WorldofBlues.com

Click play and have a listen to this song while you read this post.

A little while back I started fooling around with a database of over 141,000 blues recordings and found an amazing number of Willie Dixon songs had been recorded over the years (here is the link to that post). That gave me the idea to try to find the most frequently recorded blues song. So I asked my friends up on Twitter what they thought and got some good suggestions. I personally thought it was Hoochie Coochie Man as that had 984 recording occurrences when I did my Willie Dixon research.

I started with a list of popular blues songs and added the suggestions from my friends on Twitter then searched the database for the number of occurrences found of each song in the database of 141,000 CDs. Of the list of songs I used it turns out it thought the song that appeared most frequently in the database was Stormy Monday by T-Bone Walker with 1138 recording occurrences. But it turns out there was a very similarly named song – Stormy Monday Blues by Earl Hines that appeared 4 times in the database (I put that song at the end of the post for those who are interested.

But alas Stormy Monday (but Tuesdays just as bad) remains in the number 1 spot with 1134 recording occurrences found in the database. Number two is “Dust My Broom”. There is some contention as to who actually authored Dust My Broom, Robert Johnson or Elmore James. I’m including both versions here.

Here are the top 10 recorded blues songs in the database.

* I need to stress the database is not validated, may contain duplicates and other songs with similar titles may have been counted.

Thanks to all my twitter friends for the help. In thanks I’ve also compiled the list of all the other songs twitterers suggested. Here is that list.

I’ll do a more thorough analysis on the database later for now. Let me know if you think there is a song that should be on the list and I’ll check it out.

As promised here is Stormy Monday Blues by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine.