[Dixielandjazz] Shake it off

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Bill Haesler quotes "Ride you?"
I can't imagine it's "Wry Jew?" 

Wryed you?  Rye Dew (a sort of morning medicine)?


But let us remember Slim Gaillard, whose (and I change the spelling to get his pronunciation in its full ripe obscenity) 


motor-sickle, putty-putty 


was deemed too filthy to appear in the 1940s. Not to be confused with "Cement Mixer"

with its own "putty, putty..." 


But there is Rex Stewart's anecdote of Ellington looking at the scenery from a train and saying how handsome it was, and "like a woman's warm valley" - what does Ellington's title "Warm Valley" refer to? 

And then there was "TT on Toast", another Ellington rejoinder (has the range of these been studied?) to those who had blocked his use of more than one innocent title whose name I don't have to hand.  I shall say no more in exegesis of Ellington than that there is a spring in the TT in a woman's warm valley, also the focus of some double-entendre in "Twelfth Night" (Shakespeare's original play). 


The TT does not mean Tourist Trophy, for which motorcyclists (I am making none of this up!) competed on the Isle of Man, a handsome body of land which sticks out of the sea between England and Ireland. 

Quite what might be made of the stereotype north of England cheery loser who usually won in the end, George Formby the cheeky chappie with the banjolele, singing (as he did) "Ridin in the TT Races"  I shall not speculate. 


Of course the paranoia of PollyTickle Core-Echtness does not afford such opportunities as Ellington took, and Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers too, to get round the problem of THE PURE TO WHOM MANY IF NOT ALL THINGS ARE DIRTY...  


I have a vague memory of ... it might even have been Steve Voce .... one jazz writer I attended to in my youth commenting on how uncomfortable some Swing veterans were when the fashionable thing was to use the word Black as a proud adjective, despite its history in their memory as a very much belittling noun. 


At least there is instrumental music with which to fortify oneself against the word-obsessed!


Robert R. Calder