Definin' the Blues

When I was 12 years old, I found a Count Basie album in my father's record collection that contained a 1941 performance of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Basie band. That was the record that made me fall in love with the blues—though it goes without saying that I couldn't understand all of the lyrics, especially when they touched on what for me was the still-unexplored land of adult relationships. I found the first stanza in particular to be impenetrably puzzling: Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you / There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do. What on earth, I wondered, was a "monkey woman"? Teetering as I was on the edge of puberty, I boggled at the exotic possibilities.

“As much as a method of music making, blues were a medium of language. ” Read the full excerpt from 'Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary'

On top of everything else, Mr. Calt's book answers a question that has vexed me at odd moments for the past four decades. No sooner did I open "Barrelhouse Words" for the first time than I turned to page 164, where I found this admirably concise definition of "monkey woman": "An overly obliging or compliant female." Now I can die happy.