The Blues Lyric Formula

This book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form.

Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics.

This book g...