If Jimmy cracked corn ,and no one cared

[JitterbugPerfume]

why did they write a song about it?:banghead:

[trof]

1. Nobody cared. The master had gone away.

You know what they say...
When the master's gone away everybody stops caring.

[JitterbugPerfume]

4. hi TROF

:yourock: :pals: :hi:

[SacredCow]

2. Because the fundies made an election issue out of it...

Jimmy cracking corn is the most important issue facing 'merikuh today....

[Connonym]

3. What if cracked corn is what it's all about?

no, wait, that's the other annoying song. Nevermind.

[JitterbugPerfume]

7. Alfie?

Is that you Alfie?:scared:

[wildhorses]

5. jimmy cracked corn and

'i' don't care but,


everybody else did...apparently:P

[youthere]

6. Don't you see?

That song is just another blatant attempt of the liberal-biased drive-by media to create the appearance of wrong-doing on the part of Jimmy and to smear corn-crackers across the nation.

[JitterbugPerfume]

10. cracked corn is evil

think of the children

[Callalily]

8. Well, I think there's

quite a deep meaning here. I am definitely staying away from the blue tail fly.


Jimmy crack corn (Blue tail fly)

When I was young I used to wait
On master and hand him his plate
Pass him the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue-tail fly

Chorus
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care
My master's gone away
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

When he would ride in the afternoon
I'd follow him with my hickory broom
The pony being rather shy
When bitten by the blue-tail fly

Chorus

One day he rode around the farm
Flies so numerous that they did swarm
One chanced to bite him on the thigh
The devil take the blue-tail fly

Chorus

Well the pony jumped, he start, he pitch
He threw my master in the ditch
He died and the jury wondered why
The verdict was the blue-tail fly

Chorus

Now he lies beneath the 'simmon tree
His epitaph is there to see
"Beneath this stone I'm forced to lie
The victim of the blue-tail fly"

[patricia92243]

12. Thanks for this post. I didn't even know there were more verses to the song!!

[undeterred]

9. Don Imus would probably care

so you better stop talkin about it.

[LynneSin]

11. No, it's Jimmy Cracked Corn and I don't care

Others might care but I don't

[texanwitch]

13. The song is about drinking.

March 13, 2000


Jimmy crack corn


Jonathan Rottet wrote:
This is one that has been bothering me since I can remember. There's a folksy sort of song that has the refrain "Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care, my master's gone away." What in the name of all that is holy does this mean?
Thanks. Now I can't get the song out of my head.

Jimmy crack corn is sort of like a phrasal verb: you can explain what each part of it means, but that doesn't necessarily mean you know what the sum means when you put the parts together.

To crack corn is to break or crush it into pieces. It's an American expression that's been around since at least the late 18th century. Jimmy is young James or familiar James or "just call me Jimmy." So some guy called Jimmy was cracking corn.

Exactly. This gets us nowhere in a hurry.

The song entitled "Jim Crack Corn" was written in 1846. (That extra beat after the syllable "Jim" probably led people to start singing "Jimmy" fairly early on.) It was published by the Virginia Minstrels, and was probably written by the northerner Daniel Emmett, who wrote a lot of the songs for their blackface minstrel show. Of the many fake-dialect tunes he wrote about the south, "Dixie" is the most famous, which has to hurt if you're from the south.

For those of you who didn't have the benefit of learning this song as a child: it's a story told from a slave's point of view about how his master died from the sting of one blue-tail fly that managed to get him despite the slave's vigilant fly-brushing efforts.

Most of the theories about who Jimmy is and what he's really doing agree that whatever he's doing, the slave doesn't care about it because his master is gone. Whether he's gleefully carefree or woefully despondent is a point of dispute, depending a bit on which of the two main theories you subscribe to:

1."Cracking corn" is opening a bottle of corn liquor; the phrase is self-referential and means "I'm Jimmy, I'm upset, I'm drinking, and I don't care." Well, that sense of crack is certainly old enough, but I can't find any evidence of "corn" being used independently of the phrases "corn liquor" or "corn juice." And if Jimmy is really talking, why use "I" in the second part of the sentence, but be Bob Dole-like in the first part?

2."Cracking corn" really is crushing corn, and it means that someone named Jimmy, presumably a fellow slave, had to start grinding corn for food because of the penury visited on him after the master's death. This is as plausible as any other piece of speculation, but it's not a satisfactory answer to who Jimmy is and why he suddenly turns up in the refrain.

The use of Jim as a form of address is attested in Black English, but no earlier than 1899--although we can assume the use predated the writer Countee Cullen's recording of it. There's the term jim-cracker, meaning 'someone with remarkable skill', that was first recorded in 1834. It could well be that Daniel Emmett just put "jim-cracker" and "cracking corn" together as a bit of doggerel because it sounded nice and southern.

Wendalyn

NOTE: In response to this posting, Jim Dixon sent some citations from folk songs of the use of corn alone to mean 'corn liquor', as in the following from Hand me down my walkin' cane:
Hand me down my bottle of corn
Gonna get drunk as sure as you're born.



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About


I knew this when I was kid, we would sing this song in school.

We were singing a song about somebody drinking to much.

[MichiganVote]

14. Well.....I don't care