Mike Rowe
The country blues weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta, even if that state garners the most acclaim from blues enthusiasts today. The blues developed all through the South and in different ways. For instance, the sound of the Delta—impassioned, emotional vocals, highly rhythmic guitar accompaniment with often bottleneck a major and common ingredient—is so different from the more gentle picked melodies and general tunefulness of the East Coast or Piedmont artists. It’s different also from the Texans, whose high, keening vocals and extended guitar lines evince another kind of blues majesty. While all have their gestation on the cotton and sugar plantations and developed from the work songs and hollers about the early 1900s, the sound of the blues developed differently according to the various social and musical factors holding sway in an area—the intense segregation and isolation of the Delta contributing to the harshness of the style, the greater exposure to white Southern music on the East Coast adding a melodic strain, or the greater memories of slave songs in Texas adding a songster element to the genre. Each area often gave rise to a particularly gifted and popular performer who set the standard for the locality—for the East Coast–Piedmont grouping it would be Blind Boy Fuller; for the Mississippi Delta, Charley Patton; and for Texas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, who would be the major influences on the local sound and their followers.
But these blues “regions” are only approximate, and it should be understood that discussion of the “Mississippi blues” is often a kind of shorthand for the Mississippi Delta sound of prime movers Charley Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown. Certainly, Mississippi John Hurt growing up in nearby Avalon would have found little in common with them, while the Tommy Johnson or Ishman Bracey school of Jackson, Mississippi, would have provided stiff competition to the Delta champions. With different styles holding forth in different parts, it would be more meaningful to split Mississippi into various localities, perhaps some even overlapping the state boundaries for each discrete style. Similarly, for the other blues regions, it wasn’t only the guitarists who could stamp their sound on an area. In Texas, for example, the Santa Fe school of pianists based in Houston was a remarkable example of a piano culture that was sturdily independent of musical developments in the Northern cities.
Through the ’20s and ’30s black migration from farm to factory and from south to north and west gradually shaped an urban blues befitting the faster tempo of city life and dwelling with an increasing complexity of instrumentation. But as the music moved north, the host cities sometimes developed, for a time, their own local sound. St. Louis, for example, a halfway point, retained a lot of the country blues flavor and spawned a distinct style of piano blues centered on Roosevelt Sykes, Henry Brown, and the Sparks Brothers, among others. This gentler music making would not last and would be overwhelmed in the ’40s by the migrants’ race to Chicago and Detroit and the increasing sophistication of the blues sound.
With the onset of World War II this urbanization of the music was accelerated, but the massive increase in migration that followed the traditional routes of the railroads and highways as Delta migrants generally moved to Chicago, East Coast migrants to New York, and Texans and the western states to Los Angeles sparked a last flowering of the regional traditions. These regional factors were gradually subsumed in the northern and western cities as the music moved into the bars and clubs while records and radio broadcasts also helped smooth the idiosyncrasies to some extent. However, the huge migration of the World War II years brought a new audience from the South who would, for a few years, become the market for the new sound of the country blues—electrified and electrifying, a music forged in the steel mills and shipyards and stockyards and auto factories in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Muddy Waters was the inheritor of the Delta blues tradition, and his impassioned vocals and amplified bottleneck guitar set the benchmark for the new Chicago blues, the most striking example of the old-new blues. The West Coast, where a new record industry was built from scratch, played host to black migrants from Texas and the western states and, with T-Bone Walker and Charles Brown in command, fashioned a modern jump blues that was both old and, paradoxically, slick. New York, the host city for Piedmont and seaboard migrants, didn’t seem to develop any iconic postwar blues style—maybe the city’s jazz history was a limiting factor or the gentle East Coast blues didn’t lend so easily to modernizing or electrification.
But there were other, newer regional sounds that grew up where none had existed before, sounds promoted by certain recording studios or the popularity of particular artists. In New Orleans a definite city–jump blues sound emerged, and elsewhere, in Louisiana, the swamp blues and zydeco, a hybrid of white French Cajun and R&B, were all-conquering. Things moved fast, and it wasn’t long before most regional characteristics would be ironed out as radio and records spread the influence of the major and most popular performers, Jimmy Reed and, especially, B. B. King, throughout the blues world.