Talk:Lil the Whore

Introduction

Hello, my name is John Mehlberg. I started this article and I have a vested interest in seeing that this is a well written and maintained article.

I initially just placed up the text of the poem and not much else. I plan on expanding it and giving clear references to scholarly articles written on the poem.

Some worry that the peom is not traditional or a folk poem. They worry that someone will come forward and claim copyright. Since such poetry was considered obscene it could not be published under a copyright because the publisher would be convicted of a crime! The earliest printed version (with no copyright) is from the book Immortalia (1927).

Feel free to post below if you have any comments or concerns. If you have any variants to the poem that you learned from "oral tradition", please feel free to contact me.

John Mehlberg 02:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

An Oral Tradition Variation

Just for the fun of it, as I wandered down memory lane and remembered adolescent limericks and bawdy poems, I decided to search the internet to see if anyone else had recorded for posterity's sake, one of my favorites, "The Legend of Piss-Pot Pete." Thanks for your versions, which are epic sagas of the African American "Jailhouse Toast" tradition. (I would be interested in learning if your scholarship attributes it to some other source than the African American "toasting" tradition. Even with a seemingly Country-Western setting:"way out West," "Knoxville," --its ethnic connotation is clear -- "There were no two men black or brown/That could frog old Nell and hold her down".) Prisoners with nothing but time on their hands would create such sagas, writing them down in notebooks and commiting them to memory to recite to other inmates as a form of oral competition and entertainment. As other inmates added verses to the original poem, the saga would grow in length. This "jaihouse toasting" or recitation of epic sagas was an African American adaptation of the African griot tradition, in which the complex history, mythology, traditions and culture of an ethnic group or "tribe" was committed to memory by trained individuals (griots) and passed down orally from one generation to another -- often in a similar fashion of rhymed couplets.

On ghetto streetcorners, ex-convicts would pass down such "Toasts" but inevitably it was the truncated versions which would survive and be circulated widely. (On the streetcorners time is at much more of a premium than it is in penitentiaries, so the prodigious feats of memory aren't duplicated). In the 1960s, growing up as a teenager in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an African American inner city neighborhood in Brooklyn New York, I learned a much shorter version of "The Legend of Piss-Pot Pete." This street corner oral tradition version was a bawdy tale in which Pete was not the victor. (The page-save seems to be automatically saving this in paragraph format rather than poetry "stanza and line" format so I have inserted slashes to indicate the approximate line breaks). It went like this:

There once was a lady named Sadie Brown/ No man in town could lay her down/ But over the hill came Piss-Pot Pete/ With 22 inches of dangling meat/

Pete threw a pass/ But Sadie was fast/ She caught that meat/ Up the crack of her ass/

Now Sadie was smart/ And she blew a fart/ And blew that mutha f_ _ka's/ Meat apart/

And back over the hill/ Went Piss-Pot Pete/ With only 2 inches/ Of shredded meat/ -Yusuf N 00:07, 15 May 2006 (UTC) —unsigned comment by Yusuf Nuruddin 15 May 2006 (talk) .

Transwiki

This article does belong on the wikisource site, unless you feel like adding commentary, a discription of its influential themes, and other aspects. Pure listings of poems do not belong on wikipedia. Only short poems such as Haiku's can be listed in an article, but only as a supplemental aspect that helps with the discussion of the work. Mrathel (talk) 17:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)