Where does Blues (music) come from?
The blues comes from the Deep South of the United States, above all the Mississippi Delta. It grew out of African-American songs in the decades after slavery ended, and it went on to shape jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
Born after slavery
The blues drew on older African-American music: work songs, field hollers, shouts and spirituals. Its call-and-response pattern and its 'blue notes' can be traced back to Africa. Historians usually date its first appearance to the decades after emancipation in 1863, when former slaves became sharecroppers and juke joints opened where people could dance after a hard day's work. Rural Black musicians were rarely written about, so its earliest years are poorly documented.
A knife on the strings
Around 1903 the bandleader W. C. Handy was waiting for a train at Tutwiler, in the Mississippi Delta, when a man began to play guitar beside him, pressing a knife on the strings. He sang 'Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog', about a railway crossing at Moorhead, repeating the line three times to what Handy called 'the weirdest music I ever heard'. Handy built songs such as 'Memphis Blues' and 'St. Louis Blues' on such sounds and became known as the 'Father of the Blues'.
Why people say Chicago
Chicago's famous electric blues was made by musicians from the South. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. From 1948, when Muddy Waters recorded 'I Can't Be Satisfied', the city became a centre of electric blues, with amplified guitar, harmonica, bass and drums. In the 1960s the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, from the Delta, toured England and helped inspire the British blues movement.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Blues ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › W. C. Handy ↗ · msbluestrail.org ↗
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