the blues

Beyond the jazzier realm of my musical interests and knowledge, my heart and soul lies embedded within the blues.  This form of music (along with jazz) is what started the great tradition of American roots music.  Country music (as in bluegrass or country & western music) came later, as did rock and roll.  But the blues pretty much gave birth to all of that and was contributed by the sounds heard in the '20s and '30s in the Mississippi Delta.  Of the Delta blues men, the most well known have to be Son House and Robert Johnson.  Muddy Waters (who also came from Mississippi in a town called Rolling Fork) and his longtime guitarist Hubert Sumlin, can also be listed as originators.  Waters and Sumlin pioneered electrified blues when each moved to Chicago in the 1950s.

Then of course, after the successes of Waters, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Reed and others in Chicago, British rock and roll bands (The Rolling Stones, Cream, The Who), as well as later rock bands from the south such as the Allman Brothers, took this blues formula and supercharged it.  The guitar playing in rock and roll is traced back mostly to blues but there are other areas like country that also influenced it.  Still, the idea of bending notes or playing slide guitar with a glass medicine bottle or beer bottle, comes strictly from The Delta.  My musical tastes have begun to cover more modern interpretations.  But, the blues is where I always draw from, even if I'd decide to go down a more jazz influenced road.

There are many great innovators in blues still today whether they come from Mississippi, Chicago, Texas or anywhere else.  It will always stay alive.  It's not all about misery and woe, either.  It's a natural emotion that everyone experiences whether those emotions are happy or sad and that's part of the appeal of the music just as much as the sound of it.  I could go on and on and on about my love for blues.  But, it has to be heard to be discovered and the music will continue to be carried on to new generations.