Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith stages a full descent-into-hell nightmare as a twelve-bar blues, using classic AAB stanzas to build a horror…
mortality and damnation nightmare and dream logic sin and judgment
Son House
A loose, half-spoken reworking of a traditional blues frame in which a horse becomes a vehicle for restlessness, desire, and…
restlessness and wandering the search for a lover freedom through motion
Jimi Hendrix
This is the slow, extended blues incantation that Hendrix later compressed into 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return),' built around a…
self-mythology supernatural power cosmic/psychedelic imagery
Joni Mitchell
A short, fragmentary address to someone (or something) called Blue, mixing tenderness with an inventory of the era's chemical…
addiction and self-destruction intimacy as gift-giving disillusionment with countercultural excess
This is Hendrix inhabiting the Delta blues tradition wholesale, taking a floating verse form passed down from Muddy Waters and…
desire and transformation infidelity and temptation restlessness/travel
Bert Jansch
A hushed, traditional-sounding love lyric built around a single reassurance repeated to a young woman: come lie beside me, no…
clandestine love youthful courtship reassurance and persuasion
B.B. King
B.B. King uses a first-person narrator identified as an aging traveling musician to plead for dignity and recognition, framing…
itinerant hardship dignity under judgment aging and endurance
A minimal, twelve-bar blues built almost entirely around a single weather image, using the rain as a stand-in for hardship that…
resilience emotional numbness poverty and shelter
Townes Van Zandt
A restless travel song built on blues repetition, where the highway and its trucks become both an escape route and a kind of…
restlessness and flight addiction/escape as motion transience and homelessness
Ella Fitzgerald
Irving Berlin's standard is a compact declaration of romantic relief, built almost entirely on the pun between 'blue' as color…
romantic joy transformation of perception time and its acceleration in love
Mississippi John Hurt
A homesick blues built around the tiny Mississippi hamlet of Avalon, where the singer measures the alienation of the big city…
homesickness rural vs urban life romantic longing
John Lee Hooker
A first-person lament from the depths of an auto industry strike, where the speaker's survival hinges on a labor dispute he has…
economic precarity labor and industry dependency on institutions
The Stooges
"L.A. Blues" closes Fun House as a nearly wordless collapse — a squall of skronking free-jazz saxophone, feedback, and drum…
disintegration noise as catharsis urban dread
A weary blues confession built almost entirely from repetition and small variation, this piece follows a speaker trying to talk…
romantic exhaustion self-deception and resolve restlessness and departure
A talking-blues that starts as an ad-jingle riff on a coffee brand and quietly turns into an extended sexual pun, with the…
desire disguised as domestic ritual double entendre longing and pursuit
Steely Dan
A drifter narrates his escape from some vague personal wreckage toward a mythic seaside refuge called Blues Beach, a place that…
escape and drift resignation unreliable paradise
Moby
Moby builds this track around a looped vocal sample of a field-recorded folk/blues lament, layering electronic production…
grief religious faith as refuge isolation of suffering
Cream
This is Cream's electrified cover of a pre-war country blues (originally by Blind Joe Reynolds), turned into a slow-burning…
sexual jealousy infidelity folk wisdom/proverb
Vashti Bunyan
A short, spare lament that treats a failed love as a seasonal death, letting the bleakness of winter stand in for emotional…
loss of love seasonal metaphor for grief emotional numbness
Etta James
Etta James's late-career reading of this soul standard is a study in self-deception undone by feeling: a narrator insists she's…
unresolved longing self-deception memory as intrusion
The Replacements
A quiet, unglamorous portrait of teenage isolation, framed around confusion about sexuality and identity. Instead of anthemic…
adolescent alienation sexual confusion loneliness
Common
Common builds a triumphant victory-lap track around a sampled ELO hook, using the sky as a running metaphor for ascent,…
ambition realized spiritual gratitude celebrity and success
Fleet Foxes
A young narrator wrestles with the individualism he was raised on, wondering whether meaning comes from being special or from…
individualism vs. collectivism disillusionment with authority search for purpose
Billie Holiday
A standard from the American songbook, this rendition finds Holiday addressing the moon as a witness to loneliness and its…
loneliness longing transformation through love
Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds a heartbroken travelogue out of restlessness, cataloguing cities and cultural landmarks as a way of avoiding…
heartbreak and longing restlessness and travel as avoidance pride versus vulnerability
Arcade Fire
A breakup song filtered through disco-pop sheen, where the singer (Régine Chassagne on lead vocal) tries to process a lost love…
romantic disillusionment anonymity in crowds self-deception
James Taylor
A bartender confesses that his own steadiness is an illusion, propped up by routine and the fantasy of a rescuing lover rather…
loneliness disguised as competence dependency and self-deception stasis versus escape
Chet Baker
A torch song built entirely on approximation, where the singer tries to substitute one person for a lost love and finds every…
substitution and self-deception grief disguised as romance emotional numbness
Lead Belly
Lead Belly turns a personal humiliation—being refused housing in the nation's capital—into a blunt indictment of segregated…
racism and segregation hypocrisy of American ideals housing discrimination
The Doors
This is a late-vaulted Jim Morrison recording, released decades after his death as a posthumous single with the surviving Doors…
escapism aging and decline fame and image
Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Lincoln sets original lyrics to Thelonious Monk's instrumental theme, turning a jazz standard into a meditation on…
solitude and self-reliance the price of freedom endurance through hardship
Johnny Cash
Robert Johnson
A traveling man wakes to find his woman gone and turns the ordinary act of putting on his shoes into an emblem of dislocation…
restlessness and displacement abandonment fatalism
Van Morrison
A buoyant, playful song built around a photo shoot, where the singer coaxes a model through poses while imagining the payday and…
playful eroticism work as flirtation material pleasure
Tom Waits
A domestic wreck of a song dressed in the sunniest possible title: the narrator is broke, abandoned, and effectively parenting…
irony of optimism poverty and abandonment loneliness
Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…
ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation
Frank Sinatra
A classic torch-song-turned-swing-standard about loneliness resolved by sudden romantic arrival, addressed to the moon as silent…
loneliness romantic transformation fate and chance
Bessie Smith delivers a twelve-bar blues indictment of a charming, cruel lover, moving from a general question about bad men to…
romantic betrayal cynicism about men's constancy emotional endurance
Bessie Smith delivers a blues complaint about a lover who has gotten money and forgotten who stood by him when he had none. It's…
betrayal after success female self-respect economic power shifting a relationship
Elton John
A ballad of consolation addressed to a partner during an absence, built around the idea that longing itself is what the blues…
separation and longing reassurance under strain romantic devotion