Hay varias voces del new grove

Blues.

A secular, predominantly black American folk music of the 20th century, which has a history
and evolution separate from, but sometimes related to, that of jazz. From obscure and largely
undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all
traditional music types. It has been subject to social changes that have affected its character.
Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development
of Western popular music (see POPULAR MUSIC; POP).

1. Definition.

The most important extra-musical meaning of ‘blues’ refers to a state of mind. Since the 16th
century ‘the blue devils’ has meant a condition of melancholy or depression. But ‘the blues’
did not enter popular American usage until after the Civil War; and as a description of music
that expressed such a mental state among the black population it may not have gained
currency until after 1900. The two meanings are closely related in the history of the blues as
music, and it is generally understood that a blues performer sings or plays to rid himself of
‘the blues’. This is so important to blues musicians that many maintain one cannot play the
music unless one has ‘a blue feeling’ or ‘feels blue’. Indeed, the blues was considered a
perpetual presence in the lives of black Americans and was frequently personified in their
music as ‘Mister Blues’. It follows that ‘blues’ can also mean a way of performing. Many jazz
players of all schools have held that a musician’s ability to play blues expressively is a
measure of his quality. Within blues as folk music this ability is the essence of the art; a
singer or performer who does not express ‘blues’ feeling is not a ‘bluesman’. Certain qualities
of timbre sometimes employing rasp or growl techniques are associated with this manner of
expression; the timbre as well as the flattened and ‘shaded’ notes (produced by microtonal
deviations from standard temperament; see BLUE NOTE) so distinctive to the blues can be
simulated, but blues feeling cannot, so its exponents contend.

As the blues was created largely by musicians who had little education and scarcely any of
whom could read music, improvisation, both verbal and musical, was an essential part of it,

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though not to the extent that it was in jazz. To facilitate improvisation a number of patterns
evolved, of which the most familiar is the 12-bar blues (see BLUES PROGRESSION).
Apparently this form crystallized in the first decade of the 20th century as a three-line stanza
in which the second line repeated the first, thus enabling the blues singer to improvise a third,
rhyming line while singing the second:

I’m troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.

I’m troubled in mind, baby, feelin’ blue and sad.

The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad.

This structure was supported by a fixed harmonic progression, which all blues performers
knew: it consists of four bars on the tonic, of which two might accompany singing and the
fourth might introduce a flattened seventh; two bars on the subdominant, usually
accompanying singing, followed by two further bars on the tonic; two bars on the dominant
seventh, accompanying the rhyming line of the vocal part; and two concluding bars on the
tonic. Such a progression could be played in any key, though blues guitarists favoured E or A
and jazz musicians B♭. Many variants exist, but this pattern is so widely known that ‘playing
the blues’ generally presupposes the use of it.

The term ‘blues’ is also used to identify a composition that uses blues harmonic and phrase
structure but which is intended to be performed as written, such as Dallas Blues (1912) by
Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett, among the first to publish the form, or St Louis Blues (1914)
by W.C. Handy. There are numerous compositions that are in no way related to blues but that
bear the name, among them Limehouse Blues (1924) by Douglas Furber and Philip Braham.
Published compositions in blues form, while at first bringing a new sound to a larger
audience, contributed much to the confusion about the nature of blues as folk music, and
helped to link the term with jazz. This association with jazz retarded blues research and the
independent consideration of its origins, traditions, forms and exponents. Only since 1960 has
it been extensively discussed in its own right.

2. Origins.

In its early years the blues was wholly African American. It has been suggested that it existed
before the Civil War, but this view has no supporting evidence. Influential in its development

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were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a
responsorial ‘leader-and-chorus’ form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but
to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken
up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction
era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended
smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping.
Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or ‘hollers’, comparatively free
in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the
holler (see FIELD HOLLER).

Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden
on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even
encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong
traditions of string playing, predominated. The jelli, or griots – professional musicians who
also acted as their tribe’s historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike
those of the later blues singers, while the banjo is thought to be a direct descendant of their
banza or xalam.

In the 1890s the post-Reconstruction bitterness of southern white Americans towards the
black community hardened into segregation laws; this in a sense forced the latter to recognize
their own identity, and a flowering of black sacred and secular music followed. Ballads in
traditional British form extolling the exploits of black heroes (e.g. John Henry, John Hardy,
Po’ Lazarus and Duncan and Brady) were part of this musical expansion, and blues emerged
from the combination of freely expressive hollers with the music of these ballads. Few blues
were noted by early 20th-century collectors, but those collected frequently had a four-line or
rhyming-couplet form. Some of the ballads popular among black singers, for example
Railroad Bill, Frankie and Albert, Duncan and Brady and Stack O’Lee, had a single couplet
with a rhyming third line as a refrain. In blues the ‘couplet’ consisted of one repeated line;
See, See Rider, Joe Turner Blues and Hesitating Blues were among the earliest songs of this
type.

At first the blues was probably only a new song form in the repertory of the black songster
(see SONGSTER (II)), the titles providing a theme for a loose arrangement of verses (e.g.
Florida Blues, Atlanta Blues and Railroad Blues). Many songsters and early blues singers in
the South worked in medicine shows, street entertainments promoted by vendors of patent

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medicines. Their travels helped to spread the blues, as did those of wandering singers who
sang and played for a living. They followed the example of the street evangelists who at that
time were popularizing gospel songs. Preferring the guitar to the banjo as an accompanying
instrument, the songsters represent a link between the older black song tradition and the blues.
By the 1920s the blues singer, who sang and played only blues, began to replace the songster.

Blues songs had no fixed number of stanzas, and the inevitable return to the tonic after the
stanza’s third line gave shape to long improvisations. The ballad singers had concentrated on
the exploits of legendary black heroes, but blues singers sang of themselves and those who
shared their experiences. Many stanzas rapidly became traditional and certain images or lines
entered the stock-in-trade of every blues singer. But the inventive singer expressed his
anxieties, frustrations, hopes or resignation through his songs. Some blues described disasters
or personal accidents; themes of crime, prostitution, gambling, alcohol and imprisonment are
prominent in early examples and have persisted ever since. Some blues are tender but few
reveal a response to nature; far more express a desire to move or escape by train or road to an
imagined better land. Many are aggressively sexual, and there is much that is consciously and
subconsciously symbolic of frustration and oppression.

3. The 1920s: first recordings.

The earliest forms of blues were not the first to be recorded. Mamie Smith’s recording of
Crazy Blues (OK/Phonola) in August 1920 brought a popularized form to a large audience;
Smith was a stage performer, and her blues, accompanied by a jazz band, were sung in
vaudeville fashion. They set the pattern for numerous recordings by Edith Wilson, Sara
Martin, Clara Smith and many other black singers, most of whom were professional
entertainers working with touring shows on theatrical circuits such as the Keith-Orpheum, or
the circuit of the Theater Owners Booking Agency, which managed black artists. Among
them were singers whose songs were blues in name only; but others had a deep feeling for the
new idiom, including Lottie Beamon from Kansas City, Missouri, and Ma Rainey from
Athens, Georgia, both stocky women with powerful voices, as well as Ida Cox from
Knoxville, Tennessee, who was much admired for her nasal intonation. But the ‘Empress of
the Blues’, as she came to be called, was Bessie Smith from Chattanooga, whose majestic
recordings set a standard that few could emulate.

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Many of these so-called classic blues singers came from the South or from border states and
had heard rural singers whose blues they borrowed. Published blues, which had been
available for some years, were performed with jazz-band accompaniment to audiences in
northern cities. With Papa Charlie Jackson’s Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues (Para.), recorded
with banjo accompaniment in 1924, the recording industry began to make known the songs of
the country tradition. Jackson’s style and technique were those of the songsters, but Long
Lonesome Blues (1926, Para.), by Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, had the authentic
sound of rural blues.

Mississippi has been popularly regarded as the birthplace of blues and has been the source of
many of the earthiest, least sophisticated recordings. Many Mississippi singers were guitarists
who played a heavily accented accompaniment to their frequently guttural and always
expressive singing. The most influential blues singer from the state was Charley Patton, who
initiated a school of singer-guitarists on Dockery’s plantation, near Clarksdale, before World
War I. He influenced Tommy Johnson from the Jackson area, and they represented distinct,
though linked Mississippi styles: Patton, Son House and Henry Sims, and their successors,
Tommy McClennan and Bukka White, performed with deep, ‘heavy’ voices and strong,
persistent rhythms, while Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Bo Carter and the related Chatmon
family used more complex, lighter rhythmic patterns and sang in higher voices, sometimes
using falsetto for final syllables. Bo Carter and the Chatmons had a string band called the
Mississippi Sheiks which played blues and other forms of country music and was a link with
the earlier songster tradition. In Memphis, north of the Mississippi delta region, similar bands
were formed in which a jug was often played as a bass instrument (see JUG BAND and
WASHBOARD BAND). Ensembles using improvised instruments to augment strings were
started in many small towns, most notably in Memphis.

The Texas approach to blues was exemplified by Blind Lemon Jefferson. His words were
original and often poetic:

Sittin’ here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?

Sittin’ here wondrin’, will a match-box hold my clo’s?

Ain’t got so many matches, but I got so far to go.

This was one of the many images he created that passed into general usage. Rambling
Thomas followed his use of the guitar as an expressive ‘second voice’ answering the words of

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the long vocal lines. Alger Texas Alexander was so close to the holler tradition that he did not
play an instrument, but on his best recordings he was accompanied on the guitar by Lonnie
Johnson from New Orleans, who worked in Texas, or George ‘Little Hat’ Jones from San
Antonio.

Mobile units, notably those of Columbia, Victor and Okeh, made field recordings of many
singers who would otherwise have remained unknown. Some singers made few recordings,
perhaps giving a false impression of their abilities. As only a few centres were used, vast
areas of the South were unrepresented: hardly any recordings were made in the 1920s in
Alabama, Arkansas or Florida. In Atlanta, Georgia, a school of 12-string guitar players with
rich voices was recorded: among them were Barbecue Bob Hicks, his brother Charlie Lincoln,
Curly Weaver, Peg Leg Howell and Blind Willie McTell. Several of them employed a knife,
bottleneck or other slide to press the strings against the frets of their guitars. Some tuned their
guitars to an open chord, producing a ‘cross-note’ tuning, which enabled them to press the
slide against all the strings while playing a blues sequence. By moving the slide along the
frets, whining, mournful sounds in keeping with blues feeling could be produced. This
adaptability of the guitar made it a favourite instrument of blues singers.

Of the early southern singers only a few women were recorded. Among them were the
powerful-voiced Bessie Tucker from Texas whose songs were largely about prison, and
Lucille Bogan (Bessie Jackson) from Birmingham, Alabama, who sang robust blues about
prostitution and lesbianism. The most notable was Memphis Minnie who, in Big Bill
Broonzy’s words, ‘played the guitar like a man’. These women were admired for the
masculinity of their musical attack: traditional femininity was replaced by a bragging
sexuality.

4. Piano blues and the northern migration.

The shadings and inflections of the blues can be obtained relatively simply on a guitar, but the
blues pianist can produce the effect of blues grace notes and glissandos only by ‘crushing’ the
keys (striking adjacent keys not quite simultaneously) and the effect of blues rhythm only by
syncopation and strongly accented rhythmic phrases. Blues piano style may have derived
partly from ragtime: the form known as BARRELHOUSE has similarities to improvised rags.
Many blues pianists from Texas and Louisiana played in the makeshift lumber-camp saloons

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where barrelhouse style originated; among them was Little Brother Montgomery, who was an
exponent of the Vicksburg Blues (1930, Para.), a standard basis for extemporization with a
climbing bass figure. His contemporary from Arkansas, Roosevelt Sykes, recorded it in 1929
under the alternative name of 44 Blues (OK).

Bass figures were important in the development of piano blues; the walking bass of broken or
spread octaves repeated through the blues progression provided the ground to countless
improvisations. Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport’s recordings, including Cow Cow Blues
(1928, Bruns.), illustrate facets of the early piano blues that were unified in the playing of his
protégé, Pine Top Smith, who popularized the name BOOGIE-WOOGIE. Both went to
Chicago from the South, as did hundreds of other blues singers, pianists, guitarists and other
instrumentalists in the decade after World War I. The many immigrants forced up rent prices
in Chicago and Detroit, and pianists played for beer and tips at ‘rent parties’ organized for
mutual aid in the tenements. These became schools for other pianists, among them Meade
‘Lux’ Lewis and Albert Ammons.

The many blues teams formed in Chicago included that of the pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey
and the guitarist Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker), who were both from Georgia and had
worked with Ma Rainey. The combination of blues and vaudeville experience led them to a
vein of ‘hokum’, a combination of rural wit, sly urban sophistication and bawdiness; it was a
new type of blues, entertainment without serious intent, which mildly ridiculed country
manners while helping southern immigrants to adjust to urban life. With Big Bill Broonzy,
another member of the Hokum Boys, Georgia Tom and Tampa Red managed to go on making
recordings when the financial crash of October 1929 stopped most blues recording.

5. 1930s blues.

In the early 1930s the most popular blues singer was Leroy Carr, a pianist who was
accompanied with uncanny rapport by the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Their approach had a
strong southern character, but their lyrics had a considered, reflective quality, coloured by
disappointment rather than bitterness and reflecting the mood of many of their listeners. Carr
was widely copied, and his classic performances, such as How Long, How Long Blues (1928,
Voc.) and Midnight Hour Blues (1932, Voc.), were recorded by numerous singers, even in the
1970s, long after his death in 1935. The fatalism of his works is also found in those of his

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principal imitator, Bumble Bee Slim (Amos Easton), and of Walter Davis, a pianist based in
St Louis. Both had somewhat flat voices and a far less impassioned delivery than that of the
previous generation of blues singers. Many of the 1930s blues are characterized by a fatalism
prompted by the difficulties of the Depression. Several singers of this period were based in St
Louis, midway between North and South, and their blues reflected both southern and northern
attitudes. Although he was still recording in 1934 (the year of his death), Charley Patton in
Mississippi was already outdated, and 16 titles he made that year remained unissued. His
generation of Mississippi bluesmen, including Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey and Son
House, was still active but unrecorded; the cooler, less emotional singers of the younger
generation had taken over. So it is perhaps surprising that a singer such as Sleepy John Estes
from Brownsville, Tennessee, with a country guitar and cracked voice, singing extremely
parochial lyrics, should have been as extensively recorded as he was. He had a counterpart
further east in Tennessee and the Carolinas in Blind Boy Fuller, a street singer with a coarse-
grained voice and ragtime guitar style. He was accompanied by a brilliant harmonica virtuoso,
Sonny Terry; Estes was no less sympathetically supported by his own harmonica player,
Hammie Nixon.

6. Urban blues.

In Chicago the tough conditions of the 1930s stimulated a more defiant, extrovert blues sound
and collective performance. Tampa Red recorded some 200 titles in the decade, augmenting
his plangent guitar with the heavier sound of his Chicago Five band. Its personnel varied but
generally included Black Bob or Blind John Davis playing the piano, with other instruments
such as tenor saxophone or trumpet taking the lead. A new departure in blues, it was followed
by Big Bill Broonzy, the undisputed leader of Chicago folk music in the 1930s. Broonzy’s
groups were always subordinate to his singing and immaculate guitar playing, but he was the
centre of a school of urban singers of southern origin, including his reputed half-brother
Robert Brown, known as Washboard Sam. Sam’s washboard playing was matched by his
loud, rough voice, and he and Broonzy often played in groups. They were frequently joined
by John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson, a highly influential harmonica player with a distinctive
‘tongue-tied’ voice who recorded extensively under his own name, and William ‘Jazz’
Gillum, who also played the harmonica. Together they created an outgoing, topical form of

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blues that did not lose its sense of contact with those newly arrived from the South, though the
sound was essentially that of Southside Chicago.

In contrast to these developments in urban blues, a new generation of ‘down-home’ singers

from Mississippi, with a style firmly rooted in the Patton-House tradition, began to be
recorded as the decade came to a close. Their blues were coarser and fiercer than that of their
predecessors and provided a powerful stimulus for the blues in the early 1940s, when the
JIVE music of Louis Jordan and his contemporaries was shifting the emphasis of the blues
with humorous novelty pieces intended only as entertainment. These later Mississippi singers
included Tommy McClennan, Robert Petway, Bukka White and above all Robert Johnson
(iii), who had the most lasting influence on the evolution of the blues. While still in his early
20s (1936–7) he recorded some 30 titles shortly before his death; these highly introverted,
sometimes obsessive blues, with a whining guitar sound and throbbing beat, made a profound
impression even on singers who recorded more than 20 years later. If one artist epitomized the
range of performance and attitudes of the blues in the 1930s it was probably Broonzy, but the
most memorable creations came from the singing and playing of Carr and Johnson.

7. Postwar blues.

Until the end of World War II the recording of blues had been controlled by a few large
companies, but in the late 1940s small companies, many with black proprietors, started
commercial production. Some were in southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, some on
the West Coast, where a smooth style of blues created by westward-moving migrants from
Texas found a new market. New concerns also operated in Chicago and Detroit, so the
combined output of blues records was considerable. Until then blues recordings had been
classified and marketed in sales catalogues as ‘Race’ records (see RACE RECORD). This
segregation contributed to the development of postwar rhythm and blues, a term free of racial
connotations. Rhythm-and-blues encompassed many kinds of blues and related music, from
the soft-toned West Coast blues of Charles Brown to the technically brilliant guitar playing of
T-Bone Walker. But, like the related rock and roll, it encompassed much else besides,
including the harmonizing of the rhythm and blues quartets, the popular, nostalgic, blues-
based vocals of the New Orleans pianist Fats Domino, the frenetic performances of Little
Richard and the witty lyrics of rock and roll singers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

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Of postwar blues singers among the most notable was Muddy Waters. His early manner (as
seen in his Chicago recordings of 1947) owed much to Robert Johnson, but he soon added a
harmonica (Little Walter) and a piano, guitar or drums to fill out the sound, as the Broonzy-
Williamson groups had done. In the 1950s his music became increasingly threatening, with
hoarse singing, slow blues-boogie piano playing by Otis Spann and the complementary
warbling harmonica of Little Walter, Walter Horton or James Cotton. With all instruments
amplified, the live sound was highly charged, and the recordings sold in large numbers.
Muddy Waters’s principal rival was Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett) – romantic sobriquets
were still expected of blues singers. Howlin’ Wolf developed a ferocious and energetic style,
shown for instance in Smokestack Lightnin’ (1956, Chess). He derived much of his style from
Charley Patton, whereas Robert Johnson inspired Elmore James, who was in many ways the
archetypal postwar Chicago blues singer. James was technically quite limited, depending on a
bottleneck slide and rhythms formulated by Johnson; he sang in a taut, constricted voice and,
like many singers of his generation, paid more attention to projection and volume than to
content and subtle expression. This reflects a general change in the relationship of the blues
singer to his audience: though ‘blues’ still signified both music and mood, there was greater
emphasis on performance to audiences, and lyrics became more stereotyped and less personal
to the singer.

Many other southern blues singers were popular in the 1950s, among them John Lee Hooker,
who left Mississippi to settle in Detroit and developed his own heavily accented guitar
technique. Another was Jimmy Reed, whose loose vocals against insistent rhythms set him
somewhat apart from his contemporaries but made him very popular with black audiences. In
Texas, Lightnin’ Hopkins extended the tradition of Blind Lemon Jefferson, dominating blues
in that state. Even when the young, more urban singers from Memphis, Bobbie Bland and
Little Junior Parker, settled in Texas to work and record, Hopkins did not lose his pre-
eminence.

8. Blues and the white audience.

Though blues was without doubt of African American origin, it was adopted by a number of
white hillbilly and country artists, who began recording blues in the 1920s. Some were
imitators, but a few were innovators, like Chris Bouchillon who created the ‘talking blues’
with a spoken narrative. The Allen Brothers sang blues in harmony while, in the 1930s, the

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popular country singer Jimmie Rodgers often recorded his ‘blue yodels’. Though Woody
Guthrie sustained the ‘talking blues’ form, white blues singers were few in the 1940s, the
blues being perceived as in decline. Within jazz criticism blues had been treated with some
respect, though it was seen as a precursor of jazz rather than as a distinct musical style with a
parallel evolution. Leadbelly, though primarily a songster, was widely acclaimed in New
York in the 1940s among jazz enthusiasts and mourned at his death (1949) as ‘the last of the
blues singers’. This of course was not the case, not even in jazz itself, for the blues singers Joe
Turner and Jimmy Rushing continued to sing in jazz groups, and blues recordings were
prominent in rhythm-and-blues in the 1950s. When Big Bill Broonzy went to Europe in the
early 1950s he too was seen as a rare survivor of the blues tradition; he helped to stimulate the
growing interest in blues by the publication of his autobiography (1955). Soon after his death
(1958) the team of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry went to Europe, and during the 1960s a
succession of blues singers visited Britain and the Continent; some remained, among them the
pianists Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, Curtis Jones and Champion Jack Dupree.

In 1959–60 the first serious studies of blues were published and field trips for research were
undertaken, largely by Europeans. During the following years strenuous efforts were made to
find forgotten or unrecorded blues singers, with the result that Fred McDowell, Robert Pete
Williams, Mance Lipscomb and Robert Shaw were recorded for the first time, while
Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Son House and others were
rediscovered. Many veteran singers toured Europe, where they played to large and
enthusiastic audiences. Skiffle, a quasi-country blues band music, had a fleeting popularity in
Britain when Broonzy was alive, and the later visits of blues singers, the publication of many
studies and magazines on the subject, the availability of recordings and the consciousness of a
‘generation gap’ (which seemed to parallel the segregation of black people in the USA) all
contributed to the emergence of British pop and rock groups whose early work was strongly
influenced by blues. Of these the Beatles were the best known, but the Rolling Stones, the
Animals and the Who owed more to blues. Blues-based pop music was loud, heavily
amplified and augmented with sound-distorting devices; the performers were extravagantly
dressed, and deliberately challenged established pop music (see BLUES-ROCK). A similar
movement followed in the USA, where the young musicians were, theoretically, closer to
blues artists. Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and the group Canned Heat depended closely
on postwar blues based on the Chicago style.

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9. Conclusion.

The kindling of white interest in black music always presaged or coincided with a departure
from the idiom by the black population; when blues gained white enthusiasts it lost black
audiences. Some singers, for example Otis Rush and J.B. Hutto, retained their integrity as
artists, taking day-time jobs and performing in clubs when they could. Fortunate blues singers
toured American universities; others returned to truck driving or growing crops. In black
America soul music predominated, with its gospel techniques and some element of blues
expression. Few blues singers retained their audiences in the soul era; the most prominent was
B.B. King, an articulate, expressive, technically accomplished guitarist with a large following.
His namesakes Albert King and Freddie King worked in a similar vein, appearing at the large
open-air concerts of the 1970s. Other singers of a younger generation, including Buddy Guy
and Junior Wells, used the vocal techniques and stage mannerisms of soul singing, but they
too were most successful performing at universities. In the mid-1970s there were only a few
blues singers working steadily, and their audiences were mainly white, though the blues had
gained an international following, and blues singers were sponsored by the State Department
for tours in Africa and Asia. A few black singers, notably Taj Mahal, departed from a
sophisticated popular style to find some satisfaction in traditional blues, but they cannot be
said to represent the culture in the sense that Jefferson, Carr, Johnson or Muddy Waters once
did. By 1980, however, soul-blues singer-guitarists such as Johnny Copeland, Z.Z. Hill and
Robert Cray were welcomed. Meanwhile, blues had become international, with white blues
bands in most European countries, and blues being played in Japan and South-East Asia. It
had also become background music to television commercials and features. Appropriated in
this way it entered a new phase, being no longer African American, but a part of the currency
of global popular music.

Assessment of the importance of the blues in 20th-century American folk music has often
been made in relation to jazz or to pop music. As a music of the people it had its minor artists,
but within the extensive corpus of recordings there are innumerable examples of folk
compositions of genius and beauty, expressions of the human spirit that are both profoundly
moving and complete in themselves as creative works. It is a music that will increasingly be
valued in its own right. Blues singers and musicians extended the expressive range of the
guitar, piano, harmonica and human voice and evolved many musical substructures within the
framework of a recognizable and distinct idiom. Blues was also important as the primary
artistic expression of a minority culture: it was created mainly by black working-class men

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and women, and, through its simplicity, sensuality, poetry, humour, irony and resignation
transmuted to aggressive declamation, it mirrored the qualities and the attitudes of black
America for three-quarters of a century.

Bibliography

A Pre-Blues, Proto-Blues. B Early Blues History. C Blues, Post-War. D Content and

Analysis. E Discography and Biography – Reference.

A: Pre-blues, proto-blues

H.W. Odum and G.B. Johnson: The Negro and his Songs (Chapel Hill, NC, 1925)

R. Blesh: Shining Trumpets: a History of Jazz (New York, 1946, enlarged 2/1958/R),
chaps.4–6

H. Courlander: Negro Folk Music U.S.A. (New York, 1963/R)

P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London, 1970)

T. Russell: Blacks, Whites and Blues (London, 1970)

P. Oliver: Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (London, 1984)

A. Lomax: The Land Where the Blues Began (London, 1993)

B: Early blues history

S.B. Charters: The Country Blues (New York, 1959/R)

L. Jones: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963)

S. Charters: The Bluesmen (New York, 1967–77/R1991 as The Blues Makers)

P. Oliver: The Story of the Blues (London, 1969/R, 2/1997)

G. Oakley: The Devil’s Music: a History of the Blues (London, 1976)

S.B. Charters: Sweet as the Showers of Rain (New York, 1977)

R. Palmer: Deep Blues (New York, 1981/R)

D.D. Harrison: Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)

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W. Barlow: Looking Up at Down: the Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989)

B. Basatin: Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana, 1986)

T. Russell: The Blues, from Robert Johnson to Robert Gray (London, 1997)

C: Blues, post-war

P. Oliver: Conversation with the Blues (London, 1965, 2/1997)

C. Keil: Urban Blues (Chicago, 1966/R)

C. Gillett: The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll (New York, 1970, 3/1996)

W. Ferris: Blues from the Delta (London, 1971)

M. Rowe: Chicago Breakdown (London, 1973/R)

J. Broven: Walking to New Orleans: the Story of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues (Bexhill-
on-Sea, 1974)

M. Haralambos: Right On: from Blues to Soul in Black America (London, 1974/R)

J. Demêtre and M. Chauvard: Land of the Blues (Paris, 1994)

D: Content and analysis

P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: the Meaning of the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)

P. Oliver: Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (London, 1968/R)

H. Oster: Living Country Blues (Detroit, 1969)

R. Middleton: Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972)

P. Garon: Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London, 1975/R)

P. Oliver: ‘Blue-Eye Blues: the Impact of Blues on European Popular Culture’, Approaches to
Popular Culture, ed. C.W.E. Bigsby (London, 1976), 227–39

J.F. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977)

D. Evans: Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, 1982)

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D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music
(Manchester, 1987)

G. van Rijn: Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson,
MS, 1997)

E: Discography and biography – reference

M. Leadbitter and N. Slaven: Blues Records: January 1943 to December 1966 (London, 1968,
enlarged 2/1987–94 as Blues Records: 1943–1970) [discography]

P. Oliver: Blues entries, Jazz on Record: a Critical Guide to the First 50 Years: 1917–1967,
ed. A. McCarthy and others (London, 1968) [listeners’ guide]

R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich: Recording the Blues (London, 1970)

S. Harris: Blues Who’s Who: a Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (New Rochelle, NY,
1979/R)

P. Oliver: Blues off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary (Tunbridge Wells, 1984)
[collection of previously pubd items]

R.M.W. Dixon, J. Godrich and H.W. Rye: Blues and Gospel Records, 1892–1943 (Oxford,
1997) [discography]

J. Cowley and P. Oliver: The New Blackwell Guide to Blues Records (Oxford, 1997)

Paul Oliver

____________________________________________________________

Blues.

A secular music with roots in African American folk forms, which arose in the Southern
United States and became internationally popular in the 20th century. It has formed an
integral part of jazz, R&B, rock, and to a lesser extent country music. The content and
definitions of blues have changed to fit shifts in musical fashions, technologies, performance
styles, and audiences, but it has maintained its own identity and evolutionary history. With its
deep roots and broad influence, blues is widely regarded as the foundation for nearly all later
American popular forms. (See AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC; BLUES ROCK;

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COUNTRY MUSIC; JAZZ; POP; POPULAR MUSIC; RHYTHM-AND-BLUES; ROCK;
SOUL MUSIC.)

1. Definition.

The most limited definition of blues is as a specific sequence of chords, the “12-bar blues,”
which consists of four measures of the tonic (I), two measures of the subdominant (IV), two
of the tonic, one of the dominant seventh (V7), one of the subdominant, and two of the tonic
(see BLUES PROGRESSION). There are also 8- and 16-bar blues forms, which may have
preceded the 12-bar pattern historically, and many blues songs follow none of these patterns.
But the 12-bar form is what musicians mean if they simply agree to “play a blues.”

A looser definition is based on mood: before the word was attached to a musical style, to have
the blues or to feel blue designated a state of sadness or melancholy. This usage was
widespread in the United States by the mid-1800s, and it continues to be part of many
people’s definition of the musical genre. It is not clear when or where the word became
associated with certain kinds of songs or instrumental pieces, but the first 12-bar blues
published as sheet music, in New Orleans in 1908, connected the music to the emotional state
in its title: “I Got the Blues.” Many blues songs and performances are upbeat and cheerful, but
slow songs, whether mournful, soulful, or sexy, have continued to be considered the deepest,
most representative form of blues.

A further definition involves West African tonal and rhythmic practices, which were retained
with modifications by African American musicians. These include frequent use of slides
between notes and microtones, especially hovering around the flatted third and seventh notes
of the European major scale—the so-called “blue notes” (see BLUE NOTE (I)). These tonal
particularities have often been described as giving the music a mournful sound, and hence at
times overlap the emotional definition. Jazz musicians in all periods have been judged by
their ability to convey a “blues feel,” meaning both to comfortably execute these subtle tonal
shadings and play “behind the beat” in a relaxed relationship to a song’s rhythm, and also to
give their listeners a powerful emotional experience. This ability has been connected by many
musicians and scholars to an African American ethnic or cultural heritage, to the point that
there have been acrimonious debates about the degree to which people who are not African
American can convey a true blues feeling. The word has also been extended to non-musical

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forms, such as poetry or novels with a profound linguistic or cultural connection to African
American traditions.

The final definition is the least satisfying to musicologists, but also by far the most
widespread, and encompasses aspects of all the others. It is simply: whatever listeners,
performers, and marketers have understood to be part of the genre. This definition has
changed over the years, as styles and artists have been added to or dropped from the canon,
and there is little agreement on exactly what music it comprises in any period. Conceptions of
a typical blues performer have ranged from a black woman with a deep, rich voice, singing in
front of a small jazz group to an old black man with an acoustic guitar growling rough lyrics
on a dusty Southern street corner to a young white man playing a searing electric guitar solo
in a rowdy Texas bar. Nonetheless, many historians now choose to use this cultural definition
rather than insisting on precise musical qualities, and consider blues to be whatever a
substantial audience understood the word to mean in any particular period or region.

2. Origins.

Although there is no evidence that the word “blues” was applied to a musical style before the
first decade of the 20th century, by the late 1800s there were songs being played throughout
the Southern United States that most current historians would consider varieties of blues.
Sometimes called pre-blues or proto-blues, these were adapted from earlier African American
styles, including group work songs and the so-called moans or field hollers (see WORK
SONGS and FIELD HOLLER). Work songs frequently used the “call-and-response”
approach common in many African traditions, whereby one person sings a line and a group of
singers respond, either echoing the same line or with a repetitive chorus. Though such singing
became less common in secular contexts as machines replaced work gangs, call-and-response
remained a staple of African American religious singing, which has always overlapped and
influenced secular styles. In blues, the vocal call-and-response was reshaped into an
interchange between a singer and an instrument, played either by the singer or by an
accompanist. Bessie Smith’s 1925 recording of “St. Louis Blues,” accompanied by Louis
Armstrong, is an example of how the standard 12-bar form and the most common blues lyric
pattern (a line repeated twice and answered by a rhyming third line) are divided into three
call-and-response phrases, each taking up four bars. Smith starts: “I hate to see the evening
sun go down”; Armstrong plays a relaxed melodic response. Smith repeats, “I hate to see the

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evening sun go down”; Armstrong plays a series of slow, drawn-out notes. Smith completes
the thought: “It makes me think I’m on my last go ’round”; Armstrong plays a final passage
leading into the next verse.

The moans or hollers gave blues much of its tonal, timbral, and dynamic flavor. Sung a
cappella and generally by a single singer, they were slow, free-form vocal improvisations
without fixed melodies or measures, and often without words. Making frequent use of
melisma and microtonal slides, hollers influenced both blues singing and instrumental
performance. As a result most of the common blues instruments either do not have fixed
pitches (“slide guitar,” played by sliding a metal or glass bar along the strings) or allow an
adept performer to bend notes (trumpet, saxophone, harmonica, guitar), capturing this vocal
flavor, and blues pianists frequently use grace notes and “crunch” adjoining keys to create the
illusion of slides and microtones.

Vocal styles were the strongest influence on blues, but African and European stringed
instrument traditions also played a significant role. African slaves in the United States were
generally forbidden to play drums, leading to the disappearance or dilution of the African
drumming traditions, but slave owners permitted and even encouraged the playing of stringed
instruments. West Africa has widespread stringed instrument traditions, including
professional musicians such as the jelli or griots, who act as historians and social
commentators in the more centralized societies, and herdsmen and village amateurs playing to
amuse themselves or their friends. Slaves made banjos and fiddles based on models played in
Africa, and also adapted African playing techniques to the European violin and later the
guitar. Black musicians performed not only for their compatriots but also for European
Americans—virtually all the music played for dances on southern plantations was played by
slaves—and assimilated a wide repertoire of European instrumental music.

With the rise of minstrel shows in the 1840s, African American “plantation melodies” and
banjo and fiddle techniques entered the popular music mainstream. Minstrel songs and styles
developed by professional composers and entertainers, both Euro- and Afro-American, were
also recycled back into black rural tradition, beginning a process of cultural and musical
interchange that would continue into the early blues era and beyond.

Vernacular and rural music was rarely recorded before the 1920s, and folklorists were more
interested in lyrics than in melodies, so much of the prehistory of blues is based on conjecture.
Some historians consider it simplistic to view blues as a purely African American style, since

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the southern fiddle repertoire shows an intimate intermixing of tunes and techniques from
Africa and the British Isles, and British ballads and early blues songs were widely sung by
white and black southerners alike. However, African American vocal and instrumental
performance retained distinctive characteristics that came to new prominence with the
popularity of blues, and in the early 20th century blues songs and styles were universally
viewed as coming from African American tradition.

The songs most commonly recalled as early or proto-blues included versions of “Make Me a
Pallet on Your Floor,” “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “Alabama Bound,” and
“Hesitation Blues.” Only the last of these was a 12-bar blues, and such songs were not yet
regarded as part of a separate musical genre. They were performed by singers, pianists, dance
bands, guitarists, and fiddlers throughout the South, and depending on the setting might be
thought of as ragtime, hoedowns, dancehall tunes, or simply uncategorized songs and
instrumental pieces. In retrospect, some historians have attempted to distinguish between
“songsters” such as Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas and Mississippi John Hurt, who sang
blues alongside a wide range of other material, and blues musicians (see SONGSTER (II)). In
practice, virtually all musicians until at least the 1940s played a variety of styles at live
performances and this distinction may owe more to what survives on record than to broader
patterns of musical performance.

3. Early blues: publishing and recording.

In the fall of 1912 the publication of “Dallas Blues,” “Baby Seals Blues,” and “The Memphis
Blues” brought the style to the attention of a broad national audience. The first two songs
were already being performed in vaudeville shows (the latter by an African American song
and dance man named Baby Seals), while “Memphis Blues” was the first publication by W.C.
Handy, a Memphis bandleader. “Memphis Blues” became a major hit, in part due to its
adoption by America’s most famous dance instructors, Vernon and Irene Castle, who made it
the accompaniment to their version of the foxtrot. Handy went on to write many blues hits,
including “St. Louis Blues,” and opened a publishing office in New York that specialized in
blues numbers.

From 1913 to 1920 over four hundred songs were published that had “blues” in their titles,
and many more were associated with the blues style and performed by singers and bands in

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dance halls, vaudeville theaters, and cabarets. Interest increased in the later teens with the rise
of jazz. The first article on jazz as a musical style, published by the Chicago Tribune in 1915,
was titled “Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues,” and the national jazz craze was sparked by the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues,” an instrumental
using the 12-bar chord progression.

Much of the material published as blues in the teens could as easily be classified as ragtime,
depending on the performance: the same song may be considered ragtime if played as a perky
foxtrot by a northern dance band, but blues if sung by an artist like Bessie Smith. Since the
only recordings of blues from this period were made by urban dance bands and white
vaudeville singers, it is thus hard to get a clear sense of what proportion of blues before the
1920s would meet modern definitions of the genre.

The first significant blues record by an African American singer was Mamie Smith’s “Crazy
Blues,” made for the OKeh company in August, 1920. Smith was a vaudeville performer who
had not previously been associated with blues and she recorded the song at the behest of Perry
Bradford, Handy’s main rival as a blues composer and publisher. Its success inspired record
manufacturers to present separate lines of material targeted at African American consumers,
which became known as RACE RECORDS. For the next five years the overwhelming
majority of these records featured female singers, often known as “blues queens.” They were
generally accompanied by a pianist or a small jazz group, and their style is sometimes known
as “classic blues” in an analogy to European concert music, or as “vaudeville blues.”

Ma Rainey Georgia Jazz Band, c. 1924-25.The first wave of blues queens included Ethel
Waters, Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter, and Edith Wilson. Although Waters was already
known in black vaudeville for her blues work, these singers were versatile artists who were
popular with northern audiences and recorded blues because that was what the record
companies wanted. This focus shifted with the appearance of Bessie Smith’s “Down Hearted
Blues” in 1923. Smith was from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and her voice had the timbre and
accent of the Deep South. She could sing other pop styles, but blues was her specialty, and
she opened the door for a wave of southerners who shared her moaning, soulful sound,
including Clara Smith (known as “the Queen of the Moaners,” and no relation to Mamie or
Bessie), Ida Cox, Sippie Wallace, and Ma Rainey. Rainey, known as “the Mother of the
Blues,” was the oldest of these singers, and claimed to have named the style in the first
decade of the century. Both her musical approach and her material at times reflected rural

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sources, with banjo or guitar accompaniment and titles like “Bo-weevil Blues.” In general,
though, she performed in the mainstream vaudeville style, wearing elegant costumes and
backed by jazz musicians. Indeed, the blues queens were the first major jazz singers, and
influenced not only later vocalists but also brass and reed players.

4. Down home blues.

In 1924 a New Orleans-born six-string banjo player named Papa Charlie Jackson became the
first male singer successfully to challenge the recording monopoly of the blues queens.
However, his records had a novelty, minstrel-show flavor, and self-accompanied men would
not make a serious impact on the national blues market until Blind Lemon Jefferson began
recording in 1926. Jefferson was a Dallas street singer with a huge voice and a quirkily
virtuosic guitar technique. His repertoire consisted largely of 12-bar blues that mixed original
lines with “floating verses” adapted and recycled by multiple singers, along with hollers,
spirituals, and ragtime dance pieces. By vaudeville standards he sounded raw and
unprofessional, but to a lot of listeners that rawness was an asset. His records were advertised
with the rubric “down home,” as the sound of the rural South, and set off a wave of what has
come to be known as “country blues.”

Jefferson’s success surprised race record marketers, and for the next few years they combed
the South for other unlikely stars, preserving a more varied and idiosyncratic range of artists
than in any other period of blues. Most were singers accompanied by their own guitars, with
sometimes an additional harmonica or fiddle. Though often classified as country blues artists,
many were based in urban centers such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Memphis, and were
professional entertainers, working as street musicians, at picnics and rural “juke joints,” or
with touring medicine shows. Their repertoires ranged from old rural songs to recent pop hits,
but the record company scouts concentrated on their blues material and urged them to
compose new pieces that fit the current blues trends. Later historians have tended to divide
these artists into three regional categories: the Piedmont (the Carolinas, Georgia, East
Tennessee, and Virginia), Mississippi (specifically the Delta region between Jackson and
Memphis), and Texas.

The Piedmont was home to the South’s oldest African American communities, and its players
continued to perform a lot of pre-blues material and brought a ragtime flavor to their blues

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work. Popular Piedmont artists included Peg Leg Howell, who often worked with the fiddler
Eddie Anthony; Barbecue Bob; and in the 1930s Josh White and Blind Boy Fuller. Blind
Blake, reportedly born in Jacksonville, Florida, and based in Chicago, was the most
influential Piedmont player, with a light, conversational singing voice and intricate guitar
style related to ragtime piano, showcased on records such as 1927’s “Wabash Rag.” Atlanta’s
Blind Willie McTell recorded for multiple companies under various pseudonyms, preserving
a varied repertoire including comic monologues, ragtime, gospel, and blues, with 12-string
guitar accompaniments that ranged from infectious dance rhythms to haunting, holler-
inflected slide lines.

Texas was largely populated by relatively recent immigrants from across the South, and as a
result had no single unifying style, though many of its guitarists relied on a monotonic bass
rather than the alternating bass notes favored by Piedmont players. Aside from Jefferson, the
most prominent singer was Texas Alexander, who did not play an instrument and retained an
exceptional degree of field holler phrasing, especially on free-form improvisations such as
“Levee Camp Moan.” Another prominent Texan, Blind Willie Johnson, sang only gospel
music, but his records sold widely and his exceptionally fluid, voice-like slide style
influenced blues guitarists across the South.

In Mississippi, Charlie Patton was the central figure of a group of distinctive players based in
the central Delta region. Locally famed for his showy live performances, Patton sang in a
gruff, dramatic voice and his guitar arrangements on recordings such as 1929’s “Screamin’
and Hollerin’ the Blues” demonstrated an unsurpassed rhythmic control and complexity.
Patton’s partners and followers included Tommy Johnson, noted for his warm voice and
swooping falsetto yodel; Son House, an awesome singer and the region’s finest slide guitarist;
and later players including Booker (Bukka) White, Robert Johnson, Tommy McClennan and
Muddy Waters. Although these players had relatively little impact on the early race record
market, their work formed the foundation of the electric Chicago style of the 1950s and was
thus exceptionally influential on later blues and rock. In the 1920s and early 1930s, though,
the region’s most successful artists were the Mississippi Sheiks, who combined blues guitar
and singing with country fiddling, and Bo Carter (brother of the Sheiks’ fiddler Lonnie
Chatmon), who made a specialty of double-entendre “party blues.”

Many down-home blues recordings were also made in Memphis. Older artists such as Frank
Stokes and Jim Jackson mixed blues and pre-blues styles, while the Memphis Jug Band and

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Cannon’s Jug Stompers specialized in rowdy, good-time music. Such jug or washboard
bands, featuring guitars, harmonicas, and various home-made instruments, had a vogue in the
late 1920s and early 1930s that inspired imitators as far away as Chicago and New York (see
JUG BAND and WASHBOARD BAND).

5. Pianists and urban blues.

Recordings are the best surviving guide to the music of the 1920s and 1930s, but they were
less influential in this period than in later years and are not necessarily representative of what
was being played in live venues. While the down-home recording trend favored guitarists,
pianists were the most popular players in African American barrooms and honky-tonks
throughout the South. Pianos were less common in rural areas than guitars and fiddles, so
whereas guitarists generally mixed blues with older folk songs, pianists were more often
influenced by urban ragtime and Tin Pan Alley styles.

With its loud volume, the piano was an ideal solo instrument for noisy barrooms or dances.
The most rurally-identified blues piano style was known as “barrelhouse,” a reference to the
makeshift lumber-camp saloons of Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi where it thrived (see
BARRELHOUSE). Barrelhouse players were not necessarily virtuosos, since their main
function was to provide a powerful beat, but the best players combined intricate bass rhythms
with bright treble riffs. Little Brother Montgomery and Roosevelt Sykes, who worked from
New Orleans to Chicago and influenced many Mississippi pianists and guitarists, were known
for pounding dance pieces and a distinctive slow blues arrangement that Montgomery
recorded as “Vicksburg Blues” and Sykes as “44 Blues.”

Among blues piano’s most important contributions was its propulsive bass patterns. Charles
“Cow Cow” Davenport’s 1928 recording of “Cow Cow Blues” popularized a widespread
barrelhouse theme that would be a key component of boogie-woogie, a style that seems to
have acquired its name with the success of Pine Top Smith’s 1929 record, “Pine Top’s
Boogie-Woogie” (see BOOGIE-WOOGIE (I)). This approach was refined and expanded by
players in Chicago and elsewhere in the urban Midwest, including Jimmy Yancey, Meade
Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. Performing in speakeasies and at apartment
“rent parties” where black urbanites circumvented the Prohibition-era liquor laws, they
created distinctive, repetitive bass figures to back improvised right-hand riffs and melodies.

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The period from the teens through the 1940s saw the “great migration” of African Americans
out of the rural south, pushed by harsh conditions and the mechanization of agriculture and
pulled by the promise of better jobs and a less racist social climate. Both hopeful emigrants in
the South and new immigrants in the North turned increasingly to musical styles that reflected
life in the black neighborhoods of northern cities. The trendsetting urban blues artist, Lonnie
Johnson, was based in St. Louis and began recording in 1925, just before the wave of down-
home singers. His sound was hip and urbane, featuring mellow, conversational vocals, guitar
solos that earned him a reputation as the father of jazz guitar, and lyrics spiced with sexual
double-entendres and references to gangsters and violence.

For a couple of years, Johnson had this style pretty much to himself, but in 1928 two records
appeared that redefined the blues market. Leroy Carr’s “How Long—How Long Blues” and
“It’s Tight Like That” by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom both featured light-voiced singers
backed by piano and guitar, and defined the twin poles of the urban approach. Tampa Red
was an innovative slide guitarist whose single-string leads were widely imitated, and Thomas
“Georgia Tom” Dorsey had been Ma Rainey’s bandleader and pianist and would become the
pioneering composer in modern gospel music. But what made “It’s Tight Like That” a hit was
its slangy title, rollicking feel, and bawdy lyrics. Covered and copied by dozens of artists, it
spawned a comic style known as “hokum,” favored by Chicago studio bands like the Hokum
Boys and the Harlem Hamfats.

Carr played his share of hokum, but had his greatest success as the defining master of the late-
night blues ballad. Sensitively accompanied by the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, he was a
blues equivalent of pop crooners like Bing Crosby, taking advantage of the new intimacy
provided by electronic microphones and phonographs. He was also an exceptional lyricist,
and his introspective “Midnight Hour Blues” and “When the Sun Goes Down” became blues
standards. Carr was by far the most widely imitated male blues singer of the era, influencing
artists as disparate as Robert Johnson, the Ink Spots, and the gospel pioneer R.H. Harris, and
inspired later generations of R&B and soul balladeers.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression forced a drastic cut-back in
recording. The race records market may have been less affected than mainstream pop, since it
did not face similar competition from the virtually all-white programming available for free
on radio, but both blues queens and down home players virtually ceased to be recorded. The
new record stars were reliable studio performers in the hokum or ballad styles, mostly based

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in St. Louis and Chicago. The balladeers included Bumble Bee Slim, Walter Davis, and Peetie
Wheatstraw, who was particularly appreciated for his rich voice and the raw lyrics that went
with his nickname, “The Devil’s Son-In-Law.”

In Chicago, a shifting cast of musicians became studio regulars, backing one another and
releasing the results under the name of whoever was singing. Big Bill Broonzy played guitar
on hundreds of records, was equally comfortable singing hokum or ballads, and composed
standards such as “Key to the Highway.” Kokomo Arnold played frantically fast slide guitar
and punctuated his vocals with a biting falsetto yodel, notably on his much-covered 1934 hit,
“Milk Cow Blues.” John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson created a band-oriented harmonica
style, playing horn-like riffs between his vocals on upbeat numbers like his 1937 debut,
“Good Morning, Little School Girl.” Casey Bill Weldon mixed blues slide guitar techniques
with the shimmering vibrato of the Hawaiian style. Pianists Blind John Davis, Black Bob, and
Memphis Slim created solid backgrounds, with the latter breaking out in the 1940s as an adept
singer and composer. Though condemned by some rurally-oriented historians as overly
commercial and formulaic, these artists shaped the blues combo approach that would form the
foundation of later electric bands.

Though female singers no longer dominated the field, Memphis Minnie was one of the most
successful Chicago artists, an excellent guitarist who brought sharp, nasal vocals and wryly
hip humor to compositions like “Bumble Bee” and “Me and My Chauffeur.” Lil Johnson and
Georgia White also had success with hokum material.

The market for these artists expanded dramatically after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
Thousands of new bars installed jukeboxes, and by the end of the decade some estimates
suggest that more than half the records sold in the United States went into public machines.
The rowdy boogies and late-night whiskey ballads of the urban blues artists were ideally
suited to this market. In particular, black and white patrons alike turned to blues for rowdy
party lyrics they could not hear on the radio. A Louisiana pianist and singer named Speckled
Red had set a new standard for bawdy blues in 1929 with “The Dirty Dozens,” Roosevelt
Sykes followed with “Dirty Mother Fuyer,” and by the mid-1930s a huge proportion of the
blues market was devoted to such themes.

6. The 1940s: swing, amplification, and jump blues.

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Jazz and blues had drawn somewhat apart in the 1920s as dance orchestras expanded to suit
the demands of the large Prohibition-era ballrooms and adopted a more arranged, classically-
influenced approach. That changed in the 1930s, when a wave of swing bands turned to blues
to reinvigorate the jazz repertoire. The most important figure in this renaissance was William
“Count” Basie, whose Kansas City orchestra made its mark with 12-bar blues, including its
riff-driven theme, “One O’Clock Jump,” and slow numbers like “Goin’ to Chicago Blues,”
featuring Jimmy Rushing’s full-throated vocals. The Kansas City sound spread throughout the
Midwest, then to both coasts, and the biggest blues hits of the later 1930s and 1940s tended to
come from swing bands. Typical examples range from Earl Hines’s “Jelly Jelly” with singer
Jimmy Witherspoon and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s “Cherry Red” with the Cootie Williams
orchestra to Benny Goodman’s “Why Don’t You Do Right” with Peggy Lee and Tommy
Dorsey’s instrumental “Boogie Woogie.”

The combination of blues singers with large orchestras was made possible by the new
technology of electronic amplification. Though singers like Kansas City’s Big Joe Turner
were noted for their ability to shout over a full band, the microphone meant that anyone could
make him- or herself heard, and many adopted the more intimate, lighter-voiced approaches
pioneered by Ethel Waters and Leroy Carr. When Billie Holiday hit in 1939 with “Fine and
Mellow,” she inspired a new wave of blues queens including Dinah Washington, the most
influential female blues stylist of the next two decades. Washington combined Holiday’s
intimacy and improvisational daring with a fuller, throatier vocal timbre developed as a
teenaged church singer. Her first hits were hip swing numbers with Lionel Hampton’s
orchestra, but after going solo she increasingly brought gospel melisma and phrasing into her
blues work, shaping an approach that would be adapted by later R&B and soul singers such as
Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.

Jukeboxes and amplification both made it easier for small groups to compete with big bands,
whether on records or at live appearances. As a result, there was an increasing overlap
between what was played by swing orchestras and blues combos. Louis Jordan, an alto
saxophonist with Chick Webb’s Savoy Ballroom orchestra, formed a tight combo called the
Tympany Five in the late 1930s and updated the hokum approach with sax and trumpet solos
and hipster jive lyrics. Though not limited to blues, Jordan got his biggest hits with 12-bar
numbers including “Caldonia” (1945) and “Choo-Choo Ch’Boogie” (1946), and his style,
which became known as “jump blues,” evolved into the hard-driving rhythm and blues of the
early 1950s.

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As World War II brought a mass migration of young African Americans to the West Coast to
work in the ship-building industry, Los Angeles became the center of a new urban blues
movement. Nat “King” Cole and his trio set the pattern for the local style in 1941 with a 12-
bar ballad, “That Ain’t Right.” Their combination of swinging piano, jazzily sophisticated
electric guitar, and whispery vocals was picked up by Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, whose
“Drifting Blues” in 1945 launched the career of the defining ballad singer of the rhythm-and-
blues era, Charles Brown.

The West Coast artists tended to come from Texas and Oklahoma, and their urbane approach
drew on a variety of southwestern influences, from the down home styles of the 1920s to
Western Swing, the first music to regularly feature electrically amplified guitars. T-Bone
Walker, a smooth singer in the Leroy Carr mode, shaped a new vocabulary of blues guitar by
combining jazz harmonies and phrasing with a gritty down-home tone, and became a national
star with records such as the enduringly popular “Call It Stormy Monday.” Walker can be
considered the father of modern lead guitar, and was soon joined by Pee Wee Crayton and
Oakland’s Lowell Fulson, who added gospel-flavored vocals. The Los Angeles scene also
nurtured the upbeat jump combos of brothers Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and pianist-singers
including the smooth balladeer Ivory Joe Hunter and Amos Milburn, noted for wry drinking
songs like 1950’s “Bad, Bad Whiskey.” The West Coast sound dominated the blues market of
the late 1940s, and as it was picked up and adapted by eastern artists such as B.B. King,
shaped the mainstream of later blues.

7. Chicago, Memphis, and electric blues.

At the turn of the 1950s, popular music in the United States was in an unprecedented state of
flux. The combined effects of wartime upheavals, a two-year recording strike by the
American Federation of Musicians, the incursions of television, and the arrival of lighter, less
breakable vinyl records encouraged entrepreneurs all over the country to start small “indie”
record companies, challenging the dominance of the New York-based major labels. Many of
the indies specialized in niche markets such as “hillbilly” and “race music,” which in 1949
were given new genre labels by Billboard magazine: “country and western” and “rhythm-and-
blues.”

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The small labels were looking for sounds that would give them an edge on the majors, and as
a result were willing to take chances on artists who might otherwise have been considered too
primitive or old-fashioned for the current blues market. The first to make a national impact
were Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston and John Lee Hooker, a transplanted Mississippian living
in Detroit, who were often accompanied only by their guitars, sang in deep southern accents,
and kept “country time,” expanding and contracting musical measures to fit the mood of the
moment. In 1949, Hooker got a number one R&B hit with “Boogie Chillen,” an unrhymed
monologue spoken over a loping, repetitive guitar rhythm.

In Chicago, the Chess record label became a prime showcase for the new down home sound.
Its defining star, Muddy Waters, transformed the rural Delta style of Son House by
amplifying his slide guitar to ferocious volume, then added the innovative harmonica player
Little Walter and a full rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums. Waters’s work was
distinguished by his deep, soulful voice, uncanny control of tone and rhythm, and sure taste in
sidemen, but the fusion of older styles with electricity was picked up across the South.
Though they soon moved to Chicago, Elmore James had his first hit in 1951 while still in
Jackson, Mississippi, with a slide-powered reworking of Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom,”
and Howlin’ Wolf first recorded in Memphis. Wolf eventually became Waters’s main rival,
known for his gruff voice, awesome stage presence, and primal, one-chord compositions like
1956’s “Smokestack Lightnin’.”

Little Walter was a generation younger than Waters and Wolf, and his harmonica style owed
as much to Louis Jordan’s saxophone riffs as to rural traditions. His “Juke,” a chart-topping
instrumental in 1952, revolutionized perceptions of the instrument, which had previously been
regarded as a toy or novelty. Using amplification to expand the range of tones and techniques,
Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (born Aleck Miller, and not to be confused with the John Lee
Williamson who recorded in the 1940s) and Big Walter Horton reshaped the harmonica into
one of the most evocative and familiar blues instruments.

B.B. King, 1986Though “Chicago blues” is often used as a generic term for the electric blues
band style, the most influential artist in this format was B.B. King, a Mississippian based in
Memphis. King mixed the grit and emotion of the down-home tradition with the melisma-
heavy vocal style of the new gospel quartets, jump combo backing, and the jazz-inflected
guitar innovations of the West Coast players, inspiring both Memphis-based peers like Bobby
Bland, Albert King, and Little Milton and a younger generation of Chicagoans including Otis

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Rush, Buddy Guy, and Magic Sam. In 1965, King’s Live at the Regal album brought this
sound to a broader audience of jazz and rock fans, earning him the title, “Ambassador of the
Blues,” and his guitar approach has been echoed by virtually every major electric soloist since
the 1960s.

8. Rock ’n’ roll, the blues revival, and blues-rock.

King and the down home players primarily served an audience of African American adults,
but by the mid-1950s white teenage fans were discovering R&B under the new marketing
term “rock ’n’ roll.” Fats Domino, a young pianist and singer from New Orleans, became the
biggest-selling African American artist of the decade, Ruth Brown and Etta James updated
Dinah Washington’s style with current dance rhythms, and the veteran Kansas City shouter
Big Joe Turner hit in 1954 with “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” which was covered by a white
hillbilly group from Pennsylvania, Bill Haley and the Comets. The transformation of “race
music” into an interracial teen style was completed in 1956 with the television-fueled success
of Elvis Presley. Rock ’n’ roll was hailed as a new sound, but many of its defining songs were
12-bar blues, including Presley’s “Hound Dog,” Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” Chuck Berry’s
“Johnny B. Goode,” and the biggest dance hit of the early 1960s, “The Twist.”

In the South, there was a long history of European Americans performing and listening to
blues. Jimmie Rodgers, “the father of country music,” built his reputation in the 1920s on
blues songs punctuated with his trademark yodel. Both southeastern artists like the Delmore
Brothers and westerners like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys made blues a bedrock of their
repertoires, and the most celebrated songwriter in the country genre, Hank Williams, learned
guitar from an African American street musician and remained a dedicated blues stylist.

In the northeast, blues had generally reached white listeners in jazz or swing settings, but a
few rural artists had also attracted limited attention. Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a 12-
string guitarist and singer from Louisiana, came to New York in 1935 with the folklorist John
Lomax and remained on the local folk scene until his death in 1949. In 1938 the jazz
enthusiast John Hammond presented a concert titled “From Spirituals to Swing” at Carnegie
Hall that contrasted the blues styles of Big Bill Broonzy, the North Carolina harmonica player
Sonny Terry, and a trio of boogie-woogie pianists with Sidney Bechet’s New Orleans jazz
group and the Count Basie Orchestra. And in the 1940s Josh White combined the blues

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repertoire that had made him a popular Piedmont recording artist with British ballads and a
sophisticated nightclub style and won a devoted audience of white cabaret-goers and college
students.

A small group of New Yorkers also began to collect and study the race records of the 1920s,
and in 1959 Samuel Charters’s book and companion LP, both titled The Country Blues,
sparked a new interest in the early down home artists. Over the next few years, enthusiasts
sought out long-forgotten players and presented them at festivals, clubs, and concert halls, in
what came to be known as the “blues revival.” Like the broader “folk revival,” this movement
favored country-sounding artists over performers whose work reflected urban pop trends. As
a result, some previously underappreciated performers came to be seen as major figures.
Mississippi John Hurt was valued for his gentle charm, varied repertoire, and flowing guitar
arrangements. Skip James, a Mississippian who played uniquely idiosyncratic
accompaniments on both guitar and piano, mesmerized young listeners with original
compositions like “Devil Got My Woman,” performed in a haunting falsetto.

Robert Johnson, whose early reputation had been limited to his Mississippi peers, became the
most celebrated of all pre-war blues artists after Columbia records issued an LP of his work in
1961 as King of the Delta Blues Singers. Johnson recorded only 29 songs before his death in
1938, but his blend of the Delta style of Son House with the urban innovations of Leroy Carr
and Peetie Wheatstraw and his superlative poetic skills provided a uniquely powerful
summation of the early down home style. In the 1960s his lyrical imagery inspired Bob Dylan
and his guitar arrangements were studied by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and a generation of
players in Europe, the United States, and beyond.

On the folk scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dave Van Ronk in New York and Eric
Von Schmidt in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a wave of young urban blues performers. A
few, like John Koerner in Minneapolis, developed distinctively personal styles, but most tried
to recreate the sound of older performers. They learned songs, vocal styles, and guitar
techniques from LP reissues of early records and personal contact with “rediscovered” artists
like Hurt, James, House, and the Reverend Gary Davis, a South Carolinian gospel singer who
had moved to Harlem and taught young revivalists his virtuosic ragtime-blues guitar
arrangements.

The folk-blues movement at first eschewed electric instruments, but in Europe an annual
touring “American Folk-Blues Festival” presented House, James, and the duo of Sonny Terry

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and Brownie McGhee alongside the electric bands of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and
Buddy Guy. English performers were soon bridging the gap between older acoustic and
modern electric styles on records like the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” This fusion
crossed the Atlantic with the British Invasion, and in 1965 Dylan teamed with members of
Chicago’s Paul Butterfield Blues Band for an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. Soon
the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Led Zeppelin were playing rock versions of songs learned
from the records of Robert Johnson, Skip James, and Memphis Minnie, and John Hammond
and Taj Mahal (the one African American to make an impact in the folk-blues movement)
were alternating acoustic and electric albums.

Blues-rock became established as its own style in the later 1960s. Aside from Janis Joplin and
Mick Jagger, its biggest stars tended to be guitarists, many playing extended solos that
blended techniques learned from black players like B.B., Freddie, and Albert King with
“psychedelic” effects inspired by marijuana and hallucinogens. This approach reached its
apex with Jimi Hendrix, who had cut his teeth on the R&B scene, then moved to London and
returned in 1967 as the ultimate psychedelic bluesman. Hendrix transformed the sound of the
electric guitar with wah-wah and feedback, creating a vocabulary that was adopted by
contemporaries such as Clapton and Jeff Beck, and later by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

9. Soul and soul-blues.

While folk-blues and blues-rock were primarily marketed to white listeners, the association of
blues with deep southern roots also attracted some black performers. In the 1940s Charlie
Parker used the blues-based Kansas City approach as a basis for the harmonic innovations of
bebop, but most boppers preferred more complex chord structures and rhythms. In the 1950s,
some young African American jazz artists feared the music was losing its black audience, and
turned to blues forms and tonalities in a movement known as HARD BOP. With titles like
“Work Song” and “Back at the Chicken Shack,” Cannonball Adderley and Jimmy Smith
emphasized their connection to southern black traditions, which they signified with the word
“soul.”

The high priest of soul was Ray Charles. After some minor hits as a West Coast blues pianist,
by the mid-1950s Charles was mixing jazz, blues, and gospel styles, and he used the 12-bar
progression for both hard bop instrumentals and hit singles like 1959’s “What’d I Say,” which

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mixed blues lyrics with a gospel call-and-response. In the 1960s this approach became the
mainstream of R&B, with Ike and Tina Turner, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson
Pickett blending church shouts with blues themes. (See SOUL MUSIC.)

A couple of down-home guitarist-singers managed to make an impact on the R&B charts:

Jimmy Reed played loping Mississippi boogie shuffles and sang in a nasal, country style
punctuated by his whining harmonica, and in the early 1960s his “Big Boss Man” was
covered by rock and soul singers alike. Louisiana’s Slim Harpo, another guitar and harmonica
player, even created a fusion of down home blues and contemporary funk with his “Baby,
Scratch My Back.”

Many soul performers had mixed feelings about the word “blues,” which they associated with
slavery and the miseries of southern segregation. James Brown, the most influential figure in
the evolution from R&B through soul to funk, insisted that he neither liked nor played blues,
though the 1965 record that heralded his independence from older R&B conventions, “Papa’s
Got a Brand New Bag,” used the classic 12-bar progression.

A few performers, notably B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, and Little Milton, continued to be
known as blues singers while retaining an African American audience, but by the mid-1970s
their style seemed to be on the way out. That changed to some extent in 1982 when Z.Z.
Hill’s “Down Home Blues” became an anthem for older listeners who were tired of disco and
uninterested in rap. Southern soul singers such as Denise LaSalle, Johnny Taylor, and
Latimore began to be advertised as blues performers, and although they attracted few
European American fans and thus relatively little attention from critics and historians, they
have maintained a thriving blues circuit in the South and Midwest.

10. Conclusion.

Blues of one kind or another continues to be played and disseminated through recordings,
concerts, and electronic media around the world, but since the 1960s it has tended to be
presented in nostalgic terms, as a link to older artists, styles, and times. Some performers
attempt to put their own twist on the classic patterns, but always with the consciousness that
they are preserving an important heritage. When white alternative rockers like the White
Stripes and black rappers like Goodie Mob and Nas explore and rework blues material, it is a
way of keeping in touch with their musical or cultural roots.

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As earlier blues artists have retired or died, people interested in connecting with those roots
have increasingly depended on recordings. Whatever their own background, young fans are
now more likely to explore the blues tradition by studying records than by listening to their
relatives or neighbors, and to be particularly drawn to artists whose music suggests a different
time and place. Such explorations have ranged from the jazz singer Cassandra Wilson’s
imaginative reworkings of Robert Johnson’s Delta blues to the hip-hop artist Queen Latifah
recording an album of Dinah Washington material backed by a 1940s-style band.

In the 1990s a new wave of African American players fused old rural blues with other styles:
Keb’ Mo’ with contemporary singer-songwriter music, Alvin Youngblood Hart with hard
rock, and Chris Thomas King and Corey Harris with hip hop and in the latter’s case also
reggae. In the 2000s, Otis Taylor and the Carolina Chocolate Drops have reached still further
back, reviving pre-blues fiddle and banjo traditions.

In commercial terms, blues-rock remains the most popular style. Carried forward in the 1970s
by Johnny Winter and given a new dose of soul in the early 1980s by Robert Cray, it found its
dominant modern figure in 1983 when Stevie Ray Vaughan released his Texas Flood album.
Inspired by Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, and his brother Jimmie’s Fabulous Thunderbirds,
Vaughan was a one-man encyclopedia of blues lead guitar, and became the model for a new
wave of bar bands. The 2000s brought a further blend of traditional blues with punk and
alternative rock, most prominently in the work of the White Stripes and the Mississippi All-
Stars.

Though its golden ages are in the past, blues remains a vital component of virtually all
contemporary popular music. Any guitar-based band or soulful singer is building on the
innovations of earlier blues artists. Delta slide guitar and wailing harmonica are ubiquitous in
film soundtracks and television commercials, symbolizing everything from urban romance to
the dusty plains of the old West. And rap has made a blues-rooted lyrical sensibility the core
of modern street languages around the world. While retaining its deep association with
African American tradition, blues has become an inextricable thread of global popular culture.

Bibliography A: Discography and biography.

M. Leadbitter and N. Slaven: Blues Records: January 1943 to December 1966 (London, 1968;
enlarged 2/1987–94 as Blues Records: 1943–1970) [discography]

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R.M.W. Dixon and J. Godrich: Recording the Blues (London, 1970)

S. Harris: Blues Who’s Who: a Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (New Rochelle, NY,
1979/R)

R. Santelli: The Big Book of Blues: a Biographical Encyclopedia (London, 1994; rev. 2/2001)

R.M.W. Dixon, J. Godrich and H.W. Rye: Blues and Gospel Records, 1892–1943 (Oxford,
1997) [discography]

T. Russell and C. Smith: The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings (London, 2006)

B: Historical overviews.

L. Jones: (Amiri Baraka): Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963)

P. Oliver: The Story of the Blues (London, 1969/R, 2/1997)

G. Oakley: The Devil’s Music: a History of the Blues (London, 1976)

R. Palmer: Deep Blues (New York, 1981/R)

L. Cohn, ed: Nothing but the Blues (New York, 1993)

F. Davis: The History of the Blues (New York, 1995)

T. Russell: The Blues, from Robert Johnson to Robert Cray (London, 1997)

E. Wald: Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York,
2004)

C: Pre-blues, proto-blues.

H.W. Odum and G.B. Johnson: The Negro and his Songs (Chapel Hill, NC, 1925)

N.I. White: American Negro Folk Songs (Cambridge, MA, 1928)

P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London, 1970)

T. Russell: Blacks, Whites and Blues (London, 1970)

E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971)

L.E. Levine: Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford, 1977/R)

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P. Oliver: Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (London, 1984)

L. Abbott and D. Seroff: Out of Sight: the Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–
1895 (Jackson, MS, 2003)

T. Brooks: Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana,
IL, 2004)

L. Abbott and D. Seroff: Ragged But Right: Black Travelling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the
Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, MS, 2007)

D: Early history.

W.C. Handy: Father of the Blues: an Autobiography (New York, 1941)

W. Broonzy and Y. Bruynoghe: Big Bill Blues (London, 1955)

S. Charters: The Country Blues (New York, 1959/R)

S. Charters: The Bluesmen (New York, 1967–77/R1991 as The Blues Makers)

S. Charters: Sweet as the Showers of Rain (New York, 1977)

B. Bastin: Red River Blues: the Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana, IL, 1986)

D.D. Harrison: Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)

W. Barlow: Looking Up at Down: the Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989)

A. Lomax: The Land Where the Blues Began (London, 1993)

D. Edwards: The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (Chicago, 1997)

A. Davis: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and
Billie Holiday (New York, 1998)

J.W. Work, L.W. Jones, and S.C. Adams: Lost Delta Found (Nashville, 2005)

P. Oliver: Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recording and the Early Traditions of the Blues (New
York, 2009)

P.C. Muir: Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920 (Urbana, IL, 2010)

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E: Postwar history.

P. Oliver: Conversation with the Blues (London, 1965, 2/1997)

C. Keil: Urban Blues (Chicago, 1966/R)

C. Gillett: The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll (New York, 1970, 3/1996)

W. Ferris: Blues from the Delta (London, 1971)

J. Broven: Walking to New Orleans: the Story of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues (Bexhill-
on-Sea, 1974)

M. Haralambos: Right On: from Blues to Soul in Black America (London, 1974/R)

A. Shaw: Honkers and Shouters: the Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York, 1978)

P. Guralnick: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York, 1981)

M. Rowe: Chicago Blues: the City & the Music (New York, 1981)

H.O. Dance: Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965 (New York, 1993)

B.B. King with D. Ritz: Blues All Around Me (New York, 1996)

J. Obrecht: Rollin’ and Tumblin’: the Postwar Blues Guitarists (San Francisco, 2000)

E. Wald: Josh White: Society Blues (Amherst, MA, 2000)

R. Gordon: Can’t Be Satisfied: the Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston, MA, 2002)

J. O’Neal and A. Van Singel: The Voice of the Blues (New York, 2002)

N. Cohodas: Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (New York, 2005)

F: Content and analysis.

P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: the Meaning of the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)

P. Oliver: Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (London, 1968/R)

H. Oster: Living Country Blues (Detroit, 1969)

P. Garon: Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London, 1975/R)

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J.T. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977)

D. Evans: Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, CA, 1982)

S. Tracy: Write Me a Few of Your Lines: a Blues Reader (Amherst, MA, 1999)

Elijah Wald

_____________________________________________________________

blues.

A black American folksong tradition that influenced deeply the evolution of JAZZ and other
popular musics of the 20th century. In origin, ‘the blues’ refers to a state of melancholy or
depression; it came during the second half of the 19th century to be seen by black Americans
as their characteristic emotion, and was later applied to the kind of singing that expressed it.
The archetypal ‘downhome’ or country blues is an improvised solo song, with the (male)
singer accompanying himself on guitar or banjo. The verbal form is typically a three-line
stanza, the first line of which is immediately repeated while the singer extemporizes the third,
rhyming line, and this is supported by a conventional 12-bar harmonic scheme: four bars on
the tonic (two accompanying the first line), often with a flattened 7th in the fourth bar; two on
the subdominant (accompanying the second line); two more on the tonic; two on the dominant
7th (accompanying the rhyming line); and a final two on the tonic. BLUE NOTES take their
name from their idiomatic use in the style. Some of the earliest downhome blues singers to be
recorded were Charley Patton (1929–34), the founder of a Mississippi blues tradition, and the
Texan Blind Lemon Jefferson (from 1926). Many were recorded both in studios and in the
field during the 1920s and 30s; among those who later acquired a large white audience were
Robert Johnson (d 1938), Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins.

Beginning in about 1910 a popularizing type of blues had been pioneered by the Memphis
bandleader W. C. Handy and was diffused by Mamie Smith (Crazy Blues, 1920) and other
female singers, who performed on stage with the accompaniment of a New Orleans-style jazz
band. This so-called ‘classic’ blues was immensely popular throughout the 1920s, and did
much to sell what were then called ‘race’ records, aimed at the black audience. Classic blues
exploited other musical resources drawn from the RAGTIME and early jazz traditions; the
12-bar, three-line song form was often loosened or abandoned, and extended instrumental

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solos were common. Two of the foremost singers in this style were Ma Rainey and the
extraordinary Bessie Smith; their heirs include Nina Simone and Odetta.

During the Depression of the 1930s Big Bill Broonzy helped make Chicago the centre of an
approach to blues performance that drew on qualities of both the downhome and classic
traditions. After World War II, as the music of black Americans became more appreciated by
white audiences, an important school of Chicago blues arose, whose most notable exponents
were Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King. Their music used electronic
amplification, and was more closely allied to the emerging styles of RHYTHM AND BLUES
and ROCK AND ROLL. It acquired huge popularity and was extremely influential on white
musicians. From the 1960s onwards, the blues became a central ingredient of the universal
world of commercial popular music; at present it is cultivated by non-black musicians
throughout Europe and in parts of Asia as well as North America. But it has ceased to be a
central ingredient of black American musical expression, which has adopted in its place first
SOUL and gospel, more recently RAP and HIP-HOP.

The title of ‘blues’ is sometimes given to music that expresses the characteristic emotional
state without drawing on the distinctive resources of the core tradition.

Jeffrey Dean

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