"Drink My Morning Tea" as sung by "Bowlegs" in 1933

Boy, do I have some unique history to share today! You know how I'm always prowling the Library of Congress website for teatime images? I came across a new one this week, and I was quite puzzled by it at first. If you're in the vicinity of my age (61, to my utter amazement), you may be old enough to remember that pre-Google, there was this thing called "the card catalog" at the library, and that was where we used to look up all kinds of info. This card, with its little punch hole at the bottom, sure looks like something that was in a card catalog at one time. So "Drink my morning tea" (I noted that not all the words were capped here) was apparently sung by one "Bowlegs" at the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, in August 1933. At that point, I wasn't sure who John A. Lomax was, but I was intrigued that this was a Works Progress Administration (WAP) Project.

Not having fast access to the card catalog, I turned to Google to see if I could learn more about Bowlegs, and that led me to a page about band leader Gene "Bowlegs" Miller, but that's not our tea-drinking Bowlegs, because Miller wasn't even born until 1933.

I wonder what Bowlegs, an African American man, did to end up at the state penitentiary and, considering the era, whether he was even guilty of it. Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn't. But I did learn that Lomax was the "recordist" who recorded Bowlegs singing in a genre known as "holler." You can click here to listen to this catchy one-minute-long recording yourself. Along with all the questions I have about Bowlegs, I'm also interested that he sang about tea yet also mentions coffee, which I would have assumed was the more common morning beverage back then. Obviously, I have more research to do, as the discovery of these recordings was like unearthing buried treasure!