Results for “blues tradition/lineage”

Songs

Cream

This is Cream's electrified rework of Robert Johnson's Delta blues standard, compressing the original's verses into a lean live…

isolation and abandonment desperation and pleading the crossroads as fate/damnation myth

Laura Marling

This is a cover of a mid-1960s folk standard, sung here in Laura Marling's plainspoken, weary register, about the impossibility…

itinerancy and escape addiction as self-medication romantic longing and loss

Johnny Cash

A prisoner in California listens to a passing freight train and measures his life against it. Over four short verses he moves…

incarceration freedom and mobility guilt and remorse

Jimi Hendrix

This is Hendrix's take on the Booker T./William Bell blues standard, a compact statement of fatalism delivered through the…

fatalism poverty and misfortune blues tradition/lineage

The Temptations

A mid-80s Temptations single that pitches courtly-gentleman romance as a self-help pitch, with the narrator cataloguing small…

traditional courtship gender roles nostalgia for inherited values

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's version of this traditional folk-blues song reworks a prison-labor lament into swampy rock, keeping the old imagery of…

incarceration and forced labor longing for deliverance folk mythology / superstition

Bert Jansch

This is a traditional Appalachian song (with roots in older British/American folk balladry) about a woman driven out of a…

exile and social rejection itinerancy gendered outsider status

The Staple Singers

This is the Staple Singers' rendition of the traditional African American spiritual, built almost entirely on call-and-response…

deliverance and salvation collective faith and community crossing over / transition between states

Joan Baez

Baez's rendition of this traditional folk ballad tells the story of a woman ruined by a New Orleans house of ill repute, framing…

ruin and moral downfall warning and cautionary storytelling regret

Nina Simone

A traditional African-American spiritual rebuilt by Simone into a ten-minute chase sequence: a sinner runs from judgment on the…

judgment day futile flight refused sanctuary