“The Signifying Monkey,” as Read by Roger D. Abrahams (original) (raw)

2023, Reading matters. An Unfestschrift for Regina Bendix

The 2019 Netflix film Dolemite Is My Name follows the career of the failing comedian Rudy Ray Moore, portrayed by Eddie Murphy, and his unlikely rise to success. Moore (1927-2008) became famous in the 1970s by taking on a stage persona named Dolemite, a pimp-and-bad-man figure who excels at vulgar verbal boasting in a heavily stylized African American speech variety. Moore performed as Dolemite on stage, on records, and in low-budget movies that were part of-and mockedthe "Blaxploitation" wave of the 1970s. Dolemite himself is not Moore's invention, but a figure from a narrative poem that circulated in African American areas in the US South and, later, North, like the famous Stagger Lee. In the film, Moore learned the Dolemite toast from a homeless man named Rico, who declares himself to be a "repository of Afro-American folklore" in the film. For collecting his material and enticing his informants to share from their "repository," Moore ventured to the tents of his rough-living informants, used a tape recorder, and paid his informants small amounts of money-not unlike academic field workers. "This is the same kind of material that Roger D. Abrahams has published in Deep Down in the Jungle and Positively Black," observed the reviewer of one of Moore's albums in the Journal of American Folklore (Evans 1973). A highlight of the 2019 film is Dolemite's nightclub-stage performance of the "Signifying Monkey," the famous narrative poem or "toast" ("a long narrative poem constructed with the highest wit and performed only by the best talkers," mostly in pun-oriented rhyming couplets; Abrahams 1970: 59). Early recordings of the