Blues

A

3

Boogie-Woogie and Guitar-Piano Blues

In the late 1920s two new styles of blues developed: boogie-woogie piano blues and guitar-piano duos. Boogie-woogie is a percussive, largely instrumental style of solo piano playing based on 12-bar blues strains. The first eight bars of each section typically involve a particular technique or lick—for example, a trill, slide, or cross-rhythm—that provides a contrasting character with the preceding and subsequent strains. The last four bars of each strain serve as a refrain, repeating the same material each time through. The most important boogie-woogie pianists, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Jimmy Yancey, were all based in Chicago, Illinois. This style enjoyed a revival in the late 1930s and early 1940s, sparked by producer John Hammond’s decision to include Lewis, Ammons, and Pete Johnson in his 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Guitar-piano duos represented another style of prewar urban blues. Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell were the most successful of these city-based duos. From 1928 to 1934 Carr and Blackwell recorded 114 different songs, all of them featuring Carr’s urbane vocal and piano stylings and Blackwell’s percussive, single-string lead guitar work. Chicago-based Tampa Red and Georgia Tom made up another popular and important guitar-piano duo in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

B

Postwar Blues

World War II caused massive demographic shifts in America, including huge numbers of black people who moved from the country to the city, from the South to the North and West. The impetus for this movement can be largely traced to the employment opportunities created by the war effort and the drafting of much of the country’s labor force into the armed services. The new social environment created a new social-psychological mindset which, in turn, sparked new music. The sound of the heavily populated, noisy city was, not surprisingly, an ensemble sound rather than music produced by solo artists and duos.

B

1

Urban Blues

Big Bill Broonzy was the first Delta bluesman to find fame in the urban environs of Chicago, bridging the gap between prewar country blues and the louder, denser sound of city blues. The Chicago “band” sound of the late 1930s and early 1940s, exemplified by Broonzy, featured acoustic guitar, upright bass, harmonica, and washboard for percussion.

---

---

By the late 1940s, many Chicago blues musicians were playing electric guitars, had added drums and saxophones to their ensembles, and had started to use microphones to amplify the harmonica (harp), piano, and upright bass. The result was an incredibly harsh style of urban blues, but one that remained rooted in the emotionally charged prewar Delta blues style. With a razor-sharp electric guitar style and a powerful, distinctive voice, Muddy Waters was the best known of these musicians. Other highly influential Chicago blues performers included Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson II. Chicago blues had a huge impact on the generation of British musicians that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Several of these performers—including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton— ranked among the most important rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s.

B

2

Club and Jump Blues

Examples of more restrained postwar blues styles included the club blues tradition on the West Coast and the jump blues style that became popular nationwide. Club blues, pioneered by artists such as Nat King Cole and Charles Brown in the late 1940s, featured piano-led trios that played slow-tempo blues along with pop standards or boogie-woogie piano pieces. Club blues vocalists sang in straightforward, melancholy style no matter what the content of a given song’s lyrics.

Jump blues, on the other hand, embodied up-tempo dance music that exuded pure joy. Jump bands featured a combination of trumpet and alto and tenor saxophones accompanied by a rhythm section composed of piano, upright bass, and drums. Most tunes were riff-dominated with lyrics celebrating the excitement of big-city living. Some of the biggest jump blues ensembles during the music’s heyday in the late 1940s and early 1950s included those led by Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, and Joe Liggins.

C

Blues Decline and Revival

The years of mainstream popularity for the blues did not last long. In the early 1950s, the jump blues and club blues styles disappeared from the national R&B charts, replaced by doo-wop vocal groups and, a few years later, black rock and roll. By the end of the 1950s, with the decline of the urban Chicago blues sound of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, blues as a whole had lost popularity with its core black audience. In its place emerged the sounds of soul, female vocal groups, and, in the early 1960s, Motown. With the exception of a few artists—such as B. B. King and Bobby Blue Bland—who had developed distinctive approaches to playing and singing blues, the genre ceased to be a part of the black musical mainstream.

Black audiences continued to support the blues on a regional basis in locales such as Chicago; Memphis, Tennessee; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and northern Mississippi. However, a burgeoning interest in the blues among white audiences in the United States and Europe provided support for the music from the early 1960s to the present. Country blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Bukka White, rekindled their careers after being rediscovered by young white blues enthusiasts in the 1960s. These musicians made new recordings and performed in coffeehouses, on university campuses, and at well-known folk festivals. In addition, a new audience sprang up for the amplified postwar Chicago blues sound and its nearly forgotten musicians. White musicians began to form groups that covered blues classics and also wrote original blues-based compositions.

In Chicago a wave of younger black musicians such as Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells established blues careers, recording and playing both in Chicago-area clubs and on national tours with older blues artists. These young artists even found inspiration and influence in the playing of contemporary white blues musicians, such as Eric Clapton and Peter Green (of Fleetwood Mac). These cross-racial connections eventually produced a number of recordings in which young white blues-rock musicians played with the best of Chicago’s black blues artists, such as on The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (1970) and Fleetwood Mac’s Blues Jam in Chicago (1969).

The blues revival continued into the mid-1970s, led primarily by bands that fused blues with rock such as Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers. Some rock groups of the era, such as the Grateful Dead, routinely included blues songs in their recordings and live performances. Bruce Iglauer injected new life into the Chicago scene by starting the blues label Alligator Records in the early 1970s. Iglauer found success by recording primarily little-known and younger black blues musicians such as Hound Dog Taylor, Lonnie Brooks, Koko Taylor, Son Seals, and Albert Collins. Competing record labels such as Rooster Blues, Black Top, and Bullseye Blues sprang up over the next decade. In addition to recording the finest up-and-coming black musicians, these companies also recorded older black blues musicians and some white blues-and-roots acts, such as Roomful of Blues and Ronnie Earl.

	More from Encarta
	•  Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be discontinued. Learn more. •  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain