Topic: Web concordance of pre-war blues lyrics

[outfidel]

Web Concordance of Michael Taft's Pre-War Blues Lyrics

just stumbled across this site & thought it looked interesting...

[dj]

Wow, that's pretty cool.  Now we can easily tell that the word "Mamlish" has been used 6 times in a pre-war blues lyric in 5 different songs:  three times by Ed Bell (twice as Sluefoot Joe, both in the song Tooten' Out Blues), twice by Bobby Grant, and once by Kokomo Arnold.  Now if I only knew what it meant...   

[Norfolk Slim]

The lyrics bit of lyrics and licks just became almost redundant! 

This site suggests the last line of Otis Harris' You'll like My Loving (See lyrics and licks forum and on Back Porch) is actually 'we're hollering lord oh lordy lord" which seems to fit right in.  I'll now change how I sing it- so the site has already done me a favour on the first visit!

Great find.

[Slack]

Good lord.... Atom2 -- and you think You are anal rentitive!  You are a laid back hound dog in comparison.  20 years spent counting the word "made"?  I'm with you dj, I don't understand.

Well, it will be interesting to have another source to check lyrics by........   

Cheers,
slack

[GhostRider]

Just a dol' garn minute: (see, I can talk like Slack!).

I just checked out the lyrics to Arthur Pettis "Two Time Blues", and there's some major boo boos. And they didn't even try to? guess the" flowery mind" phrase in "Good Boy Blues".

And the words to Bessie Smith's version of "Nobody Knows When Your Down and Out are incomplete.

Licks and Lyrics is back in!

I was wrong once, but I can't remember when...
Alex

[boots]

Gee... that's some counting.

This weeks quiz:
       The word zooming appears only once in pre-war blues lyrics.
            Name that tune.

[Stuart]

Mistakes made transcribing lyrics from old blues recordings? How can that be? I remember when I once made a mistake--I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't.

Stu

[Johnm]

Hi all,
I'm with you, Alex, I think Lyrics and Licks is definitely still in business.  If their transcription of the lyrics to "Suitcase Full Of Blues" is an example of the best the site has to offer, I am not impressed.  Besides, I'm a stick-in-the-mud, do-stuff-myself kind of guy.  I would much rather listen to a tune a zillion times trying to figure out the lyrics than accept someone else's version of the lyrics and listen to the tune only ten times, say.  I like the "informed bail-out" that knowledgable friends can supply in lyric transcriptions, occasionally, too, like we have gotten in Lyrics and Licks from time to time.  I think I'll keep slogging away. . . .
All best,
Johnm

[uncle bud]

I've used this site before but there are many errors. I haven't seen the original publication (I believe these transcriptions are relatively old), and wonder if that is also full of incomplete transcriptions. It is good that there's a lot more to it than the usual stuff though. I thought this was in the Links but I guess not.

[Rivers]

I like that but, apropo a previous discussion about references to submarines in blues, they missed Little Hat Jones's reference in Kentucky Blues. In fact KB is not in there at all because no hits on 'Seguine'. So they've got a few good songs to index yet.

Lemon wasn't the only one to mention Uneeda biscuits apparently. I didn't know that.

[Slack]

'Last Kind Words' is not there either... so my scan for "Beaujolais" came up empty. 

[skip bosco]

what a weird site.

and his POINT would be?

[Stuart]

Maybe we should just view it as a possible source of information, albeit one that must be used with care, and let it go at that.

Stu

[a2tom]

I too have seen this site a couple of times before - never mentioned it for the above reasons and that frankly I find it very difficult to use (web-wise it could be much improved, I think).  Still, it adds an interesting element - that you can cross reference words.  For example, since I liked the line "when she smiles, lightning everywhere" from Bracey's Woman Woman,  I looked up "lightning" and found that Willie Brown's Future Blues used a variation on the same phrase.  That's pretty powerful, and is a neat way to be able to track the linguistics of the blues, to see how phrases propogated, changed, etc.   Still, I now come away wondering about completeness  - how many similar lines are there that aren't coming up?!  I bet many - Woman Woman itself was missing, if nothing else.

Or how about  "don't like my peaches, don't shake my tree".  I found some of these I knew (e.g. Frank Stokes), some I didn't, and some missing (e.g. Bo Carter).  Thus the completeness again seems questionable, limiting the utility for me.  Also, it is very difficult to discern or trace the history of the word usage as presented - no ability to rank by recording date, for example.   I do a lot of databasing in my work and such things aren't difficult if you have the data entered in a meaningful way (although reading through the technology he used when he did this, well, that's a different matter - I'd really like to see this redone with current abilities, and more data).

WC will live on in the face of this, the book discussed on the other thread, and any other future definitive compendia, simply because it is fun to figure it out yourself and bandy it about.

tom

p.s. Don't underestimate my ARness, Slack - I may just spend a minute today seeing how to database this...

tom

[Stuart]

I use databases and concordances in my area as well. (Chinese Language and Literature) One thing to bear in mind is that they only cover the data and information that they contain (obviously). Even in the ideal case where they included all surviving recorded works, there is little or no way to know what they left out and what the significance of the "unknown" (unrecorded) material is or was--for example, the intermediate steps in the line(s) of transmission of a phrase or line. The point is neither to be a strict empiricist or spend all your time speculating on all the unknown possibilities, but to use the tools with both eyes open, and to see them for what they really are.

Stu