Hello Corey,

I'm still studying "kind hearted Woman" and i was wondering about the lyrics? maybe you could hep me ?

A Kind-Hearted Woman shouldn't be a nice woman ? So why she studies evil ? In the first verse he said that she does anything in the world for him and then that she wants to kill him at the end... Does it means that even a nice woman wants to kill you ? Or Kind-Hearted is an ironic term ?

I know you told me to put my feeling of the moment in the song and not necesseraly try do "act" the subject of the song (wich is a good advise !) But this song's lyrics are "disturbing" me a little so i asked you how to you take the lyrics...

Thanks for help !

Cheers

JD

Hey JD,

I know you are asking Corey, but I thought I might take a shot at an answer. This song has always baffled me too. Check out Stephen Calt's 2009 book Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary. I'm not totally convinced by his definition of a kind-hearted woman (p. 143) as "a woman who caters to a gigolo in exchange for sexual fidelity," but I think it's in the ballpark. Calt does also include lyrics quoted from Lucille Bogan's "Kind Stella Blues" and Charley Patton's "It Won't Be Long" as well as Robert Johnson's "Kind-Hearted Woman," though I can't say I see a single, unambiguous use of the word kind between the three songs.

I'm guessing that kind-hearted is an idiom that means something like solicitous or ingratiating, also implying that someone is manipulative. Also, in all three songs - Bogan's included - the word is used to describe particular women in a way that is unflattering and, according to more contemporary moral values, sexist. There is nothing in the Oxford English Dictionary which suggests that the word kind in standard English can be used in this manner, but I think with this idiom it's an ironic use of the word, much like referring to something as bad when you mean really good, cool, or, as we say in Massachusetts, wicked awesome.

Anyway, I just thought I would have a go at an answer.... An answer, not THE answer, mind you.

Thanks for your enlightment JIm ! It help me a lot ! It's very hard to understand blues lyrics but this one seems very contradictory ! Now it's a little clear i'll buy this book i think ! I remmenber when i first read Miles Davis bio in english i didn't understand why all that great musicien was so "bad" or " bad motherfucker" then i realised that being so bad is being great ;)

thanks

JD

Cool JD. Yeah, reading and writing in a second language is difficult enough, and then you throw in people's regional vernacular from 80 years ago and it gets much more difficult to understand. The thing about blues lyrics is that there are always several layers of meaning below the surface. That's the real poetry of it.

I always thought kind-hearted woman was exactly what he meant...someone who is truly kind but has another side.  We men have all had experiences with women who can be the sweetest in the world when they are happy with you and the most wicked when they are not!  We all have that other side and I think that's what the song is about. 

Well you blow my mind Corey :) i have also thought of this but i was wondering if i was missing something. I love your explanation. It's the more philosophical one finally and the more realist. I agree with it and adopt it.

Thanks for your light Corey :) !

I got you Corey. That's the way I always understood the song, but I was always thrown off by the quick switch from "do anything in this world for me" to "studies evil all the time." In my own experience my wife is very steadily on the kind side, though our daughter, being very twelve, swings wildly back and forth like the wind shifting on water. It's pretty baffling actually, though in its own way fascinating.

Just a quick return to Calt's definition, though. He indicates that he got his definition from Skip James, presumably from one of his interviews. The only reason I question it is that I am not sure how he has interpreted what James actually said - in other words, since he did not directly quote James I am not sure the definition of kind-hearted woman isn't colored by Calt's own blind spots and prejudices. Some of what he wrote in his biography of Charley Patton is a bit F'ed up, so I tend to read his writing more critically than most.