuffed operetta star Nelson Eddy (from Rhode Island) took “Short'nin Bread” as his personal theme song. He treats it as a bagatelle—lightening up his operettic image, don't you know.

The Andrews Sisters were neither as inventive nor as juicy in their syncopation as were the earlier Boswell Sisters, who wove bluesy numbers into wonderfully intricate harmonies (the Boswells were from New Orleans, the Andrewses from Minneapolis), but I can't find a Boswell “Short'nin Bread.” The Andrews’ version is mostly
doodly-ah-dah, doodly-ah-dah,
and their pronunciation of
dead,
for instance, is cutesy, but, hey, I'd hate to have to do an unforced Minnesota accent.

Whoever worked up the lyrics for the Collins Kids’ rockabilly version wasn't thinking about shortbread: “I don't like cake, I don't like pie, I don't like sweets and I'll tell you why. 'Cause Mama's little baby loves short'nin’, short'nin’…” The Kids, siblings Larry and Lorrie, flourished prepubescently. They're fun to listen to, as long as we can assume that at their age they weren't thinking about the implications of “Ooo, you rock me, baby, every time you roll that dough.”

Lee Dorsey was a solid fifties R&B man, better known for “Workin in the Coal Mine.” His “Short'nin Bread” rocks.

Bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee do the tune instrumentally—acoustic guitar and juice harp. Very nice. Johnny Barakat and the Vestells’ “Surfin Bread” is a tumult of electric guitars. Awful.

The great Savannah songwriter Johnny Mercer was also an engaging
singer of his own and other writers’ songs. I am not going to accuse such a likable fellow Georgian of quasi-Ebonics, but we might say of his “Short'nin’ Bread” what Margo Jefferson has written of Bing Crosby's dialect numbers: that “you can hear the pleasure” Crosby takes “in the musical resources of this language; you can hear him learning from it…. You can hear the smugness too…; it's the vocal equivalent of a smirk, a wink and an arched eyebrow, letting the audience know that he and they are above all this…. It is just this duality …that makes the descendants of white minstrelsy, from Crosby to Presley to Mick Jagger, so interesting.”

My favorite versions are Fats “Waller's (“two little Senegambians…”) and Mississippi John Hurt's (“Shoo that chicken off that led…”). Eyebrows arched over chops.

O. B. Jackson's hollerin’ version, from a 1972 Hollerin’ Championship competition, is verbal only in his introduction: “I been hollerin’ ever since I come in the world. I went to get my Daddy some 'bacca one day, got sick—took a chew of it—had to go to hollerin’ to get help. So ever since then I've been a-hollerin’.” Believe it.

From time to time on
A Prairie Home Companion,
Garrison Keillor sings, in a commercial for Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop Rhubarb, “Mammy's little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb….”

In
Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller,
Marshall Chapman tells us that her song “Betty's Bein’ Bad” was inspired personally by our mutual friend Betty Herbert (who never shot anybody so far as I know but back in the day might well be seen as, to quote Marshall's book, “a lady in a pink linen dress and pearls …standing on a table screaming, ‘Raise Hell in Dixie!’ at the top of her lungs,” and her husband, Bobby, would say, in a philosophical voice, “Betty's being bad”) but musically by “Short'nin Bread” (“A.45's quicker than 409 / Betty cleaned the house for the very last time”).

Bea Lillie picks up the refrain in “Something Is Coming to Tea,” as do Charles Rydell and the Boys and Girls in “Tennessee Fish Fry”—and there's a reference to the bread itself in Ella Fitzgerald's version of “Summertime in the Southland.”

I also have full versions of the song by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Reaves White County Ramblers, John Mooney, Jean Ritchie, Vernon and Clyde Sutphin, Bob Catlin and John Hartford, the Tractors, “Big Sweet” Lewis Hairston, the Freight Hoppers, Neal Patman (with Taj Mahal on banjo), Leonard Bowles, Ora Dell Graham, Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, Harmonica Rascals, Earl Johnson and
His Dixie Entertainers, Paul Chaplain, Sara and Maybelle Carter, the Champs, Eloise Burrell and Eric Bibb and the Cultural Heritage Choir, The Astronauts, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Tom Prin and Quintet, and Maria Del Ray.

“Why has “Short'nin’ Bread” attracted such a diversity of performers? Most of the best of them, black and white, have given the song an erotic spin (“Waller comes closest to getting downright blue). H. L. Mencken in his second supplement to
The American Language
notes that “the obscene significance of many words commonly found in blues texts,
e.g., jelly-roll, short'nin bread
and
easy rider,
was noted by Guy B. Johnson in Double Meaning in the Popular Negro Blues,
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
April-June, 1927, pp. 12-20.”

But I say it's a
food
song. If “Short'nin’ Bread” can be said to have a single progenitor, I'll bet she was turning “Run, Nigger, Run” into something that would comfort ailing children. “We're all mama's babies. I'd give a cooky, as my mother would say, to hear “Short'nin’ Bread” rendered by that great transethnic mama's boy Elvis—we get a whiff of it in the title song of his movie
Clambake,
when he interpolates this refrain: “Mama's little baby loves clambake, clambake, Mama's little baby loves clambake too.” (If she can love
Clambake,
she can love anything.)

But let's not get too misty or color-blind. Mammy didn't get no royalties. And here's the last line of the “Short'nin’ Bread” lyrics as recorded in
American Ballads and Folk Songs:

“I'd ruther be a nigger than a po’ white man.”

A cultural history can of worms there. But I say it's a food song, and that all its elements, if we chew them up good, are digestible.

O
ne thing about being a Southerner in New York,
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you can't help but have certain areas of expertise, at least as far as New Yorkers can tell. “When Krispy Kreme doughnuts came to Gotham a year or so ago, I was telling newspapers and TV programs right and left, “Oh yeah, I been eating Krispy Kremes my entire life. “Which is one reason
my entire life may not last much longer—but
good,
aren't they? And listen, here's what's crucial: get 'em when the neon sign outside says they're
hot.
” I was like somebody in the eighth grade who has had sex.