The BLUR (Blues Lyrics Collected at the University of Regensburg) Corpus: Blues Lyricism and the African American Literary Tradition

The BLUR corpus, a computerized collection of more than 8,000 transcripts of pre-World War II blues recordings, is a powerful research tool which facilitates investigations into various aspects of the blues. This paper illustrates how an analysis of BLUR might deepen our insights into structural aspects of blues poetry and and its contribution to the African American literary tradition.