The Post Editor got a really cool Christmas present: a stack of old sheet music. This has led to a video series I'm calling 'Jazz Babies Concerts'. This one is historical.

Muddy water 'round my feet,

Muddy water in the street….

Just God's own shelter down in the delta

In their book Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880-1930,
David A Jasen and Gene Jones wrote:

DeRose's melody is studded with blue notes and melodic leaps of more than an octave, over a relentless, four-on-the-floor beat. Trent's lyric is simple, and his ear for American speech is true.

All of that is true. What is not true is that Jo Trent, a black lyricist from Chicago, had much of a clue about climate in the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is in northwest Mississippi, south of Memphis. It's flat, and most of the time, it's dry and dusty. 'It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day,' sang Bobby Gentry, and she was right. If there's 'muddy water in the street', it's time to head for the hills. The mean elevation of the state of Mississippi is 300 feet above sea level. Rosedale, Mississippi, where my mother was born in 1926, is 151 feet (46m) above sea level. So when the Mississippi flooded in 1927, my grandparents had to flee with three small children. The Army Signal Corps got some film footage of the relief operations, and you get this video.

Jo Trent was a noted lyricist in the 1920s. He worked with Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael. Peter DeRose, the composer, was married to May Singhi Breen, who did the ukulele chords. May Singhi Breen, aka the 'Ukulele Lady', campaigned for years, and finally got the musicians' union to admit that the ukulele was a musical instrument. It was a hard sell, for obvious reasons. That Harry Richman didn't write anything on this sheet music except his name. Richman (born Reichman) was just a pushy bandleader who inveigled his way into the mix. That Nora Bayes, whose picture graces the cover? A very famous singer in her day. I haven't found a recording of 'Muddy Water' by her, but I did find one on Youtube by Bessie Smith, who does a bang-up job.

Click here for the video, or watch the embedded version in your Pliny-skin page.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

04.02.19 Front Page

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