as fast as the music would play it

On the subject of the phrase / expression,

"picking them up and laying them down" ...


~~  There is a blog titled
Picking Them Up And Laying Them Down
(subtitle, "Running And Walking In Scotland")

~~  Toby Keith has a song titled "Pick 'Em Up and Lay 'Em Down"

~~  "Pickin em Up and Layin Em down" is also the title of a poem by Maya Angelou


~~  On a blog called Orange Crate Art, there's a post on Nov. 1, 2008, titled "Picking them up and laying them down" -- The post begins:  "Elaine and I went walking from door to door in a midwestern city today on behalf of a certain presidential campaign...."

~~  John Lewis, U.S. Congressman from Georgia's 5th District, tweeted, August 10, 2015, "Keep picking them up and laying them down.  Ours is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime."

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So clearly, it's an expression that's "out there" and various people use it in various ways, and adapt it to suit what they need to express.


\\   people running really fast --

"picking them up and laying them down" -- as in, their feet...


\\   somebody telling just how things are in his view --

"I told them where to pick it up and where to lay it down" ...


\\   English guys playing the blues of the American South --

They "know how to lay it down and shove it back..."

---------------- That third version drops the first part of the expression, "picking it up," and states that the musicians "lay it down" -- play it -- and "shove it back" across the Atlantic, for the American musicians to hear how the English are playing their American music.... ("check this out!"...)


--------------- It occurred to me that maybe the expression originated in "Gambler-Slang" -- like, picking up cards and laying down other cards...

     When I Google the expression by typing it in, or type it in with "origin of the expression" typed in in front of it, items come up but there's no definitive statement of the expression's origin that I can find, and the variety of references which advance upon me, leave me less edified than confused....


     I'm going to guess "picking them up and laying them down" and variations originated somewhere in the South.  Even though two known sources were people who grew up in Ohio and Pennsylvania, those states have some southern influence because of people moving north during the early and middle parts of the 20th Century.

     And that Rolling Stone reviewer who wrote that early Fleetwood Mac playing the blues could "lay it down and shove it back" spent part of his childhood in New Orleans, 

according to online encyclopedia.


     So -- Southern origins, I hypothesize.


     Okay -- okay, here's another one, out of the tangled sometimes meaningless threads of yadda on the Internet -- Louis Armstrong uses that phrase:  from Louis Armstrong:  His Life and Times:

"We would stretch out across that floor doing the Charleston as fast as the music would play it.  Boy, oh boy, you talking about four cats picking them up and laying them down -- that was us..."

     And the great "Satchmo" -- born and raised in New Orleans.

That's it -- I'm going with the theory:
It is an expression that originated in the South.


Picking them up and laying them down.

Laying it down and shoving it back.

...

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