Blues

Blues is a genre and musical form that originated in African-American communities in the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in traditional African music, combined with European American folk music. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. The blue notes (or "worried notes") which are often thirds or fifths which are flatter in pitch than in other music styles, are also an important part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect called a groove.

Blues as a genre possesses other characteristics such as lyrics, bass lines, and instruments. The lyrics of early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating troubles experienced within African American society.

Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), known by his stage name Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician who is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues".

Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi and by age seventeen was playing the guitar at parties, emulating local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson. He was recorded by Alan Lomax there for the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1943, he headed to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician, eventually recording, in 1946, for first Columbia and then Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess.

In the early 1950s, Muddy and his band, Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elgin Evans on drums and Otis Spann on piano, recorded a series of blues classics, some with bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon, including "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "I'm Ready". In 1958, Muddy headed to England, helping to lay the foundations of the subsequent blues boom there, and in 1960 performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, recorded and released as his first live album, At Newport 1960.

Country blues

Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is acoustic, mainly guitar-driven forms of the blues, that mixes blues elements with characteristics of folk. After blues' birth in the Southern United States, it quickly spread throughout the country (and elsewhere), giving birth to a host of regional styles. These include Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Texas, Piedmont, Louisiana, West Coast, St. Louis, East Coast, Swamp, New Orleans, Delta, Hill country and Kansas City blues.

When African-American musical tastes began to change in the early 1960s, moving toward soul and rhythm and blues music, country blues found renewed popularity as "folk blues" and was sold to a primarily white, college-age audience. Traditional artists like Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson II reinvented themselves as folk blues artists, while Piedmont bluesmen like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee found great success on the folk festival circuit.

Seminal compilations of pre-WWII country blues recordings assembled in the 1950s are the Anthology of American Folk Music and The Country Blues.

Big Joe

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John Lee

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