Blues Lyric Poetry [antikvár]

PREFACE This computer-generated anthology serves two main purposes. First, it is a companion piece to Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance (Taft, Blues), and thus gives the user of that concordance the complete poetic context for every word, phrase, or line in which he is interested. Second, this anthology makes available to the reader a large and varied selection of blues lyrics which have either never appeared in print before, or which are scattered among smaller anthologies and blues studies. All of the texts transcribed here are from the 1920 to 1942 period-the race record era-and comprise over two thousand commercially recorded songs sung by over three hundred and íifty singers. Other than the fact that all these singers were black and sang the blues, there are few other common factors in their make-up: their backgrounds, repertoires, styles, and reasons for recording vary greatly. Thus, this anthology includes both country and úrban, both male and female, both "downhome" (to use Titon's term) and vaudeville singers. Among those represented here are singers who recorded only one or two songs and those who recorded over a hundred; those who sang accompanied only by their own guitar or piano, and those who were a part of a string band, jug band, or jazz band. As a whole, this anthology is an exploration of the blues lyric and, more specifically, the blues couplet, which defines this lyric form. The blues, as a form of folk and popular song, demands a clear definition, since the word "blues" itself has generally been used to cover a wide rangé of both musical and lyric forms. Since this work concentrates upon the lyrics rather than the music of the song form, my inclusion or exclusion of texts in this anthology was based on lyric poetic criteria. Indeed there are both etic and emic reasons for defining the blues primarily as poetry and only secondarily as music. Charles Keil (51) and John Szwed (222) have both seen the blues as primarily a poetic form, and ex-blues singer Rubin Lacy agrees: "the blues is not sung for the tune. Its sung for the words mostly. A real blues singer sings a blues for the words" (Evans 13). Thus, the definition often given of the blues as an eight-, twelve-, or sixteen-bar form of song is not relevant to this study. In fact, this criterion has been overused and overstated in the discussion of the blues form, since the blues rarely conforms to a tight metric structure. Early in the history of blues scholarship, Odúm and Johnson discovered this disjoint relationship between blues lyrics and blues music (291), and more recently, Jean Wagner has examined the same phenomenon: "a more or less indefinite number of unaccentuated syllables can be put between the stresses, which makes a blues verse quite lengthy, so that it can be represented typographically in two lines of equal or unequal length" (from Les poétes négres des Etats-Unis, translated in Jahn 167). To define the structure of the blues stanza is to define the blues itself. As Newman I.