I learned this song back in the 1950's in WI, from the singing of Burl Ives who said his was a "folk version of the Dan Emmett minstrel song." I knew it as "Blue Tail Fly" and never heard it called "Jim/Jimmy/Gimmie Crack Corn". I always thought the reference was to "corn whiskey" as the line closely followed "pass the bottle when he got dry." But that was nothing more than an assumption on my part.

It is the final song in "The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English Speaking World", edited by Albert B. Friedman who is reffered to as "an expert in the field of folk lore." (For whatever that is worth.) It says it has been published in England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. In the book it's classed with a group of songs under the heading "Humor."

The Notes that accompany it say: "White audiences first heard Negro songs from the blackface minstrel troups, which from the 1830s on were a staple music-hall attraction in England as well as in America, and in the North even more than in the South. Very little in the minstrel repertory was genuine. Much of it, in fact, was deliberate pro-slavery propaganda, for the picture that Dan Emmett, 'Jim Crow' Rice, 'Pickaninny' Coleman and Christie's strutters gave of the Negro -- indolent, ignorant, slyly thieving, disloyal, bestial, inanely joyful and boisterous -- was calculated to show that the race was happy in its present state and unworthy of a better. One of the few minstrel pieces to survive in tradition, 'The Blue-Tail Fly" describes the surpressed glee of a little Negro pageboy when his master is thrown from his horse and killed. Curiously, the text recorded by Miss Scarborough in Texas in 1920 ('On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs', p.202) adheres almost word for word to the 'Ethiopian Glee Book' version printed in Boston in 1848." With those comments about the intent of Dan Emmett and his ilk, I don't think the song should be listed in a section on "Humor!"

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the words of the chorus go back to a children's crow scaring song. Incidently, crow scaring songs were not only an English tradition. I have a Hopi Indian friend who says that around the Hopi plots of corn, beans and squash, prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the job of the children was to stay by the field and scare off small critters like rabbits and also birds including crows and ravens. A small brush shelter would be erected at the edge of each small plot so that the children would have a bit of shade while performing their very important role. My friend said that the kids would collect pebbles to throw at the varmints, but would also shout, wave their arms and sing!

Reiver 2