Georgia White and friend: If she can't sell it she'll keep sittin' on it (before she gives it away).

For your enjoyment (or total indifference), Audiogalaxy presents a (semi-)regular feature on old-time folk, blues, jazz, country, and vaudeville, exploring their darker themes. Hell, someone's got to give this stuff some exposure. Also check out "Songs about Murder" and "Songs about Drugs," as well as Songs about Heaven from our "Light Side of Folk" feature.

Shit. That's the substance with which conservative pundits who try to sell the idea that today's American culture is more prurient than that of the past are filled to the brim. The willful ignorance of these cultural whitewashers stands out in the sharpest relief to anyone who has studied America's history via its folk artifacts rather than via old re-runs of "Leave it to Beaver" and "Ozzie and Harriet." The truth is that most Americans today enjoy an unprecedented degree of protection from life's primal, essential facts: sex, violence, and death. As a culture, we are more sheltered and puritanical than ever. Just ask U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who can't even bear to lay eyes on a fake naked breast made out of metal.

Contrary to popular assumption, there are enough bawdy songs from the early part of this century - we're talking explicitly, specifically, ear-burningly bawdy - to fill up a box set or two. Listening to the take of these old songs on things bawdy and carnal is both educating and titillating, a chuckle across generations and a glimpse of what essentially animal characteristics contemporary people share with those long since dead. The pungent language and direct sentiments of this pre-PC music are liberating - it takes the listener back to a time when the stakes were higher, the jokes were funnier, and, above all, the music was better. Oh, and John Ashcroft hadn't even soiled his first diaper.

So here's a hearty cheer for filth, depravity, perversion, and sleaze. And here are ten hilarious songs in which the narrator gives his love more than a cherry.

"Shave 'Em Dry, Part II," performed by Lucille Bogan:
Post-feminist before the term "feminism" was ever coined, Lucille Bogan was a blues singer who wrote disarmingly frank songs about turning tricks, smoking weed, loving sex (on this song, she sings "I f--ked all night and all the night before…and I feel like I wanna f--k some more") and loving life. Of all the female blues singers who sang raunchy odes to sex (and often - during the depression - prostitution: see Georgia White's breezy "If I Can't Sell It I'll Keep Sittin' On It (Before I Give It Away)"), Bogan was far and away the raunchiest, and her "Shave 'Em Dry (Part II)" is so joyfully filthy and lascivious it would make Eminem blush like a schoolgirl. Riffing on such family-values-friendly topics as nymphomania, pubic lice, necrophilia, and blasphemy (in the song's highlight, she cracks herself up while drawing an elaborate and outrageously sleazy comparison between the male genitalia and a house of worship), Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry" might just be the dirtiest song ever written and must be heard to be believed.

"Candy Man Blues," performed by Mississippi John Hurt:
Fingerstyle master Mississippi John Hurt is amazing, the perhaps the only musician in history who could perform a dirty-old-man ode to his "stick of candy that's nine inches long" and make it sound this soothing and elegantly lovely.

"The Rotten C--ksuckers' Ball," performed by the Clovers:
This clandestine recording by doo-wop forebears the Clovers rivals Lucille Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry" for pure unrestrained obscenity - it also riffs on the popular old vaudeville/minstrel chestnut "The Darktown Strutters' Ball," indicating probable roots in the early 1900's. Extremely catchy for a bawdy song, this song was probably passed orally (no pun intended) through several generations. Its snappy, salty lyrics are lewdly poetic, like a shotgun wedding of Stephen Foster and Charles Bukowski.

"My Girl's Pussy," performed by Harry Roy's Bat Club Boys:
There are a zillion 1.3-entendre "pussy" songs (Big Bill Broonzy's "Pussy Cat Blues" being a notable example), but this charming, chipper and eminently hummable piece by Harry Roy takes the jelly roll, in part because of the way in which Roy promptly disposes of his vestigial entendre (the requisite fake cat noise) before the verse even starts, in a half-hearted and rather abstracted meow, so that he can deliver the rest of the song's meaning straight. Later, Roy gets so worked-up in his delivery, growling, yelping, and affecting phoney-baloney accents, that we forget the song was even about pussy in the first place and it becomes all about Roy's contagious enthusiasm.

"Press My Button, Ring My Bell," performed by Lil Johnson:
I don't know what happened between then and now, but back in the 20's and 30's female musicians weren't above demanding their pleasure: "If you don't give me what I crave, [I'm going] to be some other good man's slave," Johnson threatens on her "If You Don't Give Me What I Want." Meanwhile, on this one, she provides a tutorial on the clitoris for clueless and inept lovers who "don't understand where to put that thing." Johnson's sentiments are echoed by other female singers of her time, too: in "Tight Like That," Clara Smith tells of a hen who complains to her "roosta": "you don't come around as often as you used'ta, now it's tight like that." Vaudevillian Sophie Tucker, meanwhile, gets so fed up with her religious prude of a boyfriend in "He Hadn't Until Yesterday" that she decides to take matters into her own hands, saying "I'm going to show him in the parlor why a girl turns out the light. And if he's never forgotten his bible, you can bet he will tonight."

"My Sweet Farm Girl", performed by Clarence "Tom" Ashley:
The amazing Clarence Ashley was thoroughly versed in the music of hillbilly string bands, black blues musicians, white minstrel shows, and dark Appalachian balladeers. His "Greenback Dollar" is one of the most foully evil songs in existence, with Ashley keening "All I want's my 32-20, just to shoot out your dirty brains." "My Sweet Farm Girl," meanwhile, is a sunny blues tune that, as Greil Marcus pointed out, sneaks coy references to both analingus and cunnilingus in among its pastoral metaphors.

"My Daddy Rocks Me with One Steady Roll," performed by Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon:
While white Clarence Ashley was travelling through the South in cork pretending to be black (a tradition that was born among well-heeled New Yorkers and Bostonians, by the way, and only died in the South) the diminutive black singer Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon was dressing up in female attire in Harlem clubs and impersonating a woman. On "My Daddy Rocks Me with One Steady Roll," Jaxon doesn't just fake femininity, he fakes orgasm, struggling to deliver his song through a constant vocal workout of vigorous giggles and moans. The sheer prurience of this song is ear-opening - imagining it actually performed in a 1920s club is a revelation.

"The Handsome Cabin Boy," performed by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman:
"The Handsome Cabin Boy" internalizes into its narrative the giddy blurring of gender represented by Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon (and by the male singer for Connie McLean's Rhythm Boys, who appeals to God in desperation: "if you can't bring me a woman, bring me a sissy man"), telling the oft-told tale of a pretty young girl who wants so badly to see the world as a sailor that she dresses herself as a man and boards a ship as "the handsome cabin boy." Soon, she's sleeping with the ship's captain. Everything threatens to go wrong when "eating of the captain's biscuit" makes her pregnant, but all works out well in the end when the captain's wife waives her jealousy, admitting that she too had been fooling around with "the handsome cabin boy." The song ends on a touching note, with the ship's crew drinking to the cabin boy and to love and kinky sex instead of war. This song has been covered by many (including, not surprisingly, Kate Bush and Phranc), but Garcia and Grisman's version from their excellent Shady Grove album is just about perfect.

"Winin' Boy," performed by Jelly Roll Morton:
The boastful Jelly Roll Morton, his own name a sexual double-entendre, claimed (ridiculously) to have invented jazz. Morton begins his "Winin' Boy" (a song he actually performed before the Library of Congress - guess those guys don't listen to lyrics much) with a spoken disclaimer stating that the reason this song is so smutty is that in his early days as a pianist he wanted it made clear to female listeners that, even though he was a musician, he wasn't gay. Boasting lyrics like: "I had that bitch and had her on the stump. I f--ked her 'till her pussy stunk" and "I'm going to salivate your pussy 'till my peter gets hard," "Winin' Boy" works pretty hard to that end. Morton's liberal use of "the n. word" and the relish with which he strews his lines with the f. word would doubtless be illuminating to Tipper Gore and anyone else who thinks music today is rougher than it ever used to be.

"I'm a Bear in a Ladies' Boudoir," performed by Cliff Edwards:
This is the least rough song on this list, not so much an innocent ditty, but one whose dirtiness (a dirtiness that caps off with a bawdy mimicry of cunnilingus) is upstaged by Cliff Edwards' delightfully quaint delivery. Edwards - a vaudeville star and proto-crooner-oddball better known as "Ukelele Ike," who popularized the Ukelele and the song "Singin' in the Rain" and was best known as the voice of Jiminy Cricket - brags here of the fact that, while he may be a 98-pound weakling instead of a "football hero," he's nonetheless "a star with the beautiful girls." A slice of pure 1920's charm, blessed with a winning melody, wryly clever lyrics, and Edwards' inimitable delivery. Edwards was a screen collaborator with Buster Keaton, and his singing seems weirdly to echo the poetic whimsy and odd, cartoonish sense of liberation from physics (like Keaton's voiceless body, Edward's bodiless voice leaps, soars, and pratfalls) that Keaton's best movies could evoke. Edwards manages to make "I'm a Bear in a Ladies' Boudoir" both sleazy and genteel.

Wow - I thought folk music was all about kisses on the cheek and bicycles built for two! What about "Let Me Play with Your Poodle," "You Stole My Cherry," and Milt Brown's muppets-on-crack breakdown "Garbage Man Blues?" Express how your life has been changed (and how you'll never listen to Li'l Kim again) on our message board: