"Aunt Hagar's Blues" - Kid Ory

"Aunt Hagar's Blues" (PDF) from the Kid Ory album, Kid Ory Plays the Blues.

Perhaps it was a foretelling choice for Kid Ory’s band to exclude the vocals from its performances.  The lyrics of Handy & Brymn’s “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” tell the story of everyone’s favorite relative standing up to the moral majority, all in the name of fun. And although the blues have a legacy of coded language referring to inhumanity, one can argue that its literal meaning simply reflects an early attitude of rock and roll against American Conservatism in the twentieth century.

We have moved on, we are making progress, and these lyrics appear to be irrelevant towards modern social injustices.  So if the lyrics were removed from its presentation, what remains?  An arrangement that makes use of dynamics and anticipation to send the crowd into a frenzied eruption of exaltation.  Kid Ory’s band realized that words lose their meaning over time and that the timeless quality of music is too powerful for words to describe.

Or maybe no one in the band actually enjoyed singing.

Recommended reading: Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz by John McCusker.  Published by University Press of Mississippi.