A Thing Called the Blues: Blues Song Guide

This title points straight at one of the oldest and most self-referential tropes in the entire genre: blues songs that are about the blues itself, treating the feeling as a tangible, almost physical "thing" that visits, haunts, or follows a person around. Here are two real songs that best represent that theme.

The clearest blues-genre example of this self-referential move is T-Bone Walker's "Call It Stormy Monday" (commonly known simply as "Stormy Monday"), first recorded in 1947. Walker's lyric spends its first verses cataloguing the days of the week before landing on the admission that, whatever day it is, the feeling underneath is the same - the blues as a constant companion rather than a passing mood. Decades later, outside the blues genre proper but squarely on the same theme, Elton John's 1983 hit "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" did something structurally similar for a pop audience: naming the emotion, giving it a title, and treating the act of naming it as a small relief in itself. Both songs, in different idioms, are reaching for the same idea this title gestures toward.

That theme - the blues as an entity you can point to and name rather than just a scale or a chord progression - runs underneath a huge amount of the Southern California blues club repertoire covered elsewhere in this journal, including the swaggering self-assurance of "Cool Blues Walk," where the narrator has made peace with that "thing" enough to walk it off with style.

The idiom this title echoes, treating "the blues" as a visitor or a possession rather than just a mood, also runs through blues vocabulary more broadly: musicians and writers have long described someone as being "visited by the blues" or having the blues "catch up with" them, language that predates any single recorded song and shows up across decades of lyric writing, interviews, and liner notes. "Stormy Monday" earned a particularly durable place in that tradition partly because of its afterlife: it became a blues-jam standard covered by artists from Bobby "Blue" Bland to the Allman Brothers Band, each version treating Walker's original melancholy-into-acceptance structure as a template rather than a fixed script.

For legal listening on the verified songs discussed here, T-Bone Walker's catalog and Elton John's catalog are both widely and properly licensed on major platforms - Spotify, Apple Music, and official-label YouTube channels all carry legitimate uploads of "Stormy Monday" and "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" respectively.