Bessie Smith – the incomparable Empress of the Blues - was a woman of big appetites: A voracious bisexual with a chaotic personal life, spent mostly on the road, and a lyrical gift for bawdy innuendo. The line in Empty Bed Blues that goes: “He boiled my first cabbage and he made it awful hot, when he put in the bacon, it overflowed the pot,” isn’t about the pleasures of making stew. If the title is to be taken literally then even sloppy seconds are off the menu.

In the same song, Bessie mentions her itinerant lover’s job as a deep sea diver, his talent for holding his breath and his “stroke that can't go wrong.” She also alludes to a lesson he gave that left her sore from the elbow down.

An extraordinarily unguarded interview that Chris Albertson recorded with Ruby Smith (Bessie’s niece) offers a fascinating glimpse into the world that informed these lyrics. The highlight of these reminiscences (which you can find in the 5th volume of Bessie’s complete recordings) involves a visit to a buffet flat, which according to Ruby was “nothing but faggots and bull dykers... an open house... everything goes on in that house.” In this spirit she goes on to describe how her advances towards a bisexual gentleman, who she had watched pleasuring another man, were turned down on the grounds that it wasn’t a fish day.

Somehow the wonderful lexicon of coded double-meanings that filled the songs of Bessie Smith and other jazz and blues artists of the times fell into disuse. The modern-day equivalent is witless nonsense like The Black Eyed Peas’ - My Humps – a listening experience on par with the over-sexed, hormonal cackle of an intoxicated, middle-aged hen party. It’s the song that all men dread being played at family gatherings in case their mother gets up and dances to it.

We could do with a few more euphemisms of the kind that populated Bessie Smiths best work:- A counter to the bare-faced confessional whose frankness is supposed to shock but no longer does. Something with a bit more poetry than Britney Spears' disingenuous, Secondary School playground chant - If You Seek Amy.

Bessie once sang: “I need a little sugar, in my bowl, I need a little hot dog, between my rolls.” Thanks to my antiseptic, middle-class upbringing I keep my sugar sealed inside a tall Tupperware container, where it will be safe from the attention of ants. “I need a little sugar in my airtight plastic box” lacks the implied carnality that she was able to wring out of a lyric. Only an ardent Clingfilm fetishist would be aroused.

Still, I dream of a world where girl groups sing of their longing for some locally-sourced organic carrots for their casseroles; where the winner of The X Factor invites listeners to glaze her line-caught, wild Alaskan salmon with a soy and Manuka honey reduction. A world where scowling, lemon-sucker - Thom Yorke - stops whining about the machinations of the government long enough to locate his mojo, and write a song in which he begs his woman to squeeze his un-waxed, ‘taste the difference’ lemon until the juice runs down his leg.

Please suggest other contemporary euphemisms that song writers might use in their lyrics. Do try to keep things superficially decent.