"Another Mule Kickin' In Your Stall" and Other Blues Wisdom

Oscar Wilde once said "a dirty mind is a joy forever." 'Tis a pity he died before the blues was invented, because his mind would find endless sources of joy. No form of music (in English) gives me a more visceral thrill with its lyrics and music. I've heard a lot of blues over the years, and some lines are like splinters of glass in my brain, stuck in deep and glittering. They speak to my condition with a brutal and at times erotic directness.

Maybe this reflects a particular moment in life, but I've been drawn to Muddy Waters lately, especially his song, "Long Distance Call." It concludes with the lines

Hear my phone keep ringin',
sound like a long distance call
When I picked up my receiver,
the party said another mule kickin' in your stall

What man can't identify with that, at some point in his life?

Then there's B.B. King. He would have turned 94 on Sept. 16 (he made it to 89) and he's got an enormous catalogue. One of my prize record finds came in 1986 when I was in New Orleans for the Jazz & Heritage Festival. Flipping vinyl in a used record store, I found an early album of his that I snapped up immediately. I like that early, less well known B.B. King.

One of his shortest songs is one of my favorites, titled "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother:"
Nobody loves me but my mother,
And she could be jivin' too

Now you know why I act crazy
When you do the things you do.

The Internet provides a great place to find the lyrics to such songs; they can be hard to hear on many albums, where clear enunciation of the Queen's English is not a paramount value.

Like a good-looking bad woman, though, the Internet let me down on one recent lyric quest. I heard a woman singer on a New York station, probably WFUV, and a line really knocked me for a loop -- it was an entire episode of the Maury Povich show rolled into a single line of words. Despite my best efforts, I haven't found anything even close to this song, and I missed the name of the artist. My faulty memory carries at least two versions of the line, with radically different interpretations. Here goes:

version 1: You got the baby, but I got the man.

version 2: You got his baby, but I got your man.

Both version pack a punch like a mule kickin' in a stall.