Entry · catalog no. 0033
back door man
/ ˈbæk dɔr ˌmæn /BAK dor MAN
n. · Mississippi Delta and Chicago · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The man a married woman is seeing, so called because he goes out the back while the husband comes in the front. A standing figure in blues lyric, treated less as scandal than as an arrangement everyone in the song understands, and sung from either side — by the man boasting of the position or by the wife defending the necessity of it.
“Every sensible woman got a back door man, and that was the whole verse.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Southern blues vernacular of the 1920s, carried north to Chicago with the Great Migration. Sara Martin recorded the figure in "Strange Lovin' Blues" in 1925, and it runs through Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell and Lightnin' Hopkins before Willie Dixon wrote the song that fixed the phrase: Howlin' Wolf recorded "Back Door Man" in Chicago in June 1960 with Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin and Fred Below, and Chess released it in 1961.
1925
Sara Martin's "Strange Lovin' Blues" carries the earliest documented use in recorded blues
1960
Howlin' Wolf records Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man" in Chicago in June
1961
Chess releases it as the B-side to "Wang Dang Doodle"
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Mississippi Delta and Chicago · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Southerners and Chicago blues audiences; the figure sung by both men and women
$BACKDOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded101 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1925
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
"Strange Lovin' Blues" — Sara Martin, 1925
audio · recording
■
"Back Door Man" — Howlin' Wolf, written by Willie Dixon, recorded June 1960, released Chess Records, 1961
audio · single
■
+ Cite a sourceBlues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues — Paul Oliver, Cambridge University Press
text · scholarship
See also