Blues

W. C. Handy had published blues sheet music since 1912, and Black singers had been singing it in tent shows for longer than that. What the 1920s added was the record. After "Crazy Blues" sold in 1920, every label wanted a woman who could sing the blues with a jazz band behind her. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and dozens more filled the "race record" catalogs Okeh, Columbia and Paramount created for Black buyers. These are the classic blues singers, and Bessie Smith is the one whose records still sound like a storm.

The second wave came from the country. In 1926 Paramount released records by a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson, alone with his guitar, and they sold. Suddenly the companies wanted men with guitars from the South: Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell, and in June 1929 Charley Patton, the Dockery Farms entertainer who had taught half the Delta. Patton is where the line runs to Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

A third thing was happening on the piano. Leroy Carr in Indianapolis sang the blues softly over an easy piano and guitar and became the most popular male blues singer of his time. Pine Top Smith in Chicago cut a record in December 1928 that put a name on a rolling left-hand style: boogie-woogie. Both point at the city blues of the next two decades, and boogie-woogie is a direct ancestor of rock and roll.

The blues also learned to be funny and dirty on record. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom's "It's Tight Like That" in 1928 started a craze for hokum, sly party songs with a two-guitar bounce. Georgia Tom was Thomas A. Dorsey, and within four years he would be the father of gospel music. Hold on to that.

The blues had its first great recording boom in the late 1920s, and the Depression ended it almost overnight. Paramount, the Wisconsin label that had recorded Charley Patton, Son House, and Skip James, went out of business in 1932 and its masters were scrapped. Field trips to the South slowed to a trickle. The most important Delta record of the decade, Robert Johnson's twenty-nine songs from San Antonio and Dallas in 1936 and 1937, sold modestly and was forgotten for twenty years. That silence is the reason his legend grew: the music arrived in the 1960s without a face attached.

Meanwhile the blues that actually sold in the 1930s came out of Chicago. Lester Melrose, a music publisher turned producer, built a house sound for RCA's budget label Bluebird around Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Washboard Sam, and the harmonica player John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson. It used a piano, a string bass, and often a drummer behind the guitar, which no Delta record had. People call it the Bluebird beat. It is the sound of the blues becoming a band, and the band is the model Muddy Waters plugged in after the war.

Two other blues streams fed forward. The piano blues of Leroy Carr and the boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson put a rolling left hand under everything, and by the end of the decade Kansas City shouter Big Joe Turner was barking over it in a way that is rhythm and blues in everything but the name. And the string-band blues of the Mississippi Sheiks, whose fiddle-and-guitar "Sitting on Top of the World" sold to Black and white buyers alike in 1930, reminds you that the color line on record labels was never the color line in the music.

The decade opens with the Delta blues as it had been: a voice, a guitar, a world of hurt. Charley Patton had died in 1934 and Robert Johnson in 1938, leaving twenty-nine recordings that guitar players would treat as scripture. Son House, the preacher turned blues prophet, was still farming in Mississippi. Blind Lemon Jefferson's high, fluid Texas style had been gone since 1929 but lived in every Texan who picked up a guitar. In the summers of 1941 and 1942 Alan Lomax and Fisk University's John Work drove into Coahoma County with a recording machine and found both the past and the future on the same plantation: Son House with his hard, hypnotic slide, and a young field hand named McKinley Morganfield who called himself Muddy Waters.

Then the migration moved the blues to the city, and the city was loud. In Chicago, Big Bill Broonzy had already been bridging country blues and a small-band, urban sound through the 1930s. Muddy arrived in 1943, put a pickup on his guitar so a bar could hear him over itself, and by 1948 was cutting "I Can't Be Satisfied" for a tiny label called Aristocrat with nothing but that electric guitar and a slapped bass. The record sold out in a weekend. This is the moment the blues band, and with it the rock combo, is invented: a small group, amplified, urgent, built around a riff.

The same thing was happening in three other cities at once. In Los Angeles, T-Bone Walker, who had led Blind Lemon around Dallas as a boy, played a hollow-body electric guitar held flat across his chest and made it phrase like a horn. "Call It Stormy Monday" in 1947 is the first electric blues guitar solo that every later guitarist had to learn. In Detroit, John Lee Hooker stamped out "Boogie Chillen'" in 1948 on one chord and a piece of plywood. In Houston, Lightnin' Hopkins spun street-corner poetry over a loose, jazz-touched guitar. Four regions, four electric styles, one decade.

Why it matters: everything called rock a decade later is one of these records played faster by someone younger. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song. B.B. King built his whole approach on T-Bone. ZZ Top and Canned Heat lived inside Hooker's boogie. This decade is the roots of rock, and this essay is the root system.

The blues moved north with the people who sang it. Muddy Waters had come to Chicago from Clarksdale in 1943; by the early 1950s he had an electric band with Little Walter on amplified harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on second guitar, Otis Spann on piano and Willie Dixon writing the songs and playing bass. Chess Records, run by two Polish-born brothers on the South Side, put it on wax. "Hoochie Coochie Man" (1954) is the template: a stop-time riff, a boast, a band that hits like a fist.

Howlin’ Wolf came up from Memphis and was cutting for Chess in Chicago by 1953 with a voice like a tire on gravel and became Muddy’s only real rival. Little Walter’s "Juke" (1952) made the harmonica a lead instrument and sat at number one on the R&B chart for eight weeks. Elmore James took Robert Johnson’s "Dust My Broom" and turned its slide riff into a siren that every rock guitarist would eventually steal. Down in Memphis, B.B. King, a disc jockey on WDIA, had his first number one with "Three O’Clock Blues" in 1952 and began the long career that would make single-string lead guitar a language.

This is the music the Rolling Stones would name themselves after. It is also the music Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry were sitting in the Chess waiting room to make, and Sam Phillips had recorded Wolf and Ike Turner before he ever met Elvis. The line from the Delta to the arena runs straight through 2120 South Michigan Avenue.

In 1960 the blues was a Black working-class music in Chicago, Memphis and the Delta, and its audience was aging. Two things changed that. The folk revival rediscovered the old country players: Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James were found, sometimes literally, and put on stage at Newport in front of white college kids. And in England, a generation of art students bought every Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf record they could find and started bands to play them.

The British blues boom is the story of one room, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and the players who left it. Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds because they were getting too pop, made the "Beano" album with Mayall in 1966, and somebody wrote "Clapton is God" on a London wall. He left to form Cream. Peter Green replaced him and left to form Fleetwood Mac. Mick Taylor replaced Green and left to join the Rolling Stones. The Stones themselves had named the band after a Muddy Waters song and cut their early records at Chess.

The originals were listening. Muddy Waters played Newport in 1960 and cut an album called "Electric Mud" in 1968 to chase the kids who were copying him. B.B. King crossed over to the rock audience once Bill Graham started booking him at the Fillmore, and "The Thrill Is Gone" at the very end of 1969 made it official. And when Jimi Hendrix played "Red House" or the Stones played "Little Red Rooster", a whole generation heard where rock had come from for the first time.

Blues in the 1990s was a reissue business and then it was not. Columbia's "Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings" box set in 1990 sold a million copies of a man who had died in 1938. Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash on 27 August 1990, and the blues-rock guitar hero seat stayed empty. Buddy Guy, who had been without a label for a decade, made "Damn Right, I've Got the Blues" in 1991 with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and won a Grammy. Clapton himself made "From the Cradle" in 1994, a straight blues album that went to number one. John Lee Hooker, at seventy-two, was in the Top 40 with "The Healer" and its follow-ups.

The interesting blues came from Mississippi and from kids. Fat Possum Records, out of Oxford, recorded R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough playing the one-chord hill country trance they had played in juke joints for fifty years, and put Burnside on tour with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Keb' Mo' and Corey Harris went back to the acoustic Delta. Susan Tedeschi and Jonny Lang, who was fifteen, were the new guitar players. The White Stripes were in a Detroit garage working it out. The blues was not the decade's sound. It was under the decade's sound, the way it had been under every decade before it.

The blues in the 2010s was mostly a story of custody: who was keeping it, and how. B.B. King, the last true superstar of the electric blues, played his final shows in 2014 and died in May 2015 at eighty-nine. With him went the last direct line to the Mississippi juke joints of the 1940s.

What carried on did so at the edges of other genres. Gary Clark Jr. played Chicago blues with a fuzz pedal and a modern rhythm section and got a Grammy for it. The Black Keys built an arena career out of a two-piece blues band from Akron. Alabama Shakes, led by Brittany Howard, won Best Alternative Music Album in 2016 for a record that is really a Southern soul-blues album. Buddy Guy kept winning Grammys into his eighties, and Bobby Rush won his first at eighty-three.

Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops did the archival work: showing where the banjo, the fiddle tunes and the field hollers actually came from, and who has been written out. That is blues history done as scholarship, and it changed how a lot of younger listeners heard the whole American songbook.