A Negro Love Song.

Seen my lady home las' night,
Jump back honey, jump back.
Hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight,
Jump back honey, jump back.
Heahd huh sigh a little sigh,
Seen a light gleam f'um huh eye.
An' a smile go flitin' by--
Jump back honey, jump back.

Heahd de win' blow thoo de pines,
Jump back honey, jump back.
Mockin' bird was singin, fine,
Jump back honey, jump back.
An' my hea't was beatin' so,
When I reached my lady's do',
Dat I couldn't ba' to go--
Jump back, honey, jump back.

Put my ahm aroun' huh wais',
Jump back, honey, jump back.
Raised huh lips an took a tase',
Jump back, honey, jump back.
Love me honey, love me true?
Love me well ez I love you?
An' she ansawhd: "'Cose I do"--
Jump back, honey, jump back.

• as heard on morning edition this morning
  - steve 2-12-2006 6:44 pm [add a comment]




• you are correct! i knew it sounded familiar and then found the gene vincent connection. probably heard it on jim marshalls the hounds show. ...athough its not listed here.
  
  
  - bill 2-12-2006 7:42 pm [add a comment]

JUMP BACK, HONEY, JUMP BACK
(Hadda Brooks)
GENE VINCENT & THE BLUE CAPS (Capitol EAP 3-764, 1956)

Well, jump back, honey, jump back (5x)
Jump back (Rock cats, rock!)

Well, my baby seen me home last night
Jump back, honey, jump back
Held me long and squeezed me tight
Jump back, honey, jump back
Heard her sigh her little sigh
Seen the lovelight in her eye
Jump back, honey, jump back
Jump back, honey, jump back

Heard the wind blow through the pines
Jump back, honey, jump back
Mockingbirds were singing fine
Jump back, honey, jump back
And my heart was beating sore
When I brought her to the door
Jump back, honey, jump back
Jump back, honey, jump back

I put my arms around her waist
Jump back, honey, jump back
Raised her lips and took a taste
Jump back, honey, jump back
Love me honey, dee-da-do
And she answered, 'course I do

hadda brooks

Also on Okeh, Hadda recorded her own song, "Jump Back Honey," which was subject of several cover versions, including those by Ella Mae Morse on Capitol, Jimmy Dorsey on Columbia, Your Hit Parade's Dorothy Collins & Snooky Lanson on Decca and Vaughn Monroe & Sunny Gale on RCA Victor.

Dunbar wrote the dialect because he loved the dialect, because that was the people, that was us. That was our vernacular, this informal conversation, the way we spoke to each other. And it was obviously something that he had heard, given the fact that the majority of people, even in the urban centers of the north were from the South. Given the fact that both of his parents had been enslaved. So it was a dialect, it was vernacular that he was comfortable with. And it represented for him the soul of African American people. So I think that he represented African Americans in this vernacular because that's one aspect of the black community which he saw. But it's also important to recognize that that's not all Dunbar wrote. That's what whites focused on. And that's what William Dean Howells, who was the white man who catapulted him to fame, wanted to focus on. That's what Howells was interested in. African Americans loved Dunbar, they loved his dialect poetry, but they also loved the finer elements of life that Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote. So he was far more diverse than people gave him credit for.

Dunbar, the son of two former slaves, was born in Dayton, Ohio, and attended the public schools of that city. He was taught to read by his mother, Matilda Murphy Dunbar, and he absorbed her homespun wisdom as well as the stories told to him by his father, Joshua Dunbar, who had escaped from enslavement in Kentucky and served in the Massachusetts 55th Regiment during the Civil War. Thus, while Paul Laurence Dunbar himself was never enslaved, he was one of the last of a generation to have ongoing contact with those who had been. Dunbar was steeped in the oral tradition during his formative years and he would go on to become a powerful interpreter of the African American folk experience in literature and song; he would also champion the cause of civil rights and higher education for African Americans in essays and poetry that were militant by the standards of his day.

[...]

Much of the controversy surrounding Paul Laurence Dunbar concerns his dialect poetry, wherein some scholars, such as the late Charles T. Davis, felt that Dunbar showed the greatest glimmers of genius. Sterling A. Brown, writing in Negro Poetry and Drama in 1937, asserted that Dunbar was the first American poet to "handle Negro folk life with any degree of fullness" but he also found Dunbar guilty of cruelly "misreading" black history. This points to the basic flaw in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s attempts to represent authentic African American folk language in verse. He was not able to transcend completely the racist plantation tradition made popular by Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Irwin Russell, and other white writers who made use of African American folk materials and who showed the "old time Negro" as if he were satisfied serving the master on the antebellum plantation.

While Dunbar sought an appropriate literary form for the representation of African American vernacular expression, he was also deeply ambivalent about his undertaking in this area. He recognized that many of his experiments yielded imperfect results and he was concerned that prominent white critics such as William Dean Howells praised his work for the wrong reasons, setting a tone that other Dunbar critics would follow for years as they virtually ignored his standard English verse and his published experiments with Irish, German, and Western regional dialects.

What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar's poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature. In my criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France, and I had forgetfully failed to allege the far greater Pushkin in Russia; but these were both mulattoes, who might have been supposed to derive their qualities from white blood vastly more artistic than ours, and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their literary development. So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. It seemed to me that this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness. I said that a race which had come to this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had made of one blood all nations of men. I thought his merits positive and not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by a white man, I should not have found them less admirable. I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.

stanford university PLD centennial conference fri, mar 10 - sut, mar 11, 2006 Program

In eight consecutive panels, running from Friday morning until Saturday evening, the conference will focus on the following topics: Dunbar's relationship to his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and successors; his stylistic innovations and experiments in literary form; his engagement with cultural discourses of realism, humor, and dialect; his personal and political confrontation with the history of the Nadir; his interest in religious faith and folklore; his engagement with visual culture; and his groundbreaking literary movements onto the international stage and into transracial subject matter.
- bill 2-12-2006 10:17 pm [add a comment]