The Sound Before the Name
Before anyone called it blues, W.C. Handy heard it at the Tutwiler, Mississippi, train station around 1903. A man in ragged clothes was pressing a knife blade against his guitar strings, sliding it up and down while singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” a reference to the junction where the Southern Railway crossed the Yazoo Delta Railroad, locally called the Yellow Dog. Handy, a formally trained bandleader, had never heard anything like it. The technique, pressing a hard object against strings to bend pitch, traces back to one-stringed instruments in Central and West Africa. In the American South it arrived through the diddley bow, a single wire stretched between two nails on a porch beam, played with a bottle or bone for a slide. Children across the Delta learned music on these before ever touching a guitar.
The blues took shape in the decades after emancipation, somewhere between the 1860s and 1890s, growing out of field hollers, work songs, and spirituals. Its venues were juke joints, whose name derives from the Gullah word “juk,” itself rooted in the Wolof “jug,” meaning to live a disorderly life. These were rough rooms at rural crossroads: bare floors, kerosene lamps, a musician in the corner. The music that filled them was built on the twelve-bar form, three chords (the I, IV, and V) across twelve measures in 4/4 time. The lyrics followed an AAB pattern: a line sung, repeated with variation, then answered by a new concluding line. Handy later said the repetition existed to give the singer time to think up the third line. The melody leaned on the minor pentatonic scale, bending the third, fifth, and seventh notes flat to produce “blue notes,” tones that sit between major and minor and refuse to resolve cleanly.
First Recordings
The blues existed for decades as a purely live, oral tradition before it reached wax. Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues for OKeh Records on August 10, 1920, in New York. It sold 75,000 copies in its first two months. Smith was the first African American woman to lead a commercial blues recording, and the sales shocked the industry. OKeh and other labels scrambled to sign Black women singers and launched “race record” catalogues for a market they had ignored entirely.
The Delta’s own music took longer to reach the studio. Freddie Spruell recorded Milk Cow Blues in Chicago in June 1926, the first Delta blues on record. Charley Patton, considered the father of Delta blues, did not record until June 14, 1929, when he cut fourteen sides in a single day at a studio in Richmond, Indiana, for Paramount Records, earning $50 per song. Six months later he entered Paramount’s facility in Grafton, Wisconsin, and recorded nearly thirty more, including the two-part High Water Everywhere, about the catastrophic Mississippi Flood of 1927. Paramount operated out of a furniture factory in a small Wisconsin town, pressing records on shellac so cheap that many copies have barely survived.
Robert Johnson recorded only twice. His first session ran November 23 to 25, 1936, in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where he cut sixteen songs including Cross Road Blues, Sweet Home Chicago, and I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom. His second was June 19 to 20, 1937, in the Vitagraph Building in Dallas. Both were produced by Don Law. Johnson died in August 1938 at twenty-seven, leaving twenty-nine songs total. The crossroads legend, that he sold his soul to the devil for his ability, has no basis in his lyrics. In Cross Road Blues he falls to his knees and asks the Lord for mercy. He never mentions the devil once.
Electric Conversion
The migration north changed everything. Between 1910 and 1970, over six million African Americans left the South. Chicago’s Black population jumped from 44,000 in 1910 to over 800,000 by 1960. The blues came along and was immediately too quiet. Acoustic guitars could not cut through crowded South Side clubs and rent parties. The impulse to amplify was purely practical: be heard or be ignored.
T-Bone Walker, out of Dallas, was among the first to go electric, amplifying his Gibson ES-250 around 1940. His July 1942 recording of Mean Old World was a landmark. Walker discovered that an amplifier’s volume control could sustain pitches, and by combining that sustain with string bending and finger vibrato, he effectively invented a new instrument. The guitar could now solo in single-note lines, holding its own against horns and piano.
Muddy Waters brought the Delta style to Chicago in 1943 and started playing electric by 1944. His 1948 single I Can’t Be Satisfied, recorded for Aristocrat Records (soon renamed Chess), became a hit that defined the new Chicago blues sound: amplified slide guitar, electric bass, drums, harmonica. Chess Records, founded in 1950 by Polish immigrant brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, became the genre’s center of gravity. Its roster included Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon, whose songwriting held the whole operation together. Dixon wrote or co-wrote over 500 songs, including Hoochie Coochie Man, Spoonful, Back Door Man, and Little Red Rooster. He was also Chess’s house bassist, arranger, and talent scout.
B.B. King named every guitar he ever owned Lucille. On a winter night in 1949, he was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, heated by a barrel of burning kerosene. A fight broke out, the barrel tipped, and the building caught fire. King ran back into the flames to rescue his $30 Gibson L-30. Two people died. The fight had been over a woman named Lucille. King named the guitar after her so he would never do anything that foolish again.
Crossing the Atlantic
In the early 1960s, young British musicians buying American blues imports on Chess and Vee-Jay picked up the music and sent it back. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bonded on a train when each noticed the other carrying a Muddy Waters record. They named their band after his song Rollin’ Stone. The Yardbirds cycled through Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers served as a finishing school for British guitarists. Fleetwood Mac started as a Peter Green blues project before becoming something else entirely.
The paradox of the British blues boom: it was Black American music re-exported to white American audiences by white British musicians, which then pushed those audiences back toward the original artists. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker found new concert halls and festival stages in the wake of the Rolling Stones’ success. It remains one of the strangest loops in the history of popular music.
Essential Listening
- Robert Johnson – King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)
- Muddy Waters – The Best of Muddy Waters (1958)
- Howlin’ Wolf – Moanin’ in the Moonlight (1959)
- B.B. King – Live at the Regal (1965)
- T-Bone Walker – T-Bone Blues (1959)
- Bessie Smith – The Complete Recordings, Vol. 1 (1991)
- Elmore James – The Sky Is Crying (1965)
- John Lee Hooker – The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker (1959)
- Albert King – Born Under a Bad Sign (1967)
- Son House – Father of Folk Blues (1965)
- Junior Wells – Hoodoo Man Blues (1965)
- Freddie King – Let’s Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King (1961)