This is the latest installment in our weekly series, The Language of the Blues, in which author and rocker Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase from a blues song. Come back every week for the latest! Devi’s award-winning book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to ZuZu, is now available at Bluescentric.com!
White Chicago blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield got the shock of his young life when he was in a van heading to a gig with blues legend Muddy Waters and members of the Muddy Waters band –and Waters started talking about how much he loved to suck cock. It took a minute for Bloomfield to figure out that Waters was using “cock” to refer to a woman’s genitalia, not a man’s. (Special thanks to former Blues Revue editor and close Bloomfield friend Andrew M. Robble for this anecdote!)
Muddy Waters, a.k.a. McKinley Morganfield, was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915. “Cock” was slang for female genitalia among Southern country African American speakers during the early-to-mid-1900s. A “cock opener” was a penis, as in: “Baby you got a cock. This here is a cock-opener,” from Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog: His World As Composed by Mingus.
Lexicon of Black English explains that in the early 1800s African Americans “likely picked up a ‘low’ English usage in which cock was a verb meaning ‘to copulate with, but generally in the passive.’ As in ‘to want cocking’ or ‘to get cocked.'” Cocking it on the wall was a pleasure men engaged in when going outside for a break at juke houses. “Dick,” which is probably a variant of “prick,” was used to refer to male genitalia
In “On the Wall,” singer and barrelhouse pianist Louise Johnson (a.k.a. Bessie Jackson) brags, after the piano break:
Well, I’m going to Memphis, stop at Church’s Hall
Show these women how to cock it on the wall
Through Muddy’s mentorship, Bloomfield was one of the first white artists to gain entry into the Chicago blues scene. Bob Margolin is another white guitarist who showed enough promise and dedication to impress Muddy Waters, and earned a chance to learn from him. Margolin, who played guitar in the Muddy Waters band from 1973 to 1980, confirms that Waters continued to use the word cock “when he was talking about pussy,” even after Waters had lived in Chicago for several decades.
According to Margolin, Muddy only talked like that only in private, among friends and band-mates. When Margolin first started playing in the band, he struggled with Muddy’s fluid behind-the-beat phrasing. Margolin struggled to master the subtleties of Muddy’s blues. He eventually succeeded, even though Muddy’s idea of constructive criticism, Margolin recalls, was to say, “Don’t ever play that again, it makes my dick sore.”
Song:
“On The Wall” – Louise Johnson
Video:
Louise Johnson (with Buddy Boy Hawkins and Charley Patton) – “On The Wall”
