Lucille Bogan's Shave 'Em Dry - The Song From 1935 That's So Filthy It Comes With A Parental Warning
Updated: Oct 6
On 5 March 1935, in a New York studio, a blues singer named Lucille Bogan recorded a song so explicit that her own record label wouldn't put it out. It wasn't banned or pulled from shelves. It was simply never pressed for sale in the first place, cut for private laughs among the studio engineers or for the kind of under the counter party record that got passed around after hours rather than sold in stores. It sat unheard by the public for the next 41 years.
What's worth telling here is the story around the song: who Bogan was, why a track this filthy exists on a 1930s master tape at all, and how a scrappy young session guitarist on that same recording went on to become friends with a U.S. president.
How Explicit Is It?
This isn't innuendo. Where Ma Rainey's 1924 original stuck to blues convention, using the title phrase as a stand-in for something the listener was left to infer, Bogan's take describes a woman's anatomy and sex acts directly and anatomically, in the plainest available slang of the day, verse after verse, with no metaphor standing in the way. The tone isn't seductive so much as boastful and comic, closer to a woman bragging about her own body and sexual stamina in front of an audience than to a love song. Walter Roland can be heard laughing and egging her on through parts of it, which is part of why historians read the whole thing as closer to a party performance caught on tape than a polished studio product.
Quick Answers
Who recorded 'Shave 'Em Dry'? Blues singer Lucille Bogan, recording under the name Bessie Jackson, cut the explicit version on 5 March 1935 in New York, backed by pianist Walter Roland and guitarist Josh White.
Was it released at the time? No. A tamer version went out on five record labels that July. The explicit take was never pressed for sale and only surfaced publicly in 1976.
Did Bogan write it? Not from scratch. The song began as a much milder number recorded by Ma Rainey in 1924, and the writing credit is still shared between Bogan, Rainey and songwriter C.C. Carter.
Is it really that explicit? Music historian Elijah Wald has called it, in his book on the history of rap, the most explicit blues song preserved at any commercial pre-war recording session.
Within this realm lies a subgenre dubbed 'Dirty Blues,' featuring tracks with delightfully scandalous titles like "Big Ten Inch Record," "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box," and "Get 'Em From The Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)." Bogan didn't invent the song from scratch. "Shave 'Em Dry" started as a much tamer number first recorded by Ma Rainey back in 1924, and the writing credit is still shared between Bogan, Rainey, and songwriter C.C. Carter. Bogan's 1935 session took Rainey's original innuendo and, in that second unreleased take, removed the innuendo entirely.
Lucille Bogan, hailed as one of the earliest professionally recorded blues singers, also stands tall among the pantheon of Dirty Blues legends. Throughout the 1930s, her repertoire largely revolved around themes of drinking and sex, with songs like "Sloppy Drunk Blues" and "B.D. Woman's Blues" (where 'B.D.' stands for Bull Dyke). Among her most notorious recordings is "Shave 'Em Dry," which exists in two versions: a tame rendition reflective of the sanitized tracks pressed onto wax at the time, and a jaw-droppingly explicit version that offers a glimpse into the unfiltered lyrics heard in the clandestine clubs. It's a rare window into a bygone era slipping away into obscurity. Backing her on both takes were pianist Walter Roland and a young guitarist named Josh White, who would go on to become one of the most influential folk and civil rights era musicians in America, a long way from a session best remembered today for its filthiest four minutes.
Who Was Lucille Bogan?
Lucille Bogan was born Lucille Anderson on 1 April 1897, though even that much is disputed. Some sources put her birthplace as Amory, Mississippi; her own 1900 census entry says Birmingham, Alabama, which is where she was raised either way. She married a railwayman named Nazareth Bogan in 1914 and had a son, Nazareth Jr, a couple of years later.
She started out singing vaudeville numbers for Okeh Records in 1923, then spent the back half of the 1920s recording in Chicago for Paramount and Brunswick. By the early 1930s, working in New York and often recording under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson, seemingly to keep some distance between her name and her material, she'd built a catalogue that dealt openly with drinking, gambling, prostitution and lesbian relationships, subjects most of her contemporaries only hinted at. The critic Ernest Borneman later grouped her with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as "the big three of the blues."
The full lyrics for Shave 'em dry -
I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb I got something between my legs'll make a dead man cum Oh, daddy, baby, won't you shave 'em dry?
Now, draw it out!
Want you to grind me, baby, grind me until I cry
Say I fucked all night, and all the night before, baby And I feel just like I wanna, fuck some more Oh, great God daddy, grind me, honey, and shave me dry And when you hear me holler, baby, want you to shave it dry
I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb Daddy, you say that's the kind of 'em you want, and you can make 'em cum
Oh, daddy, shave me dry
And I'll give you something, baby, swear it'll make you cry
I'm gon' turn back my mattress, and let you oil my springs I want you to grind me, daddy, 'til the bell do ring Oh, daddy, want you to shave 'em dry
Oh, great God daddy, if you can't shave 'em baby, won't you try?
Now if fucking was the thing that would take me to Heaven I'd be fucking in the studio 'til the clock strike 11 Oh daddy, daddy, shave 'em dry
I would fuck you, baby, honey, I'd make you cry
Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell sapper And your dick stands up like a steeple Your god-damn ass-hole stands open like a church door
And the crabs walks in like people, haw, shit! Shucks, ooh! Baby, won't you shave 'em dry?
A big sow gets fat from eating corn And a pig gets fat from sucking Reason you see this whore, fat like I am Great God, I got fat from fucking
Eh, shave 'em dry (with pleasure)
My back is made of whalebone And my cock is made of brass And my fucking is made for working men's two dollars Great God 'round to kiss my ass Whoa, woo, daddy, shave 'em dry
A Real Genre Called Dirty Blues
Bogan worked in a genuine, well documented corner of early blues history known as dirty blues: records built around sex, drink and street life, sold mostly through the same race record catalogues that carried mainstream blues to Black audiences in the segregated South and industrial North. Most dirty blues relied on innuendo, food and animal metaphors standing in for the parts of the story a record label could actually print on a label. Bogan's explicit take on "Shave 'Em Dry" is famous specifically because it dropped the metaphor altogether.
Where the Song Actually Came From
Bogan didn't invent "Shave 'Em Dry." Ma Rainey recorded a considerably tamer version in Chicago back in 1924, built around ordinary blues complaints about love and money, and the songwriting credit is still shared between Bogan, Rainey and C.C. Carter. The phrase itself was blues slang. Guitarist Big Bill Broonzy once explained it plainly: it meant sex without any preamble, nothing romantic about it, just getting straight to it.
Bogan cut two versions of the song on the same day, at what turned out to be her final studio session before her contract with the American Record Corporation lapsed. The first was a relatively restrained cover, close in spirit to Rainey's original. The second, according to Document Records producer Keith Briggs' liner notes on a later reissue, went somewhere else entirely, and Bogan herself sounds like she's reading unfamiliar lyrics off a sheet as she sings them, as though the words were catching her by surprise too.
The Session and the Men in the Room
Backing Bogan on both takes were pianist Walter Roland, her frequent collaborator throughout the early 1930s, and a young guitarist named Josh White, barely into his twenties at the time. Roland can be heard shouting encouragement through the explicit take. White, for his part, was still years away from the career that would eventually take him to the White House.
The tame version went out that July on five different labels, Banner, Melotone, Oriole, Romeo and Perfect, standard practice for a company hedging its bets across multiple retail lines. The explicit take never got a catalogue number. Whether it was cut purely to amuse the engineers in the room or for private, off the books distribution as what collectors call a party record, nobody involved ever said so on the record, so to speak.
Forty-One Years in a Vault
The explicit take of "Shave 'Em Dry" stayed effectively unheard by the wider public until 1976, when Stash Records included it on a compilation called Copulatin' Blues, a collection built specifically around the small handful of dirty blues recordings explicit enough that they'd never been sold at the time. Document Records later reissued it properly as part of Bogan's complete recorded works, with Briggs' liner notes providing most of what's actually known about how the session played out.
The Guitarist Who Went On to Meet a President
Josh White's story afterwards is the strangest footnote to this whole session. Within a few years of backing Bogan, he'd moved into New York's folk and jazz scene, playing Café Society, one of the first integrated nightclubs in the country. A protest song he wrote about racism in the military, "Uncle Sam Says," reached President Franklin Roosevelt directly. The two became genuinely close. White gave five command performances at the White House and played at two of Roosevelt's inaugurations, the first Black musician to do either.
It didn't last. In the anti-Communist climate of the early 1950s, White's outspoken civil rights advocacy got him blacklisted, and in 1950 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he read the lyrics to the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" into the congressional record in his own defence. Eleanor Roosevelt had warned him beforehand that testifying would be used against him. She was right. He spent much of the following decade rebuilding his career from London before John F. Kennedy finally brought him back into the mainstream with a televised civil rights special in 1963.
What Happened to Bogan
Bogan's own recording career ended the same day the second take of "Shave 'Em Dry" was cut. Her ARC contract wasn't renewed, and she never went back into a studio. She returned to Birmingham for a stretch to manage her son's jazz outfit, Bogan's Birmingham Busters, then relocated to Los Angeles not long before her death from heart disease in 1948, at 51. She's buried at Lincoln Memorial Park in Compton.
It Wasn't All Shock Value
It's worth saying that Bogan's explicit material sat alongside songs grounded in real, unglamorous hardship. "Tricks Ain't Walking No More," recorded three times across 1930, is a prostitute's lament about a dwindling supply of paying customers as the Great Depression hit even the sex trade. Some later critics read it as a moral statement, a woman refusing to further degrade herself. Blues historians who've studied it closely disagree: it reads less like repentance and more like a straightforward complaint about business drying up, delivered by someone who clearly felt genuine kinship with the poor Black women the Depression hit hardest. Whether Bogan was singing from direct experience or performing a persona built around that world is something historians still debate, and one she took to her grave either way.
What Happened to Walter Roland
Bogan's regular pianist didn't fare much better than she did after that March 1935 session. Roland, who'd made three trips from Birmingham to New York between 1933 and 1935 and cut around fifty sides of his own alongside his work backing Bogan and White, never went into a recording studio again once his ARC run ended. He drifted into farming by 1950, supplementing his income playing guitar as a street musician around Birmingham and the mill towns nearby. Sometime in the 1960s he was blinded after being struck by buckshot while trying to break up a fight between neighbours. He died in Fairfield, Alabama, in 1972.
Its Place in Music History
Historians treat the explicit take of "Shave 'Em Dry" as more than a novelty. Music historian Elijah Wald, in his book on the roots of rap, called it the most explicit blues song preserved at any commercial pre-war recording session, and scholars researching the lineage of explicit Black popular music, from prewar blues through to hip hop, regularly cite it as the clearest surviving evidence of just how far that tradition of blunt sexual bragging goes back. In 2022, decades after her death, Bogan was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why didn't Lucille Bogan's record label release the explicit version?
It was almost certainly never intended for retail sale in the first place. Party records like this one circulated privately, outside the normal catalogue system, specifically because their content was too explicit for the mainstream race record market of the 1930s.
Is Josh White the same guitarist who later played for presidents?
Yes. The same Josh White who backed Bogan on this session in 1935, when he was barely twenty, went on to become a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt and later a target of the McCarthy era blacklist.
You Might Also Like
Josh White wasn't the only performer of this era caught between artistry and persecution. Billie Holiday, who also sang "Strange Fruit," endured her own decades-long campaign of harassment, covered in The Long and Cruel Persecution of Billie Holiday.
The fight over exactly what counted as obscene didn't end with race records. See Shaved for the Mailman: How America's Nudist Magazines Beat the Post Office and the Supreme Court for the decades-long sequel to the same argument.
For a wider look at the scene Bogan and White came out of, see A Great Day in Harlem: Capturing the Heartbeat of Jazz.
