| The White Stripes – Your Southern Can Is Mine Lyrics | 21 years ago |
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This is one of my favorite songs, first done by Blind Willie McTell in 1927. At that time, at the height of the segregation system, singing any kind of open protest song would likely mean that you would wind up dead by sundown. If someone dared to protest, it would have to be done in a coded way coded so white people could not understand it. A common form of coding back then was to sing about WOMEN when what they really meant was WHITE PEOPLE. People often deride blues as a bunch of songs about bein' mistreated by bad women. That's absolutely, absolutely true. And if McTell is singing about someone's southern can -- (i.e. southern ass) -- belonging to someone else, well, that may very well be social commentary. The references to violence make an awful lot more sense this way. Of course, I may be totally wrong. Yet, it's certainly worth re-listening to a lot of your old blues records and thinking about what they might be trying to say. |
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