A music dictionary reveals blues clues

NEW YORK —  The music called the blues can express emotions with unmistakable clarity, but some of the words, whether sung by 1930s Mississippi Delta sharecroppers or big-city electric-guitar heroes, can be pretty obscure.

Hunting down the origins and meanings of those words was the mission of New Jersey rock musician and journalist Debra DeSalvo. The result, “The Language of the Blues,” is a witty, bawdy and fascinating dictionary.

In an interview, DeSalvo said the idea for the book came when she was an associate editor at Blues Revue magazine.

“Talking to a lot of artists, I realized there were a lot of words that I thought I knew what they meant,” she said. “You sort of assume you know what mojo means, or voodoo -- and you really don’t.”

She added, “I thought it would be really cool to investigate this and, more importantly, ask the artists directly what these words mean.”

Amply footnoted, “The Language of the Blues” draws on many scholarly and not-so-scholarly sources including interviews with musicians, among them Dr. John (Mac Rebennack, who also contributed the foreword), B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Bonnie Raitt and Robert Lockwood Jr.

All the entries, from “alcorub” to “zuzu,” cite musicians and songs that used the words. The book also includes many photographs of blues musicians past and present.