I take a little powder
I take a little salt
I put it in my shotgun
and I go walking out
Chuba-chuba1
Wooley-booley2
Looking high
Looking low
Gonna scare you up and shoot you
’Cause Mister Charlie told me so3
I won’t take your life
Won’t even take a limb
Just unload my shotgun
and take a little skin
Chuba-chuba
Wooley-booley
Looking high
Looking low
Gonna scare you up and shoot you
’Cause Mister Charlie told me so
Well, you take a silver dollar
Take a silver dime
Mix ’em both together
in some alligator wine
I can hear the drums
Voodoo all night long
I can’t do nothin’ wrong
Chuba-chuba
Wooley-booley
Looking high
Looking low
Gonna scare you up and shoot you
’Cause Mister Charlie told me so
Now Mister Charlie told me
Thought you’d like to know
Give you a little warning
before I let you go
Chuba-chuba
Wooley-booley
Looking high
Looking low
Gonna scare you up and shoot you
’Cause Mister Charlie told me so
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Ron McKernan
Possibly a variant spelling of juba, which is the name of a type of dance in African American culture that flourished, along with the Buck Dance (see “Uncle John’s Band”), from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century.
Step It Down, by Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes, contains an entire section on “clapping plays,” to which category the Juba dance belongs:
That’s one of the oldest plays I think I can remember our grandfather telling us about, because he was brought up in Virginia. He used to tell us about how they used to eat ends of food; that’s what juba means. They said “jibba” when they meant “giblets”; we know that’s ends of food. They had to eat leftovers.
“Mrs. Jones is right; this is one of her oldest rhymes. George Washington Cable saw African slaves doing a dance called the Juba in New Orleans’ Congo Square, long before emancipation; today it may be seen in some of the Caribbean Islands. In the United States, occasional mention of “juba” may be found in songs, generally associated with hand-clapping, but the dance itself appears to have been lost. . . .
Juba, Juba
Juba this and Juba that
And Juba killed a yellow cat
And get over double trouble, Juba.
You sift-a the meal,
You give me the husk;
You cook-a the bread,
You give me the crust;
You fry the meat,
You give me the skin;
And that’s where my mama’s trouble begin.
And then you Juba,
You just Juba.
And there’s the parallel to the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” which has a nonsense “juba juba” chorus.
Partridge refers to the standard army-issue heavy jumper (pullover), worn as part of barracks dress since around 1960.
There is also the famous hit song “Wooly Bully,” words and music by Domingo Samudio (1965).
From The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang:
Charlie: white men regarded as oppressors of blacks—used contemptuously. Also Mr. Charlie, Boss Charlie. [1923 in E. Wilson Twenties: Mista Charlie, I hear—I hear the niggers is free, is that right?] . . . 1928 McKay Banjo: We have words like ofay, pink, fade, spade, Mr. Charlie, cracker, peckawood, hoojah, and so on—nice words and bitter.
An article by John Cowley, “Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors: Bluesmen as Ethnographers,” in The Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 28, nos. 2 and 3, pp. 135–162, recounts the story of the Lowrence family, a set of seven brothers—the oldest named Charley—who were notorious contractors of cheap labor, mostly African American, that built the levees alongside the Mississippi in the 1920s. A number of songs quoted in the article refer to “Mr. Charley” specifically in this context, giving rise to speculation on the part of Alan Lomax that he may have “discovered the identity of the elusive Mr. Charley.” Cowley’s article goes on, however, to quote a comment by Alan Dundes regarding Lomax’s article, that “Mr. Charley would appear to date from antebellum times.” But the repeated reference to a “Mr. Charley” by Southern bluesmen was undoubtedly in reference to Charley Lowrence.
A similar sense of the white man in authority as oppressor has been ascribed to Mr. Benson, familiar from “Candyman.”
James Baldwin’s 1964 play Blues for Mr. Charlie, based on the murder of Emmett Till, in 1955, also immortalized this characterization of the white oppressor.
Recording: Europe ’72 (November 1972).
First performance: July 31, 1971, at the Yale Bowl, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.