Yellow, Black, and Blues
February 15 2010
A LOOK AT OUR AGRICULTURAL PAST MAY EXPLAIN WHY HONEY BEES AROUND THE WORLD BEGAN DISAPPEARING THREE YEARS AGO.
Consider the story of the 1951 Muddy Waters song “Honey Bee”: When Waters arrived in Chicago in 1943 he found no audience for what he called the “sad old-time blues” that he’d learned growing up in Mississippi, listening to delta greats like Son House and Robert Johnson. So he spent the next couple years working full-time factory jobs as he tried to find a place for his woeful southern songs in the hot Chicago music scene alive with dancing pianos and swing jazz.
Then in 1945 Waters’ uncle gave him an electric guitar. It was this event that music historian Ted Gioia later called “a major step forward in the history of Chicago Blues, a harbinger of the electrified sound of that music.” Waters crafted his songs to fit the new instrument’s piercing volume and confidence. At the age of 33 he had his first hit, and soon after found himself in a recording studio for Chess records, solidifying his increasingly singular sound as he laid down three soon-to-be top-10 hits on the Billboard R&B Chart.
“Sail on, sail on my little honey bee, sail on…” he cried, with all the joy of a man who had struggled for more than a decade, unappreciated, before finally succeeding in creating something truly original. “Honey Bee” was an electrified version of a song he had written years back on a cotton plantation in Mississippi. In some ways, it was just another blues song: the bee, with its long stinger and its sweet honey, had long been a staple of sexual imagery in the blues (“I got a bumble bee… he got all the stinger I need,” sang Memphis Minnie in 1929). But Waters had recast the honey bee from a sexual symbol to an ideal of dependable love, made bitter by worry: In lyrics strung out by the blue notes of the guitar, he wonders if despite his lovers constancy, she may never return. “…I don’t mind you sailing,” he howled, “but please don’t sail so long.”
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