Did John Lennon mumble, “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or, as Lennon maintained in interviews, the phrase was actually “cranberry sauce”? And would anyone reading this even blink an eye if you heard the words “fuck it” in a song today? Cranberry sauce! Of course, we hear what we want to hear sometimes.

The lyric “bucket” was heard as “fuck it,” and it is commonly thought to be the first use of the F-word in popular music. His 1938 cover of Louis Armstrong’s “Old Man Moses,” with Patricia Norman on vocals, caused a scandal for its wink-wink use of innuendo. Thus far, credit goes to the super clean-cut American pianist Eddy Duchin.

This is a verse from the Art Gilliam:įinally, while we will never know where the word cocktail actually comes from, who was Jack the Ripper, or where all of your lost socks have gone, so, too, may we never learn who dropped the first F-bomb in a song. The lyrics span from the mildly suggestive to the direct. It’s been covered by such artists a Janis Joplin, Dave Van Ronk, Willie Nelson, and Hot Tuna, among many, many others.

The song is a jug band standard and is also played as blues and sometimes as Western swing. Adaptations of the lyrics vary widely, though typically the refrain is recognizably consistent. Handy as “Hesitating Blues.” Because the tune is traditional, many artists have taken credit as writer, frequently adapting the lyrics of one of the two published versions. One song that may have started out as a raunchy tune in clubs but underwent bowdlerizing when it was published and recorded was “Hesitation Blues.” One version was published by Billy Smythe, Scott Middleton, and Art Gillham. Nobody would dispute the “copulatin’” nature of songs like “New Rubbin’ on That Darned Old Thing” by Oscar’s Chicago Swingers, “Shave ’Em Dry” by Lucille Bogan, or “Hot Nuts” and “Buck Naked Blues” by Lil Johnson, but they were usually on sale as “party records” not meant for radio play. While there were many more less discreet songs out there, they were rarely heard on air. However anyone swore in real life, cussing, cursing, or just “potty-mouth talk” did not really begin to make its way into the recording booth until the late 1960s. This is to say that although the songs were deemed vulgar or subversive, actual profanity-or “sweary” language, if you will-was still a rare bird. This content, though, was generally regarded for its subject matter and not necessarily for the language used in expressing the ideas. Although the earliest indictments of these genres were aimed primarily at the music itself, it was not really until the 1950s that songs were being banned for their lyrical content. In 20 th-century America, ragtime, jazz, rock, and later punk and rap, all bristled against the accepted music of their times. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote, “Forms and rhythms in music are never altered without producing changes in the entire fabric of society.” He also said, “No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death,” so it’s better that we stick with his take on music. This post originally appeared on Strong Language, a sweary blog about swearing.

I swear song writer