"Ask us ANYTHING!!"

Answered


Jimmy cracks corn?

From:  "Christina"

If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares then why does he continue cracking corn, and why is there a song about it?..yeah it is kind of a dumb question. but thats i posted it up here.this site is amazing..you guys are awesome.so i was hoping you could tell me the asnwer.thanx! bye bye!

Well we have received a few different versions of the question true answer. So I'm going to post them all and you can decide which one you believe to be true. *Lauren*

C.H.U.D. shared his experpt advice with us on this: 

Jimmy Cracks Corn? Feed corn (the kind grown to be fed to farm animals) is different from the corn you would buy at the grocery store. It's hard and brittle and is usually broken into smaller pieces (cracked) to make it easier to mix with other feed grains. The song refers to a boy busy at work cracking corn. The narrator doesn't care because "the master's gone away", i.e. there's nobody around to make me help Jimmy crack the damn corn, so to hell with him and his goodie-two-shoes corn cracking. Why does Jimmy continue to crack the corn? Presumably to stay on the master's good side. Why write a song about it? The same reason anybody writes a song about anything. To convey an emotion, in this case the joy of getting the day off work while that stupid Jimmy sits there cracking corn like a brown-noser.

Monty Goolsby corrected us with this:  

It's not Jimmy. It's Jenny.
Jenny was a mule. When a mule eats dried corn it makes a cracking sound.

FiveOhhhStang shared his opinion with us:  

This song was originally written about a black slave in America, who’s master gets drunk (the southerners used to ‘crack corn’ to make ingredients for a potent liquor), falls, and hits his head. Hence why the slave ‘don’t care’.

Mike wanted to help solve the mystery so he sent us this piece of info: 

the song "jimmy cracks corn" is referring to the making of moonshine, the song originated at the time of the prohibition. In the song when it mentions that no-one cares it is because of the unpopularity or the prohibition. In the south moonshine was made out of a mixture of yeast, and corn mash. In order to get the corn mash, you have to go through a process of "cracking" the corn, that is, grinding it up to an almost flour consistency, I hope that this will put this question to rest.

TB helped us solve another question: 

THERE ARE SEVERAL ANSWERS BUT THIS URL APPEARS TO BE THE MOST INFORMATIVE.

Click here
 

back to main page

©2001 - 2002 Stupid Questions Answered