But I'm cryin' hey baby, Honey don't you want to go Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago[13] Johnson sang this as the first verse and used it as the refrain.

Instead, he adapted the boogie piano accompaniments of Roosevelt Sykes to "Honey Dripper" and by Walter Roland to "Red Cross" to guitar.

One interpretation is that Johnson intended the song to be a metaphorical description of an imagined paradise combining elements of the American north and west, far from the racism and poverty inherent to the Mississippi Delta of 1936.

Music writer Max Haymes argues that Johnson's intention was "the land of California or that sweet home Chicago".

[17] Another suggests it is a reference to Chicago's California Avenue, a thoroughfare that predates Johnson's recording and which runs from the far south to the far north side of the city.

A more sophisticated and humorous interpretation has the narrator pressuring a woman to leave town with him for Chicago, but his blatant geographic ignorance reveals his attempt at deceit.

[1] "Sweet Home Chicago" is a popular blues standard for professional and semi-professional music artists and many of them have recorded it in a variety of styles.

[21] Steve LaVere, the manager of Johnson's recording legacy, commented, "It's like 'When the Saints Go Marching In' to the blues crowd".

In 1967, Chicago blues musician Magic Sam recorded a version for his influential album West Side Soul.

[24] Stephen Thomas Erlewine commented in an album review: He [Magic Sam] not only makes "Sweet Home Chicago" his own (no version before or since is as definitive as this), he creates the soul-injected, high-voltage modern blues sound that everybody has emulated and nobody has topped in the years since.

[27] President Obama began by describing the origins of blues in the South and added "The music migrated north – from Mississippi Delta to Memphis to my hometown in Chicago".