What did Suzie get up to?

While working well into the night this weekend, I was listening to a lot of blues. In particular, to the blues of Mississippi John Hurt from the OKEH period (not the stuff from his second career in the Sixties). And while listening to some of his tracks, one in particular popped out at me: Ain’t Nobody’s Dirty Business.

Mississippi John Hurt – Ain’t Nobody’s Dirty Business

Ain’t nobody’s dirty business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but mine
Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

Some of these mornin’s, gonna wake up crazy
Gonna grab my gun and kill my baby
Nobody’s business but mine
Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

Some of these mornin’s gonna wake up boozy
Gonna grab my gun, gonna kill old Suzie
Ain’t nobody’s business but mine
Goin’ back to Pensacola, goin’ to buy my babe a money moulder
Nobody’s business but my own

Say babe, did you get that letter?
Would you take me back, I’ll treat you better?
Nobody’s business but mine
Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

Some of these mornin’s, goin’ to wake up crazy
Gonna grab my gun, gonna kill my baby
Nobody’s business but mine
Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

Ain’t nobody’s doggone business, how my baby’s treatin’ me
Nobody’s business but my own

You can hear a relatively crappy recording free at the Internet Archive. The CD version is much cleaner, modern audio cleanup tech be praised.

When Googling for the lyrics, to save me the effort of typing them, I found out that there were two versions of this song–and apparently this is V2 from 1928.

V1, which showed up in 1920, was much less murdery, and much more That Damn Woman. The second verse in V1 was this:

Sometimes my baby gets boozy, then again she tries to rule me,
nobody’s business but mine
Nobody’s dirty business how my baby treat me,
nobody’s business but my own
(spoken: That’s all right, just let her rule me)

One wonders just what Suzie got up to in the intervening eight years to change his mind from “let her rule me” to “gonna kill old Suzie”…