Barton on Winehouse

It's so easy to lose the Winehouse plot, but Laura Barton articulates precisely why I'm sorry we lost Amy Winehouse.

"It was often noted that Amy Winehouse's music harked back to another age — to the heydays of Motown and soul, R&B, jazz, girl groups and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound; it was there in the brass, in the impeccable period production and the sublime smoke and burnish of her voice.

But it was a quality that seeped into her words too, into the lyrics that nodded not to her contemporaries, but to the work of early female blues singers such as Big Mama Thornton and Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. These were songs sometimes written by the blueswomen themselves and occasionally contributed by male songwriters (JC Johnson for example, who wrote Smith's Empty Bed Blues and Waters's You Can't Do What My Last Man Did), but that took a female perspective – tales of hound dogs and backdoor men, coffee grinders, deep sea divers, and of love lost, deserted, thrown out and taken back again.

Pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehouse's lyrics revealed something mulchier, messier. Here was a woman who refused to conform – not in the eccentric mad woman in the attic mould of Kate Bush or Björk, but a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and sing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing, drink and drugs and dicks, songs that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question: "What kind of fuckery is this?"

She sang openly of female desire – not the squawky, shrill sexuality of Sex and the City and Ann Summers, but something truer, more physical, more serious. She sang about the ache of the body, the need for emotion, the distracting allure of a man's shoulders, shirt, underwear. "When he comes to me, I drip for him tonight," she sang on I Wake Up Alone. "Drowned in me, we bathe under blue light."

She frequently gave her songs a familiar, almost domestic setting, a world of kitchen floors, chips and pitta, Tanqueray and Stella. "I'm in the tub, you on the seat," she sang on You Know I'm No Good. "Lick your lips as I soak my feet/ Then you notice likkle carpet burn/ My stomach drops and my guts churn." It was a verse that started off like a Degas painting, naked and intimate and warmly erotic, but swiftly dissembled into something sad and messy and ruined.

And this, too, was key to Winehouse's lyrics – she gave you an image and then quickly swiped it away, a honeyed love scene soon dissolved into wretchedness; over the course of an album it gave the impression of a life of instability, lived from one ramshackle lurch to the next.

But there were constants – namely addiction and passion, the flaming five-storey fire of love she always returned to in Love Is a Losing Game, the ferocious, proprietorial female strength of Some Unholy War, the mind fogged by drugs and love and desire. In Back to Black's great tangle of pride and neediness we found a melding of the two: "You love blow and I love puff," she sang. "And life is like a pipe/ And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside."

The other constant presence was of self-recrimination and remorse. In her lyrics Winehouse seemed to show how she screwed things up – how she should never have played the "game" of love in the first place, of "teasing" her self-esteem, and of "this regret I got accustomed to". In Tears Dry on Their Own she gives herself a stern talking-to: "I cannot play myself again, I should be my own best friend," she warns. "Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men."

She had a special knack in her lyrics, a trick, a twist that made her songs often startlingly truthful; each composition would contain at least a line, an image, a turn of phrase that seems to shuck the song open."