Big Long Slidin' Thing by Dinah Washington (1954)

Dinah Washington was called the Queen of the Blues and sang with a diction so precise that every word landed exactly where she put it, which is what makes her double entendres so devastating. Big Long Slidin' Thing, recorded for Mercury in 1954, is about a musician and his "instrument". She admires how he handles it, how it slides, how big and long it is, and the arrangement helpfully features the trombone in question, in case of legal enquiries.

The song sits in a tradition that runs through her career. She had already recorded Long John Blues, about a dentist and his "drill", and the technique never changed: pick an object, describe it accurately, and let the listener's mind do the rest. Washington never leered. She sounded amused, which is far more effective, and far more worrying for the trombonist.

Its afterlife is as the finest instrument-as-anatomy record there is, done with more elegance than anyone has managed since; The Who took the device into rock twenty years later with Squeeze Box, where the instrument belongs to her. With Long John Blues she is the only woman with two songs on this list. Recognition is low, which is a scandal.