It's Tight Like That
Tampa Red & Georgia Tom (1928). Excerpted from "The 50 Songs That Gave Birth to Rock and Roll"
Thomas Dorsey—not to be confused with Tommy of swing fame—is often recognized as the father of gospel music. He was among the first to incorporate the hymnal spirituals of Black Southern gospel churches with the cadences of rhythm and blues.
He would later go on to become the musical director for the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, author of the definitive 1937 gospel composition “Peace in the Valley, and a major spiritual influence on Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of course, you wouldn’t know he was a man of God from his earliest recordings.
In those early days, he was better known as Georgia Tom. Born in 1899, Georgia Tom journeyed to Chicago in the 1920s, where he teamed with the likewise-transplanted Tampa Red (né Hudson Woodbridge). As a duo—and sometimes as a trio with Frankie “Half-pint” Jaxon—Tampa Red and Georgia Tom pioneered the blues subgenre called hokum.
Distinguished by its shuffling rustic rhythms and its humorous sexual double entendre, the hokum championed by the young Georgia Tom brought him into communion with the likes of Ma Rainey, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Memphis Minnie.
“It’s Tight Like That” is a representative tune of its genre, a strumming novelty with country blues tuning and tawdry content. Hokum blues is an elemental genre in modern American music, a farcical style of sex-punning that actually predates jazz, ragtime, and even most forms of country music. Some choice representative titles include Bo Carter’s “Please Warm My Weiner” (1930) and Lil Johnson’s “Press My Button (Ring My Bell)” (1935).
Descended from the blackface minstrel and medicine shows that toured from town to town as early as the 1830s, hokum might well have reached its peak importance in the considerable body of work produced by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom.
A genre often dismissed in high culture during its time for its connection to deeply racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and downright vulgar portrayals of American life, hokum (and minstrelsy in general) occupies an important part in our musical evolution. The endless cycle of racial appropriation that has defined popular music from Elvis Presley to Pat Boone to Vanilla Ice can trace its musical, theatrical, and sociological roots to the minstrel show’s interplay of white business principles, Black cultural tropes, and musical ingenuity from both sides of the color barrier.
Selling no fewer than seven million copies, “It’s Tight Like That” amply demonstrated the appeal of Black music and culture to white record buyers. Moreover, its emergence as a hit would give hokum a degree of survivability beyond vaudeville and the burlesque houses.
Georgia Tom and Tampa Red would split in the late 30s, with the latter enjoying R&B chart success in the 1940s before descending into alcoholism and dying penniless at the age of 77. Georgia Tom, by contrast, lived to the ripe age of 93 and enjoyed adulation and enshrinement in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame—the first African American to receive the honor.
Every dirty double entendre to land on a record from Big Joe Turner to Snoop Dogg to Lil Nas X owes a debt to hokum.
See the full list of 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll