Grove Music Online

Blues
Paul Oliver

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.03311
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

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,
though not to the extent that it was in jazz. To facilitate

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 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 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

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 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), 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 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

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 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.

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,

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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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.

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

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 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 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.

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 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)

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 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)

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)

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 See also
Touré, Ali Farka
Dorsey, Thomas A.
Handy, W.C.
Blues progression
Chicago, §7: Jazz and blues
Bolden, Buddy
Guy, Barry
Blackwell, Scrapper
Bo Diddley
Broonzy, Big Bill
Clapton, Eric
Cray, Robert
Davis, Gary
Fuller, Blind Boy
Guy, Buddy
Hooker, John Lee
Hopkins, Lightnin’
House, Son
Hurt, Mississippi John
Jefferson, Blind Lemon
Johnson, Blind Willie
King, Albert
King, B.B
Korner, Alexis
Leadbelly
McTell, ‘Blind’ Willie
Mayall, John
Muddy Waters
Patton, Charley
Vaughan, Stevie Ray
Walker, T-Bone

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 White, Josh
USA, §II, 2(iii): Traditional music: African-American: The
fusion of Oral and written traditions
Little Walter
Wells, Junior
Williamson, Sonny Boy
Williamson ‘II’, Sonny Boy
Popular music, §I, 3(ii): Europe & North America: An
outline history
Lyrics, §2(iii): Pop lyrics: Orality and technology
Memphis, §2: Popular music
Carr, Leroy
Lewis, Meade ‘Lux’
Spivey, Victoria
Yancey, Jimmy
Boogie-woogie
Ravel, Maurice, §3: 1918–37
Williams, J. Mayo
Rhythm and blues
St Louis, §2: Ragtime, blues and jazz
Chenier, Clifton
Cox, Ida
Eckstine, Billy
Holiday, Billie
Hunter, Alberta
Jackson, Mahalia
Johnson, Lonnie
Johnson, Robert (iii)
Joplin, Janis
Little Richard
Memphis Minnie
Rainey, Ma
Rushing, Jimmy
Smith, Bessie

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 Smith, Pine Top
Turner, Joe
Still, William Grant
Violin, §I, 6: The instrument, its technique and its
repertory: Blues
Washboard band
Baraka, Amiri
Charters, Samuel

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