Willie the Weeper
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-07-22

Day 128 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "R. W. Gordon in his editorship of the Adventure magazine department " Old Songs That  Men Have Sung" received thirty versions of Willy the Weeper, about one hundred verses different.  Willy shoots craps with kings, plays poker with presidents, eats nightingale tongues a queen cooks for him; his Monte Carlo winnings come to a million, he lights his pipe with a hundred dollar bill,  he has heart affairs with Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba, and movie actresses.

"As against versions of this heard in Detroit and New York, we prefer the one by Henry (Hinky) McCarthy of the University of Alabama. He gives it with pauses, with mellowed, mellifluous tones,  with an insinuating guitar accompaniment. The lines "Teet tee dee dee dee dee," are lingering" and dreamy, supposed to indicate regions where the alphabet is not wanted."

"Minnie the Moocher" is a jazz song (based on Willie the Weeper) wasfirst recorded in 1931 by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, selling over a million copies."Minnie the Moocher" is most famous for its nonsensical ad libbed ("scat") lyrics (for example, "Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho"). In performances, Calloway would have the audience and the band members participate by repeating each scat phrase in a form of call and response, until making it too fast and complicated for the audience to replicate it.

"Minnie the Moocher" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2019 was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress. It has been argued that the record was the first jazz record to sell a million copies.

The song is based lyrically on Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon's 1927 version of the early 1900s vaudeville song "Willie the Weeper" (Bette Davis sings this version in The Cabin in the Cotton).

The lyrics are heavily laden with drug references. The character "Smokey" is described as "cokey", meaning a user of cocaine; the phrase "kick the gong around" was a slang reference to smoking opium. The "hi-de-ho" scat lyrics came about when Calloway forgot the lyrics to the song one night during a live radio concert.