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What are you listening to?

Denton

A-List Customer
Messages
324
Location
Los Angeles
A song from the seemingly bottomless well of creativity of the Mississippi Sheiks, their associates, and their rivals.


While listening to this song yesterday, I started to wonder about the chorus. "Now look here, baby, you're going too fast, / The law gonna step on you." The title is "The Law Gonna Step on You," but Carter sings that line a bit differently. "You" isn't pronounced like the other instances of "you" in the song. What is he singing? "You all"? "Yuh"?

My best guess: it's "your." Carter is singing, "The law gonna step on your ass," without quite singing it. The code for "ass" is the emphatic phrase "yas, yas, yas," as in the line from Speckled Red's popular piano blues "The Dirty Dozens": "If you can't shake your shimmy, shake your yas, yas, yas."

I did a google search, and it appears that the obsessives at the country blues music forum "Weenie Campbell" solved this mystery back in 2008. God bless the internet.
 

The Shoe

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,251
Location
Wakayama, Japan
At 95 years old. Frickin’ amazing!
IMG_1322.jpeg

Just looked him up on Wikipedia. Didn’t realise he had passed. RIP.
 

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