I heard it blowing out of the car radio just before we took the right turn into Target. My wife was driving.
“Be my woman, girl, and I’ll be your man.
“Be my woman, girl, and I’ll be your man.”
The voice was rough, exultant, claiming.
And I knew it.
The song was “Hey Mama,” a rap song by David Guetta, Nicki Minaj, Bebe Rexha and Afrojack, but the “be my woman” holler at the beginning was older — what rap artists call a “sample.”
For a 58-year-old white man with a fondness for tweed, I have some odd tastes in music, but they all make sense to me. I like older country music because, as the cliché runs, “it tells a story.” I like Cajun music because I spoke French as a child. I like rap because I’m a writer and rap is words.
For the rest of it, my music collection is loaded with everything from Woody Guthrie to Dean Martin.
And a CD called “Murderous Home.” It’s a 1947 recording of black convicts singing work songs at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
I suppose you could call it “oppression porn” when I sit in my air-conditioned house and listen to a recording of wood-chopping convicts, singing to keep the axes in rhythm, down on Parchman Farm.
The “be my woman” sample comes from a work song on the album called, “Rosie,” and you can hear the axes biting on the down stroke. The singers on “Rosie” are listed as C.B. and Axe Strokes, an anonymous name for one man and the other men behind him, the guys playing the axe.
An axe is a snake, ready to bite, and the best way to charm it is to keep in rhythm. A nine-pound hammer is much the same, though the hammer crushes instead of biting.
“Listen to that,” I said to my wife as the Guetta/Minaj/Rexha/Afrojack song crashed into life on the radio.
“Be my woman, girl, and I’ll be your man.”
I turned it up.
Rap is supposed to be anti-history and anti-civilization, sexed-up, crack-smoking, pistol-flashing, baby mama, twerk music, an affront to a great culture built entirely by white people of white people and for white people.
But someone in that ho-pimping universe reached back for C.B. and the Axe Strokes, back for that rough-tongued holler, back for that classic R&B voice that sang only to convicts with screaming muscles, untreated syphilis, sweat-drenched backs and a long time yet to serve.
“Be my woman, girl, and I’ll be your man.”
What I’ve always liked best about my album of convict music is that the men on it are anonymous but, all these decades later, I can hear them, hear their axe strokes, feel the Mississippi heat.
Then they were gone, dead in prison, of old age, shot, stabbed, starved, run down by the dogs until just the song was left and the sound of the axes, themselves long since rusted and rotted away.
And then the song came back, for seconds, in a rap.
To the boys on the axe gang: You made it. You finally made it.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. “Marc Dion: Volume I,” a collection of the best of Dion’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns from 2014, is available for Nook and Kindle.