Hokum blues and sexual lyric codes

What scared white parents about R&B was often hokum: adult innuendo about sex via puns, not kids’ content. Hokum is not “Black-only”—Jimmie Rodgers’s *Pistol Packing Papa* (1930) sits in the same joke family—but racist panic mapped Black male singers singing sex onto myths about white daughters.

Titles could be blunt (*Sixty-Minute Man*, *Work With Me Annie*). When whites covered R&B chart hits for the pop board, sex often became dancing. Big Joe Turner’s *Shake, Rattle and Roll* cleaned up by Bill Haley left many listeners missing the original metaphors. Black artists experienced lyric scrubbing as unequal access. Race is already wired into the birth of rock’s marketplace. Next chapter: 1955–59, when the break actually happens.