And what names and lines, words and melodies, records and improvisations of the new race blues! Plaintive blues, jolly blues, reckless blues, dirty dozen blues, mama blues, papa blues,—more than six hundred listed by one publisher and producer. Here they are—the workaday sorrow songs, the errant love songs, the jazz lyrics of a people and of an age—as clearly distinctive as the old spirituals. And how like the road songs and the gang lines, straight up from the soil again, straight from the folk as surely as ever came the old spirituals.
Samples of the growing list of blues, some less elegant, some more aggressive, will be found in [Chapter II]. And of course we must not forget the bad man blues: Dangerous Blues, Evil Blues, Don’t Mess With Me Blues, Mean Blues, Wicked Blues, and most of all the Chain Gang Blues, Jail Blues, and the Cell-bound Blues.
All boun’ in prison,
All boun’ in jail,
Col’ iron bars all ’roun’ me,
No one to pay my bail.
And the singer presents, as one of his standard versions of many songs, a regular weekly calendar:
Monday I was ’rested,
Tuesday I was fined,
Wednesday I laid in jail,