Henry Spaulding - "Cairo Blues"

There are at least eight Cairos in the United States. There's one in Georgia and one in Illinois, one in Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota and New York. There's a Cairo in West Virginia and there's even one in Ohio, that nearly palindromically named place. Little is known about Henry Spaulding, an American blues musician active in the 1920s, so which of these Cairos is the subject of his song, and therefore which to avoid, is impossible to say (though from the exotic picture he paints of the town, it might as well be in Egypt). "Women of Cairo," Spaulding will have us believe, "treat you kind and strange." The kindness is but a ruse, it turns out, and the strangeness is something far worse than merely strange. They "kick you and knife you, beat you and cut you, too," he sings, before adding the temporal location of these offenses (and the only reason anyone might construe these belligerent women as kind): "when you're through." Still, Spaulding has a masochistic streak, and though he sings throughout of leaving, we're not sure whether he's leaving from or to Cairo, whether he's departing from or reuniting with his kind and strange Cairo baby.

[Buy]