Jellybean man 2004

Jellybean man
Originally published 5/22/2004

“Baby when you marry, you oughtn’t to marry a jellybean man.
Said, baby, when you marry, you oughtn’t to marry a jellybean man.
The women’ll all be telling you, you can’t have that whole man.”
So sang Bo Carter in “Baby When You Marry.” Or maybe he’s singing “you ought to marry,” not “oughtn’t.” From the advice he gives, citing the disadvantage of marrying each type of man, “oughtn’t” makes more sense, but it’s hard to hear the “n’t,” and maybe he’s being sardonic.
At any rate, the other types of men he warns the listener about marrying are the farming, job-working, railroad and loafing varieties – types that are as familiar today as they were when Carter sang 70 years ago.
But that “jellybean man” is puzzling. The last line of the verse clues us about what a jellybean man is, though. In the other verses, the man’s drawback has to do with his ability as a provider. But the problem with the jellybean man, from his wife’s point of view, is that he’ll have plenty of other women. So “jellybean man” appears to be 1930s slang for a “mac daddy,” a “ladies’ man,” a slick character who charms the women.
But why call that type of guy a jellybean? Probably because the jellybean is “slick,” like the guy himself, and his hairdo. Confirmation of this theory comes from none less than William Faulkner, America’s great novelist, a Mississippian like Carter. In his 1929 book The Sound and the Fury, we find this passage, in which Jason Compson angrily confronts his truant niece:
“I want to know where you go when you play out of school,” I says. “You keep off the streets or I’d see you. Who do you play with? Are you hiding out in the woods with one of those damn slick-headed jellybeans? Is that where you go?”
Faulkner, atypically helpful to his reader, provides us with a little redundancy to make the term clear. So what do you know – Nobel prizewinner William Faulkner and bluesman Bo Carter spoke in the same slang. And from what we know of their lives, neither of them was a jellybean man, despite plenty of eroticism in their works.