The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #40592 Message #3857929
Posted By: GUEST,Joseph Scott
30-May-17 - 03:48 PM
Thread Name: Origins: I Know You Rider
Subject: RE: Origins: I Know You Rider
"understanding that the lyrics come from C.C. Rider" "Rider" was a very common black slang expression meaning lover i.e. meaning the person you're currently having sex with. It was liberally thrown into folk songs where "mama" or "baby" could be thrown in instead and it wouldn't make any difference. The presence of the word "rider" in one black folk song should never be taken as evidence that the song is related to another black folk song with the word "rider" in it, any more than you would do the same with the interjection "mama."
Ma Rainey popularized Lena Arrant's song "See See Blues" (as Arrant initially called it) in 1924, but Arrant's song was just one version of a family of black folk blues songs about seeing what you done, many of which didn't happen to have the word "rider" in them, and many of which, e.g., said "look" what you done rather than "see." Even in the '50s and '60s the members of that family that didn't happen to include the word "rider" still existed. None of this had anything to do with e.g. "circuit courts" as was creatively imagined by some later. See meant see.
The Lomaxes were notorious for lumping fragments together and rewriting them to create unidiomatic messes. In this case Coltman turned an unidiomatic (from a blues standpoint) Lomax mess into unidiomatic (from a blues standpoint) actual music.