Some Theories About The Meaning Of "Crack Corn" In The Song "Jimmy Crack Corn" ("The Blue Tail Fly")

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series about the song "Jimmy Crack Corn" ("The Blue Tail Fly").

This post presents some theories about the meaning of "crack corn" in the song that is now known as "Jimmy Crack Corn" ("The Blue Tail Fly").

The lyrics to the most often cited contemporary version of "Jimmy Crack Corn" ("The Blue Tail Fly") is also given in this post.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2019/09/big-bill-boonzy-lead-belly-bugs-bunny.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. Part II showcases a YouTube sound file of "Jimmy Crack Corn" by Big Bill Broonzy and by Lead Belly.

The Addendum to that post presents a sound file reproduction of a 1846 version of "The Blue Tail Fly". WARNING: This sound file includes one instance of the offensive referent that is often referred to as "the n word".

The Addendum also presents a clip of "Jimmy Crack Corn" from a Bugs Bunny cartoon as well as two comments from that YouTube video's discussion thread.

The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, and cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

****
LYRICS FOR THE MOST OFTEN CITED CONTEMPORARY VERSION OF "JIMMY CRACK CORN" ("THE BLUE TAIL FLY")

The Blue Tail Fly (Jimmie Crack Corn)
Written By: Unknown
Copyright Unknown

When I was young I use' to wait
On massa an' hand him his plate
An' pass de bottle when he got dry
An' brush away de blue-tail fly

Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Ol' Massa's gone away

One day he ride aroun' de farm
De flies so num'rous they did swarm
One chanced to bite him on de thigh
De devil take de blue-tail fly!

Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Ol' Massa's gone away

De pony run, he jump he pitch
He threw my Massa in de ditch
He died an' de jury wondered why
De verdict was de blue-tail fly

Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Ol' Massa's gone away

They lay him under a simmon tree
His epitaph is there to see --
"Beneath this stone I'm forced to lie --
Victim of de blue-tail fly."

Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Jimmie crack corn an' I don't care
Ol' Massa's gone away

Source: https://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/b034.html
-snip-
"Massa" = master

****
THEORIES ABOUT THE MEANING OF "CRACK CORN" IN THE SONG "JIM CRACK CORN" (most often contemporary given as "JIMMY CRACK CORN/THE BLUE TAIL FLY"

These excerpts are given in no particular order.

Excerpt #1:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Crack_Corn
" "Jimmy Crack Corn" or "Blue Tail Fly" is an American song which first became popular during the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the 1840s through performances by the Virginia Minstrels. It regained currency as a folk song in the 1940s at the beginning of the American folk music revival and has since become a popular children's song. Over the years, several variants have appeared.

Most versions include some idiomatic African English, although sanitized General American versions now predominate. The basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his white master's death in a horseriding accident. The song, however, can be—and is—interpreted as having a subtext of celebration about that death[3][4] and of the slave's having contributed to it through deliberate negligence[5][6] or even deniable action.

[...]

Melody
The melody is similar to "Miss Lucy Long" and was originally set for piano accompaniment,[3] although "De Blue Tail Fly" was marketed in Boston as one of "Emmett's Banjo Melodies".[22] The four-part chorus favors a single bass and three tenors: the first and third tenors harmonize in thirds with the second completes the triads or doubles the root, sometimes crossing the melody line.[3] The versions published in 1846 differed rather markedly: "De Blue Tail Fly" is modal (although Lhamar emends its B♭ notation to C minor) and hexatonic; "Jim Crack Corn", meanwhile, is in G major and more easily singable.[3] Its simplicity has made it a common beginner's tune for acoustic guitar.[23] The melody is a chain of thirds (G-B, F♯-A, G-B, [A]-C, B-D, C-E) harmonized a third above and below in the manner of the choruses in Italian opera.[3]

Meaning
The first verses usually establish that the singer was initially a house slave.[24] He is then charged with protecting the master out of doors—and his horse as well—from the "blue-tailed fly". This is possibly the blue-bottle fly[26] (Calliphora vomitoria[27] or Protophormia terraenovae), but probably the mourning horsefly (Tabanus atratus), a bloodsucking pest with a blue-black abdomen[28] found throughout the American South.[29][30] In this, the singer, ultimately, is unsuccessful; the horse begins to buck, and the master is thrown and killed. A coroner's jury is convened to investigate the master's death, or the singer is criminally charged with that death, but owing to the "blue-tail fly," the slave escapes culpability.

The chorus can be mystifying to modern listeners, but its straightforward meaning is that someone is roughly milling ("cracking") the old master's corn in preparation for turning it into hominy[33] or liquor.[34] There has been much debate, however, over the subtext. In the 19th century, the singer was often considered mournful and despondent at his master's death; in the 20th, celebratory: "Jimmy Crack Corn" has been called "the baldest, most loving account of the master's demise" in American song.[5]

The debate has been further muddled by changes to the refrain over time. Throughout the 19th century, the lines referred to "Jim",[2] "Jim Crack",[12] or "Jim Crack Corn"[37] and lacked any conjunction across the line's caesura; following the rise of highly-syncopated musical genres such as ragtime and jazz, anaptyxis converted the name to "Jimmy" or "Jimmie" and the "and" appeared, both putting more stress on their measures' backbeat. This has obscured some of the possible original meanings: some have argued that—as "Jim" was a generic name for slaves in minstrel songs—the song's "Jim" was the same person as its blackface narrator: Speaking about himself in the 3rd person or repeating his new masters' commands in apostrophe, he has no concern with his demotion to a field hand now that his old master is dead. Another now-obscured possible meaning derives from jim crack being eye dialect[40] for gimcrack ("worthless"[38][41]):[43] The narrator is so overcome with emotion (be it pleasure or sorrow) that he has no concern at all about his gimcrack cracked corn, his substandard rations.[3] Since "corn" was also a common rural American ellipsis and euphemism for "corn whiskey",[45] it could also refer to the slave being so overcome that he has no concern about his rotgut alcohol.[46]

Other suppositions include that "cracking" or "cracking corn" referred to the now-obsolete English and Appalachian slang meaning "to gossip" or "to sit around chitchatting";[47] that the singer is resting from his oversight duties and allowing Jim to steal corn or corn liquor; that "Jim Crack" is simply a synonym for "Jim Crow" by means of the dialectical "crack" to reference the crake; or that it is all code for the old master "Jim" cracking his "corn" (skull) open during his fall. The 1847 version of the song published in London singularly has the lyrics "Jim Crack com'", which could refer to a poor Southern cracker[48] (presumably an overseer or new owner) or a minced oath for Jesus Christ (thus referencing indifference at the Judgment Day); the same version explicitly makes the fly's name a wordplay on the earlier minstrel hit "Long Tail Blue", about a horse. A number of racehorses have been named "Jim Crack" or "Blue Tail Fly" and, in at least one early-20th century variant of the song, it's given as the name of the horse that killed the master,[49] but that is not a common element of the song. (Another uncommon variant appeared in the 1847 Songs of Ireland published in New York: it has the slave being given away by the master.[13])

Explanations of the song based upon "jimmy" or "jimmie" being slaves' slang for crows or mules (here being allowed into the old master's corn fields instead of being chased away) or deriving "jimmy" from "gimme" are unsupported by the existing records. Pete Seeger, for instance, is said to have maintained that the original lyrics were "gimme cracked corn" and referred to a punishment in which a slave's bacon rations were curtailed, leaving him chickenfeed;[50][53] the same lines could also just be asking for the whiskey jug to be passed around. The idea that Jim or Jimmy is "cracking open" a jug of whiskey is similarly unsupported: that phrasal verb is attested at least as early as 1803[54] but initially applied to literal ruptures; its application to opening the cap or cork of a bottle of alcohol was a later development.

History
The present song is generally credited to Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels,[10] whose shows in New York City in the mid-1840s helped raise minstrelsy to national attention.[55] Along with "Old Dan Tucker", the tune was one of the breakout hits of the genre[56] and continued to headline Emmett's acts with Bryant's Minstrels into the 1860s.[55] It was also a common song of Tom Rice's.[57] The song was first published (with two distinct sets of lyrics) in Baltimore and Boston in 1846, although it is sometimes mistakenly dated to 1844.[1] However, as with later rockabilly hits, it is quite possible Emmett simply received credit for arranging and publishing an existing African-American song.[11] The song was certainly picked up by slaves and became widely popular among them.[58] The chorus of the song not uncommonly appeared in the middle of other African-American folk songs, one of which may have been its original source.[59] The song differed from other minstrel tunes in long remaining popular among African Americans: it was recorded by both Big Bill Broonzy and Lead Belly after World War II.

Abraham Lincoln was an admirer of the tune, calling it "that buzzing song". Throughout the 19th century, it was usually accompanied by the harmonica or by humming which mimicked the buzzing of the fly (which on at least one occasion was noted disrupting the parliament of Victoria, Australia.[60]). Lincoln would ask his friend Ward Lamon to sing and play it on his banjo[61] and likely played along on his harmonica.[62] It is said that he asked for it to be played as the lead-in to his address at Gettysburg.[10][11]

Following World War II, the "Blue Tail Fly" was repopularized by the Andrews Sisters' 1947 recording with the folk singer Burl Ives. It then became part of the general Folk Revival through the '50s and early '60s before losing favor to more politically-charged fare, as parodied by Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army". A 1963 Time article averred that "instead of ... chronicling the life cycle of the blue-tailed fly", the "most sought-after folk singers in the business"—including Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Bob Dylan—were "singing with hot-eyed fervor about police dogs and racial murder".[63] All the same, Seeger claimed to have been present when Alan Lomax[65] first taught the song to Burl Ives for a CBS radio show[64] and their duet at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in 1993 was Ives' last public performance”…
-snip-
*I added italics to highlight these sentences.

****
Excerpt #2:
From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=1141

[Note: Numbers assigned for this pancocojams post]

1. Origins: Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn)
Subject: RE: Blue-Tail Fly (lyric reguest)
From: belter
Date: 26 Mar 97 - 09:37 AM

"I just looked up blue-tail fly, and the notes sujest that cracked corn might be refering to wiskey. While that coule be, I wounder if it might mean corn that isn't soft enough to eat whole so its cracked up and used as slave rations, since it would be cheap, and although they couldn't have known, it's a lousy source of protein and hinders brain development if thats all you have to eat. I wounder how it got to be comon to use jimmie crack corn."

**
2.Subject: RE: Blue-Tail Fly (lyric reguest)
From: gargoyle
Date: 03 Apr 97 - 12:32 AM

"The "jimmy" is a variation of "gimme" or "give me"
This has a rich heritage in folk annals.

Abraham Lincoln is said to have heard it from a minstral show and it was one of his favorites. (Sorry, I don't have tyhe time to dig for the original reference at this moment.)"

**
3. Subject: RE: Lyr Add: (De) BLUE TAIL FLY
From: GUEST,freeatlast
Date: 13 Jan 04 - 05:21 PM

"The clue for 13 down in the January 13th, 2004 cryptic puzzle in the "Globe and Mail" was: "Poorly made Russian fighter goes up with a bang (8)".
The answer, of course, is GIMCRACK.
I know, I know… you don't care.
Anyway, "gimcrack" or "jimcrack" got me to thinking about the song and just what "Jim-crack Corn" might be. As the crossword clue says, gimcrack means "poorly made." And "corn," as we all know, is a care banishing beverage.
The narrator of the song says, "When I was young." This means he is no longer young. This would make him what -- old?
He's got a lot to think about; some of it is painful. His carefree youth when all he was required to do was to brush away a few flies might seem pretty golden when viewed through a whiskey bottle.
Jimcrack corn might just be cheap whiskey, moonshine, Tennessee wine, granny's rheumatiz medicine. It's still good for what ails you – especially at those moments when you realize that none of us are ever going to be free.
Cheers"

**
4. Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Blue-Tail Fly
From: Azizi
Date: 08 Jan 06 - 04:58 PM
..."Source: Leadbelly version of Jimmy Crack Corn" [Note: September 15, 2019: This hyperlink no longer viable.]

This site notes the following about the origin of this song:
"Credited to Daniel Emmett by Spaeth but it's likely that if he wrote it from other sources. One of the earliest publications was in a series credited to him -- but the absence of his name on the earliest copies goes far toward discrediting his authorship. The subtext for this song is that the slave in fact killed the master himself, blaming it on the blue-tail fly. This is hinted at, to varying degrees, in some versions of the song".

-snip-

There's alot of theories on what "Jimmy Crack Corn" means. Here's several theories from that same site -and notice that an anonymous poster from Mudcat Discussion Forum is mentioned:

"CRACK CORN? The Civil War song, Jimmy Cracked Corn, was one of Abe Lincoln's favorite songs! However, in the song, Jimmy wasn't really cracking corn. He was sleeping, and "cracking corn" was another term for snoring.

"Jimmy Crack Corn" was slang for "gimme cracked corn" or corn liquor. "Jimcrack o' corn and I don't care" "Jimcrack" is a measure of whiskey.

"Cracking corn" for telling jokes or tall tales: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless bunch of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. G. Cochrane, 1766, in "Letters," 27 June. OED; The term comes from the Scottish-northern English word crack (crake), meaning boasting, which has been used in that sense from 1460 in print. See OED, 1971 and later eds. Georgia apparntly [sic] was first called the Cracker State in print in 1808, in "Balance," Verses by a Cracker Planter.

According to "The Cassel Dictionary of Slang" "Crack-Corn" referred to White People and originally meant the White natives of Kentucky. It was apparently a variation of "corncracker" which meant a poor white farmer and was apparently applied to the natives of Florida, Georgia, Kentucky or Tennessee possibly because of their dependance ]sic]on corn or maize. Corn in the British Isles refers to wheat, oats or barley as distinct from the American meaning. (From Mudcat Discussion Forum)"

-snip-

Other websites such as The Mavens' Word of the Day indicate that "To crack corn is to break or crush it into pieces".

Are there any other theories you want to throw in the mix?"

**
5. Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Blue-Tail Fly
From: Joybell
Date: 09 Jan 06 - 05:16 PM

"Yes there's mine, but I have nothing except word-of-mouth information. Here it is from my father. He told me in 1949, here in Victoria Australia:
"Jimmy is the old name for The Crow. The Crow was called Jimmy in England. 'Jimmy crack corn and I don't care' means that the Crow may crack, and eat, the corn because there's no one to care now that the 'Master' of the farm is dead."
If the teller of the tale had among his tasks the scaring of the birds, from the cornfield, this would make a lot of sense.

This ties in with my theory - and it's speculation, that the chorus of this song came from an English Crow-scaring song. I repeat - THE CHORUS of this song - only.
There are examples of crow-scaring songs from both England and America. Children were employed for this task and the songs were collected from them. I've never actually found an ancestor for this song but I live in hope.
For what it's worth. Cheers, Joy"

**
6. Subject: RE: Lyr Add: (De) Blue Tail Fly
From: GUEST,Black Deep
Date: 30 Jul 08 - 03:21 PM

"Crack Corn. Moon shine was made from cracked corn, then mixed with sugar and water and fermented, the distilled. Up until I was in my early 30's they called it cracking corn. Or another term for moonshining wisky."

****
This concludes Part I of this series.

Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Visitor comments are welcome.