"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.
On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his white master's death in a horse-riding accident.
The song, however, is also interpreted as having a subtext of celebration about that death and of the slave having contributed to it through deliberate negligence or even deniable action.
Den arter dinner massa sleep, He bid dis niggar vigil keep; An' when he gwine to shut his eye, He tell me watch de blue tail fly.
Den arter dinner massa sleep, He bid me vigilance to keep; An when he gwine to shut he eye, He tell me watch de blue tail fly.
An scratch 'im &c. "De Blue Tail Fly" was published by both Keith's Music House[7] and Oliver Ditson[8] in Boston in 1846, but Eric Lott (citing Hans Nathan[9]) gives the version a date of 1844.
Jim Crack com', &c.[12] If you should go in summer time, To Souf Carolina sultra clime,[14] And in de shade you chance to lie, You'll soon find but dat blue tail fly.
When ole massa take his sleep, He bid dis nigga sight to keep, And when he gows to shut his eye, He tell me watch dat blue tail fly.
Den arter dinner massa sleep, He bid dis niggar vigil keep; An' when he gwine to shut his eye, He tell me watch de blue-tail fly.
Ole massa gone, now let 'im rest, Dey say all tings am for de best; I neber forget till de day I die, Ole massa an' dat blue-tail fly Jim crack corn, &c.[16] Sometimes mistakenly attributed to 1844.
[1] With some minor change of punctuation, this is the version that was republished by Oliver Ditson in subsequent song books.
Den arter dinner massa sleeps, He bid dis nigga vigils keeps; An' when he gwine to shut his eye, He tell me watch de blue tail fly.
[18] When I was young, I useter to wait Behine ole marster, han' he plate, An' pass de bottle when he dry, An' bresh away dat blue-tail fly.
[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.
This is possibly the blue bottle fly[24] (Calliphora vomitoria[25] or Protophormia terraenovae), but probably the mourning horsefly (Tabanus atratus), a bloodsucking pest with a blue-black abdomen[26] found throughout the American South.
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[31] or liquor.
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.
The 1847 version of the song published in London singularly has the lyrics "Jim Crack com'", which could refer to a poor Southern cracker[46] (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.
(Another uncommon variant appeared in the 1847 Songs of Ireland published in New York: it has the slave being given away by the master.
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;[48][51] 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[52] but initially applied to literal ruptures; its application to opening the cap or cork of a bottle of alcohol was a later development.
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.
[53] Along with "Old Dan Tucker", the tune was one of the breakout hits of the genre[54] and continued to headline Emmett's acts with Bryant's Minstrels into the 1860s.
[55] 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.
[57] 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.
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.[58]).
[10][11] Following World War II, the "Blue Tail Fly" was repopularized by the Andrews Sisters' 1947 recording with the folk singer Burl Ives.
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".
A commercial for Cingular Wireless in December 2006 raised some controversy when a character having a conversation with "Jim" begins referring to him by every nickname he can think of including Jimmy Crack Corn.