What Happened to Jody

Abstract

LIFE IN AN ARMY during wartime and life in prison anytime have a number of aspects in common, so it is not surprising when we find items of folklore shared by both camps. One mutual concern is who is doing what, with, and to the woman one left at home. Negro folklore, this concern is personified in the songs and toasts about one the Grinder-Jody, a contraction of Joe the, and a metaphor in folk use for a certain kind of coital movement. Jody's activities and life style are perhaps best described in the toast bearing his name. Roger Abrahams collected a version of Jody the Grinder in Philadelphia in the early i96o's.1 I collected a longer and more detailed version in Texas in I965. toast is pretty well dated by its content and slang: solid news and solid sender were out of circulation by the early I950's; Japanese war brides didn't start receiving much attention until some time after the American occupation of Japan was well under way, probably around I947. atom bomb and fall of Japan are so central they supply an absolute early cutoff date. One would be safe in assuming somewhere between 1947 and I950. But was around earlier. He is named in the brief blues Joe the Grinder, recorded by John A. Lomax from the singing of Irvin Lowry in Gould, Arkansas, in I939.2 During the war years, figured in the marching song Sound Off, a version of which is printed in Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America.3 Lomax says In many variants this was sung by all Negro outfits in World War II. Abrahams notes that This song is often called 'Jody's Song' and other similar ones 'Jody Calls.' 4 Woody Guthrie, in an undated note included in Born to Win, says, The best of marching I saw in my eight months in the army was to the folk words of a folky chant tune that went: Ain't no use in writin' home / Some joker got your gal an' gone. / Hey, boy, ya' got left, right? / Ho, boy, ya' got right. If Abrahams' version of the toast is at all representative of its current condition, it seems the toast is wearing down with age-younger performers have dropped the allusions and slang they don't understand, and, concomitantly, some of the narrative elements. man who performed the longer version printed here was sixtyfour and, fortunately, he is one of those uncreative folk performers incapable of destroying anachronisms in a text.