The bedroom blues: love and lust in the lyrics of early female blues artists

Abstract

Blues lyrics have long been recognized for their earthiness, their apparent directness and their ability to make the listener feel as if they are being directly and personally addressed. This article pays particular attention to the manner in which female blues artists talk to their audience about love, in both an ethereal sense and a more down-to-earth sense, and is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who briefly examined the lyrics of male singers. Kuhn’s study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus (five songs, by three artists). This article aims to extend Kuhn’s enquiry by examining the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, intuitively assumed by those less familiar with the blues that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. This article investigates this assumption, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by applying an amended model of Tyrmi’s (2004) typology of love. This is applied to a corpus of female blues artists totalling 111 songs by 39 different artists, who predate the 1950s. The results show that these women were as forward as men in stating their needs, often in a most direct and colourful manner, and that sexual metaphor abounds in the lyrics of early female blues artists.