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As their lives and surroundings changed, so did their blues. This journey has made the landscape of the blues as diverse as our country’s rivers, prairies and mountains. So here we take a look at some of the major regional styles and the artists and songs that helped define and illustrate them.
Find Regional Blues Albums, Artists and Songs, and Hand-Picked Top Regional Blues Music on AllMusic.
Blues subgenres include country blues, Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners.
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The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are usually lyrical rather than narrative because the expression of feelings is foremost.
Where did the blues get its name?
In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues, which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates.
How did the blues begin as a musical genre?
The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants created this genre while working on Southern plantations, taking inspiration from hymns, minstrel show music, work songs and field hollers, ragtime, and popular music of the Southern white population.
Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?
Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems of love but also oppression and hard times. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma (sustaining a single syllable across several pitches), rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.
As a musical style, the blues is characterized by expressive “microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line textual stanza of the form AAB, and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats, answers, or complements the vocal line. In terms of functional (i.e., traditional European) harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is described as follows (I, IV, and V refer respectively to the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant notes of the scale):
Phrase 1 (measures 1–4) I–I–I–I
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Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Acoustic Blues. Acoustic Blues encompasses just about every type of blues that you can play on a non-electric musical instrument. This includes a wide range of guitar and musical styles such as folk, slide, fingerpicking, and all the regional strains (Chicago, Delta, Louisiana, Mississippi, and so on.)
- African Blues. A genre of popular music, African blues originated in West Africa. Ali Farka Touré, the Malian guitar legend, was a pioneer of African desert blues and one of the continent’s most internationally renowned musicians.
- Blues Rock. Blues rock is a fusion genre featuring elements of blues and rock music. Primarily an electric style of music, blues rock involves instruments like the electric guitar, electric bass guitar, and drums.
- Blues Shouter. A blues shouter is a blues singer who can sing unamplified with a band. They’ll belt out songs at constant full volume, performing in a way that projects energy and drives the audience to get on their feet due to the electricity in the air.
Regional Blues Styles. The blues has been on a journey. Its roots reach all the way back to Africa and the musical traditions enslaved Africans brought with them to the rural South. African slaves fused those traditions with the European styles and instruments of early settlers, and they told new stories about their hardships and poverty.
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Where did the Blues come from?
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in the early 20th century. [1]
