Please Warm My Weiner by Bo Carter (1935)

Armenter Chatmon, who recorded as Bo Carter, played with the Mississippi Sheiks and was one of the most prolific blues musicians of the 1930's, and he specialised in songs that would have got him arrested in most of the places that played them. Banana in Your Fruit Basket, Pin in Your Cushion, Ram Rod Daddy: the titles tell you everything, and the titles were the subtle part. Please Warm My Weiner, from 1935, is one of the few where the euphemism barely bothers to be one.

The record is a single guitar and a single voice, cut in a hotel room or a rented hall the way most blues of the era were, and it is far more musically sophisticated than its subject suggests. Carter was a gifted guitarist who played in unusual tunings and could make one instrument sound like a small band. That craft is why his records survived; the filth is why they were bought.

Its afterlife is the whole genre. The rock songs, the rap songs and the comedy songs on this list are descendants of the pre-war dirty blues, and Carter is its most direct practitioner: he registers a real, spoken word for the thing, which few of his blues contemporaries dared to do. Ninety years on, about 110 people a month still type the title into Google, presumably not all of them hungry.