Blues (1900–2026)

The blues was born towards the end of the 19th century in the American South, especially in the Mississippi Delta, among the descendants of enslaved people. It inherited work songs, spirituals and African call-and-response. It sings of sorrow, but also humour and the will to get through: playing the blues often means easing your own “blues”.

W. C. Handy recalled hearing, around 1903 at a Mississippi railway station, a guitarist sliding a knife along the strings as he sang. In 1912 Handy published The Memphis Blues, among the first published blues; in 1920 Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues was a hit that opened recording to Black musicians. In the 1920s and 1930s Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Son House and later Robert Johnson recorded alone with their guitars.

The heart of the blues is the twelve-bar pattern on three chords (I, IV, V), and a scale in which some notes are “bent”: the third, fifth and seventh are played a little flat; these are the blue notes. On the piano, boogie-woogie makes the left hand roll; on the guitar, players bend strings or use a bottleneck slide.

After the Second World War musicians moved to Chicago and plugged in their guitars: this was the electric blues of Muddy Waters in Chicago; elsewhere, T-Bone Walker and B.B. King made the electric guitar sing as a solo voice. That sound crossed the Atlantic and gave birth to 1960s British rock.