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Blues Analysis Project


blues homepage art
Artist: Larry Poncho Brown

"Born under a bad sign, been down since I began to crawl. If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all"

- Albert King


Network showing our collections' song artists as they occur through the decades.

Artists are connected to each decade by one or more of their songs (represented by the connecting lines).

Our Bluesy Project Research

In honor of the many legends of the blues, our project team gathered our vast collection of blues lyrics from various foundational blues artists to conduct intriguing analysis on various aspects of the blues.

Our primary research questions include:

  • How many of the blues songs from our collection were written and performed by the same artist?
  • How many original songs are widely shared across many different perfomring artists?
  • What is the decade range of our blues song collection?
  • How many blues artists in our collection have written songs which outlived them, or at least their own performances?
  • Which artists and songwriters tend to be interconnected the most? (Performer/Songwriter relationship patterns)
  • Are there key words or phrases that tend to be used frequently across our collection of lyrics? What are they, and what are their origins or significance to the blues genre?