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From the Magazine | Music
Hot Shot and Hut-Sut
Posted Monday, Jul. 28, 1941
Hot
Shot Dawson on a river boat,
With his brawlin', sprawlin' sweetie. . . .
Hot Shot is an Irish pug,
The river boat is the Queen,
His brawlin' lass is Bridget Cass
And Hot Shot is her dream.
That snatch of a song had a college professor, a U.S. poet, numerous
song collectors and Mississippi river folk scratching their heads last
week. The lines had been sent to Bill Henry, columnist in the Los Angeles
Times, by a friend who remembered hearing them many years ago in "Hell's
Half Acre" in St. Louis. Henry printed the song, remarked its similarity
to the current No. 1 sheet-music seller, the No. 2 ditty of the NBC and
CBS networks, The Hut-Sut Song. This doubletalk, mock-Swedish "serenade"
was written by Ted McMichael (of the singing "Merry Macs"), Jack Owens,
Leo V. Killion. The song goes as follows:
Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah,
And a brawla, brawla, soo-it. . . .
Now the Rawlson is a Swedish town,
The rillerah is a stream. . . .
The brawla is the boy and girl,
The Hut-Sut is their dream.*
Hot Shot Dawson seemed last week to be on the tips of a few tongues,
although the most encyclopedic U.S. collectors—Alan Lomax of the U.S.
Library of Congress, Chicago's Poet Carl Sandburg, Boston University
Professor Horace Reynolds, Radio Singers Frank Luther and Burl Icle
Ivanhoe Ives, Mary Wheeler of Paducah, Ky., Ernest C. Krohn of St. Louis,
Author Carl Carmer, "Daddy of the Blues" W. C. Handy—did not know it.
Apparently it was never published. But Cincinnati rivermen remembered Hot
Shot, so did Captain D. T. Wright of the Waterways Journal in St. Louis.
Two Memphis experts—Joe Curtis and Charles L. Maughan—narrowed the
authorship of the song down to a blind Missouri Negro who sang at boat
landings around 1914. Of the music, nobody remembered a note.
The authors of The Hut-Sut Song—to whose bouncing tune the lyrics of
Hot Shot Dawson can easily be sung—last week kept silent as soo-it, mum as
a rillerah.
* By permission of the copyright owner, Schumann Music
Co. From the Jul 28, 1941 issue of TIME
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