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"We Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town" is a song originally recorded on September 3, 1936, by Piedmont blues musician Casey Bill Weldon.[1] Weldon performed it as a solo piece, with vocals and acoustic guitar plus piano and double bass accompaniment.[1]
The song has been adapted and recorded by many other musicians, most often under the title "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town", and sometimes simply "Outskirts of Town". In 1941, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five recorded "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town" (Decca 8593), and the following year recorded another version as "I'm Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town", with the writing credit given to Roy Jacobs and Casey Bill Weldon (Decca 8638).[2][3] This second recording became the first of Jordan's many R&B chart hits, reaching No.3 on Billboard's newly established "Harlem Hit Parade" chart in October 1942.[4]
Critical Reception
The lyrics of this song have been criticised by feminist analysis; some have called for the track to be pulled from contemporary play lists such as TSF Jazz in France.
The critique focuses on the framing of the orator’s wife as behaving wantonly with various male visitors to the home. The song writer’s response, as captured by the track’s very title, is to move the wife “way on the outskirts of town”, away from male visitors. This, it is argued, advocates for and legitimises a traditional and deeply patriarchal control of female sexuality, further embedded in the treatment of a wife as a possession that can be moved along with the home, seemingly without consultation.
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