the Blues Concordance, aka Horse v. mule

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Quoting George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>:

> The on-line version of Michael Taft's concordance to blues lyrics is
> evidently not complete, or not reliable.  I looked for "fore-day
> creep" and found nothing under "fore-day", whether filed under F or
> under ' (as in "'fore-day").   But under "creep" I found a record by
> Barbeque Bob, 1927, with "fore-day creep".  The record title was given
> as "Fo-Day Creep" but the line was transcribed by Taft as "Fore...."

The problem is that the concordance index doesn't properly deal with the
apostrophe in "'fore-day" -- words beginning with apostrophes are alphabetized
at the very beginning of the index, before the A's:

http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/c1.htm#'FORE-DAY

If the index poses any problems, one can always just do a Google site search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:dylan61.se+fore-day


--Ben Zimmer