Based on real events and people, Shave ’em Dry! is about liberty and libertinage, copyright and copulation, and takes place in 1935. ACT ONE: Blues singer Lucille Bogan arrives at a Manhattan recording studio accompanied by a middle-aged white man, mysteriously traumatized, identified only as Spenser, whom she has met the night before. Soon they are joined by Walter Roland, Lucille’s piano player. Both musicians are angry about the lousy terms for their recordings. With the entrance of engineer Art Farnsworth and producer WR Ralway, Lucille makes her objections known. Spontaneously, she appoints a reluctant Spenser to be her manager while Farnsworth and Ralway take up Lucille’s offer to record the bluest, dirtiest version of her song, “Shave ’em Dry.” Spenser, until now scarcely able to talk, vents his indignation at the “pervasive lust” of such a song but also reveals his own dark background: Fighting with the Jewish brigade that fought in Palestine during World War I a traumatic sexual event there affected him profoundly. It provokes Lucille to sing and record the rambunctious song she titles “Alley Boogie” that closes Act One. ACT TWO: Farnsworth and Ralway — joined by a record salesman Charlie Breastman — try to cajole Lucille into recording “Shave ’em Dry” but she holds out for better terms. Meanwhile, she and Walter interrogate Spenser, a professor of English literature who has made Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen the focus of his scholarly research. In trying to explain this poem of chivalry and honor, Spenser connects with Lucille — and is smitten by her. For her part she takes deep umbrage at the moralistic high ground he claims. For her it recalls the vicious hypocrisy she witnessed as a child, at age six, at the notorious lynching of Luther Hobart and his wife, immolated and murdered by a Mississippi mob. As Lucille finishes recounting the tortures inflicted upon them, Spenser is mortified and genuflects before her. She takes advantage of his allegiance to restore him mentally and physically. He will no longer be a knight in a search of a lady, but her true champion, the manager of all her affairs. She entrusts him to negotiate the terms for “Shave ’em Dry.” He succeeds. Yet she won’t allow him to witness her singing it. She gives him the key to her hotel room, and sends him there to await her. Then, in the late afternoon, 5 March 1935, she and Walter wax “Shave ’em Dry,” referred to, euphemistically in the in the dusty files of the American Record Corporation, as “Alternate Take One” — the most graphically sexual and most uncompromising blues song ever recorded.