When blues are performed, they often provoke laughter from an audience that identifies with the experience being described or that appreciates the novel way the experience is described. There are a number of humorous verses here that could be compared for the way they achieve their effects, from Bracey's hyperbole to Carter's prurience to Cox's unexpected assertiveness to the startling images of Wheatstraw and Lewis. Such a discussion would emphasize the idea that the blues, though often discussing sadness and hardships, contain a pretty fair amount of humor. An advantage to playing the songs for the students is that it allows them to hear how the various stanza structures are fit into the music. For instance, the lyrics of Childers and Wheatstraw are both sung to eight-bar musical stanzas, but the lyric patterns are different.
Students can discuss the advantages of one stanza over the other.
The selection from Margaret Carter is from a sixteen-bar vaudeville blues especially, but present in other kinds of blues as well. The rest of the examples included come from twelve-bar blues, but certainly the examples from Jefferson, Bracey, Cox, Robert Johnson, and Holmes are sufficiently different to indicate the possibility of diverse phrasing in the blues, even within what is sometimes considered to be a rather restrictive form. Students might be encouraged to take the first line of stanza two or six and generate an individual rhyme line that completes the thought in some kind of personal manner as a way of helping them understand how tradition has an effect on the individual blues singer. While some early commentary argued that the blues were often incoherent, more recently texts have been discussed as nonthematic, partially thematic, or thematic, and the presence of such associative linkages and contrasts is important to see and recognize as a textual strategy rather than an example of textual incoherence. Again, students can be encouraged to discern the associations among lines and stanzas the way they might be asked to do for poetry by Ezra Pound , T. S. Eliot , or Amy Lowell.