Music: Hot Shot and Hut-Sut

Hot Shot Dawson on a river boat,

With his brawlin’, sprawlin’ sweetie. . . .

Hot Shot is an Irish pug,

The river boat is the Queen,

His brawlin’ lass is Bridget Cass

And Hot Shot is her dream.

That snatch of a song had a college professor, a U.S. poet, numerous song collectors and Mississippi river folk scratching their heads last week. The lines had been sent to Bill Henry, columnist in the Los Angeles Times, by a friend who remembered hearing them many years ago in “Hell’s Half Acre” in St. Louis. Henry printed the song, remarked its similarity to the current No. 1 sheet-music seller, the No. 2 ditty of the NBC and CBS networks, The Hut-Sut Song. This doubletalk, mock-Swedish “serenade” was written by Ted McMichael (of the singing “Merry Macs”), Jack Owens, Leo V. Killion. The song goes as follows:

Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah,

And a brawla, brawla, soo-it. . . .

Now the Rawlson is a Swedish town,

The rillerah is a stream. . . .

The brawla is the boy and girl,

The Hut-Sut is their dream.*

Hot Shot Dawson seemed last week to be on the tips of a few tongues, although the most encyclopedic U.S. collectors—Alan Lomax of the U.S. Library of Congress, Chicago’s Poet Carl Sandburg, Boston University Professor Horace Reynolds, Radio Singers Frank Luther and Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives, Mary Wheeler of Paducah, Ky., Ernest C. Krohn of St. Louis, Author Carl Carmer, “Daddy of the Blues” W. C. Handy—did not know it. Apparently it was never published. But Cincinnati rivermen remembered Hot Shot, so did Captain D. T. Wright of the Waterways Journal in St. Louis. Two Memphis experts—Joe Curtis and Charles L. Maughan—narrowed the authorship of the song down to a blind Missouri Negro who sang at boat landings around 1914. Of the music, nobody remembered a note.

The authors of The Hut-Sut Song—to whose bouncing tune the lyrics of Hot Shot Dawson can easily be sung—last week kept silent as soo-it, mum as a rillerah.

* By permission of the copyright owner, Schumann Music Co.