Old Music Is Messed Up

Somebody must care if Jimmy cracks corn.  After all, they wrote a song about it

At the very least, Bender is concerned, since he's singing about it at the 5:30 mark of This Video.

If I'm not mistaken, Homer Simpson also had a rendition of the song (known as either "Jimmy Crack Corn" or "Blue Tail Fly," depending on where you look), but I can't find a video of that at the moment.  

Anyway, I decided to look around today and see if anyone actually knew what this song was actually talking about.  Turns out, that was a big mistake, as the internets ruin a major part of childhood once again.  So, this charming little folk song about a fly turns out to be something much darker and more sinister than I ever thought before. 

The ostensibly wholesome song is actually about a former slave whose master is killed falling off of a horse.  The horse bucked off the master due to negligence on the singer's fault, as he, perhaps intentionally, was negligent in performing his duties of shooing away flies.  The fly ends up biting the master, master panics, horse panics, horse throws master into a ditch, master splits his head open (the aforementioned corn cracking), and dies.  The slave is later brought to court to face charges for the master's death but is acquitted on grounds that the fly actually committed the crime.  

I'm not making this up.  

There are even other schools of thought, that the corn cracking is referring to opening jugs of corn whiskey in celebration over the master's death.  One other interpretation of the lyrics suggest that cracked corn is the punishment the singer would be forced to endure for killing the master, and that he decided the punishment was totally worth it, and went ahead with his plan anyway.  

Long story short, this whimsical little song that I used to play on little 45 records and in the folk music classes in middle school is nowhere near the pithy little ditty I used to think it was.  Thanks, Internets.