A brief history of the blues

Mississippi, 1903. Musician WC Handy is waiting for a delayed train, and trying to sleep. He notices a man singing and playing guitar, using a knife to bar the frets. In a mournful style, he repeats the lyric: ‘Goin’ where the southern cross the dog’. It was an obscure reference to a railway crossing in Moorhead, Mississippi.

This is the first written record we have of the blues, though it is much older. The genre originated among southern slaves sometime in the 19^th century. Though its early history is not known, it was clearly influenced by the West African tradition of musical storytellers (‘Griots’), and early African-American religious songs.

The blues style developed in plantation fields, as slaves sang to pass the time, motivate themselves, and express their feelings. These tunes had simple ‘call and response’ patterns, and were strongly rythmic, even though they had no instrumental backing.

Having ‘discovered’ the blues, WC Handy helped popularise it, publishing the first blues tune, Memphis Blues, in 1912. It was recorded two years later: 

However, Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit Crazy Blues is considered the first proper blues record:

This sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and encouraged other record labels to cash in on the genre. In the early years, labels would often give blues artists a jazzy backing band, and censor their lyrics. Fortunately, many legendary blues artists escaped this treatment, leaving a vast body of one-man-one-guitar blues masterpieces. Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, and Leadbelly are particularly memorable. Among the women, it’s Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey who stand out as early pioneers.

The next major development in blues was another move away from acoustic solo work. A group of bluesmen in Chicago, faced with noisy audiences, started playing electric guitar and using a backing band. Muddy Waters is generally credited with starting this movement with his 1948 hit I Just Can’t be Satisfied.

The guitar/bass/drums combination used by the Chicago bluesmen was borrowed by almost every major rock band, most of whom were heavily influenced by the blues. It has a good claim to being the most influential genre of all time.

The last word goes to George Carlin: “White people have no business playing the blues ever, at all, under any circumstances. Ever, ever, ever. What the fuck to white people have to be blue about? Banana Republic ran out of khakis?... The espresso machine is jammed? ...Hootie and the Blowfish are breaking up?”