Hokum is a particular song type of American blues music—a song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make humorous, sexual innuendos. This trope goes back to early dirty blues recordings, enjoyed a huge commercial success in 1920s and 1930s, and is used from time to time in modern American blues and blues rock.
An example of hokum lyrics is this sample from "Meat Balls", by Lil Johnson, recorded about 1937:
Terminology
"Hokum", originally a vaudeville term used for a simple performance bordering on vulgarity, but hinting at a smart wordplay, was first used to describe the genre of black music in a billing of a race record for Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band (Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, 1929). After producing a big hit, "It's Tight Like That", with Vocalion Records (and its sequel) in 1928, the musicians went on to Paramount Records where they were called The Hokum Boys. Other recording studios joined the fray using similarly named ensembles. The application of "hokum" to describe the musical approach of these bands was fostered by Papa Charlie Jackson with his "Shake That Thing" (1925).
The term "hokum blues" did not become a formal designation of a style until 1960s. "Hokum" is also used to describe the low comedy acts that were used at the turn of the 20th century to lure audiences to musical performances. In the words of W. C. Handy, a veteran of a minstrel troupe, "Our hokum hooked 'em" outside the opera house, so that "ticket sellers would go to work".
Similar genres
Some of the hokum songs are also classified as belonging to the "dirty blues" subgenre of blues. Some sources treat hokum and dirty (also "bawdy") blues as interchangeable terms. However, music researchers point to differences: dirty blues were played before the appearance of hokum, the innuendo in the dirty blues is earnest and mature, while the hokum was full of sass and humor. The dirty blues are good for dancing the slow drag, while hokum, with its bouncy, ragtime-influenced songs is intended for more lively dance style typical for the “mischievous branch” of music (similar to lundu, maxixe, xote, samba).
Daniel Beaumont points to minstrel shows, vaudeville, and medicine shows as the origins of humor in blues. These genres influenced the classic and country blues, which in turn fed hokum in the 1930s. Hokum after its heyday influenced rhythm and blues in 1940s and Chicago blues in 1950s and 1960s.
Hokum in early blues
After the First World War, the fledgling record industry split hokum off from its minstrel show or vaudeville context to market it as a musical genre, the hokum blues. Early practitioners surfaced in jug bands performing in the saloons and bordellos of Beale Street, in Memphis, Tennessee. Light-hearted and humorous jug bands like Will Shade's Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers played good-time, upbeat music on assorted instruments, such as spoons, washboards, fiddles, triangles, harmonicas, and banjos, all anchored by bass notes blown across the mouth of an empty jug. Their blues was rife with popular influences of the time and had none of the grit and plaintive "purity" of blues from the nearby Mississippi Delta. Cannon's classic composition "Walk Right In", originally recorded for Victor in 1930, resurfaced as a number one hit 33 years later, when the Rooftop Singers recorded it during the folk revival in New York's Greenwich Village, and a jug band boom ensued once more.