“Yeah, don’t advertise your man-or woman”-The Blues Of Sippy Wallace  

By Zack James

Jack Callahan had been talking to his old time high school friend Seth Garth at one time the music critic for the now long gone alternative newspaper, The Eye, one night about all the music lines, specifically the blues lines that they had picked up as kids hanging around in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. Seth had discovered the blues accidently one Sunday night when listening to his transistor radio and in the sky ghost radio airwaves had picked up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WMYX in Chicago and had heard Howlin’ Wolf singing a song “Doin’ the do” (and beating up a harmonica too as both found out later in Newport in 1964 at the folk festival there when they saw him in person). Of course it took several listenings for a couple of whitebread city boys from a whitebread city to figure out that that line referred to the, ah, sex act. Ever after the guys who hung around Tonio’s would when discussing girls wonder aloud whether and when they would “do the do.”

That was the most famous example, there were tons of others, but as is the case with almost everything when Seth and Jack talked about the blues or any music they had to wind up picking favorites. Seth naturally went with “the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on you mind,” first heard on an old Lightnin’ Hopkins record since his mind had been cluttered for years by the “woman question” as the old radicals he used to hang around with in Cambridge and Berkeley during his newspaper days had in “high political expression” put the matter. The woman question as a personal matter since he had spent half his love falling in love, in love, and when the hammer went down out of love. That latter was no simple matter either except maybe early on in junior high school when everybody was expected to go for or ditch their “loves” at the drop of a hat. Seth had three scar-filled failed marriages to prove that hard and fast point.

Jack though dismissed Seth’s choice as so much special pleading, so much hot air and stated categorically, his usual method of argument with Seth (although certainly not with others, and certainly not with his wife, Kathy Kelly, whom he met in high school and except for a few bumps on both sides had stuck it out together all these years). His favorite was from the time that Bonnie Raitt had brought the legendary black female blues singer Sippy Wallace up to Boston for a concert on Boston Common back in the late 1960s and Sippy had blown the crowd away even though she had not performed for many years since she, one way or another, had gotten “religion” and the blues once again in her life became the “devil’s music.” The line that caught Jack’s attention that day, actually as that day turned to evening was the plaintive plea-“don’t advertise your man” from her song Women Be Wise.

This sentiment was not a matter of pure theory though since at the time Jack had actually been the subject of that very concept. He had known Kathy for a few years at that point and they were, as with all couples, having their ups and downs (mainly around the marriage question- she “yes,” he “let’s wait”). One day he was telling his college roommate about how nice Kathy was (despite the nagging on the marriage question), how she had made his life easier, and, fatal mistake, guy talk about how good she was under the sheets. That roommate knowing that there was tension in the air between Seth and Kathy went full-bore after her. And succeeded for a while in producing a very big down bump between Jack and Kathy. Eventually Kathy tired of the guy, and the guy left town for a job in New York City after he and Seth graduated so that left the field open for them to get back together-and get married. No need to draw any lessons for the reader from that experience since Sippy already telegraphed you the message-male or female.                

If you want to hear more great lyrics by Miss Sippy Wallace from her “discovery” days back in the 1960s grab a copy of one of her CDs and listen up, listen up to some bawdy blues with grit in them.