Chicago Blues, which is now referred to as the "classic Chicago style" was developed in the late '40s and early '50s. It took Delta blues, amplified it and put it into a small-band context. Drums, bass, piano, and sometimes saxophones were added to the basic string band and harmonica aggregation, and the genre created the now standard blues band lineup. The form is flexible enough to accommodate anyone from the singers, guitarists, pianists and harmonica players as the featured performer in front of the standard instrumentation.
Country Blues
Country-Blues is mainly, but not entirely, a genre filled with acoustic guitarists. It embraces a range of techniques from intricate fingerpicking to the early roots of slide playing. A number of regional styles and variations can also be put under the heading of Country Blues, including Piedmont, Atlanta, Memphis, Texas, Acoustic Chicago, Delta, ragtime, folk, songster. Early Piano Blues and Classic Female Blues often fall into this genre also.
Acoustic Blues
Acoustic Blues is a wide-ranging term that describes almost every type of blues that you can play on a non-electric musical instrument. It can cover a wide range of guitar and musical styles that include folk, the songster tradition, slide, fingerpicking, ragtime, and all of the countless regional styles. But acoustic blues is not limited to simply guitar music; the term, "acoustic" is one that can include mandolin, banjo, piano, harmonica, jug, and other non-electric instruments including homemade ones, like the one string monochord bottleneck diddley bow.
Classic Female Blues
Classic Female Blues or more accurately "Vaudeville Blues," was a field dominated by female singers that enjoyed its peak in the '20s. Mamie Smith officially introduced the style with her hit Okeh recording of "Crazy Blues" in 1920. She was an educated city girl from the West End of Cincinnati, which made her somewhat of an anomaly among Classic Female Blues singers; most of the women were from the South and toured on the TOBA booking circuit. A few of these artists, like Ethel Waters, and probably the best known artist in the genre, Bessie Smith, made the transition to legitimate venues. Some of the singers led their own bands. After 1930, the genre went into a slow decline, with the advent of popular singers in a non-"Classic Blues" vein, but its impact on jazz was still felt in 1942 when Peggy Lee adopted Lil Greens race market hit "Why Dont You Do Right." Classic Female Blues singers disappeared altogether, as R&B singers came to dominate the field, but the example of Bessie Smith was still being felt long after her death.
Acoustic Chicago Blues
Acoustic Chicago Blues describes the version of music coming out of the Windy City in the years before Muddy Waters and electric guitars arrived and changed everything. In the '30s and '40s, Chicago was where most blues recording artist went to record and most performers were into an acoustic-based forefather of the later electric Chicago blues band lineup. Its music is usually described as a "hokum style," the lyrics promoted a lighthearted mood, and were driven by a jazz-influenced beat and a more city derived slant.
Acoustic Texas Blues
The earliest incarnation of Acoustic Texas Blues occurred in the mid-'20s, and it scored some of the very first guitar driven blues hits in the marketplace. This style has a more relaxed approach than Delta Blues. The acoustic guitar work featured intricate patterns that were more or less an extension of the vocals rather than merely a strict accompaniment to it. The earliest version of the Texas style embraced both the songster and country-blues traditions. Its lyrics relied less on matters of the heart than in other forms. Its lyrical tradition also generated many of the now commonplace blues metaphors like, "mean black snake," etc. and some of the hardest indictments on life in prison also came out of this style.
Acoustic Louisiana Blues
Acoustic Louisiana Blues has distinctly folk leanings to its basic makeup; the form communicates a sometimes backwoods-front porch ambience to both its sound and its stylings. The genre is rough and informal by nature, but doesn't pay homage to a specific influence, yet it reflects the spirit and ambience of its country surroundings. Its lyrical content can waver between common folk themes, some going back to the turn of the century, to more personal and confessional ones as well.
Vaudeville Blues
On the African-American T.O.B.A. vaudeville circuit of the '20s and early '30s, the headlining acts were the blues singers. Even the minstrel shows, which had an emphasis on group performance, gave preference to the blues performer, which was usually a female performer rooted in the then-popular classic style of shouting. Many of the Vaudeville Blues singers used the blues as an outline for their numerous comedy routines. Others were prolific songwriters, who used their material in their stage act, or shared it with other performers on the same circuit.
Delta Blues
The Delta Blues style comes from an area in the southern part of Mississippi. The style was the first black guitar-dominated music to make it onto phonograph records back in the late '20s. Many original Delta blues performers worked in the context of a string band for live appearances, but very few of them recorded in string bands. Therefore, the recordings from the late '20s through the mid-'30s consist mainly of performers working as solo artists. The style is dominated by fiery slide guitar and passionate vocals, with the deepest of feelings being applied directly to the music. Delta Blues lyrics are passionate, and in many cases show blues songwriting at its best. New performers in this form work in the older solo artist traditions and style.
Early American Blues
Early American Blues delineates the sound of the raw African-American song being put into a recognizable form of a commercial context. Starting with the work songs of slaves in the plantation fields down South and following it to the development of "floating verses" used by them to form actual songs, there was no written structure involved. But the strength and popularity of the music could not go unnoticed by other African-American musicians of more professional standing. This development brought with it the very first attempts to put the blues into the standard 12-bar form, utilizing three basic-chord changes and the AAB verse stanzas indigenous to the genre.
Blues Revival
During the '60s, the blues were rediscovered by a new generation of young listeners. Many older country-blues artists, like Son House, Furry Lewis, and Mississippi John Hurt experienced a dramatic upsurge in popularity, as their older records became popular and they became in-demand performers. Many of these artists recorded prolifically during the Blues Revival of the '60s, and their records became very popular. In some cases, these recordings were the only opportunity the musicians had to record since the '20s or '30s, or their only chance to record at all.
Work Songs
Work Songs were handed down from the days of slavery, and they helped black field workers pass the time under harsh social and environmental conditions. They were usually simple, repetitive chants and melodies, which were easily remembered and modified. Some work songs had a spiritual focus, while others were carefully disguised metaphors containing social commentary and/or plans for escaping. After slavery was abolished, work songs continued to be passed along, especially in black sharecropper families who still worked in the South. The field recordings by the father/son team of John and Alan Lomax, most made during the first half of the 20th century, constitute the primary modern-day source for work songs.
Spirituals
Spirituals are traditional folk-gospel songs that originated in African-American slave communities during the 19th century. When African slaves were brought to the United States and Christianized, they began to perceive Biblical parallels to their own situation (and were sometimes even encouraged to do so by zealously evangelical whites). Thus, many spirituals address themes of freedom, earthly suffering, and hope for deliverance. They were sung both at worship services and in the fields, and were passed down orally from generation to generation. Given those origins, spirituals are usually performed very simply and written in repetitive, easily remembered structures (for example, many verses in spirituals include a one-line refrain that's sung by the entire group and repeated after each new line of the verse). In that sense, spirituals often bear a resemblance to secular prewar country blues, a music stemming from a similarly rural lineage.
Songster
The songster tradition pre-dated blues music and co-existed with it, especially in the areas of the Southeast that produced music in the Piedmont style. It began soon after the end of slavery in the south, when African-American musicians were able to travel and play music for a living. The songster was usually a solo musician with a guitar, or occasionally a banjo, who would perform songs from a range of musical styles including gospel, field songs and folk, and later ragtime and blues. Songsters maintained broad repertoires to appeal to a wide range of audiences. Through minstrel and medicine shows, black songsters interacted with white musicians, who would later adopt the black musicians' songs and use them, along with songs from white sources, as the foundations of early country music.
Modern Acoustic Blues
Modern Acoustic Blues finds contemporary artists reviving the older, more country-derived styles of blues in its myriad strains. The form places a great deal of emphasis on instrumental expertise, providing the genre with some astounding players who do more than merely replicate older styles. An outgrowth of the folk music boom and original blues revival of the mid-'60s, its emotional makeup can encompass everything from provincialism to intense personal statements. While honoring traditional forms, the style also has room for original material, providing a forum for new ideas as well as extending the genre's musical repertoire into the future.
Acoustic Memphis Blues
The Memphis style of acoustic country blues is a very distinctive form, and is historically important for the rise of two distinct changes it brought to the music. First was the rise in popularity of the jug band, a style of lighthearted blues played on homemade instruments with a pronounced Dixieland jazz feel to it. The second influence, and perhaps most important, was the beginnings of assigning parts to guitarists for solo / lead and rhythm work, a now-commonplace form of arranging that is a part of all modern day blues bands. This version of Memphis blues was heavily tied to the local medicine show and vaudeville traditions, lasting well into the late '30s. Because of its proximity to Mississippi and the Delta, slide guitar work also crops up in acoustic Memphis blues from time to time, though in nowhere the proportion that it does in other genres.
Acoustic New Orleans Blues
The Acoustic New Orleans Blues style, embraces everything from itinerant street singers and guitarists to rag-tag "spasm" bands (themselves an offshoot of the jug band) to house frolic piano players. The music also reflects the tastes of the patrons on the street, including jazz, boogie woogie, ballads, rhythm & blues, and pop tunes, all of them interfacing with the most serious of blues.
Blues Gospel
Almost all of the artists in this genre were lay preachers or street-corner evangelists. Blues Gospel is a mixture of blues guitar patterns and religious messages; a combination of the sacred and the profane. This type of blues never had a particular guitar style, the instrument was used as a device to propel the lyrical message, and in doing so, the artist would embrace everything from ragtime fingerpicking and knife-edged slide techniques to coarsely strummed rhythm patterns.
Prewar Country Blues
Prewar Country Blues is acoustic, country-blues that was recorded before World War II. It refers to a number of different styles, including Delta Blues, Memphis Blues and jug bands, but all of them are recognizable by their acoustic instrumentation, folk songs and rural feel.
Folk-Blues
Folk-Blues describes a type of blues usually played on non-electric musical instruments. It embraces a wide range of guitar and musical styles that thrived in the early days of the music style's gestation. But folk-blues is not limited to merely guitar music; its "folk" appellation is an elastic enough term to also include down-home, no-frills music played on mandolin, banjo, harmonica, and other non-electric instruments, with its group sound being projected through the jug bands. Folk-blues evokes the sound and image of a rough-hewn, somewhat informal music, a sound and style born of southern plantations, house frolics, and juke joints; it is true folk music, played by and for the people. The term also provides a convenient general heading for all the multiple regional styles and variations (Piedmont, Atlanta, Memphis, Texas, Delta, ragtime, songster, etc.) embraced by the form.
Memphis Blues
Memphis Blues gave rise to two distinct forms: the jug band (playing and singing a humorous, jazz-style of blues played on homemade instruments) and the beginnings of assigning parts to guitarists for solo (lead) and rhythm, a tradition that is now a part of all modern day blues and rock & roll bands. The earliest version of the genre was heavily tied to the local medicine show and vaudeville traditions, lasting well into the late '30s. The later, post-World War II version of this genre featured explosive, distorted electric guitar work, thunderous drumming, and fierce, declamatory vocals.
Dirty Blues
The Dirty Blues is a bit of a clichι in some areas, and to many modern ears, it seems more a joke than a legitimate form. But the dirty blues has a long tradition in the blues, and it often resurfaces in modern blues and rock. During the early days of recorded blues, raunchy songs were recorded nearly as often as love songs and laments. These songs were distinguished by their often-humorous double entendres and metaphors; in performance, the songs could actually flirt with the vulgar, but on wax, the meanings were suggested. The dirty blues primarily were about sex, but there were many songs about drugs and reefer that were essentially dirty blues namely, simple country blues with taboo lyrics. The dirty blues thrived in the days before World War II. After the war, many record labels concentrated on records that were commercially viable, and the dirty blues faded away, only to be resurrected during the blues revival of the '60s, when many white collegiates discovered the form.
Prewar Blues
Prewar Blues is country-blues recorded before World War II. Prewar blues is entirely acoustic, but there are variations to the style it could be acoustic guitars, piano blues, solo singers, string bands, or jug bands. The primary factors are that the music is all acoustic, is usually a folk song, and was recorded prior to World War II.
Prewar Gospel Blues
Prewar Gospel Blues is gospel blues recorded prior to World War II. There has always been a point, both stylistically and philosophically, where the sacred (gospel music) and the profane (blues, the devil's music) have had an uneasy alliance, and this genre strain is it. Consisting almost entirely of performers who are lay preachers or street corner evangelists, their use of blues guitar patterns are tightly interwoven to the most heartfelt statements of religious conviction. Embracing everything from ragtime fingerpicking and knife-edged slide techniques to crudely strummed rhythm patterns, the style owes less allegiance to a particular style of guitar than to using the instrument's possibilities to propel its lyrical message. Though its proponents are few, there are few sounds in the blues that are as alternately spiritual or as bone chilling as gospel blues music.
Fingerpicked Guitar
The finger-picked guitar style arose in the American south, where it was often used to make one guitar mimic the sound of two by allowing the musician to generate bass notes with the thumb on the lower strings while the fingers picked out the melody in the higher strings. Fingerpicking is also known as thumbpicking, particularly in Kentucky, and may also be called "Travis picking" after Merle Travis. Finger-picked styles feature predominately in blues music, as well as country and folk styles. Similar styles originated from classical guitar music and have surfaced in European folk styles, Hawaiian slack-key guitar and jazz.
East Coast Blues
East Coast Blues essentially falls into two categories: Piedmont Blues and Jump Blues and its variations. Musically, Piedmont Blues describes the shared style of musicians from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia as well as others from as far as Florida, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. It refers to a wide assortment of aesthetic values, performance techniques, and shared repertoire rooted in common geographical, historical, and sociological circumstances. The Piedmont guitar style employs a complex fingerpicking method in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. The guitar style is highly syncopated and connects closely with an earlier string-band tradition integrating ragtime, blues, and country-dance songs. It's excellent party music with a full, rock-solid sound. Jump Blues is an up-tempo, jazz-tinged style of blues that first came to prominence in the mid to late 1940s. Usually featuring a vocalist in front of a large, horn-driven orchestra or medium sized combo with multiple horns, the style is earmarked by a driving rhythm, intensely shouted vocals, and honking tenor saxophone solos, all of those very elements a precursor to rock & roll. The lyrics are almost always celebratory in nature, full of braggadocio and swagger. With less reliance on guitar work (the instrument usually being confined to rhythm section status) than other styles, jump blues was the bridge between the older styles of blues-primarily those in a small band context-and the big band jazz sound of the 1940s.
Jump Blues
Jump Blues refers to an up tempo, jazz-tinged style of blues that first came to prominence in the mid- to late '40s. Usually featuring a vocalist in front of a large, horn-driven orchestra or medium sized combo with multiple horns, the style is earmarked by a driving rhythm, intensely shouted vocals, and honking tenor saxophone solos all of those very elements a precursor to rock & roll. The lyrics are almost always celebratory in nature, full of braggadocio and swagger. With less reliance on guitar work (the instrument usually being confined to rhythm section status) than other styles, jump blues was the bridge between the older styles of blues primarily those in a small band context and the big band jazz sound of the 1940s.
Piedmont Blues
Piedmont Blues refers to a regional sub style characteristic of black musicians of the southeastern United States. Geographically, the Piedmont means the foothills of the Appalachians west of the tidewater region and Atlantic coastal plain stretching roughly from Richmond, VA, to Atlanta, GA. Musically, Piedmont blues describes the shared style of musicians from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, as well as others from as far as Florida, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. It refers to a wide assortment of aesthetic values, performance techniques, and shared repertoire rooted in common geographical, historical, and sociological circumstances; to put it more simply, Piedmont blues means a constellation of musical preferences typical of the Piedmont region. The Piedmont guitar style employs a complex fingerpicking method in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. The guitar style is highly syncopated and connects closely with an earlier string-band tradition, integrating ragtime, blues, and country-dance songs. It's excellent party music with a full, rock-solid sound.
New York Blues
New York Blues is primarily variations on jump blues and uptown blues, where the singer is prominent and the music is slightly more sophisticated and jazzy than its rural and urban counterparts.
Harmonica Blues
Harmonica Blues refers to any style of blues where the harmonica plays a central figure. Although the harmonica was present in many country-blues recordings, it became a dominant force in the '50s, when the instrument was amplified. Although who was the first bluesman to blow his harp into a cheap microphone plugged into an equally cheap public address system and distorting it beyond belief will be forever lost to history, the artist who made the genre known as Electric Harmonica Blues come to life was none other than Little Walter Jacobs. Its greatest single innovator, greatest selling artist, and the wellspring of the entire genre, Walter's tone became the sound to emulate and his legacy has persisted in defining the sound and style of the genre decades after his death. Not unlike Charlie Parker's shadow in modern jazz and Hank Williams, Sr. in country, Walter's influence has so saturated the genre that it has only been in the last decade or so that new players have turned to the other geniuses of the form (most notably alter Horton) for inspiration, finding new and innovative ways to express themselves on this humble instrument.
Louisiana Blues
A looser, more laid back and percussive version of the Jimmy Reed side of the Chicago sound, Louisiana Blues has several distinctive stylistic elements to distinguish it from other genres. The guitar work is simple but effective, heavily influenced by the boogie patterns used on Jimmy Reed singles, with liberal doses of Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters thrown in for good measure. Unlike the heavy backbeat of the Chicago style, its rhythm can be best described as 'plodding,' making even up tempo tunes sound like slow blues simply played a bit faster. The production techniques on most of the recordings utilize massive amounts of echo, giving the performances a darkened sound and feel, thus coining the genre's alternate description as "Swamp Blues."
Modern Electric Blues
Modern Electric Blues is an eclectic mixture, a sub genre embracing the old, the new and something that falls between the two. Some forms of it Xeroxes the older styles of urban blues-primarily offshoots of the electric Chicago band style-right down to playing the music itself on vintage instruments and amplifiers from the period being replicated. It's also a genre that pays homage to those vintage styles of playing while simultaneously recasting them in contemporary fashion. It can also be-by turns-the most forward looking of all blues styles, embracing rock beats and pyrotechnics and enlivening the form with funk rhythms and chord progressions that expand beyond the standard three that usually comprises most blues forms.
Modern Electric Chicago Blues
Modern Electric Chicago Blues keeps the same structure and sound as Chicago blues, so the term is primarily a distinction of eras. The modern era begins in the late '60s, as a new generation began to play the blues. Some of these players displayed rock influences, mainly in terms of loud amplification, but they kept the spirit of Chicago blues alive.
Contemporary Blues
Contemporary Blues draws upon traditional acoustic and electric blues, but offers a more smoothed-out take on the genre that incorporates the influences of rock, pop, R&B, and/or folk. As such, contemporary blues is most often (though not always) electric, and rarely (though once in a while) purist. Because of its up-to-date production and mellower audience sensibility, the style tends to be more polished and sometimes even a bit genteel; it's still definitely soulful, but not quite as earthy or gritty as the music that predates it, and not as aggressive or fiery as modern-day electric blues from Chicago or Texas. Since other types of music inform it, contemporary blues has a greater chance of crossing over to pop, album rock, or adult-contemporary radio formats. Artists like Robert Cray, Keb' Mo', and prodigies Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang epitomize the contemporary blues sound.
Blues-Rock
Though much early rock & roll was based in the blues, Blues-Rock didn't fully develop into a sub genre until the late-'60s. Blues-rock emphasized two specific things the traditional, three-chord blues song and instrumental improvisation. Borrowing the idea of an instrumental combo and loud amplification from rock & roll, the original blues-rockers bands like Cream that grew out of the Alexis Korner and John Mayall tradition of British blues, as well as American bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Canned Heat also attempted to play long, involved improvisations which were commonplace on jazz records, as well as live blues shows. The hybrid became quite popular and the bands that immediately followed them were louder and more riff-oriented. Out of this approach came heavy metal and Southern rock, which both used basic blues riffs and featured extended solos. In the early '70s, the lines between blues-rock and hard rock were barely visible, as boogie-based bands like ZZ Top employed album-rock production techniques that tended to obscure their blues roots. However, blues-rock soon backed away from hard rock, and there were a set number of acts that continued to play (and rewrite) blues standards as well as write their own songs in the same idiom. In the '80s and '90s, blues-rock was more roots-oriented than in the '60s and '70s, even when artists like the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan flirted with rock stardom. By the '80s, blues-rock had become an accepted tradition, much like the blues.
Modern Delta Blues
Modern Delta Blues is essentially a revival of classic Delta blues traditions. Modern Delta blues musicians typically play acoustic country blues and only rarely amplify their instruments, since Delta blues is an acoustic tradition. Modern Delta blues rarely expands upon the traditions of Delta blues it simply keeps them alive.
Modern Electric Texas Blues
Modern Electric Texas Blues is exactly that classic Texas shuffles performed in a contemporary, slightly rock-influenced style.
Texas Blues
A geographical sub-genre earmarked by a more relaxed, swinging feel than other styles of blues, Texas Blues encompasses a number of style variations and has a long, distinguished history. Its earliest incarnation occurred in the mid 1920s, featuring acoustic guitar work rich in filigree patterns, almost an extension of the vocals rather than merely a strict accompaniment to it. This version of Texas blues embraced both the songster and country-blues traditions, with its lyrics relying less on affairs of the heart than in other forms. The next stage of development in the region's sound came after World War II, bringing forth a fully electric style that featured jazzy, single-string soloing over predominantly horn-driven backing. The style stays current with a raft of regional performers primarily working in a small combo context.
Electric Blues
Electric Blues is an eclectic genre that embraces just about every kind of blues that can be played on an amplified instrument. Its principal component is that of the electric guitar, but its amplified aspect can extend to the bass (usually a solid body Fender type model, but sometimes merely an old "slappin'' acoustic with a pickup attached), harmonica, and keyboard instruments. Stylistically, the form is a wide-open field, accessible to just about every permutation possible embracing the old, the new, and sometimes futuristic, and something that falls between the two. Some forms of it copy the older styles of urban blues (primarily the Chicago, Texas, and Louisiana variants) usually in a small combo format, while others head into funk and soul territory. Yet electric blues is elastic enough to include artists who pay homage to those vintage styles of playing while simultaneously recasting them in contemporary fashion. It is lastly a genre that provides a convenient umbrella for original artists of late '40s and early '50s derivation that seemingly resist neat classifications.
Soul-Blues
Perhaps one of the most modern forms of blues, Soul-Blues fuses disparate elements of black popular music to create a wholly urban amalgam of its own. Artists who wanted to move stylistically beyond the three-chord confines of conventional blues forms found the rhythm & blues strain of the 1950s and the southern soul style of the mid-'60s far more to their creative liking. Soul-blues combines the best elements of the two and blends that with the standard blues band instrumentation sometimes augmented with an R&B-styled horn section. The genre also provides more traditional blues artists with a style to visit on occasion, injecting some contemporary life into their recordings.
Electric Country Blues
During the '80s, several blues revivalists, who primarily played Delta and Mississippi blues, decided to amplify what essentially was a country form. Structurally, there was no change from the original country blues; it was simply electrified, and not very loudly at that. It was a rare occasion that country blues was electrified most revivalists preferred to stick to the original acoustic form but when it was, the only difference was its (albeit subtle) amplification.
Electric Memphis Blues
The later, post-World War II version of Electric Memphis Blues featured explosive, distorted electric guitar work, thunderous drumming, and fierce, declamatory vocals. Sam Phillips largely captured this wonderfully animated music for posterity at the Memphis Recording Service studio, later issuing much of it on his Sun Records label.
Urban Blues
The descriptive phrase Urban Blues was first used in the early part of the 20th century to differentiate between the more uptown sentiments pervasive to the style and the cruder, more rural stylings of country-blues artists. This term was later used in the 1940s to describe a type of sophisticated blues written about the vagaries of city life, its lyrics alternately dealing with romantic strife and the innumerable good times to be easily obtained in an urban area. Always city-derived, the music is earmarked by a pronounced uptown emphasis, embracing everything from jump blues to jazz-influenced stylings to smooth, supper-club-style vocals.
Swamp Blues
Swamp Blues, the looser, more rhythmic variation of the standard Louisiana sound, also brings more contemporary elements of New Orleans, zydeco, soul music, and Cajun to bear on its style. The guitar work is simple but effective, and is heavily influenced by the boogie patterns used on Jimmy Reed records, with liberal doses of Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters. Unlike the heavy backbeat of the more popular urban styles, its rhythm can be best described as laid-back, making even its most up tempo offerings share the same mood and ambience of the most desultory of slow blues.
Electric Chicago Blues
Electric Chicago Blues was developed in the late '40s and early '50s, taking what was essentially Delta blues, amplifying it, and putting it into a small-band context. Taking the basic guitar and harmonica lineup and fortifying it with drums, bass, and piano (sometimes saxophones), the form created what we now know as the standard blues band. Over the years, the electric Chicago style has been flexible enough to accommodate singers, guitarists, pianists, and harmonica players as the featured performer in front of the standard instrumentation. It has developed over the decades as well, with later versions of the style moving away from the strict Delta guitar patterns and embracing the lead guitar work of B.B. King and T-Bone Walker, creating the popular West Side sub genre, which usually featured a horn section appended to the basic rhythm section. Although Electric Chicago Blues has also embraced rock beats and modern funk rhythms in the last decade or so, its most avid practitioners have generally stayed within the guidelines developed in the '50s and early '60s.
Electric Texas Blues
The geographical sub genre known as Texas blues has encompassed a number of style variations over the decades, but its longest-lasting and most developed is its electric incarnation. This change in the region's sound came after World War II, bringing with it a fully electric style largely pioneered by T-Bone Walker that featured jazzy, single-string soloing over predominantly horn-driven backing. The style stayed much the same throughout the 1950s, but started moving toward a smaller combo, sans horn section, as the decade moved on. But as much of an uptown sound as Electric Texas Blues represented, its juke-joint roadhouse roots were never too far below the surface, with artists like Lightnin' Hopkins, Juke Boy Bonner, Hop Wilson, and Frankie Lee Sims rocking the joint in duo and trio formats with a frightening intensity. The style moved away from the larger horn-led sounds to smaller and smaller combo formats, eventually embracing much of the same instrumentation as the electric Chicago style, with even more emphasis placed on the lead guitar work. The genre stays current and thriving with a spate of regional performers primarily working in small combo contexts, with a great many of them hailing from the Austin area.
Electric Delta Blues
When electric guitars became the staple sound of blues, the Mississippi Delta area was one of the very first to react and adapt quickly. Harnessing the rawness and emotional passion of Mississippi blues to this technological development largely an outgrowth of the necessity of being heard over the din in noisy taverns and juke joints gave Electric Delta Blues a primordial thump all its own. Often distorted and played at high volumes, its guitar work shares many of the patterns that occur in the electric Chicago style its spiritual cousin while imparting the cruder, more down-home flavor of the region.
Electric Harmonica Blues
It's unclear who was the first bluesman to blow his harp into a cheap microphone plugged into an equally cheap public address system and distort it beyond belief, but the artist who made the genre known as Electric Harmonica Blues come to life was none other than Little Walter Jacobs. Its greatest single innovator, greatest-selling artist, and the wellspring of the entire genre, Jacobs' tone became the sound to emulate, and his legacy has persisted in defining the sound and style of the genre decades after his death. Not unlike Charlie Parker's shadow in modern jazz and Hank Williams, Sr.'s in country, Walter's influence has so saturated the genre that it has only been in the last decade or so that new players have turned to the other geniuses of the form (most notably Walter Horton) for inspiration, finding new and innovative ways to express themselves on this humble instrument.
New Orleans Blues
Primarily (but not exclusively) piano- and horn-driven, New Orleans Blues is enlivened by Caribbean rhythms, an unrelenting party atmosphere, and the "second-line" strut of the Dixieland music so indigenous to the area. There's a cheerful good-naturedness to the style that infuses the music with a good-time feel, no matter how somber the lyrical text. The music itself uses a distinctively "lazy" feel, with all of its somewhat complex rhythms falling just a hair behind the beat. But the vocals can run the full emotional gamut from laid-back crooning to full-throated gospel shouting, making for some interesting juxtapositions, both in style and execution.
Juke Joint Blues
Juke Joint Blues refers to the hard-driving variation of Southern R&B and electric blues where the rhythm is dominant. It's hard-rocking blues, intended for dancing, and it is usually frenzied up tempo blues or greasy slow blues. Generally, the term refers to R&B and blues singles made in the '50s and early '60s.
Slide Guitar Blues
Slide guitar blues is produced when a player uses some kind of tubular finger covering (usually made of metal or glass, like a bottleneck) to depress the strings of a guitar over the frets so that the strings are stretched and bent, producing a wavering tone. Traditionally slide guitar blues was played on resonator guitars, but a variety of acoustic and electric guitars have also been used. Blues slide guitar originated in the Mississippi Delta region where it was popularized by a number of blues players, including Robert Johnson. Electric slide guitar blues developed along with other electric blues styles with the migration of African-Americans north to Chicago in the 1940s.
Piano Blues
Piano Blues runs through the entire history of the music itself, embracing everything from ragtime, barrelhouse, boogie woogie, and smooth West Coast jazz stylings to the hard-rocking rhythms of Chicago blues.
Jazz Blues
As a specific stylistic term, Jazz Blues can refer either to a blues artist who employs more advanced harmonies and/or rhythms which break out of traditional, straightforward blues patterns; or to a jazz artist who keeps his harmonies and/or rhythms relatively simple, making the music more visceral and emotional than intellectual or sophisticated. The results might sound more like one side of the equation with a touch of the other mixed in, or even approach R&B. Blues and jazz were rooted in the same African-American musical traditions in the first place, and they have always intersected enough that an absolute dividing line has never been a reasonable (or, to many listeners and musicians, desirable) proposition.
West Coast Blues
More piano-based and jazz-influenced than anything else, West Coast Blues is in actuality the California style, with all of the genre's main practitioners coming to prominence there, if not actual natives of the state in particular. In fact, the state and the style played host to a great many post-war Texas guitar expatriates, and their jazzy, T-Bone Walker style of soloing would become an earmark of the genre. West Coast blues also features smooth, honey-toned vocals, frequently crossing into urban blues territory. The West Coast style was also home to numerous jump-blues practitioners, as many traveling bands of the 1940s ended up taking permanent residence there. Its current practitioners work almost exclusively in the standard small-combo format.
St. Louis Blues
St. Louis Blues tends to be a variation on Jump Blues or Piano Blues, featuring solo singers or a pianist performing with small combos or large bands. It has an urban feeling, with little of the rural atmosphere that distinguishes country-blues.
British Blues
More than a mere geographical distinction, the early British Blues of the late '50s and early '60s paid strict adherence to replicating American blues genres, with an admiration for its originators bordering on reverence. But by the time of the blues revival of the mid-'60s, British guitarists in the main led by Eric Clapton were starting to bend the form to create their own amalgam. Wedding the string-bending fervor of the B.B., Albert, and Freddie King styles to the extreme volume produced by large amplifiers, British blues largely coalesced into blues-rock, with formerly traditional blues artists like the Rolling Stones and Clapton becoming rock stars. The British style has perhaps the closest ties to rock music as opposed to rock & roll, a distinct stylistic descendant of the 1950s. It is this constant shift between preserving older styles and mainstreaming it into the pop marketplace that is the hallmark of British blues.
Detroit Blues
Detroit blues has historically been overshadowed for two reasons: the wealth of other music for which the city is better known (gospel, jazz, Motown, hard-driving rock & roll), and the much more celebrated scene of its Midwestern neighbor Chicago. Only one performer rose to fame directly through the Detroit blues scene: John Lee Hooker, whose idiosyncratic style was difficult to imitate and thus never became the standard sound of the city. Aside from Hooker, Detroit blues was stylistically very similar to Chicago blues: rooted in the Mississippi Delta, it was the music of Southern blacks who migrated north to work in the auto plants, and began to play familiar music using amplified electric instruments. Like Chicago, the Detroit blues scene hit its creative prime in the late '40s and early '50s, centered around the clubs on Hastings Street and the surrounding Black Bottom neighborhood. Pianist Big Maceo Merriweather went on to greater fame on the Chicago scene, but for the most part, Detroit's finest performers including singer Alberta Adams and guitarists/singers Calvin Frazier, Eddie Burns, and Johnnie Bassett gained little recognition outside of their hometown, due in part to a relative lack of promotion and recording opportunities. Detroit's blues scene was nearly wiped out by the advent of Motown, but gradually rebuilt itself thanks to promoter and former recording artist Bobo Jenkins; it survives today, still on a mostly local basis.
Minstrel
While the term Minstrel dates back to medieval times, it is most commonly and infamously associated with white musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century who performed African-American songs, jokes, and impersonations in blackface makeup for racially-segregated audiences; among the more well-known minstrel performers were Emmett Miller and Honey Wilds.
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