The Blues: A History

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The Delta blues started as we know it around 1903 on the famed Stovall and Carson Plantations. While slaves were made to work, they sang work songs. The songs interested a man named Charles Peabody. One man with a strong voice would start a song, which all of the other workers seemed to know and have a response back to the call. Otherwise known as "call and response." The music had an aboriginal sound to it. Most of the music was known as work songs or hollers, but when accompanied by instruments the songs became party or dance music. Most of the blues that we know as of today was not typically heard until 1941 when Alan Lomax and John Work, folklorists from The Library of Congress, went looking for Robert Johnson. They never got to meet Robert Johnson because he had passed away. They did however meet a man by the name of Muddy Waters(McKinley Morganfield), who recorded a couple of songs for them. During the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many slaves from the South and entered into a different type of blues called jazz. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James and many others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire. From here the rest is living history with bands such as The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many others. There will never be an end to the blues. The Blue Note