<<<Back to page 2

Doin’ the monkey

You can have my husband

But please don’t mess with my man

— Koko Taylor

Pat Hare wrote the verses of “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby,” but the song’s tune and half its chorus derive from a 1941 blues by Peter Joe “Doctor” Clayton called “Cheating and Lying Blues.” A St. Louis-by-way-of-Georgia singer/songwriter, Clayton recorded for the Bluebird label in the ‘30s and ‘40s, then migrated to Chicago in 1950 (with guitarist Robert “Junior” Lockwood) when a house fire killed his entire family. The tragedy freed him to pursue music full-time but also drove him to drink. Little remembered today due to a modest recorded output (he also died fairly young, at 48), Clayton wore floppy hats and oversized glasses – a comic look that mirrored the tone of the composition Hare released as “Murder.”

I work like a bee
And come straight home with my pay
My baby either clowns it up
Or give it all away



I’m gonna murder my baby

If she don’t stop cheatin’ and lyin’

Well, I’d rather be in the penitentiary

Than to be worried out of my mind

Doctor Clayton: “Cheating and Lying Blues” (1941)

If Hare’s version is darkly sardonic and aurally aggressive, Clayton’s is easy on the ears and played mostly for laughs – his woe-is-me vocal (atop affable piano backing) and indignant rube act congruent with his clownish hat and specs. A clever lyricist, known for the story-song “Pearl Harbor Blues” as well as vaudeville-ish hokum like “Moonshine Woman Blues” (both 1942 – the latter replete with “drunken” tuba accompaniment), it’s hard to hear Clayton’s song, with its goofy references to Superman and Hitler, and imagine him hurting – let alone murdering – anybody. Even with the “green-ey’d monster” ascendant in the final verse, Clayton’s song remains cuckold humor of the stag-antlers-hat variety:

Four o’clock this mornin’
When I stagger in the block
The little moonshine joint in the rear
Has just started to rock

I sneaked inside
To get a better view
I caught my woman
Doin’ the boogie too

A less burlesque version of “Murder,” featuring Clayton’s “penitentiary” chorus but an otherwise fresh set of lyrics, was recorded in 1963 by bluesman Robert Nighthawk (nee McCullom). Here, Hare’s hot reading and pungent sarcasm yield to a cooler, soulful but sly delivery.

I went down to Eli
To get my pistol out of pawn

When I got back home

My woman had gone



Yes, gonna murder my baby

If she don’t stop cheatin’ and lyin’

Well, I’d rather be in the penitentiary

Than to be worried out of my mind

Robert Highthawk: “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” (“Goin’ Down to Eli”) (1963)

Like Hare, better known as a sideman than solo player, Nighthawk’s nom de blues (sometimes preceded by the appellation “Prowling”) jibed with the itinerant, under-the-radar nature of his career. Born in Arkansas (also like Hare), the singer/guitarist left home young and wandered the country most of his life – busking, gigging, and occasionally recording solo or with the likes of Henry Townsend, Big Joe Turner, and the original Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee Curtis). A fine slide guitarist and underrated singer, he performed on ‘40s radio as Robert Lee McCoy. Around the time that Pat Hare ended two lives along with his career, Nighthawk emerged in Chicago and performed there – in clubs and on the street – off and on for the rest of his life (he died in 1967, age 57, back in Arkansas).

Nighthawk brings an understated but awesome authority to his Chicago blues version of Clayton’s “Cheating” (sometimes called “Goin’ Down to Eli”). His expressive slide and spare-but-forceful small band backing (minimal drums, a second guitar) forge a down-and-dirty, hip-swaying foundation for his resonant baritone. If Hare’s “Murder” feels a little too real for comfort and Clayton’s “Cheating” lacks bite, Nighthawk’s variation balances urgency with calm and – critically – injects sex into the mix. Dark and libidinous elements co-mingle in his rendition (in a sense, Nighthawk rediscovers the erotic side of jealousy) in a sweaty equilibrium redolent of film noir. This extends to the song’s humor: “Eli” ends, like Clayton’s “Cheating,” with the singer-voyeur peeping at his lover through a window of the nip joint “in the rear” which has “just begin to rock”:

I kinda ease upside

To get a better view

I saw my woman

Doin’ the monkey too

The implication of “doin’ the monkey” (“the boogie” in Clayton’s version) is clear, but the dance-as-sex euphemism is funny, not edgy, suggesting the genial carnality of Rufus Thomas – the Memphis R&B pioneer whose songbook bulges with zoological references ripe with sexual innuendo (e.g., “The Dog,” “Walking the Dog,” “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog,” and “Somebody Stole My Dog”). If Clayton’s “Cheating” is cartoon cuckoldry, Nighthawk’s “Eli” – murder threats notwithstanding – is bluesy erotica. Early rock and roll, like blues, delights in paradox: in finding links between sex and violence, flirtation and threat, sacred and profane, and gleefully exploding the boundaries between binaries.

This subversive, sexy brew features explicitly in a film clip that’s also the best way to experience Nighthawk’s song. In 1964, experimental filmmaker Mike Shea shot a 50-minute, no-narration, black-and-white documentary about Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market – a near-century-old outdoor meeting and mercantile space that, until urban renewal and the University of Illinois at Chicago finally cannibalized it in 1994 (a feeble remnant, relocated to a spot less visible to passing traffic, remains) – was one of the city’s most vital off-the-grid cultural institutions. A vast, funky, American-style bazaar, Maxwell Street was packed each Sunday with sundry goods (clothing, folk art, a vacant lot’s worth of hubcaps) and unforgettable characters (hawkers, soapbox preachers, an old man who hypnotized chickens). Shea’s documentary, And This Is Free, captures the market’s boisterous, postwar incarnation in all its diverse racial, ethnic, and economic glory.

Maxwell Street was also a mecca for roots music – a place where Southern-style white gospel singers in crew-cuts and ties bumped physical and stylistic elbows with nattily dressed blues musicians, all busking through lo-fi PA’s to entertain traders and their marks. Shea’s camera captures it all, including an unforgettable sequence where Robert Nighthawk and a small band play “Goin’ Down to Eli” for an enthused crowd of mostly black listeners.

Robert Nighthawk at Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market
in Mike Shea’s “And This Is Free” (1965)

It’s a stellar performance, ably augmented by Shea’s gritty, gray-scale visuals: Nighthawk, ruggedly handsome, singing seated beside a second guitarist with a dangling cigarette … dancers swaying sensually, then lewdly, grinding their hips front-to-back in pairs – then trios – feigning fornication … slickly dressed men laughing, slapping backs, sharing pulls of hooch from a brown-bag bottle. The lack of self-consciousness of these men and women is striking and underscores realities both personal and political. Each is wringing every possible bit of pleasure from their day of no work, far from the city’s (white) power centers, in the historic year that the 88th Congress literally replaced Jim Crow with Civil Rights. The lusty song and dance, juxtaposed with both black and white gospel singing, also serves as a symbolic rejoinder to priggishness, or perhaps – to revive Jüng’s paradigm – a reassertion of shadow as the essential flip side of light. That the literal subject of the song they’re celebrating is infidelity and the threat of homicide is a paradox worthy of the things murder ballads are made of.