The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.

Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name

The Poetry of the Blues

This essay seeks to use the wider society’s first glimpse of the blues in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues as an image to sketch the character of the genre. I wrote it as the introductory chapter to a book of my essays on blues lyrics as poetry, many of which are posted on this site.



     Some of the finest twentieth century American poetry appeared neither in little magazines nor in books from literary or academic presses. The poetry of the blues was sung on front porches and in juke joints in some of the poorest and least educated regions of the country. In fact, it was specifically in such areas that the blues could flourish as could other traditional forms of oral poetry such as Appalachian ballads and Cajun song.
     In the Mississippi Delta gifted poet-musicians created a body of work that continues to move listeners both through recordings of the original artists and the countless others whom they influenced. The power of their poetry is best experienced in performance, but the strength of their lyrics as poetry emerges more dramatically in transcriptions on the page. Close readings of classic blues songs depend on a sophisticated system of conventions which the artist may observe or flout, but which have the precision and expressive power of troubadour cansos or Elizabethan sonnets.
     The subtlety and complexity of this signifying system allowed the singers to express the themes most central to the psyche in profound and beautiful verses. The primary topic of the blues is sexual love, the most powerful human desire, though the songs also engage alienation and mortality. The emotional range of the blues is wide. Though the melancholy heart’s cry predominates, some blues songs are high-spirited, even rollicking, which others have a tone of confidence or contentment.
     The orthodox origin myth of the blues is well-known. In his autobiography in 1941, W. C. Handy describes hearing a ragged man in the train station at Tutwiler, Mississippi who played slide guitar and made the “weirdest” music he had ever heard while singing the repeated line: “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” Handy understood the phrase to refer simply to the man’s destination, the town of Moorhead, at the intersection of the Southern Railroad and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley line sometimes called the Yazoo Delta or the “Yellow Dog.” The reference to such a crossroad has the functional purpose of using a landmark rare in a flat agricultural district, but that literal meaning is simply the foundation for a more significant complex of connotation from which may be spun a characterization of the blues themselves.
     The energy, the passion, even the “weirdness” of the song Handy heard suggest semantic trajectories beyond the simply geographical. In Handy’s own “Yellow Dog Blues” the poem expresses love-longing as the singer finds her lover has fled and has “gone where the Southern cross' the Yellow Dog.” [1] Here the intersection is less a specific location than simply indicating a place inaccessibly far away. Indeed, in most of the songs that later use the same phrase it signifies the distance distant between the singer and the love-object, and thus the phrase bears commonly a plaintive edge of lament. The utterance of the original singer in Tutwiler is obscure given the scarcity of data, but it is clear that he is expressing some heartfelt suffering associated with separation. In Handy’s usage the pangs of love-longing are explicit and foregrounded.
     Loneliness, though, is not always the inverse of romance. A feeling of lost desolation may be existential as well as situational and the bereft tones of blues songs have long spoken to listeners in a wide variety of suffering. If many blues songs are, in fact, laments or complaints, this is because the world is, as Christians say, a “vale of tears,” or, in the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths, life is suffering.
     Though the singer looked like a vagrant (probably especially so to the fastidious Handy), he was far from aping popular white musical styles as a great many black entertainers have done in all periods. His song sounded strange because it was a creole form using African elements of which the artist was well aware. He was in a sense an underground rebel, impudently asserting his own music in the center of a hostile Jim Crow culture. Local railroad slang -- “Yellow Dog,” “North Dog,” “Cannonball,” “Peavine” – was primarily used by the black workers, so the lexical choice as well is assertively African-American.
     The steam locomotives were spectacles and the railroad company’s properties reflected that industrial sector’s great strength, both mechanical and financial. The intersection of two rail lines, an intensification of a highway crossroad, seemed a nexus of power. Any such point suggests a point of decision, a choice of routes in life as in the motif of Herakles at the crossroads of virtue and vice. More broadly in many traditions including the New World belief systems derived from Yoruba, crossroads suggest a point of contact between human and divine realms. [2] In the context of blues history one cannot avoid the supernatural associations that lend such power to Robert Johnson’s prayer at the crossroads in “Cross Road Blues.”
     Though Handy was, by his own declaration, ignorant of the blues, and his experience was not only fragmentary but also accidental, these terms together construct the distinctive semantic field that characterizes the blues. They are often focused on the theme of suffering, alienation, and a consciousness of mortality, and on a dramatic enactment of the power of Eros. The songs are expressed in a purely American creolized form that mixes African and European musical conventions and employs subcultural slang. At times a scent of the divine or of the diabolic lingers in the air.
     The generic development over a period of time generated a rich inventory of conventions and thus an equal number of ways to negate or twist or develop those conventions, leading to increased signifying potential. The code was rendered denser yet by the African-American perspective which lent it a hip DuBoisian “double consciousness.” The signifying monkey, though a figure in toasts rather than blues songs, is an apt emblem for the cunning indirections of African-American poetry and, indeed, of all artful use of language.
     Since adolescence I have been as captivated by the sound of the blues as W. C. Handy was upon hearing the anonymous musician. I am convinced that listeners’ appreciation of the lyrics of singers like Son House and Charlie Patton would benefit from close critical reading no less than sonnets by Spenser and Sidney. I, like any reader of blues songs on the printed page, will return to the recorded performances, of course, in which the addition of expressive music, phrasing, and tone contribute to the uniquely American beauty of these extraordinary poems. Anyone who has ever felt abandoned and lost, or altogether in love, or simply lusty has experienced the blues. Anyone susceptible to poetry can feel the power of the blues in these masterful American songs.



1. See W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues. With only this snatch of the anonymous singer’s song, his meaning remains unknown. In their general narrative outline, Handy’s later lyrics are a reply to Shelton Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” (1913) which uses racetrack imagery and makes no reference to trains. The versions of “Yellow Dog Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith follow Handy closely.

2. Crossroads are associated with Odin, Hekate, Hermes, and other deities. In late medieval and early modern times, suicides and sometimes murderers as well were buried at crossroads.

The Heart of the Blues

The text of "Love in Vain" follows.

     Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” immediately places the listener in the heart of the blues, lamenting in an artful manner and in that way transcending or at any rate accepting the pain of life. The title itself has a certain stately, slightly learned sound, as though it might have been found in a sonnet or a madrigal (an association I find also in “Careless Love” though that song is, I think, unknown prior to Buddy Bolden). “Vain” may well be derived from church usages, perhaps sermons on Ecclesiastes.
     The primary reference is eros; in the first stanza the persona’s lover is departing and he follows hopeless to the station, under her spell but unable to alter the fact of their separation. His feeling of helplessness and confusion is eloquently expressed in the line “Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.” He sounds as though he were dazed from a concussion as well as lovelorn.
     Tension mounts in the second stanza when he establishes a valedictory eye contact in a final attempt to appeal for reconciliation. Yet the gesture only depresses him further: “Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.”
     The song focuses on the lyric moment of the departure of the beloved on a train, yet this precise focus, like the pinhole opening of a camera oscura, provides a much broader view. The pain of love longing is generalized from sexual romance to suggest all suffering but, further, the fundamental anxiety of our species when contemplating the passage of time.
     The third and climactic stanza is most compact of all. The suffering of life has been compressed into the train’s lights, shrinking and shortly disappearing into the void, leaving the singer devastated and yet still singing. The red and blue lights come to signify the phantasmagoric world of everyday phenomenal reality passing as the river of time flows on unstoppable. The most essential formulation of the speaker’s existential woe is not a woman or other specific sources of pain, but rather the constant passage of time. The train’s vanishing lights represent the reality that is constantly slipping away from us, suggesting the same poignant feeling as a train’s distant whistle or, in Yuan drama, the cries of wild geese. In this way each of us will one day see the world itself receding.
     In the song’s coda the lover transcends language itself, adding moans and cries to the name of the beloved and ending by repeating the theme: “all my love’s in vain.” He howls like a beast or a madman. The only articulate utterance he can manage is the name of the loved one.
     Even in this final pit of despair, the tone is mournful but elegiac, implying strength and fortitude. In spite of the persona’s trials, he retains a certain self-possession suggested by the tight poetic form, with its fourteen syllable lines, the first pair of which repeats a concrete Image and the final line stating a subjective mood with uncompromising inevitable iambs. The rhythm insists, “what is, is right,” and the part of wisdom is submission. One may cry, but one may simultaneously sing.
     Thus suffering is transfigured by art, and the singer from Hazlehurst, Mississippi joins with the ancient Hebrew preacher (and the Buddha and a range of sages before and after) who with measured and melodious words look with open eyes and call out “Vanitas, vanitatum! All is vanity!”



LOVE IN VAIN

I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand. (2x)
Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.

(chorus) All my love's in vain.

When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eyes. (2x)
Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.

When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind. (2x)
The blue light was my blues; the red light was my mind.

Hoo-hoo, ooh, Willie Mae
Oh oh hey, hoo, Willie Mae
Hoo-hoo, ooh, eeh, oh woe
All my love's in vain


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”

Bukka White’s Limpid Lyric Clarity

Bukka White recorded many of his songs in several versions, particularly in the later phase of his career. The lyrics differ but usually only in details insignificant for my thesis. I am not including the texts of the songs to which I refer as they are readily available.


     Though poetry and art in general have a unique capacity to express the irrational processes that underlie human consciousness and thus excel in representing ambiguity and the mysterious, some works appeal to the reader very simply and directly. Such simplicity is often associated with honesty which has been praised as a desirable literary quality since Classical times. To Plato “Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity” [1] When Sir Philip Sidney reported his Muse’s mandate “look in thy heart and write" he was employing a rhetorical pose, but one which gains its power from the claim that it presents a subjective truth unornamented. Sincerity became a far more widely recognized literary value with Rousseau’s Confessions and the Romantic movement. By later Victorian times this standard had become sufficiently accepted that to Matthew Arnold “an essential condition” of great poetry is “the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity.” [1]
     In the blues songs of Bukka White the listener encounters few surprising or original metaphors and little in the way either of ambivalence or complexity. For instance, “Good Gin Blues” barely goes beyond declarations like “I wants me a drink of gin” and “I love my good old gin.” To some the celebration of alcohol may seem an insubstantial theme, but White approaches love with a similar lyric clarity. For instance the first verse of “Bukka’s Jitterbug Swing” is a simple statement of desire in which the primary rhetorical device is repetition.


Hey-eee, come on you women
Let's a do the the jitterbug swing
Hey-eee, come on you women
Let's a do the the jitterbug swing
When ya do the jitterbug swing
Then you know you will be doin' the thang


     The song closes with the same outcry reaching beyond language with which it opened.


Hey-eee, please ma'm don't say, 'Uh-uh'


     In his version of “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” a song originally recorded by Big Joe Williams as a prisoner’s lament, each of the fifteen stanzas opens with a poignant line, repeated three times. The song’s long life as a rhythm and blues and rock and roll standard [3] is surely a reflection of the understated power of such lines as that of the title (which itself occupies four stanzas), “turn your lamp down low,” and “I b’lieve your man done come.” White’s song of love longing associated with incarceration, “Poor Boy Long Way from Home” is similarly minimal with the fact of separation bearing the emotional burden, progressing only from the title phrase through the plaintive cry “Baby, I wanna come back home to you” to the final poignant stanza in which the singer says he cannot even make contact by telephone.
     White complains of depression in the most concrete manner, in “Sleepy Man Blues” declaring “when a man gets trouble in his mind/ he wanna sleep all the time.” His struggle to “stay in the sun shine” and “keep from weakin’ down” is all the broader in implication for his lack of further specification. Similarly, his complaint on his mother’s death “Strange Place Blues” laments the alienation the singer experiences at his mother’s death not through explicit lamentation but by calling himself a stranger in a strange place. In the same way he sings of the hardship of prison not by protesting brutality but with the question “When Can I Change my Clothes,” repeating the question through six stanzas with little variation but with incremental intensity. Similarly, the immensely moving “Parchman Farm Blues” simply says “I sho’ wanna go back home.”
     White’s gospel turn “I am in a Heavenly Way,” perhaps one of his most minimalist songs, repeats the word joy as a kind of single syllable mantra fifty-seven times through fifteen stanzas if my count is accurate. Here poetry functions less as delivery of information than as a magic charm.
     The primary signification of works like these by White cannot be doubted. The critic may note subtle sound effects and allusions to other songs, but the fundamental impact of these songs is on the surface. This analysis implies no value judgment. Every reader of Hemingway’s fiction is aware that simple statement, even understatement, can be as powerful as indirect, complex, or conflicted formulations especially when dealing with the most powerful and fundamental of human passions. Lack of rhetorical figures is in itself a figure, and Bukka White was a master of the cri de coeur.


1. This is Jowett’s version of the Republic III 400d-400e.

2. Matthew Arnold “The Study of Poetry.” The slippery impressionism of the standard is well-illustrated by the fact that Arnold asserts without thinking he need present any evidence that Burns and Chaucer are lacking in this regard. In Burns he finds “something which makes us feel that we have not the man speaking to us with his real voice; something, therefore, poetically unsound.” One looks in vain for further specification.

3. Versions were recorded by the doo-wop group the Orioles and by Muddy Waters before the rock versions by Them, Van Morrison, AC/DC and others.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”

Skip James’ Blues Imagery

Texts of all songs discussed are appended to the essay.


     During the summer of 1964 I traveled with a friend east from Chicago without stopping until we reached Greenwich Village where we attended a show at the Gaslight hard by Izzy Young’s Folklore Center and the Kettle of Fish. Sleeping in his parents’ car, we toured the Northeast visiting folk clubs as we went. In a coffee house one evening in Cambridge Massachusetts with perhaps a half dozen people in the audience we heard Skip James perform, his wife by his side. As reluctant a performer at the end of his life as he had been when young, [1] James has nonetheless produced a powerful oeuvre which has exercised a strong influence through the fifty years since I heard him including versions by Jimi Hendrix, the Cream, and others.
     His distinctive fingerpicking with open D minor tuning (which he called “cross-note”) to accompany his falsetto voice produced a unique sound often described as spooky, otherworldly, or ethereal. His repertoire helped shape the expressive and beautiful system of images in the Delta blues. Quintessentially poetic in that their significations provide rich detailed information that could not be encoded without metaphor, they shed light on the techniques of all poetry. The body of classic blues songs, like the comparable systems in Troubadour lyric or the Elizabethan sonnet, is particularly revealing about convention. Frequently misunderstood as clichéd or automatized expressions characteristic of second-rate writers, convention is, in fact, a dynamic process in which every occurrence is unique and the meaning of which deepens and transforms through intertextuality. The understanding of American readers of Chinese poetry is often limited by their lack of familiarity with the image conventions of Chinese poetry. The blues aficionado, however, is in a position to see the often complex and revealing interrelations of text to text.
     As a rural Southern genre, the blues made use of the imagery people knew best including the barnyard rooster, the catfish, and the cow. As a source of milk cows are female (as authors of children’s books know) and singers developed a complex of ideas in which the beloved is represented as a cow. [2] A milk cow was a relatively expensive investment and require substantial care, yet she might provide rich cream and butter, a striking analogy for the delights of love. The most common use of such bovine imagery is to signify the longing the owner feels when a cow has been lost. [3] Among the more familiar lines in the blues are the following.


If you see my milk cow, please, drive her on home
'Cause I ain't had no milk and butter
Since my cow's been gone.


     In James’ “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” (see song 1 appended) James is primarily the cow itself, searching for love as the animal whose offspring is missing would devote all her efforts to “just tryin' to find, my calf, again,” paralleling his own search for his “used-to-be.” With the same poignant attachment of so much ancient Greek poetry to love and sex, only heightened by recognition of the evanescence of pleasure, James notes that all potential affective relationships are conditioned by mortality. “Every cow and calf, I believe was born to die,” and “I ain't gonna be here long.” Thus the listener to his song, if competent in the signifying codes of the blues, will respond first at the mere mention of a cow with a train of associations with the elements of voluptuous pleasure and well-being which simultaneously involves the opposite, the fear of painful loss. Since the speaker would ordinarily be the cow’s owner, the altered perspective here, the trope or twisting of the convention adds wit and ingenuity while recalling to the mind the costly loss of livestock, lovers, money, happiness, and health, and life itself. By loving one always puts oneself at risk of suffering. The entire figure resembles the Wheel of Fortune in which success prefigures failure.
     Another term that recurs repeatedly in the blues is the “killing floor.” Though the popularity of the expression has been identified with the slaughterhouses of Chicago’s stockyards, [4] James used it in his 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor,” (see song 2) one of the rare blues songs that directly comments on politics. The song, which often burst through intelligibility into moans and sighs, depicts life itself as enacted on a killing floor. The Depression is the immediate cause of suffering (“Hard time's is here.”) so great as to be all but lethal (“these hard times gon' kill you”), but the song’s continuous appeal suggests that life itself is a killing floor. The infernal stink and blood and suffering that characterizes the abattoir might serve a medieval monk as an apt picture of life here below and it seems equally apposite to the Southern sharecropper or farm laborer. The suggestions of joy and fulfilment, even luxury, inherent in the dairy cow image is absent; the vision could hardly be bleaker.
     James’ “Devil Got my Woman”(song 3) is a complaint against the woman’s fickleness. Surely the devil has led her, after she had left another to be with the singer, to then change her mind and returned to the original lover. In the approximate center of this straightforward, if mellifluous and eloquent, lament is a striking image, placed like a jewel on a necklace. “But my mind got to rambling/ Like a wild geese from the west.” It is not the woman who “rambles,” though this particular word is often used for free-wheeling sexual habits; it is the speaker’s own unruly mind. The image of wild geese is common in Chinese poetry where it connotes sadness, exile, loss, and separation, [5] though James’ listeners would hardly have known this. It occurs only rarely in blues songs and with different associations. [6] The restless wandering character of the birds and their piercing cries are parallel to a train in the distance with its “lonely” whistle. Perhaps they are “from the west” primarily for the sake of the rhyme, but the phrase can only contribute to their air of wildness as they appear over a bleak landscape. The goose image is an example of the growth of the inventory of images available to the singer, as some are added and others fall away over the years.
     James may seem to deliver a dubious compliment when he says of his woman in “Lorenzo Blues,” (song 4) “You know, she's stutters in her speech/ An she wiggle and she wobble,” but the image has many precedents both out and in the blues idiom. The scintillating movement of a body in motion ravishes the singer just as it had dazzled Robert Herrick (who in “Upon Julia’s Clothes” had noted the “liquefaction” and “brave vibration, each way free”) and Theodore Roethke (who wrote “I'm martyr to a motion not my own “ in “I knew a woman lovely in her bones”). The classic statement in the blues is


I got a big fat woman, meat shakin' on her bone
I say, hey, hey, meat shakin' on her bone [7]


     The whole poem in fact is a systematically constructed string of compliments rather like the convention of the blason, common in the Middle Ages but never thereafter vanishing altogether. The woman oddly named Lorenzo has a Coke bottle shape and “a likeness” that’s “outta this world,” and apparently her speech impediment only intensifies the dizzying impact of her charm.
     In a song titled “Forty Four” included in Thomas W. Talley's 1922 collection Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise & Otherwise the number refers first to a handgun and then to a Bible verse. Roosevelt Sykes' popular “.44 Blues" in 1929 elaborates this process of wit by cleverly using the same number to refer first to a gun, then to a train, and finally to a home address (presumably in prison). James, however, in his 1931 “22-20 Blues” (song 5) accompanied by his excellent piano playing ignores such ingenuity and focuses (as Robert Johnson was later to do in his “32-20 Blues”) on pure aggression. The weapon, and such shocking lines as “I cut that woman half in two,” express in the strongest terms the speaker’s distress at his “unruly” lover.
     Simple though the situation may seem, it is presented with considerable ambiguity. Who is the mysterious “Mr. Crest” who appears at the outset? Has violence been done, or is it merely threatened? At the end the singer pictures himself out on the highway, on the pilgrimage of this life, as one might say, holding the gun that he has said is “burnin’ hell,” but declaring that he has harmed no one yet, though he says he means to “raise some sand” (start a fight) before heading on down the line. Experts seem to disagree on just what gun is meant, but the speaker makes it clear that he is weighing all options and selecting the one that reflects his despair. This indeterminacy contrasts sharply with the fatalistic directness in murder ballads such as “Little Sadie,” for James’ song is not narrative, but is primarily lyrical, defining through concrete terms the persona’s state of mind. The audience would here the song, even in its earliest versions, in a context of others’ use of similar imagery, against which the singer/poet seeks to define a new turn to the familiar convention.
     In each of these cases the listener responds to a whole complex of images. I have elsewhere explained [8] that every recognizable convention immediately spawns a host of variations which require competence in the tradition to perceive. In Skip James’ beautiful and expressive lyrics the strands of intertextuality may take a number of forms. In “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” the singer provides an original twist to a familiar image, keeping the word fresh and the meaning original. In “Hard Time Killing Floor” a formula is used in a very standardized way, but signifying an intense and upsetting reality. The goose image in “Devil Got my Woman” is nonetheless suggestive for being innovative, but neither is it for that reason superior. Though the song concerns a missing lover, the image on which I focused in “Lorenzo Blues” celebrates women’s beauty. Equally intense, the weapon image of “22-20 Blues” takes its place among a lineage of songs referring to specific models.
     One may note significant patterns in the artist’s oeuvre as his reality is organized in a set of ever-changing symbolic forms. For Skip James the texts surveyed here emphasize the delights of love (in the cow and the wiggling), the feeling of love-longing (in the geese), and the terrible truths of aggression and suffering (in the killing floor and the gun). In every case the only amelioration or (temporary) elimination of pain is through fulfilled love. The images themselves portray a world-view more accurately (including emotional tone) than prose would be likely to do. These rural American songs deploy the stratagems of image usage in ways as artful (and artificial) as any sonneteer or mandarin.


1. James (born Nehemiah Curtis) had refused to record for Okeh in 1927, perhaps because his illegal activities, notably dealing in moonshine, seemed at once more lucrative and a good reason not to draw attention to himself. After he began performing again after his rediscovery by John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine he felt constrained both by failing health and his commitment to church music. James told a biographer that, while he was willing to play blues with his “thinkin' faculties,” he refused to “put my heart in it.” See Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues.

2. Compare the standard Homeric epithet “ox-eyed Hera.” My wife tells me that, while growing up in North Carolina, her sister was told by a high school boyfriend that she “had pretty eyes, like a cow.”

3. Among the very numerous occurrences of this topos in work by Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley and others, two are of particular, if passing interest here. In Sara Martin’s 1928 recording “Mean Tight Mama” she sings “the cow that black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk.” In Sleepy John Estes 1930 “Milk Cow Blues” the convention is well enough established that a cow is never mentioned except in the title. The tone of yearning loneliness is evoked in a narrative of fleeing love snatched while the “slow consumption” does her in “by degrees.”

4. Hubert Sumlin says that for Howlin’ Wolf the term had particular reference to an incident in which he was shot by a jealous woman and, when downed, saw himself as on the killing floor according to Debra Devi. See her The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.

5. As far back as the Confucian Classic of Poetry (the Shijing) geese symbolize the suffering people in the poem Hong Yan. Geese appear prominently as emblems of what might be called the blues often connoting longing for an absent friend or lover in many later poets including Du Fu and Su Shi.

6. See “Wild Goose Blues” and “Blue Goose Blues.” “Cry of the Wild Goose” by the folk-style singer/composer Terry Gilkyson who recorded with the Weavers was a hit for first Frankie Laine and then Tennessee Ernie Ford.

7. From Blind Boy Fuller “Meat Shakin’ Woman,” but see many others including Ida Cox’s “Four Day Creep” and Tommy Johnson’s “Big Fat Mama Blues.”

8. See my “Transformation of Convention” article posted in August of 2013 for the most general statement of this idea.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Song 1

Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die

I'm a-milk my heifer, milk her in a churn
I'll milk my heifer, I'll milk her in a churn
If you see my rider, tell her it ain't a darn thing doin'

I wringed my hands, baby, and I wanted to scream
I wringed my hands, honey, and I wanted to scream
And when I woke up I thought it was all a dream

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die
Hey hey-hey, I ain't gonna be here long
Hey hey-hey, pretty mama, I ain't gonna be here long
That's the reason why you hear me singin' my old lonesome song

Hey, hey-hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
And every cow's calf, honey, got to be dyin'

I walked the levee from end to end
I walked the levee, honey, from end to end
I was just tryin' to find, my calf, again

I'm feelin' back to my used-to...
I feel a notion, back to my used-to-be
I have a pretty mama, she don't care for me


Song 2

Hard Time Killing Floor

Hard time's is here
An ev'rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th'ever been befo'

Um, hm-hm
Um-hm
Um, hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

You know that people
They are driftin' from do' to do'
But they can't find no heaven
I don't care where they go

Um, hm-hm
Um-uh-hm
Mm-hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin' flo'
Lord, I'll never get down
This low no mo'

Um, hm-hm-hm
Hm, um-hm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Well, you hear me singin'
This old lonesome song
People, you know these hard times
Can't last us so long

Hm, hm-hm
Hmm, hmm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm, oh Lord

You know, you'll say you had money
You better be sho'
But these hard times gon' kill you
Just drive a lonely soul

Um, hm-hm
Umm, hmm
Umm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Umm-hm
Hmm-hm-hm
Umm-hm
Hm-hm-hm
Hmm, hm-hm-hm


Song 3

Devil Got my Woman

You know, I'd rather be the ol' devil
Well, I'd rather be the devil
Then to be that woman' man
You know, rather be the devil
Than to be that woman' man
You know, I'm so sorry
You know, so sorry
That I ever fell in love wit' you-ooo-hoo-oo
Because you know you don't treat me
Baby, like you used ta do-hoo
You know, I laid down last night
You know, I laid down last night
And I thought to take me some rest
But my mind got to rambling
Like a wild geese from the west
You know the woman that I love
The woman that I love
I stol't her from my best friend
But you know he done got lucky
An he done got her back, again
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
Baby, then I made you some fire
Then I would tote all your water
Way, way, way, from the bogy brier
You know, my baby she don't drink whiskey
My baby, she don't drink no whiskey
An I know she ain't crazy about wine
Now, it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done changed my baby's mind
You know, I could be right
You know, I could be right
Then again, I could be wrong
But it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done got my baby
Now he done gone


Song 4

Lorenzo Blues

I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
You know, we had a nice time Christmas
But she left me on New Year's Day

Oh, you got to know her
When you see her
'Cause she's so different
From any other girl
Oh, you've got to know her
When you see her
From any other girl
Because she's made up
Like a Coke-Cola bottle
An she got a likeness
It's outta this world, alright

You know, she's stutters in her speech
An she wiggle and she wobble
When she walk
She's stuttered in her speech
An she wiggle an a-wobble
When she walk
Yes, an she got three gold teeth
An she got deep dimples in her jaw, yeah

I say, 'Hello, Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
I say, 'Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
Darling, you know that you was gonna leave me
But you didn't tell me you was goin' to stay

Now, if I can make a half a million
I declare, I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
I declare, if I can make a half a million
I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
Just after he promise me that he will
Bring my lovin' Lorenzo, back home to me, again
An I want her back ho-oh-ome, to me again.


Song 5

22-20 Blues

Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
You've got my 22-20
Layin' up across my breast

Oh, if I send for my baby
An she act a fool
An she don't never come
If I send for my baby
She act a fool
An she don't never come
All the doctors in New York City
I declare, they can't help her none

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev'rything, alright

Ah-or, your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
Your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
But my .22-20
I declare you, it's a-burnin' hell

I was stranded on the highway-hi
With my 22-20 in my
I was standin' on the highway
With my 22-20 in my
They got me 'cused for murder
I declare, I never have harmed a man

Lord, oh I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right arm
I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right
I'm gon' raise me some sand
And back down the road, I declare.