1927-1929United States / Chicago, Illinois

Hokum Blues

Also known as dirty blues, hokum

A compact, commercial blues fad from the late 1920s and early 1930s, hokum lives on through its playful recordings rather than a rigid scene or canon. The style’s best-documented center is Chicago, where Tampa Red and Georgia Tom made the formula click for a national audience.

Origins and context

Documented early commercial hokum centered on Chicago recordings by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, with roots in blues, ragtime, and vaudeville performance practice.

United StatesChicago, Illinois

The sound

Characteristics

Double-entendre lyrics
Comic banter
Syncopated blues piano
Guitar
Ensemble vocal interplay

History

Hokum emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a short-lived but influential blues fad, especially in Chicago recording circles. The Blues Foundation describes Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s 1928 recording of “It’s Tight Like That” as a prime example of hokum, and the Library of Congress notes that their music—blending blues, ragtime, and vaudeville with slyly suggestive lyrics—helped turn the style into a sensation. The label was never a neat, self-contained genre so much as a loose commercial mode: comic, sexually coded, and built for records, theaters, and streetwise popular appeal. It overlaps with vaudeville blues and dirty blues, and its biggest recordings circulated widely enough to influence later rhythm-and-blues and rock-era songwriting habits, even after the original fad faded.