The People's Songbag Whipping The Cat

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31304, 25 February 1967, Page 5

The People's Songbag Whipping The Cat

(Specially written for "The Press" by DERRICK ROONEY)

1 got a black cat bone. 1 got a mojo tooth, I got a John the Conqueroo. I’m gonna mess with you.

Sang the Mississippi bluesman, Muddy Waters, at the Newport Jazz Festival a few years ago, proving—if any proof were needed—that in this advanced day people still firmly believe what folk-lore has told us throughout the ages: that evil lurks within a black cat. In Muddy Waters’ case the bone comes from—theoretically, at any rate—a black cat captured in the dark after a heavy fall of rain and boiled alive, In a vessel on which the sun has not shone, until the flesh is stripped from its bones. In our own culture we merely defer to the evil by stepping aside when a black cat crosses our path—unless, of course, we happen to be driving a motor car.

But traces of barbarism remain. We have such phrases as “whipping the cat” and "not room to swing a cat”; we refer slightingly to selfsatisfied citizens as the “cat’s whiskers” or the “cat’s pyjamas”; when a joke is “enough to make a cat laugh” we “grin like a Cheshire cat”; we “let the cat out of the bag”; or we “fail to come up to scratch.” “Letting the cat out of the bag” is related to "the pig in a poke”; both phrases are said to come from the former habit of taking a suckling pig to market in a bag. Sometimes the seller substituted a cat for the pig, and if the purchaser was gullible he bought “a pig in a poke”—if he was not he “let the cat out of the bag.”

“Whipping the cat” comes from the English habit in time past of using a cat as a scapegoat by whipping it to death. At inn-sign in a Shropshire village commemorated the custom: The finest pastime that is under the sun Is whipping the cat at Albrighton

At Shrovetide—the time of expiation and confession—the practice was to expiate the sins of the populace by whipping the cat. Similarly it was formerly the custom of the Flemish to hurl a cat to its death from the top of the Ypres tower every second Wednesday in Lent. Is this more barbaric than the New t

Zealand custom of drowning unwanted kittens?

“Not room to swing a cat” is a reminder of an unpleasant form of recreation in Scotland in the 18th century. One method was to hang -up a cat in a barrel half-filled with soot. Horsemen rode by, striking the bottom of the barrel until they had made a hole big enough for the cat to escape —and when it appeared covered with soot it caused much merriment all round. With the less refined method the cat was held by the tail and swung around to provide a target for the sportsmen.