Both blues and gospel are strongly formulaic in many respects. One area in which songs demonstrate the degree of originality necessary for them to become memorable to a particular audience is in the types of images to be found in their lyrics. This chapter is not therefore concerned with the description of everyday events, or the way narratives are created, but with the use of the imagination to render the commonplace in some way extraordinary.

Blues and gospel music belong to the oral tradition. Access to these lyrics can, therefore, be highly problematic. Record transcriptions present a great many difficulties both because of the condition of the often very rare records and the highly idiomatic articulation often employed. Early folklorists and publishers printed many lyrics from songs that were sung to them. The pioneer of recorded blues lyric analysis is Paul Oliver, but his 1960 Meaning in the Blues and his 1968 Screening the Blues contain only isolated stanzas. The same holds good for Samuel Charters in his 1970 The Poetry of the Blues. Paul Garon's surrealistic approach to blues lyricism in his 1975 Blues and the Poetic Spirit, while a controversial but stimulating effort, does not lay the groundwork for a comprehensive study.

To analyze the use of imagery in blues and gospel songs an accurate written corpus with complete transcriptions is required. In 1969 Eric Sackheim published his The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters. At the time this was a breakthrough publication and although the (complete) transcriptions in it are more than adequate, there are many lines in italics, which indicate phrases Sackheim could not hear.