Delta branch is especially significant for rock. The impact of those who remained in the region has been deeply felt: the reissue of Robert Johnson’s 1930s recordings by Columbia in the 1960s strongly influenced Bob Dylan and spawned covers by Cream (“Crossroads”), the Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain”), and Led Zeppelin (“Travelling Riverside Blues”). But those who left the region were among the early pioneers of rock: Muddy Waters moved to Chicago, as did harmonica player and vocalist James Cotton and Willie Dixon, one of the great songwriters for Chess Records; B. B. King moved to Memphis; and John Lee Hooker moved to Detroit. Alan Lomax, an important documenter of blues in the 1930s and 1940s (he made the first recordings of Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, for the Library of Congress) reports the lineage.
[Son House, interviewed in the early 1940s]: “Little Robert [Johnson] learnt from me, and I learnt from an old fellow they call Lemon down in Clarksdale, and he was called Lemon because he had learnt all Blind Lemon’s pieces off the phonograph.” Now I [Lomax] felt like shouting. Son House had laid out one of the main lines in the royal lineage of America’s great guitar players—Blind Lemon of Dallas to his double in Clarksdale to Son House to Robert Johnson. “But isn’t there anybody alive who plays this style?” I asked. “An old boy called Muddy Waters round Clarksdale, he learnt from me.” (Lomax 1993: 16–17)
A.L. [in an early 1940s interview with Muddy Waters]: Did you know the tune before you heard it on record [Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues”]?
M.W.: Yessir, I learned it from Son House; that’s a boy that picks a guitar. I been knowing Son since ’twenty-nine. He was the best…. I followed after him and stayed watching him.3 (411)
Waters had a special reputation among British rock and rollers: “At the Beatles’ first press conference in New York, a reporter asked them what they most wanted to see. They immediately replied, ‘Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley.’ … Mick Jagger named his Rolling Stones after a line from one of the blues Muddy recorded at Sherrod’s [plantation] on that long-ago day [1941–42; rerecorded for Chess in 1950]” (406). Son House also reinforced stereotypes about bluesmen: “‘Bob [Robert Johnson] was a terrible man with the women, like all us guitar players.’ Son looked at his sweet-faced wife and they both laughed. ‘And I reckon he got one too many down there in Lou’sana. So this last one, she gi’n him poison in his coffee. And he died’” (16).
The recording industry did not see any commercial value in recording blues artists until 1920, when it began recording women blues singers, who had developed another, more urbane style variously called city, vaudeville, or classic blues, typically accompanied by pianists or small jazz bands. A wave of women classic blues singers was recorded starting in 1923. The most renowned were Ma Rainey, known as “The Mother of the Blues,” as she came from an early generation, and the next generation Bessie Smith (“The Empress of the Blues”). Recordings of men country blues singers followed in 1926. The 1920s became a golden era of early blues recordings (see figure 12). The following decade the music eventually fell out of fashion, to be replaced by big band jazz (also called swing) and, by the mid 1940s, small group rhythm and blues.
When the women blues singers were first recorded in the 1920s, the genre had gelled into a standard twelve-bar form: one line of lyrics was sung over four measures (of four beats each measure), the same line was repeated over another four measures, and a responding line was sung over the final four measures. This lyric pattern can be diagrammed as aab. Each of these four-measure sections had a distinguishing chord pattern, played on the piano or guitar (see figure 13). “Down Hearted Blues,” recorded by Bessie Smith in New York for Columbia in early 1923, follows this pattern strictly, although it is preceded by a four-line verse (wherein each line is four measures, totaling sixteen measures), which sets up the story. This practice of an introductory verse is borrowed from the Tin Pan Alley songs of the day. The presence of a separate vocalist and accompanist (or ensemble) dictated that a standardized format be followed.
The earliest country blues singers, however, had no need to standardize the musical form. As solo singer-guitarists, they could expand or contract their guitar accompaniment at will, according to how they felt at the moment. When Charley Patton was finally recorded in 1929, he was still playing blues forms that were open ended. In “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” for example, he used the aab lyric scheme, with the usual chord pattern associated with each line, but he would expand or contract each line at will to more or fewer than four measures. In this piece he systematically turns the beat around (moving the accented strong beat from the downbeat to the offbeat) at the end of the first line and then turns it back around at the end of the response line as he moves into the next verse (see figure 11, which shows the number of beats in each measure for each verse).
Blues forms and vocal and guitar styles laid the foundation for rock through the 1960s. The three-line aab lyric structure can be called a verse or a chorus depending on its function within a song. In American popular song, the term verse, which refers to lyrics that typically move the story line ahead, is contrasted with chorus (sometimes called a hook or refrain), which alternates with verses and repeats the same lines throughout the piece. (The term chorus can refer to a full AABA form or, as here, a repeated line or section that contrasts with the verse—see the glossary for clarification.) Blues developed independently of this verse-chorus tradition and did not initially follow it, but in the 1940s it assimilated mainstream popular song forms to do just that. For example, Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” opens with a twelve-bar blues chorus (“Oh Maybelline”) that alternates with a twelve-bar blues verse, which pushes the story along. Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” uses the first two lines of the aab form as a verse (with two separate lines rather than repeating the first line) and the response line (“Roll over Beethoven”) as a chorus.
Blues lyrics are often marked by strong sexual references, almost always couched in metaphor using double entendre, wherein a phrase or line could be interpreted two ways. This led to consumption of certain forms of blues recordings by whites in the 1920s that would be similar to the pattern for certain forms of rap music in the 1990s. The first widely recognized professional blues composer W. C. Handy (“Memphis Blues,” 1912; “St. Louis Blues,” 1914) wrote in his autobiography, “A flock of low-down dirty blues appeared on records, not witty double entendre but just plain smut. These got a play in college fraternities, speakeasies and rowdy spots. Their appeal was largely to whites, though they were labeled ‘race records’” (1941: 209).
Not only did blues styles, forms, and lyrics cast a long shadow over rock, but so also did the actual compositions, which were covered by young white British and American groups in the 1960s. This brought them into their most direct contact with the musical materials and also opened up the ears of their fans, stimulating some of them to seek out the original sources. Two of the more well-known examples from virtuoso electric guitarists (Duane Allman and Eric Clapton) are the Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” (1928) and Cream’s 1968 cover of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (1937).
Blues forms are malleable and can be open-ended. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen’” (1948), for example, does not strictly follow the chord pattern or form of blues but rather pares down the form to just two (rather than three) chords and is a vehicle for spoken storytelling. Here boogie can refer to dancing, partying, having a good time, or, perhaps more abstractly, following your passion in life (“cause it’s in him and it got to come out”).
In addition to referring to a musical form, blues refers to a more general aesthetic about music making, a feeling, and an attitude toward life. Baraka’s book Blues People was one of the first to explore this aesthetic and attitude in depth. Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism has further explored the significance and cathartic and empowering role of the blues in African American life. Referring to blues women in particular, Davis notes, “Naming issues that pose a threat to the physical
