The book Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From (a collection of writings by various authors discussing lyrics to early black songs) includes an interesting piece by Paul Oliver about "Lookin' for the Bully."
Oliver shows that the 'tin pan alley hit' was not an invention but a lifting from oral tradition.
He quotes WC Handy remembering how he wished to compose
a down-home ditty fit to go with twanging banjos and yellow shoes
and recalling his time in St Louis in 1893
Songs of this sort could be tremendous hits sometimes. On the levee at St Louis I had heard Looking for the Bully of the Town sung by roustabouts, which later was adopted and nationally popularized by May Irwin.
The explanation, Oliver relates, is that May Irwin happened to share a long train journey with a sports writer and horse-race judge called Charles Trevathan. He amused the people in the carriage by playing his guitar and performing a version of
The Bully he'd picked up from some black singers in Tennessee. Irwin spotted a potential show-stopper and got Trevathan to write words for her.
At the same time that WC Handy was in St Louis, there was a grand 'sporting house' in the red-light district where the famous Tom Turpin played piano and the more obscure Mama Lou sang bawdy songs and more respectable numbers such as
Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-E, Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, Who Stole the Lock and the bully song. [The clients probably paid more attention to the dancing girls with long skirts and no knickers dancing on a big mirror.]
Trevathan's song wasn't even the first version of the bully song to be published, but it was the most popular.
Some of this is repeated in the notes to this performance by somebody I previously knew as an author but not a performer: Elijah Wald
Wald reports some more recent research by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
Two cuttings from the
Leavenwoth HeraldThere are a great many Kansa City tramps called piano players in town.
Kansas City girls can't play anything on pianos except 'rags', and the worst kind of 'rags' at that. 'The Bully' and 'Forty Drops' are their favourites.
Abbott and Seroff addThis is the earliest-known printed reference to the word "rags" to indicate a particular type of music.
Trevathan's words for May Irwin seem to have been based on traditional lyrics. Oliver believes that the theme of a a black razor-wielding ruffian invading a dance continued in the Blues tradition as variations on the
Razor Ball such as this song by Blind Willie McTell.
The tradition also leads to Howlin' Wolf