Jimmy crack corn
Jonathan Rottet wrote:
This is one that has been bothering me since I can remember. There's a folksy sort of song that has the refrain "Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care, my master's gone away." What in the name of all that is holy does this mean?
Thanks. Now I can't get the song out of my head.
Jimmy crack corn is sort of like a phrasal verb: you can explain what each part of it means, but that doesn't necessarily mean you know what the sum means when you put the parts together.
To crack corn is to break or crush it into pieces. It's an American expression that's been around since at least the late 18th century. Jimmy is young James or familiar James or "just call me Jimmy." So some guy called Jimmy was cracking corn.
Exactly. This gets us nowhere in a hurry.
The song entitled "Jim Crack Corn" was written in 1846. (That extra beat after the syllable "Jim" probably led people to start singing "Jimmy" fairly early on.) It was published by the Virginia Minstrels, and was probably written by the northerner Daniel Emmett, who wrote a lot of the songs for their blackface minstrel show. Of the many fake-dialect tunes he wrote about the south, "Dixie" is the most famous, which has to hurt if you're from the south.
For those of you who didn't have the benefit of learning this song as a child: it's a story told from a slave's point of view about how his master died from the sting of one blue-tail fly that managed to get him despite the slave's vigilant fly-brushing efforts.
Most of the theories about who Jimmy is and what he's really doing agree that whatever he's doing, the slave doesn't care about it because his master is gone. Whether he's gleefully carefree or woefully despondent is a point of dispute, depending a bit on which of the two main theories you subscribe to:
1."Cracking corn" is opening a bottle of corn liquor; the phrase is self-referential and means "I'm Jimmy, I'm upset, I'm drinking, and I don't care." Well, that sense of crack is certainly old enough, but I can't find any evidence of "corn" being used independently of the phrases "corn liquor" or "corn juice." And if Jimmy is really talking, why use "I" in the second part of the sentence, but be Bob Dole-like in the first part?
2."Cracking corn" really is crushing corn, and it means that someone named Jimmy, presumably a fellow slave, had to start grinding corn for food because of the penury visited on him after the master's death. This is as plausible as any other piece of speculation, but it's not a satisfactory answer to who Jimmy is and why he suddenly turns up in the refrain.
The use of Jim as a form of address is attested in Black English, but no earlier than 1899--although we can assume the use predated the writer Countee Cullen's recording of it. There's the term jim-cracker, meaning 'someone with remarkable skill', that was first recorded in 1834. It could well be that Daniel Emmett just put "jim-cracker" and "cracking corn" together as a bit of doggerel because it sounded nice and southern.
NOTE: In response to this posting, Jim Dixon sent some citations from folk songs of the use of corn alone to mean 'corn liquor', as in the following from Hand me down my walkin' cane:
Hand me down my bottle of corn
Gonna get drunk as sure as you're born.
