I’d Rather Be With The Devil That To Be That Man’s Woman- With Skip James In Mind 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even when a thing, a fling, okay an affair is over there is always, always some residue, some flash back point that gets the blood boiling especially when a guy takes the walk on you, leave’s you flat. Josie Davis certainly had been down that road ever since she left the friendly confines of her family’s New York City apartment and had chosen to go to the wilds of Madison, Wisconsin and go to the university there (friendly in that she hardly went out of the house to face any heartbreak, and went to Hunter College High where she was a nose-to-the-grindstone drudge).

In the space of a few short months she, tutored by her Chicago born roommate Susan Phillips, had gone from drudge to an aficionado of the budding folk scene that had heated up and replaced the be-bop “beat” scene that had dominated the big city café life until that faded out in places like the Village, North Beach, Harvard Square about 1960 or so. That introduction to folk had led to her first serious dates, dates with one Jack Kiley, her own blue-eyed blonde Irishman from Boston who also was the first to take her to bed, to show her the niceties of sex (the dates with the one-size-fits-all with nice Jewish boys form the city or from Long Island picked by her mother or the same picked by some classmate don’t count since she could see that they were nowhere, nowhere now that she was a woman). But Jack had left her high and dry, no, not really high and dry but had left school to “find himself” out in the 1960s cultural wilderness. She had hoped he would come back but the new Josie, now that she was that woman she claimed for herself was not going to wait.

Enter one James Prescott from Racine, a guy she had met one night at the Dusty Dog, the local coffeehouse hang-out for budding sophomores (the class structure, school class, and in effect social order class, would baffle any half-bright sociologist since Freshmen hung at The Grog, Sophs at the Dog, Juniors at the Hungry Hawk, and Seniors at The Club Algiers and while there were no obvious roadblocks for anyone to enter any of those establishments without the appropriate escort it wasn’t worth the hassle or the evil eyes which bore into the offender stuff that would not go down in big city life but was tolerated in campus towns). He had spied her (and she him) knowing each other slightly from American History class (along with about two hundred other students filling the big hall) since he had a running battle with the professor conducting the class about George Washington’s place in the American pantheon and she had congratulated him on his efforts after one class. So they talked a bit, or rather he talked a lot since he was hot that night on the subject of country blues from down South, down in the Delta in Mississippi now that folk-singers or archivist had gone down there and “discovered” a bunch of old black guys who were famous and influences on the development of the blues, electric blues that everybody knew about. Guys down south that everybody was going crazy over. Guys like Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House and James’ favorite, Skip James.              

And so their thing started although Josie was a little put off by James’ habit of cutting her off before she was finished with her thought, and more put off by his singing which was pretty bad for a guy who knew some of the most esoteric information about folk and blues music she had ever heard. Put off because he would sing at the drop of a hat even in the streets which embarrassed her. Especially when he tried to do a falsetto version of Skip James’ most famous, or infamous song “I’d rather be with the devil than be that woman’s man.” She assumed everybody would think that he meant her, the gal he was walking with. So they went along for a while until she tired of his ways, tired of being treated like some rag doll with no opinions of her own.

After she had given him his walking papers she found herself for a while humming that Skip James’ song except she would sing-“I’d rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Yeah, two could play that game but she sorely wished that Jack Kiley would find himself soon and come clutter up her doorway.