more on "allegory"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Feb 4 15:18:13 UTC 2010


At 11:38 PM -0500 2/3/10, Wilson Gray wrote:
>You got that right! I'm still trying figure out what we're supposed
>get out of the fact the torturer is a black American: to borrow from
>an old R&B song, "The tables turned and now it's your turn to cry," so
>to speak? Meant as an on-the-qui-vive directed to the Aryan
>Brotherhood?
>
And here I always thought it was the Stones.  Go know. I am indebted
Wilson, with a chorus from Wikipedia, for setting me straight.  It
was the Valentinos (or more accurately, the Womacks, written by Bobby
and Shirley W.) who wrote and first cut the song.  Nice anecdote
about it, though, featuring the intercession of none other than
Murray the K:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_Over_Now
The Valentinos' original version of the song was played to the
Rolling Stones during their first North American tour in June 1964 by
a New York radio DJ named Murray the K. After the band heard the song
they recorded it nine days later at Chess Studios in Chicago. Years
later Bobby Womack said in an interview that he told his manager that
he did not want the Rolling Stones to record their version of the
song, that he told Mick Jagger to get his own song. His manager
convinced him to let the Rolling Stones record a version of the song.
Six months later when he received the royalty check for the song he
told his manager that Mick Jagger can have any song he wants. The
Rolling Stones' version of "It's All Over Now" is the most famous
version ever cut of the song. It was the band's third single released
in America, and stayed in the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks,
peaking at #26. Months later it appeared on their second American
album 12 X 5. It was first released as a single in Great Britain,
where it peaked at # 1 on the Disc Weekly charts, giving the Rolling
Stones their first number one hit ever.

ObADS:  There's a line in the song I had always heard as

"[Well, she used to run around
With every man in town]
-->She spent all my money, playing her half-assed game(s)"

and it always struck me as surprising that they were able to get away
with it in the mid-60s, but according to the posted lyrics, that's
just a "kiss-this-guy"/"bathroom-on-the-right" type reanalysis on my
part for the actual line:

Well, she used to run around with every man in town
She spent all my money, playing her high class game

LH

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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