25. Diddie Wa Diddie

Blind Blake (Paramount 12888, 1929 – b/w “Police Dog Blues”);
composed by Gary D. Davis

Credited to Rev. Gary Davis, this is the first relatively famous version of this song – or “meme,” insofar as there are numerous different songs with the same or similar title, Bo Diddley’s being the most familiar today. And while there are a lot of great Blind Blake records, I am particularly fond of this one – over his polychromic clear-as-a-bell fingerpicked guitar he expounds in his reserved and quietly amused baritone about “a great big mystery” that “sure is worrying me”: “I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means.” The great cosmic joke, of course, is that he – like everybody else who is even remotely involved – may claim not to know what Diddie Wa Diddie means, but there is not even the slightest ambiguity about what it is: it is sex, sometimes it is the parts of you that you have sex with, and sometimes it is every kind of discourse that touches on it – like, you know, good parties do. And inevitably, Blake embodies the whole package: “I went out and walked around / Somebody yelled, said ‘Look who's in town’ / Mister Diddie Wa Diddie.” There is no reason that this could not happen to you.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).