Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week, (4)
It’s that time again…….
So, kitties……More from our new series, “Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week.”
Each week around Sunday night (the longest period before more church, lol…) I’ll post a new quote from my friend Debra DeSalvo’s book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.
I love this book.
The quotes won’t always be dirty and filthy (though sometimes they will), but they’ll always be great. And they’ll always be dirty and filthy in spirit, because it is, after all, the blues
Here’s this week’s quote:
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balling the jack
When a conductor got a locomotive steaming at top speed, he was said to be balling the jack, as in “they were balling the jack at the time of the wreck.”[i] The train was the jack~~short for “the jackass carrying the load.” To “ball” meant to go flat out, pedal to the metal, and came from the railman’s hand gesture signaling the crew to go faster.[ii]
By the 1920s, the expression “balling the jack” had leapt from the rail yards into the popular lexicon as an expression for any wild, all-out effort~~from dancing to sex to, for gamblers, risking everything on a single toss of the dice. Shortened to “balling,” it came to mean having a wild time in and out of bed.
The phrase was given a push by the Balling the Jack fad, which reportedly began as a sexy juke joint dance involving plenty of bumping and grinding. It evolved into a group dance “involving vigorous hand clapping and chanting or singing,” according to From Juba to Jive by Clarence Major. [iii]
A variation was performed in 1913 at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem in a play called The Darktown Follies. Theatrical producer Florence Ziegfeld caught the play and liked the dance so much that he bought the rights to it for his Follies of 1913. [iv] Chris Smith (music) and James Henry Burris (lyrics) wrote “Balling the Jack” for the Follies based on the African American ragtime tune. The Balling the Jack craze swept white America, eventually getting mixed in with the Lindy Hop to become a popular swing step.
Judy Garland and Gene Kelly performed the Smith/Burris version of “Balling the Jack” in the 1942 film Me and My Gal:
First you put your two knees close up tight, then you sway ’em to the left
Then you sway ’em to the right, step around the floor kind of nice and light
Then you twist around and twist around with all your might
Stretch your lovin’ arms straight out into space
Then you do the Eagle Rock with style and grace
Swing your foot way ’round then bring it back
Now that’s what I call Ballin’ the Jack
As Bessie Smith sang in “Baby Doll” in 1926, a man can make up for a lot by being a good dancer:
He can be ugly, he can be black
so long as he can eagle rock and ball the jack
Songs:
:“Baby Doll”~~Bessie Smith/H.Webman
“St. Louis Blues”~~W.C. Handy (William Christopher Handy)
“I Feel So Good”~~Big Bill Broonzy (Willie Lee Conley Broonzy)
[i]From Hobonickels.org.
[ii]From Streetswing.com, “Ballin The Jack.”
[iii]Major, p. 19.
[iv]Ibid.
(Excerpted from The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
by Debra DeSalvo. Published 2006 by Billboard Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of VNU Business Media. Reprinted with permission. ISBN: 0823083896)