Shortnin' Bread


"Shortnin' Bread" is an African-American folk song dating back at least to the 1890s. James Whitcomb Riley published a poem building on older lyrics in 1900. A "collected" version was published by E. C. Perrow in 1915. It is song number 4209 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
Shortening bread refers to a bread, made of corn meal and/or flour and lard shortening. It should not be confused with shortbread.

Origins

"Shortnin' Bread" is a plantation song. Its first written version was captured by poet James Whitcomb Riley in 1900. He titled the song "A Short'nin' Bread Song—Pieced Out", and wrote the first verse as:
The dialect rendered into common English would be:
The verse includes:
Another pair of verses may be later, and exist in several versions:
were once referred to by one of several racist terms.
Other verses include:

Folk version

Titled "Shortened Bread", E. C. Perrow published the first folk version of this song in 1915, which he collected from East Tennessee in 1912. The folk version of the song—as with Riley's—does not have any distinct theme, but consists of various floating lyrics, some relating to "shortnin' bread", some not. The traditional chorus associated with the folk song goes:

The Beach Boys version

The song was recorded by the American rock band the Beach Boys numerous times. Only one version has seen official release, as the final track on their 1979 album L.A. .
During the 1970s, principal songwriter Brian Wilson was reportedly obsessed with the song, recording more than a dozen versions of the tune. Alex Chilton recalled receiving middle-of-the-night phone calls from Wilson asking him to sing on a recording of "Shortenin' Bread"'. The Monkees' Micky Dolenz wrote in his autobiography that while tripping on LSD with Wilson, John Lennon, and Harry Nilsson, he remembers Wilson playing "Shortenin' Bread" on piano "over and over again". Elton John and Iggy Pop were also bemused by an extended, contumacious Wilson-led singalong of "Shortenin' Bread", leading Pop to flee the room proclaiming, "I gotta get out of here, man. This guy is nuts!" Alice Cooper recalled that Wilson considered "Shortnin' Bread" to be the greatest song ever written, as he quotes Wilson for an explanation: "I don't know, it's just the best song ever written."
Beach Boy Al Jardine speculated that Wilson's obsession with the song may have begun after co-writing the song "Ding Dang" with the Byrds' Roger McGuinn in the 1970s. McGuinn explained that Wilson had one day come to his house for amphetamines while escaping from his therapist. After McGuinn spent some time crafting "Ding Dang" with Wilson, he went to bed. The next day, he awoke to Wilson, still awake, and still playing "Ding Dang" on piano. Only one lyric was ever written: "I love a girl and I love her madly / I treat her so fine but she treats me so badly". During sessions for The Beach Boys Love You, engineer Earle Mankey commented that "everybody who showed up got subjected to 'Ding Dang'."
A significant number of "Ding Dang" and "Shortenin' Bread" permutations exist in the Beach Boys' tape vaults. Most of them are unreleased, with titles such as "Clangin'", "Brian's Jam", and "Rolling Up to Heaven". A version was completed for the unreleased album Adult/Child in late 1977. This recording was developed from a 1973 session conducted with Wilson's girl group side-project American Spring.

Other renditions

Music