What’s Your Name, Little Girl?
Rebecca Johnson
Word Count 450
The spring of 1987, my mother came to New York from Memphis, Tennessee to watch me graduate from college. We wanted to do something festive and “New York-y,” so we went to a jazz club in the Village to hear the singer B.B. King. I was standing at the back of the room, (my mom must have been in the bathroom) when the singer himself appeared at my side. King was jaunty but, at 62, ancient to my 19 year old eyes. We chatted. I told him my name, how I’d grown up in Memphis, how I was about to graduate. I took my seat with my mother and told her I had just met B.B. King!
In King’s first song, he kept inserting my name whenever he referred to a woman. At first, I thought it was a coincidence. Wow, I thought, Rebecca, with its notes of the Old Testament, didn’t seem like the name for a vixen in a blues song but what do I know? When he did it again in the next song, my mother looked at me. What the hell? I don’t remember the exact songs but imagine hearing a blues legend drop your name into:
Well she's thirty-six in the bust
Twenty-eight in the waist
Forty-four in the hips
She's got real crazy legs
You upset me REBECCA
Yes you upset me REBECCA
Was I supposed to feel flattered? King was famous for naming things—he called his guitar Lucille—but the man was old enough to be my grandfather. I tried to laugh but, really, it was beyond creepy. As he came to the end of the set, I told my mother we should get out of there. She didn’t need persuading.
Over the years I have come to see the evening as less playful and more sinister. If a rock star saw something he liked, he took it. The younger, the better. She was just seventeen, you know what I mean? From Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 year old cousin to 24 year old Elvis hooking up with 14 year old Priscilla, that was the way of that world. If you were a girl, you were inhaling those fumes, whether you wanted to or not. It’s a wild world, but I’ll always remember you like a child, girl. A man needs a maid. She’s under my thumb. And hey, little girl is your daddy home?
There’s a great scene in the television series Daisy and the Six when the male rock star is making noises about Riley Keough’s character (Elvis’ granddaughter in real life!) being his inspiration. No, she sets him straight. “I am not the muse. I am the somebody.” The times, they have changed. Finally.
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Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
