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
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
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
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
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
The Replacements
A quiet, unglamorous portrait of teenage isolation, framed around confusion about sexuality and identity. Instead of anthemic…
adolescent alienation sexual confusion loneliness
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
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
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
Abbey Lincoln
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
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
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
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
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
Brian Eno
Deep Blue Day is a slow, pedal-steel-laced instrumental from Eno's soundtrack to a documentary about the Apollo moon missions.…
weightlessness nostalgia Americana in space
Townes Van Zandt
A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…
poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado
A direct address from the working poor to the wealthy, this 1928 blues sides a plea for economic justice with an implicit…
class inequality economic desperation war and sacrifice
Curtis Mayfield
A sermon set to music, this track has Curtis Mayfield addressing Black America directly about internal divisions that threaten…
racial solidarity colorism self-determination
Laura Marling
This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…
itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow
Deep Purple
A hard-rock strut through a one-night pickup that curdles into dismissal, built more for Jon Lord's organ pyrotechnics than for…
macho posturing casual sexual conquest dismissal and contempt
Robert Johnson
A restless travelogue of the Mississippi Delta juke-joint circuit, this is Robert Johnson at his most physically direct — a…
itinerant desire sexual boasting bondage and debt
The Velvet Underground
A hushed, plainly strummed confession about loving someone who is unavailable, oscillating between tenderness and quiet…
forbidden love longing and loss guilt and self-justification
Johnny Cash
A first-person prison lament in which the narrator, confined and hopeless, is tormented by the sound of a train he cannot board.…
confinement and freedom guilt and moral consequence class resentment
Muddy Waters
A late-career Muddy Waters track that functions as a genealogical claim and a roll call, tracing rock and roll's parentage…
musical lineage authorship and ownership of a genre community and testimony
Sam Cooke
A slow, blues-based lament on solitude, built from a single insistent refrain that circles rather than progresses. Cooke uses…
loneliness longing for love emotional isolation
A twelve-bar blues in the most traditional sense: a man walks to his lover's house only to find himself locked out, suspects…
romantic abandonment resilience through humor the blues tradition itself
Led Zeppelin
A blues-boogie strut built almost entirely on riff and repetition, this song stages sexual pursuit and its exhausted aftermath…
desire and lust boasting and bravado romantic disillusionment
The Doors
A loose, blues-based closer that trades narrative coherence for atmosphere, following a barfly heroine into a fictional…
urban decay and escape self-mythology blues lineage and authenticity
This is Hendrix's take on a blues standard about fatalism and hard luck, stripped down to a single circling complaint. The song…
fatalism poverty and hardship isolation
Harry Nilsson
A traditional-blues lament about the aftermath of a lovers' quarrel, delivered as a loose, almost improvisational vamp built…
heartbreak and regret isolation blues tradition
"Lazy" is less a lyric than a pretext for a long instrumental workout, its handful of blues-derived lines circling a single…
indolence and refusal futility of persuasion blues fatalism
Annie Lennox
This is a Neil Young cover Annie Lennox transforms into a bleak urban nocturne, stringing together images of death and…
urban decay mortality indifference of the city
Van Halen
A cover of John Brim's blues novelty tune, retooled by Van Halen as a live, stage-patter-heavy party anthem. The song trades on…
seduction as commerce summer as sexual awakening showmanship/performance
Cream's version compresses Robert Johnson's Delta blues into a lean, high-velocity rock performance, turning a song about…
isolation spiritual desperation the blues tradition
Lead Belly
Lead Belly's take on the traditional "C.C. Rider" blues strips the song down to its call-and-response bones: a rolling…
betrayal and desire itinerant love (the "rider" figure) sexual boasting and fantasy
The Band
This is The Band's cover of the old blues/Sun Records standard, reworked here as a mournful, swampy shuffle rather than a…
loss and abandonment travel as metaphor for separation folk/blues tradition
"Toad" is Cream's showcase for drummer Ginger Baker, an instrumental built around a lengthy drum solo bookended by a terse…
virtuosity showmanship rhythm as narrative
A traveler moves through a haunted, mythic American South, stacking images of slavery, exile, and vice into a single vision of…
historical memory of slavery the blues as witness/testimony original sin and corruption