Willie Brown, Future Blues Part Two

Well, the other day I said that Willie Brown’s Future Blues was about a woman. And about the feeling of uncertainty. As you can see, I only got to make a few remarks on the first two verses of the song. Today I’m going to comment the third and the fourth verses.
Willie Brown mentions his woman in the second verse, by making an allusion to her “low-down way”; in the third and fourth verses he completes her description:

Lord, de woman I love, now, she’s five feet from de groun’,
I says woman I love, mama, is fi’ feet f’om de groun’
En’ she’s taylor-made and ain’t no hand-me-down.

Lord, en I got a woman now, Lordie, she lightnin’ when she, she lightnin’ when she mamlish smiles,
I says, I’ve got a woman, Lord, she lightnin’ when she smiles,
Five feet en foo’ inches, and she’s jist good huggin’ size.

Blues scholars and linguists never get tired of giving account of the pre-war African- American’s apetite of using periphrastic expressions whenever theygot the opportunity. It is suggested that this way of speaking is having its roots in a brench of dialects in West Africa; when Black slaves got to America and began learning English, they woulf have preserved the African periphrastical stuctures, as well as the syntax or the way of using prepositions. So, a little woman will be “five feet from the ground”, while a dead man will be “six feet in the ground”.
In the blues imagery, little women have a particular place in the order of being. Like brown, long tall, black jet or fat women, little women may generate extreme rejection ar attraction. I’ll write some day, soon hopefully, a post about a comical disputation that opposed Dobbie Red and Bama (two prisoners in Parchman Farm) and that states for all these woman’s blues avatars.

When describing his baby as being “taylor-made”, Willie Brown actually suggests something more. It’s not only that she’s desirable, but she might be able to bring his uncertainty to an end. It seems to me that this description is the core of the song’s significance, the element that brings togeher the two themes (the anxious love for a woman and the anxious uncertainty about his own fate).

As for the other description in the verse, she “ain’t no hand-me-down”, I suppose it isn’t so much in referrence to the woman’s virginity, as one might believe, but rather to the “taylor-made” epithete. Now I could be tempted to write about tissues as ordered structures, or about Willie Brown’s desire (that his life made sense) expressed by the means of this manufactory metaphor, but I shan’t do this (Lord, I love writing “shan’t”). It is much more likely that the source of these metaphors would have been the world Willie Brown was living in and its associated representations, the pawn-shops anf the attitudes towards clothing (just remember how much money successful bluesmen used to spent on taylor-made clothes, Stetson hats and jewelry).

I read the verse once again and I think that the metaphor is even more complex than my bare suggestions. Just like the clothes, a first-hand taylor-made woman can be a mark of the social status, a sign of being respectable. It appear’s that the song background (and intention) is the bluesman’s need to gain his place within the world.

The fourth verse gives accont of the qualities that make the woman desirable.
First of all, the woman smiles. Smiling may not seem, at a time when glamour magazins flourish, a big deal, but one should remember that bluesmen are always terrified about women who don’t smile, oversleep, have headaches and boss them around. A “blues smiling woman” is the one you can git along wid, the one that will satisfy your soul (and eventually your body, as we can see in the third line of the verse).

The word “mamlish” is really a rare one; it provoked some discussions within the blues circles and it appears it was used mainly in Alabama, but this conclusion is based only on the fact that Ed Bell, the author of the Mamlish Blues, was Alabamian.
(Ed Bell’s Blues is also known as “Mamlish Moan”, but it ain’t much of a moan, as you could see for yourselves.)
I really don’t know what’s the origin of “mamlish” (if you do know, please drop a comment), and I couldn’t give you its dictionnary “definition” (I wonder if someone can); it is used – as an adverband adjective – in a positive, even superlative way.
Finally, the expression “just good huggin’ size”;well, during the 30s and in the blues slang, “to hug” was used in referrence to the sexual intercourse (e.g. Jazz Gillum’s Keyhole Blues).

Now, if you feel like listening again to the Future Blues, you’ll find in on the Document Record website:

http://www.document-records.com/mp3/21663.mp3

Last, but not least, here’s what I’ve been playin’ all day long.

PS Coming soon: The Anatomy of Blues series: a few posts on the symbolism and imagery of anatomical parts in the pre-war blues.