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79 DOI: 10.7330/9780874219043.c04 4 Where Is Jody Now? Reconsidering Military Marching Chants Richard Allen Burns In the spring of 1944, an African American US soldier named Willie Duckworth was on detached service at Fort Slocum, a provisional training center in New York State. To motivate his recruits to march in step during close-order drill, Duckworth used the catchy, rhythmic call-and-response chants that we know today as marching cadences or cadence calls. After the war, the Department of Defense distributed the cadences in a publication edited by Bernard Lentz (1955), and they became generally known as “Duckworth chants” (Lineberry 2003). Literally hundreds of such cadences have been invented by drill instructors following Duckworth’s example (see, for example, Johnson 1983, 1986), and they are a common feature of the boot camp experience in all the services. By those who employ them, marching chants are also known as “Jody calls,” or simply “Jodies”; in vernacular usage, “cadence call” and “Jody call” are synonymous terms. The usage arises from the fact that, from the 1940s on, a certain percentage of such calls have referred to the exploits of a fictional character called Jody, a ne’er-do-well who sexually preys upon soldiers’ wives and girlfriends while the soldiers themselves are away from home. Carol Burke collected a typical example from a student enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute in 1988: Ain’t no use in callin’ home. Jody’s on your telephone. Ain’t no use in lookin’ back. Jody’s got your Cadillac. 80 Richard Allen Burns Ain’t no use in goin’ home. Jody’s got your girl and gone. Ain’t no use in feelin’ blue. Jody’s got your sister too. (quoted in Burke 1989, 431) As the reference to the Cadillac suggests, the Jody character is often seen as stealing (or making use of) not only the absent soldier’s woman but his material possessions as well. Like Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey, his basic functional role in the military narrative is to serve as a threat to the soldier’s home and property. Like soldiers, men in prison are separated for long periods of time from their loved ones, and thus subject to possible predation by Jody-like characters . It’s not surprising, therefore, that the marching chant tradition credited to Willie Duckworth has a parallel in the prison work songs of incarcerated African Americans. Folklorist Bruce Jackson’s seminal article (1967) on Jody songs, in fact, mentions the military venue only tangentially: The songs he collected came from prisoners at a maximum-security prison farm in southeast Texas. As he notes in his book on southern blues, a mutual concern of those serving in the Army during wartime and those serving prison sentences is the question of “who is doing what with, and to, the woman one left at home” (1999, 167). Jackson has observed this concern not only in blues lyrics but also in African American toasts dealing with the Jody character, where the protagonist (and toast name) is “Jody the Grinder.” In the toasts as in the songs, he says, Jody is a contraction of “Joe the,” while “Grinder” functions as “a metaphor for a certain kind of coital movement.” One example, a blues performed for Jackson by convict Benny Richardson in March 1966, well illustrates the thematic similarity between the prisoners ’ songs and the soldiers’ calls: Goin’ back home to my old gal Sue . . . My buddy’s wife and his sister, too . . . Ain’t no need of you writin’ home . . . Jody’s got your girl and gone . . . Ain’t no need of you feelin’ blue . . . Jody’s got your sister, too. First thing I’ll do when I get home . . . Call my women on the telephone . . . Where Is Jody Now? 81 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gonna settle down for the rest of my life . . . Get myself a job and get myself a wife . . . But there are complications here as well. If the typical Jody call references simply a backdoor man who cuckolds the absent soldier (or prisoner), the first verse of Richardson’s song suggests that the enlisted (or incarcerated ) man is himself a sexual predator, the fourth one references his multiple partners (“my women”), and the last one hints at a domestic resolution that looks beyond the complaint of the usual story line. Such complications appear in marching chants, too, and I will look more closely at them later in...

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