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“Everyday, everyday, I have the blues,” goes the lyrics of a popular blues song by American blues guitarist and singer B. B. King. With this Guide to the Blues, aficionados of the music can assemble a collection vast enough to guarantee a different blues song every day. Music professor Rob Bowman takes readers on a tour of urban and country blues and all the styles they’ve encompassed, from Texas blues to blues of the Piedmont, and he provides some recommended listening along the way.
By Robert Bowman
The blues. The name brings images of a mournful singer pouring out the sorrows of love and life gone wrong to the melancholy accompaniment of a lone guitar or harmonica. Out of such direct musical expression, however, blues has developed a varied history and a range of styles that influenced the vast majority of popular music in the 20th century. The blues enters the new millennium still filled with passionate energy and with its traditions enriched by contact with other music.
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Blues music first appeared in the 1890s, a quarter of a century after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. Although freedom did not substantially change the economic status of the majority of African Americans, it did have a tremendous effect on the mindset of those born into freedom. Music always meets its social moment, and it is no accident that the first generation born outside slavery created a new music that reflected their worldview and the social situations in which they lived.
As African American writer and activist LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) pointed out in his seminal book Blues People (1963), freedom brought a number of new experiences to black people. Primary among these were mobility, loneliness, the freedom to seek out consensual love relationships, and the need to find employment. Not surprisingly, these four themes are voiced over and over again in the blues songs of the first several decades of the 20th century.
Although blues music was clearly an important part of the cultural landscape of the southern United States by 1900, it did not make its way onto record until 1920, when Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues.” Smith's style—and that of the singers, most of them women, who flooded into recording studios after her song found success—was called vaudeville blues or classic blues. It was an urbanized style, mostly written by professional songwriters such as W. C. Handy and sung by vaudeville theater performers as part of a much larger repertoire, worlds away from the rural blues tradition.
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The most important blues singer of the classic era was undoubtedly Bessie Smith, who recorded more than 160 songs for Columbia Records between 1923 and 1933. Classic blues instrumentalists included trumpeter Louis Armstrong and clarinetist Sidney Bechet, and the influence of blues is clear in the music of other jazz greats such as Count Basie and Miles Davis.
Check out the classic blues period by listening to these recordings:Classic Blues and Vaudeville Singers and Bessie Smith: The Collection.
The country blues sound first appeared on record in the mid-1920s, around the same time as the first recordings of jazz, country, and Cajun music. The country blues tradition can be roughly divided into three regional styles: Texas blues, Mississippi Delta blues, and Piedmont blues. Although the styles of individual blues artists vary greatly in each area, certain elements define each regional style.
The Texas style of country blues tends to feature single-string accompaniment on guitar and very precise, rhythmic playing and singing. Its best-known practitioner before World War II was Blind Lemon Jefferson, while in the postwar period Lightnin’ Hopkins was an important artist who continued to play in this early style.
Some standout Texas blues recordings are Blues Masters: Texas Blues; Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mojo Hand: The Anthology; and Blind Lemon Jefferson: King of the Country Blues.
The blues that was born in the fertile farmland of the Mississippi River Delta would have a huge effect on the evolution of popular music in the United States. Delta blues is commonly based on short melodic patterns called riffs; it often features slide guitar; and it is marked by highly emotional singing, as exemplified by the landmark work of Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson.
To hear some of the best Delta blues, try these recordings: Dust My Broom: The Essential Recording of Mississippi Delta Blues; Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers; Charley Patton: Founder of the Delta Blues; and Son House: Preachin’ the Blues.
This brand of blues, which emerged primarily from the Carolinas and Georgia, is the most harmonically sophisticated and melodically developed of the country blues styles. It was influenced by other black folk music, by Anglo-American folk music, and most importantly, by ragtime. Piedmont blues guitarists evolved finger-picking techniques that extended the potential of their instrument. Blind Blake is the most important ragtime-influenced Piedmont blues player, while Blind Willie McTell is a well-known Piedmont artist who played 12-string guitar.
Recommended Piedmont blues recordings include Deep River of Song: Virginia and the Piedmont; Blind Blake: The Master of Ragtime Guitar; and The Definitive Blind Willie McTell.
Starting about 1910, many Southern blues musicians moved north, a relocation that often occurred along regional lines. Travelers from the Piedmont often ended their journey in New York City's Harlem district, and those from Texas tended toward Kansas City and Los Angeles. Especially important for the history of the blues was the route that took many artists from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago.
The first new blues form to arise within an urban context was a piano-guitar duo style that appeared in the late 1920s. Based in Indianapolis, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell were the most successful of these piano-guitar duos. Between 1928 and 1934 they recorded more than 110 different songs, all of them featuring Carr’s suave vocal and piano stylings and Blackwell’s percussive, single-string guitar work.
Blackwell’s playing proved to be an important influence on later guitar masters such as T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, and Tampa Red. With Georgia Tom, Tampa Red formed another popular and important city blues piano-guitar duo, based in Chicago.
Good recordings to check out are Leroy Carr: Sloppy Drunk and It Hurts Me Too: The Essential Recordings of Tampa Red.
During the 1940s, the relocation of the Southern and rural populace became a flood. Both blacks and whites moved en masse from the country to the city, from the South to the North and West. For black Americans, this migration was a chance to pursue a better life and escape the institutionalized racism and oppression that permeated Southern society. The new social environment and mindset necessitated new music, and the crowded urban scene produced an ensemble blues sound, loud and full and electric—in every sense of the word.
Big Bill Broonzy was the first Delta bluesman to find fame in Chicago. The Chicago “band” sound of the late 1930s and early 1940s, exemplified by Broonzy, featured acoustic guitar, upright bass, washboard (for percussion), and harmonica.
Check out Broonzy’s work on the recording Where the Blues Began (2000).
Although acoustic-based, Broonzy's band set the tone for the heavily electrified sound that became popular after World War II, a sound best represented by the brilliant recordings of Mississippi natives Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. By the late 1940s Chicago blues musicians had plugged in their guitars, added drums and saxophones, and begun to amplify the harmonica, piano, and upright bass via microphones. The result was an incredibly harsh style of urban blues rooted in the emotionally charged Delta blues style. Muddy Waters is justifiably the best known of the Chicago blues musicians, but the exemplary work of the gravel-voiced Howlin’ Wolf and harmonica wizards Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) was also extremely important.
It was Chicago blues that set off the British blues explosion of the 1960s, exerting a potent influence on the generation of British musicians that came of age during this time. Several of these Britons—including guitarists Eric Clapton, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin—developed into the most important rock musicians of their day.
Some important recordings include Muddy Waters: His Best 1947 to 1955; Howlin’ Wolf/Moanin’ in the Moonlight; Little Walter: His Best; and Sonny Boy Williamson: His Best.
There were also more refined and restrained postwar blues styles, exemplified by the club blues tradition on the West Coast and the jump-blues style that was popular nationwide. These styles are sometimes categorized under the related rhythm-and-blues genre. West Coast club blues, pioneered by Nat “King” Cole and Charles Brown among others, featured piano-led trios that invariably played quiet, slow-tempo blues as part of a repertoire that also included pop standards and, on occasion, boogie-woogie piano pieces.
Vocalists in the club blues tradition sang in a relatively unadorned, melancholy style, no matter what the lyrics might say. A musician who performed in this style when young but later extended his art in many other directions was Ray Charles.
To hear the club blues sound, listen to Charles Brown, Driftin’ Blues: The Best of.
Jump blues, on the other hand, was an up-tempo, dance-based music that exuded pure joy. Ensembles of the late 1940s and early 1950s led by Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, and Joe Liggins typified jump bands. They featured a front-line combination of trumpet and saxophones (alto and tenor) accompanied by a rhythm section composed of piano, upright bass, and drums. Most jump-blues tunes were riff-dominated, with lyrics celebrating the excitement of big-city living.
Some good recordings are Jumpin’ Jive: Jump Blues Essentials; The Best of Louis Jordan; Roy Milton & His Solid Senders; and Joe Liggins & the Honey Drippers.
Most of these styles of blues live on, played by a small number of artists in a variety of North American locales. Periodic blues “revivals” occur when a new blues artist or newly rediscovered artist bursts onto the scene and brings attention to the form. In the 1980s the brilliance of Texas wonder Stevie Ray Vaughan, the soulful guitar and vocals of Robert Cray, and the renewed popularity of old-school masters Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker led a resurgence of the blues. The 1990s witnessed the retro acoustic appeal of bluesman Keb’ Mo’ and the flash of teen blues/rock sensations Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Many large cities have clubs devoted to blues music, and familiarity with blues greats and their work is recognized as essential to a knowledge of modern music.
Far beyond its own popularity and recognition, the 12-bar blues form has been enormously important to a range of other music. Virtually every style of white and black popular music for the last 50 years has made liberal use of the blues form, to the point where blues has become a lingua franca for jam sessions by jazz, rock, rhythm-and-blues, and even country music artists. Through the influence of blues on soul, and to a lesser degree on funk, aspects of blues can also be heard in rap music. Public Enemy’s sampling of B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” and Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” on the 1994 song “Air Hoodlum” is just one example among many of rap artists acknowledging their debt to their blues forebears. Created in the aftermath of slavery and in a setting of discrimination and disadvantage, blues form and blues styles have become a fundamental part of the music of the Western world.
Some standout blues recordings of the last 25 years include Stevie Ray Vaughan: Greatest Hits; Robert Cray: Heavy Picks; Buddy Guy: Slippin’ In and Buddy Guy: A Man and the Blues; John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection; Keb’ Mo’ (self-titled); Jonny Lang: Wander this World; and Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Trouble Is.
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Blues; African American Music
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