John the Conqueror second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo", and in "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" it is called "John De Conquer Blue". John the Conqueror was an African prince who was sold as a slave in the Americas. Despite his enslavement, his spirit was never broken and he survived in folklore as a sort of a trickster figure, because of the tricks he played to evade his masters. Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit of the "Uncle Remus" stories is said to be patterned after High John the Conqueror. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of his adventures ("High John de Conquer") in her collection of
George Remus River from Cincinnati) where he lived out the next twenty years of his life modestly without incident. He married for a third and final time to his long time secretary Blanche Watson. Remus ran a small contracting firm, Washington Contracting, until he suffered a stroke in August 1950. For the next two years, he lived in boarding house in Covington under the care of a nurse. Remus died on January 20, 1952 at the age of 77. He is buried beside his third wife at Riverside Cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky. Remus is the subject of Craig Holden’s, "The Jazz Bird