Turkey in the Straw
by Richard Parks
I. Jovan Campbell
Consider the case of Jovan Campbell, aka Jibbs, b. 1990.
Jovan is one of six children born to Jonathan and Sherri Campbell and raised in a majority-black section of the highly segregated American city of St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis will rank among the top ten “most dangerous” cities in America each year of Jovan’s childhood. The Campbells push their children to pursue hobbies, particularly music.
Jovan is blessed with a musician’s ear and, from the safety of his family home, he studies the melodies and rhythms of the streets around him. The dry crack of a pistol followed by the yawl of a police cruiser’s siren. A lovers’ street-side quarrel. And, on summer nights, the Dopplered warble of an old tune issuing forth from an ice cream truck, trundling down the street. The soundtrack of the inner city.
Jovan feels an affinity with a relatively new musical genre born out of the urban black inner-city experience during Reagan’s eighties—rap.
At age eight, the precocious boy authors his first rap. At fourteen, he signs a contract with Geffen. Adopting the sobriquet “Jibbs,” he records his first single, a cheeky bit of lapidary braggadocio called “Chain Hang Low.” The chorus? A joyful melody lifted from the streets, easily recognizable as the ice cream truck’s chirpy processional.
When it is released in the summer of 2006, “Chain Hang Low” quickly rises to number seven on the Billboard charts, making Jovan Campbell a rich man before his sixteenth birthday.
Critics reviewing “Chain Hang Low”—almost to a man—mention the melody’s confectionary origin, recognizing it as one of a handful of American ice cream truck songs. Others also hear it as the nursery tune “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” It is the score to Steamboat Willie. It is the old American fiddle tune, “Turkey in the Straw.”
In fact, it is all of these things, and more.
The history of “Turkey in the Straw” goes back hundreds of years, to the fiddle and bagpipe music that sailed in with the early European settlers to the New World and mixed with African traditions. It has been released on every format from 78 r.p.m. to ring tone, and it’s included on the video game Wii Music. Like Jibbs after him, Antonin Dvořák quoted the song in his most famous composition, “The New World Symphony”—a recording of which Neil Armstrong brought with him to the moon.
But to young Jovan Campbell and most of us, “Turkey in the Straw” is the ice cream truck song, full stop.
II. “I Scream, Ice Cream!”
There is a longstanding connection in this country between ice cream sales and singsong-y children’s music.
In the early 1800s, street vendors could be heard shouting, ringing bells, and blowing harmonicas as they hawked their fare. In 1828, “I scream, ice cream!” was being called out on the streets of New York City, according to a report in the National Advertiser. By the second half of that century, your average American ice cream parlor wasn’t complete without a music box. These elegant mahogany cases housed delicate, hand-cranked, chime-making machinery programmed by Swiss and German craftsmen.
The Regina Company, later known for its vacuums, once held a near monopoly on this parlor entertainment technology. “To the child it is the most welcome and delightful music teacher,” reads an advert for a Regina music box from 1901. In the 1890s, one of the discs you could buy for Regina’s Style 11 Music Box—along with a handful of other fiddle tunes, romantic waltzes, and “Dixie”—was a cheery, catchy number called “Turkey in the Straw.”
The rest of the story goes like this: In 1920, Harry Burt, a confectioner in Youngstown, Ohio, became the first to impale an ice cream sandwich on the end of a wooden stick. Burt also outfitted the first ice cream trucks with sleigh bells (taken from his son’s sled, it is said). The bells of Burt’s fleet were soon replaced by music boxes, like those in the parlors of old. The 1950s saw the advent of amplified ice cream vending and the proliferation of Swiss-made mechanical music boxes. Song snippets were harvested from the public domain in order to skirt copyright issues. Along with “The Entertainer” and “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Turkey in the Straw” is one of a triumvirate of ice cream truck hits used early on and still in wide use today.
Modern ice cream trucks’ digital music boxes are programmed to sound like their nineteenth-century predecessors. The aim of continuing to play “Turkey in the Straw,” in the context of ice cream sales, is to evoke something old-fashioned and also childlike. The most popular tunes in the ice cream truck canon often are also old nursery rhymes—“kiddie tunes,” one industry insider called them. The prevailing message being that a high-calorie frozen snack that will cost you less than a buck—pocket money, even in the high-density, low-income communities that ice cream trucks often traffic—provides an affordable escape to a simpler time. The tinny, high-frequency timbre of “Turkey in the Straw” will take you there.
These days, ice cream truck drivers have no reason to load their iPods with anything else, so intrinsic is the connection between the confection and its soundtrack. Cities have even started putting ordinances on the books to prohibit the amplification of “Turkey in the Straw” within a thousand feet of a public school, where truck drivers vie for turf. These laws are most common in the aforementioned high-density, low-income urban areas.
What I’m leading to is, you can’t really write something about ice cream truck music without taking into consideration its implications for food deserts where childhood health problems are rampant. It seems to me that the people to whom the ice cream is being marketed and sold are the people who need it least. It seems, at least from one perspective, there is some insidious plot at work here. But of course, from another, it’s an open-shut case of marketing smarts and American ingenuity.
III. George Washington Dixon Halts a Riot
He was said to have had “a splendid head of hair,” and on the Internet, you can see an illustrated portrait that confirms this assertion. More pertinently, he is one of a handful of blackface performers from the early nineteenth century to lay spurious claim to the authorship of “Turkey in the Straw.”
One thing we know for certain is that George Washington Dixon’s performance of the tune at the Bowery Theatre during the Farren Riots of 1834 is the earliest on the books.
Responding to pro-abolitionist remarks made by George P. Farren, the theater’s owner, thousands descended on the Bowery on July 9, 1834, in one of three coordinated pro-slavery riots in lower Manhattan that evening. The crowd demanded Farren’s apology. It was then that Dixon took the stage, and, according to the New York Sun, “The singer gave them their favorite song, amidst peals of laughter… [Dixon] next addressed them—and they soon quietly dispersed.” The violence resumed and escalated in ensuing days, with the mayor of New York eventually calling in a volunteer militia to stifle the mob.
It’s almost quaint—the idea that in the 1800s, a song-and-dance man could quell a swarming crowd of rioters with a rendition of his signature tune. But Dixon was playing into their hands, and he knew it. A singer whose star was one of the brightest in minstrelsy, Dixon was followed on stage that night by the mayor, who apologized to the throng for the theater owner’s abolitionist statements.
But it had been Dixon’s rendition of “Turkey in the Straw”—he called it “Zip Coon”—that soothed the pro-slavery horde. Dixon would go on to build a career on the popularity of the song and his portrayal of the character Zip Coon—a black-skinned, citified dandy from the North who plays a kind of foil to the rube-ish Jim Crow in minstrelsy traditions. Others laid claim to “Zip Coon” in the blackface era, including Bob Farrell and most notably Thomas Birch, who beat Dixon to publishing sheet music to the song in 1834. Dixon’s version, “Ole Zip Coon,” was published a year later, with slightly different lyrics.
Both of these early versions contain this stanza…
(3x) O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an conny in a holler.
(3x) Posum up a gum tree, coonny on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump.
… and Dixon’s contained this one…
I went down to Sandy Hollar t other arternoon
And the first man I chanced to meet war ole Zip Coon;
Ole Zip Coon he is a natty scholar,
For he plays upon de Banjo “Cooney in de hollar”.
… which, along with the title, have led researchers to refer to the tune as a “coon song.”
As long as there were blackface performers, there was the Zip Coon character and his unmistakable leitmotif. After Dixon and company, various “authors” published well-received versions of “Turkey in the Straw” on sheet music throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, when a man named Otto Bonnell is often credited as composer (including on music box versions). While it’s unclear when the instrumental “Turkey in the Straw” was selected as one of the iconic early ice cream truck songs, Sambo-style caricatures appear on the covers of sheet music for the tune that were released into the era of ice cream trucks.
In 1916, just four years before Harry Burt dispatched the first ice cream trucks from his confectionary in Youngstown, Ohio, the Columbia Graphophone company released a 78-r.p.m record titled, “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!” by the blackface performer Harry C. Browne. After an instrumental overture, in which a banjo sounds a brief, familiar refrain, Browne can be heard exclaiming, “C’mon, chillun!… you [unintelligible] niggers… come down and get your ice cream!” To which a gleeful chorus replies, “ICE CREAM!?!?”
“Yes, ice cream,” Brown continues, “colored mans’ ice cream—watermelon.” And the song begins in earnest.
It’s “Turkey in the Straw.”
IV. “Minstrel Show Rap”
It was several months after the release of Jibbs’s breakout single “Chain Hang Low” before the diligent ministrations of Kelefa Sanneh, then a pop music critic at the New York Times, unearthed the song’s more troubling origins: “Jibbs has updated one of the most popular melodies of the blackface era.” Sanneh revealed the racially charged title once associated with the melody, calling it “one of the oldest tunes in the American repertory.”
Soon after, a columnist writing for the hip-hop magazine XXL, Byron Crawford, included Jibbs in a piece tracking an “insidious new trend,” which he coined “minstrel show rap.” In a brief invective against the “outright and purposeful embrace of minstrelsy” in contemporary rap music, Crawford wrote, “record labels are rushing out to sign the most coon-like negros they can find. … Indeed, I doubt this was a coincidence at all.” The piece made no reference to ice cream trucks.
A spate of articles echoed Crawford’s suspicions—and his censorious tone. Meanwhile, Jibbs was named one of “10 Artists to Watch” in 2006 by Rolling Stone. “Chain Hang Low” was remixed by other artists, including Lil Wayne.
The video for the song, which has tallied millions of views online, consists of a lot of peacocking from Jibbs (wearing a low-hanging chain that he sends circling around his neck in sixty-frame-per-second slow motion). A sub-plot follows a portly ice cream truck driver as he makes his rounds in a St. Louis neighborhood. The driver, wearing a doofus-y grin, is eventually outfoxed by a group of kids, who, by way of a con involving a suggestively dressed young woman, make off with his sugary product.
Jibbs has maintained that he was ignorant of the melody’s blackface origins. And despite suspicions, it seems very unlikely to me that the young rap star had anything but innocent childlike associations with the tune, the siren song signaling the arrival of Eskimo Pies, Firecrackers, and Fudgsicles. Jibbs wasn’t doing anything but making a bouncy anthem of summertime freedom and a blinged-out, Bomb Pop–wielding alterego.
“And see I got that nice cream,” he raps, “my money spend on jewels / I call it my ice cream.”
V. Pre-America America
As a student of old-time fiddle music, when I hear “Turkey in the Straw,” I don’t just hear ice cream truck music, although of course I do hear that. I hear “Natchez on the Hill”—another, slightly more obscure fiddle tune from the American vernacular that’s barely different from “Turkey in the Straw.” It’s just by a few notes, so sometimes it’s hard to think of them as separate pieces of music. There’s usually no chasing down the exact origins of fiddle music, as most are certainly ancient, lost in the Old World. Probably Ireland or Scotland bagpipe music or ballads.
The first American edition of the libretto for The Poor Soldier, a comic opera about the Revolutionary War written by a Brit and an Irishman, is dated MDCCLXXXVII—several years after the opera’s debut, and more than two centuries before Jibbs appeared on the scene. The plot revolves around a solider returning from the War to find his sweetheart in love with another man. The Poor Soldier also features a French fop—a caricature based on stereotypes just as Zip Coon is in minstrelsy.
The opera includes a ballad called “The Rose Tree,” which reminds me a lot of “Natchez on the Hill,” but it runs slow as molasses in January. When you hear “The Rose Tree,” you’ll probably agree that it bares more resemblance to Jibbs’s pared-down chorus for “Chain Hang Low” than to the busier fiddle-tune versions of “Turkey in the Straw.” In a way, it sounds like the ice cream truck song that we all know.
This—the earliest documented incarnation of the melody I could find—is credited to the English composer William Shield, b. 1748. But Shield no more authored the tune than Jibbs, or Dvořák. Chances are, he heard it played on a fiddle in a pub in South Shields, where as a young man he apprenticed with a ship builder. Chances are, that fiddler heard it sung as a Gaelic ballad somewhere else. And so on, into obscurity, where the origins of “Turkey in the Straw”—and our indigenous American ice cream truck music—are lost.
The point is, ice cream truck music is not just ice cream truck music. It’s Jibbs and Swiss music box makers and American marketing ingenuity and blackface and Old World fiddle tunes and our deepest cultural past. I’m not suggesting that you think on all this each time you hear the ice cream truck rolling down the street. I am suggesting that our American past—compromised, uncertain, surprisingly moving—is there for us to find, underneath the gaudy cornucopia of Popsicle ads pasted on the sides of trucks. It’s a story we tend to sentimentalize, but perhaps there should be limits to the fictions we tell ourselves.
And so the tinny, chirpy, irrepressible melody of summer plays on. I heard “Turkey in the Straw” nightly as I wrote this essay from my apartment in northeast Los Angeles, where our neighborhood trucks’ processional continues into fall and even winter. As children’s voices gather in the dusk, I realize the tune has taken on a new, somewhat eerie dimension for me.
It’s been a long few weeks of listening to the same eight bars of music over and again. As the truck rolls on down the street, with “Turkey in the Straw” evaporating in the evening air, I hear it playing still.
Richard Parks’s last article for Lucky Peach was about Cambodian doughnuts. He is on Twitter @reechardparks.
