Author: Debra Devi

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. In 1960, Willie Dixon wrote the powerful tune “Spoonful” for his friend and fellow Chess Records artist Chester Burnett, a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf. Wolf lent his earthshaking roar to many songs that Dixon wrote expressly for him,…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. In The Land Where the Blues Began, musicologist and producer Alan Lomax described a party in the Delta countryside late one sultry summer night. The party was in a little wooden shack and “from it came…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. Signifying in the blues refers to the use of innuendo and doubletalk that is fully understood only by members of one’s community. Countless blues lyrics use metaphor and innuendo to allow the singer to brag about…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. The blues shuffle is a beat based on swinging eighth-note triplets. It should sound like four sets of train wheels bumping along the rails. To play a shuffle, give the triplets a swing feel: ONE two-three,…

In the blues, to shuck means to exaggerate, lie or clown around. It may be derived from the Bantu word shikuka, which means to lie, bluff or fake. In From Juba to Jive, author and professor of African-American literature Clarence Major described shuck as “a variant of shit.” Shuck also means to remove the outer covering from something–the shell from an oyster or the husk from an ear of corn, for example. But in the blues, to shuck is to tell a tall tale. Former Blues Reveue editor-in-chief Andrew M. Robble was a close friend of the gifted Chicago blues guitarist…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. The shout, or ring shout, was a shuffling circle dance around a centerpiece of some kind–usually a table–performed by singing and clapping worshipers in the black Sanctified and Pentecostal churches of the South. In The Land…

This is the latest installment of our series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining, award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. The shimmy was a popular dance in Harlem’s Cotton Club in the 1920s. To dance the shimmy, women wiggled their shoulders back and forth to get their breasts moving from side to side. Eventually, the entire body would…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a share of the revenue that the tenant’s crops earn when the landowner sells them. Sharecropping or tenant farming kept European…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. In the 1800s, shank referred to the long shaft of the metal keys that were common at the time. When sharpened to a point, a key shank made a nasty weapon. Linguists speculate that this may…

This is the latest installment of our weekly series The Language of the Blues, in which author and rock musician Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s entertaining & award-winning glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Foreword by Dr. John) at Bluescentric.com. Also available as an eBook. Depending on the decade, there are many different meanings in the blues for shake, including a rent party (1920s), an erotic dance (1930s), or to extort or “shake down” someone (1940s). Shake is also slang for…