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:
—————-
back door man
A back door man is the secret lover of a married woman. He’s the one scooting out the back door just as the man of the house is turning his key in the front door.
According to Clarence Major, author of Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, “The back door as an entrance/exit for blacks working in white homes during and after slavery perhaps gave the idea of the back door a great presence in the psyches of African Americans.”
The concept of the back door man as lover may also stem from the post-slavery phenomenon of the sweet back papas. These were men who dodged a lifetime of manual labor~~the fate of most African American men in the South at that time~~by becoming blues players and living off of women.
“These big-town blues players…” Big Bill Broonzy told William Ferris in Blues from the Delta, “They lived like a king because most of them had women cooking for some rich white man, and they lived in the servant’s house behind the white man’s house.” Blues musicians had the added allure of extra coins jingling in their pocket from playing house parties and juke joints.
The lyrics sung to musicologist Alan Lomax by David “Honeyboy” Edwards one sultry afternoon in Friars Point, Mississippi in 1942 spell out the story. “Here’s my toast,” Edwards said:
My back is made of whalebone
My belly is made of brass
I save my good stuff for the working women
And the rest can kiss my ass
“Two things a musician likes, that’s whisky and women,” Edwards told Lomax. “And the womens likes us better than they do the average working man.”
Willie Dixon immortalized the back door man in a song he wrote for Howlin’ Wolf, who drove “Back Door Man” home with the conviction of a man who had slipped out of more than his share of back doors. According to Wolf’s long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin, “Wolf loved that song…’cause he was one! Know what I’m talking about? Someone who’s with a married woman. The song consist of he got caught in these folks house, in this mad man’s house. Hey, the man was gone! And so he got caught and like he says in the song ‘If you see me coming out the window, I ain’t got nothing to lose.’”
But what about Jim Morrison’s leering cover of “Back Door Man,” rumored to have more to do with a proclivity for anal than for married women? Were Dixon and Wolf also hinting at knocking on a different sort of back door?
“No, it’s not all a that,” Sumlin responded in his calm and courtly fashion~~at seventy-four still too much the Southern gentleman to bristle at a gauche question. “I imagine some people do think that, but if you listen real good at the whole song, you would get more out of it than that. It’s about being at the bottom, running from a bad situation. Wolf, he did all this stuff. He got caught in that house and had to break out.”
According to Major, “In black culture, it [the back door] rarely refers to the anus, as it does in popular American culture.” By virtue of being white and singing to a white audience, however, Morrison gave “Back Door Man” a sexual twist~~which must have given Morrison the poet and provocateur an extra dose of satisfaction.
Songs:
:“Back Door Friend”~~Lightnin’ Hopkins (Sam Hopkins)
“Back Door Man”~~Willie Dixon, performed by Howlin’ Wolf
“I Crave My Pigmeat”~~Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen)
(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)
I just wanted to tell everyone about the start of 
and I’d be writing stupid comments. Not long after, because my friend and I were the “computer kids” of the elementary school, we got to spend our lunch time on AOL.
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