Buddy Guy / Bring 'Em In / 2005
What Kind of Woman Is This?
playful, horny, triumphant
A straight-ahead blues boast built on a single conceit: a woman so overwhelming she performs miracles usually reserved for divine intervention. Buddy Guy stacks hyperbole on hyperbole -- angels, blind men healed, Eden itself -- to turn ordinary male desire into mock-scripture, all delivered with the wink of someone who knows he's exaggerating.
desire and hyperbole sacred/profane inversion male bravado the blues boast tradition objectification played for comic effect
Who's speaking
A first-person male narrator addresses the listener and, briefly, the woman herself; he's an unreliable hype-man whose claims escalate past plausibility on purpose, inviting the audience to enjoy the exaggeration rather than take it at face value.
What happens
The song opens with a vision of heaven cracking open, then narrows that cosmic image down to one woman walking by. From there it moves through a string of increasingly absurd reactions -- a blind man regaining sight, biblical temptation, a crowd of women reduced to background noise next to this one -- before settling into a repeated, almost helpless refrain asking what kind of woman could cause all this. There's no plot resolution; the song ends still asking the question, which is the point.
How it's built
Loose verse-and-refrain blues structure with heavy repetition of lines (a hallmark of the form) rather than a fixed verse/chorus/bridge architecture. The title question functions as a recurring hook that interrupts and punctuates each escalating claim, and the song builds through accumulation -- each verse adds a bigger comparison -- rather than through a dramatic turn.
Section by section
Opening verses
“gates of heaven must be open”
The song starts at maximum hyperbole, framing the woman's appearance as a cosmic event before we even know what she looks like. This sets the comic register immediately -- we're meant to register the overstatement as tongue-in-cheek rather than literal devotion.
Blind man verse
A bystander's reaction does narrative work the narrator's own praise can't: an outside witness confirms the woman's impact, which lets the boast feel corroborated rather than purely self-serving.
Adam and apple tree verse
“same thing that Adam did”
The Eden reference turns a crude pickup line into mock-theology, equating sexual desire with original sin in a way that's playful rather than guilty -- temptation here is a selling point, not a warning.
Spoken/vamp break
The brief spoken aside functions like a performer catching his breath mid-brag, a classic blues-showman move that keeps the song feeling live and spontaneous rather than tightly composed.
Crowd comparison verse
“somethin' from outer space”
By placing this woman above a crowd of other attractive women at a storied venue, the song escalates its hyperbole scale from biblical to extraterrestrial, pushing the joke further rather than repeating it.
Closing refrain
The song ends not with resolution but with the question repeated and intensified, including a demand that someone explain her -- the lack of answer is the final punchline, insisting she's beyond categorization.
Craft
- hyperbole
- The woman's effect is described as literally supernatural -- restoring sight, enabling speech -- pushing ordinary attraction into miracle territory for comic and rhetorical effect.
- biblical allusion
- References to heaven's gates, an angel, and Adam under the apple tree recast seduction as a kind of fall from grace, letting the song have it both ways: reverent and lecherous at once.
- anaphora
- The repeated title question and repeated opening lines of each verse are characteristic of blues phrasing, creating a call-and-response feel even in a solo vocal.
- rhetorical question
- The unanswered central question keeps the song in a state of awed exaggeration rather than resolution, reinforcing that the 'kind of woman' is beyond description.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a comic blues boast in a long lineage of songs that use religious and mythic imagery to inflate ordinary lust into cosmic spectacle -- the humor is the point, and the narrator's awe is performative rather than sincere devotion. A secondary reading could take the religious imagery more seriously, as genuine reverence toward the woman that borders on worship, but the crude apple-tree line and the outer-space comparison tilt the song toward parody rather than earnest adoration.
Context
This fits Buddy Guy's late-career output on Bring 'Em In, an album where he leans into traditional blues forms and collaborates within a classic-sounding studio blues idiom. The lyric's structure and imagery draw on long-standing blues tropes -- miraculous women, religious allusion used for sexual boasting -- common to the genre since its earliest decades; I don't have specific confirmed details about this song's writing or recording session beyond the album credit.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal delivery between the sung verses and the spoken aside
- how the repeated question functions almost like a guitar lick, returning with slight variation
- the escalation in comparison from angelic to biblical to extraterrestrial
- any call-and-response feel between Guy's voice and the band underscoring the blues tradition
- the way repetition of lines builds intensity without advancing a literal story
About Buddy Guy
George "Buddy" Guy is an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter. He is an exponent of Chicago blues who has influenced generations of guitarists including Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr., and John Mayer.
b. 1936 / United States
Full biography and catalogue