"Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)" by Joe Tex

Song 37:

"Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)" by Joe Tex

Peak: 12

Year: 1977

Year end position: 86

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/4

Chronological Songs by Artist: 4/4

Video?: No

Wikipedia?:  Yes:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_Gonna_Bump_No_More_%28With_No_Big_Fat_Woman%29

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:  http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/joe_tex/aint_gonna_bump_no_more.html

Today is the 2nd day in the walk down "Ain't" lane, and we have a good old fashioned disco song.  This one came out only 4 years before yesterday's song, but they really couldn't really be much more different.  Part of that is that there was a real sea change in popularity at the beginning of the 1980s.  It seemed that once the 80s came around, all disco acts and songs were persona non grata on the charts.

Today's song marked the last time we heard from Joe Tex on the charts.  He had a very strange career arc.  He only wound up with 4 top 20 songs, but 2 of them were in the 1965-66 time frame.  He then was largely absent from the charts for 6 years before coming out with his biggest hit: "I Gotcha".  He then took another 5 years off before releasing this song.  It's strange enough to have one 5+ year gap between songs, but to have 2 such gaps in a career that only spanned 4 top 20 songs is very strange.  I don't know if there are many people that have a comparable pattern, but I'll try to look into it.

I wasn't terribly familiar with this song when I saw it come up on the playlist.  I initially thought that the song title was some veiled reference to sex, but it turns out that Joe Tex was being quite literal.  If you listen to the song, you can tell that he is referring to a dance called "the bump".  I looked up how to this dance on YouTube, and once you know what the dance is, the song makes a little more sense.  The dance seems to consist of just two steps.  The first is to jump up.  The second comes when you come down.  You move your hips out and "bump" your partner.  That's it.  Almost anyone can do this dance, I think.

The story tells the story of an ill-fated trip to the disco.  At the start of the song, Joe Tex is pretty excited about his night out.  He's got his dancing shoes on, and he's "rarin' to go".  Not long after he gets to the disco, a big fat woman pulls him onto the floor and starts to do the bump with him.  I watched some video of Joe Tex, and he didn't strike me as a tiny man, so the woman must have been pretty big to inflict the damage to Joe Tex that he talks about in the rest of the song.  They start dancing and by the end of the first verse, Joe Tex is more or less begging for mercy.  She "done knocked me down".  He even tries to beg off from dancing, saying "if you want to dance / Find you a big fat man".  The second verse has her coming back to Joe Tex for more dancing.  This time he claims an injury by saying "You done hurt my hip".  That's a rough night for Joe Tex.  As the song is trailing off, you can hear Joe practically sprinting away from this woman saying "She done warn me out" and "I'm tired y'all".  It seems as though Joe Tex has had enough for one night.  I guess if she really is a big fat woman, the bump is maybe not the best dance to do.  She sounds like she had a lot of energy though.

Fun fact:  There was a response song to this one called "I Wanna Bump With That Big Fat Woman" by Bobby Marchand.  You don't hear about response songs much anymore, except for maybe some rap feuds.  Honestly, even before the hip hop era, they weren't all that common.  Funny, but not common.

Also, if we were to be grammatically correct, this song should have been titled: "I'm not going to bump any more (with that big fat woman).  That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  I think Joe Tex chose wisely on this naming.