How to sin…99 different ways. In the 1920s, record companies found the Black audience could be profitable.

Record sales soared. Sex – disguised -was a major part of blues lyrics. Fish, flesh, fruit and fowl were all co-opted, as well as rent men and gas men, butchers and bakers, carpenters and coffee grinders, keyholes and kitchens, cigarettes and sissies, frying pans and furniture, and unkindly, a bicycle.

Here’s a raucous, red-blooded blues investigation of one of Humanity’s constant fixations, from artists like Julia Lee, Lonnie Johnson, Victoria Spivey, Roosevelt Sykes and many, many more.