Go to Blues Lyrics
Blues Lyrics is a site that enables visitors to perform keyword searches on blues lyrics from Race recordings from the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. Besides searching lyrics, visitors can browse by artist, song, gender, musical genre, geographical region, year of recording, and recording location. They can perform searches in each of these categories as well. The site is still very much under construction, but it currently boasts more than 20 artists and 60 songs.
In order to facilitate keyword searches, I am collecting and transcribing lyrics with an aim toward standardization rather than a wholly accurate reflection of pronunciation differences. For example, "and" and "you" will appear in a song's lyrics even if, in the actual recording, the former sounds like "an" and the latter sounds like "ya."
Though standardization is my main goal, I have tried whenever possible to indicate regional pronunciation differences and to preserve the overall sound of each blues singer's speech pattern. Consequently, when a visitor searches for a certain word or phrase, he or she might also have to search for variants. Click here for search tips and a guide to word and phrase variants.
My name is Phillip Calderwood. I am a 32-year-old published poet, originally from northern California. I received Bachelor's degrees in English and history at UC Berkeley and am currently a Master's candidate in the history department at American University. I began Blues Lyrics as the final project for a course entitled "History in the Digital Age."
If you would like to send me comments, or if you have any questions about me or my site, please contact me at the address below.
Go to Blues Lyrics