Stephen Blair

Nobody’s Business

There’s a clear division between the two branches of this song’s tradition, which seem to have nothing to do with each other. On the one hand is the slower and more harmonically complicated jazz standard ‘’Tain’t nobody’s business if I do’, co-written by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins, published by them in 1922, and recorded in the same year by Anna Meyers and by Sara Martin (with an 18-year-old Fats Waller), and later by Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; on the other hand, the more upbeat country blues recorded by Frank Stokes, Mississippi John Hurt (‘Nobody’s dirty business’), Mance Lipscomb (‘Cocaine done kill my baby’), Earl Johnson, Riley Puckett, Woody Guthrie, Eric von Schmidt (‘Champagne don’t hurt me, baby’), Taj Mahal and others.

The two are only very loosely related, and I would call them different songs. The folk song is older than Grainger and Robbins’ jazz tune: the earliest reference to it I’ve come across is in a 1911 article by H.W. Odum (Journal of American Folklore 24: 275) under the title ‘’Tain’t nobody’s business but my own’, which must have resembled the country blues more than the jazz standard, since it preserves a stanza also heard, in slightly altered form, on Frank Stokes’ recording:

Baby, you oughta told me
Six months before you rolled me;
I’d’ve had some other place to go…

Evidently Grainger and Robbins borrowed only the title and the structure of the verse from the folk song: two pairs of rhyming lines, each followed by a recurring ‘’tain’t nobody’s business…’. Everything else Grainger and Robbins reinvented—not only the melody and harmony, but also the lyrics, and with them the whole spirit. The words to the jazz version have the argumentative clarity and thematic coherence of a careful and systematic treatment of a topic:

If my friend ain’t got no money
And I say ‘Take all mine, honey’,
’Tain’t nobody’s business if I do:
If I give him my last nickel
And it leaves me in a pickle,
’Tain’t nobody’s business if I do.

Here the syntax is complex, the sequence of ideas is clear, and the argumentation is sound. But the other version—and folk music in general—operates by a different logic. It accumulates, distorts, and recombines snatches of meaning to produce enigmatic, impressionistic, allusive, and often opaque results. Like this verse (from Frank Stokes’ version):

I laid my head just between ’em,
Swore to the world I’d never seen her,
Nobody’s business but mine:
I think that rooster ain’t got no comb,
Poor roustabout ain’t got no home,
Nobody’s business but my own.

Or:

She runs a weenie stand
Way down in No-Man’s-Land,
Nobody’s business but mine…

Or:

Don’t care if I don’t make a dollar
So’s I wear my shirt and collar,
Nobody’s business but mine…