Sunday, November 3, 2013

20131103.0957

I suppose that I could make some comment regarding the fall-back day that has happened, the extra hour of sleep that many of those in the United States have been accorded, and the perennial comments that Daylight Savings Time ought to be abolished.  But I won't, and not in the way McClintock won't (by face-punching).*  Instead, I will return to something I have mentioned before, something that is on my mind because of the recent Dia de los Muertos--something I at least passingly observe, given that I grew up near San Antonio and have a wife and coming child whose heritage makes it appropriate that my household do so.

In a blog post from some years ago, I note that "'Stormy Weather' looms large in the mythos of my mother's family."  It does so because of one of the more...extravagant characters in the family, Denny Hardy, whose passing...is still difficult to discuss.  However that may be, one thing that is still to be celebrated of him is his sense of humor, which ran not to, but all the way through, the bawdy, often through the use of clever (and, admittedly, sometimes less than clever) word-play.  Not seldom, this would take the form of what came to be called "dirty virgins" (follow the pun), re-settings of the lyrics of jazz and blues standards far the opposite of bowdlerization (with as many of us as have been involved in music, it makes sense that we would turn to songs for our entertainment).

Family gatherings among my mother's family frequently become celebrations of word-play; we revel in the ability to manipulate the language and cram as many jokes into a single phrase or sentence as can be done.  (I think it is part of why I have always been good at finding the oddities in pieces of literature; thanks, folks!)  Many times, we would come up with new dirty virgins, trying to outdo one another with the audacity and freshness of the refigurings while still remaining true to the cadence of the lyrics of the original songs.  Quite a few have emerged and become fairly standard points of reference for us--and among those, perhaps the fundamental touchstone is one of Denny's, working from "Stormy Weather."

Those who knew Denny (or who know me, because I cannot keep my mouth shut, as my family has often bemoaned) know the "new" lyrics to which I refer--and they know them to be exceptionally lewd as well as infectious; a number of us cannot hear the song without thinking the "dirty virgin" lyrics before the "actual" lyrics.  As I think on it, the replacement by the more recent version of the earlier is something of an analogue to the ways in which literary tropes and figures recast and succeed one another, which has been one of the major foci of my research.  I have been embedded in the very thing I study since well before I had any notion that it could be studied.

Even now, even from the other side of the grave, the old man is teaching me...

*It occurs to me that making a reference to John Wayne movies says some...interesting things about me.

No comments:

Post a Comment