Topic: What's a sand footin' woman?

[Lyle Lofgren]

A quote appeared here saying something to the effect, "I don't want no sand footin' woman who'll cut my throat."

I clicked forward before the quote clicked with me, so I don't know where it came from. Google has never heard of a sand footin' woman. Any ideas what she is, so I can be sure to avoid her? Thanks.

Lyle

[Gumbo]

No idea. There was some mention in the Blind Willie McTell Lyrics thread but no definition.

The quote was taken from a  Bukka White interview.

[Slack]

My guess would be: sand footin = bare footin' = a low class woman.

[Richard]

And the various other references to sand in songs which I can't immediately think of     but include the likes of  "digging sand" "it's sand man" ?

[Rivers]

The quote was from Bukka White, the quote in full is typically laconic:

I don't want to get my throat cut by a sand-footin' woman or anything unnecessary like that -  Bukka White

I entered it but failed to provide attribution, bad me. I'm 90% certain it came from this rekkid though, which includes the aforementioned Remembrance of Charlie Patton monologue:

GNP Crescendo 10011 (1972)
Legacy of the Blues Vol. 1
= Poljazz PSJ-147 (Po 1976)




...visible on Stefan's Bukka White discog page at http://www.wirz.de/music/whitebuk.htm

I wonder if it's listed in Stephen Calt's Barrelhouse Words book, somebody check.

[blueshome]

Somebody did! No reference in Calt.

"raisin' sand" was to cause trouble, maybe there is a link?

[Bunker Hill]

Don't know if this is relevant but according to Robert Goldberg's A Jazz Lexicon (Knopf, 1964) there was a black vaudevillian dance step called The Sand which was later revived in Harlem during the 40s.

[frankie]

I have a friend who tap dances, and he once once described learning "sand dancing" - a kind of pre-cursor to tap that's performed in soft shoes (no taps).  This site has some history:

http://www.theatredance.com/tap/

[Lyndvs]

Wilson and Keppel, Sand Dance. 1934

[dj]

Fred Astaire does a sand dance near the start of Top Hat.

I doubt that "sand footin' woman" has anything to do with sand dancing though.  The phrase is probably very much related to "raising sand", maybe through the idea of kicking sand around with one's feet. 

Hmmm...  I wonder if the origin of "raising sand" was the image of two people fighting, kicking up dirt as they wrestled? 

[bnemerov]

my (unreliable) memory is of Zora Neal Hurston using "sand foot" as a Negro colloquialism for a "hick"...a country person ignorant of more urban ways. i.e. Not Hip.

[uncle bud]

Quite possibly related to raising sand as suggested. Perhaps another possibility is a variation of "fanfoot". Calt does have a definition for this, "an indiscriminately promiscuous female, who 'don't care who she's with, long as she get what she wants [sex]' (Skip James). Gary Davis defined fanfoot as a woman who 'gets drunk, falls down in the street...don't care who get on her; don't even know half the time,' and distinguishes fanfoots from other promiscuous women by virtue of their physical dirtiness."

He goes on to suggest fan likely derives from fen, archaic British slang for prostitute "or its original standard English meaning of mud or filth (OED). The suffix may have a similarly archaic basis in either foot, a term for an act of copulation dating to Shakespeare...or footy, a term Grose cites as meaning despicable, and the EDD as obscene or base. The latter gave rise to footer, recorded by the EDD as 'a term of the deepest contempt,' which is almost certainly related to fanfoot."

Is some of that reaching?   

[Gumbo]

re: fanfoot so it's less a case of duck shaped feet than both feet opening up in a fanlike way. Like a groupie without the group perhaps ..... (runs)

[dj]

Thanks for remembering "fanfoot", uncle bud.  It would make sense that "sand footin' woman" is a mixture of the ideas of "fanfoot" and "raisin' sand".

[Slack]

That sand dance video was worth this whole thread!   

Is some of that reaching?

 

Well, I know I'm still sticking to the simplest explanation.... e.g. a woman with sand on her feet.