Blues Roots

This narrative (in progress) is derived from the work of Wikipedia contributors, “Origins of the blues,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origins_of_the_blues&oldid=1293292810 (accessed June 18, 2025).

Many of these blues elements, such as the call-and-response format, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The use of melisma and a wavy, nasal intonation also suggests a connection between the music of West and Central Africa and the blues. The belief that blues is historically derived from the West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré’s tradition as constituting “the DNA of the blues”.^[8]

Perhaps the most compelling African instrument that is a predecessor to an African-American instrument is the “Akonting“, a folk lute of the Jola tribe of Senegambia. It is a clear predecessor to the American banjo in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griots or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola music may not have been influenced much by North African/Middle Eastern music, which may point to African American music not being, according to Sam Charters, related to kora music.^{[citation needed]} The music of the Akonting and that played by on the banjo by elder African-American banjo players, even into the mid 20th century is easily identified as being very similar. The akonting is perhaps the most important and concrete link that exists between African and African-American music.

While the findings of Kubik and others clearly attest to the essential Africanness of many essential aspects of blues expression, studies by Willie Ruff and others have situated the origin of “black” spiritual music inside enslaved peoples’ exposure to their masters’ Hebridean-originated gospels.^[9] African-American economist and historian Thomas Sowell also notes that the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish “redneck” neighbors. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might share its origins with the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming.^[10]

Influence of spirituals

The most important American antecedent of the blues was the spiritual, a form of religious song with its roots in the camp meetings of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Spirituals were a passionate song form, that “convey(ed) to listeners the same feeling of rootlessness and misery” as the blues.^[5] Spirituals, however, were less specifically concerning the performer, instead about the general loneliness of mankind, and were more figurative than direct in their lyrics.^[5] Despite these differences, the two forms are similar enough that they can not be easily separated — many spirituals would probably have been called blues had that word been in wide use at the time.^[14]

Social and economic aspects

Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the slaves. According to Lawrence Levine,^[19] “there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington‘s teachings, and the rise of the blues.” Levine states that “psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did.”

An important reason for the lack of certain knowledge about the origins of the blues is the earliest blues musicians’ tendency to wander through communities, leaving little or no record of precisely what sort of music they played or where it came from. Blues was generally regarded as lower-class music, unfit for documentation, study or enjoyment by the upper- and middle-classes^[20]

… a lean, loose-jointed Negro who had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars.
… The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly… The singer repeated the line (“Going’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog”) three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

Handy had mixed feelings about this music, which he regarded as rather primitive and monotonous,^[22] but he used the “Southern cross’ the Dog” line in his 1914 “Yellow Dog Rag“, which he retitled “Yellow Dog Blues” after the term blues became popular.^[23] “Yellow Dog” was the nickname of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad.

In a long interview conducted by Alan Lomax in 1938, Jelly Roll Morton recalled that the first blues he had heard, probably around 1900, was played by a singer and prostitute, Mamie Desdunes, in Garden District, New Orleans. Morton sang the blues: “Can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ You can’t give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime/ Just to feed that hungry man of mine”. The interview was released as The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.^[28]

Blues Sheet Music

The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: “Baby Seals’ Blues”, by Baby Franklin Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews); “Dallas Blues”, by Hart Wand; and “The Memphis Blues“, by W.C. Handy.^[72]

Handy was a formally trained musician, composer, and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the “Father of the Blues”; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;^[24][73] Handy’s signature work was the “Saint Louis Blues“.

In the 1920s, the blues became a major element of African-American and American popular music, also reaching white audiences via Handy’s arrangements and the classic female blues performers. These female performers became perhaps the first African-American “superstars”, and their recording sales demonstrated “a huge appetite for records made by and for black people.”^[74] The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Booking Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African-American music.

As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, and Blind Blake became more popular in the African-American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in 1923 the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.^[75] The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues.^[76] The first blues recordings from the 1920s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished city or urban blues.

Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early 20th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar. The little-recorded Robert Johnson^[77] combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House. Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern “delicate and lyrical” Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,^[78] with Curley Weaver, Tampa Red, “Barbecue Bob” Hicks and James “Kokomo” Arnold as representatives of this style.^[79]

The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the 1920s and 1930s near Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Kansas Joe McCoy, Casey Bill Weldon, and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s and became part of the urban blues movement.^[80][81]

Urban blues

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City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate, as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community, and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience’s aesthetic.^[82] Classic female urban and vaudeville blues singers were popular in the 1920s, among them “the big three”—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Lucille Bogan. Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African American to record a blues song, in 1920; her second record, “Crazy Blues”, sold 75,000 copies in its first month.^[83] Ma Rainey, the “Mother of Blues”, and Bessie Smith each “[sang] around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room”. Smith would “sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed”.^[84]

Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such as Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. An important label of this era was the Chicago-based Bluebird Records. Before World War II, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as “the Guitar Wizard”. Carr accompanied himself on the piano with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 1950s with artists such as Charles Brown and even Nat “King” Cole.^[76]

Boogie-woogie was another important style of 1930s and early 1940s urban blues. While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis).^[88] Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence “Pine Top” Smith and Earl Hines, who “linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong’s trumpet in the right hand”.^[82] The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles.

Another development in this period was big band blues. The “territory bands” operating out of Kansas City, the Bennie Moten orchestra, Jay McShann, and the Count Basie Orchestra were also concentrating on the blues, with 12-bar blues instrumentals such as Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” and “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” and boisterous “blues shouting” by Jimmy Rushing on songs such as “Going to Chicago” and “Sent for You Yesterday“. A well-known big band blues tune is Glenn Miller‘s “In the Mood“. In the 1940s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues grew up from the boogie-woogie wave and was strongly influenced by big band music. It uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals. Jump blues tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues.^[89] Dallas-born T-Bone Walker, who is often associated with the California blues style,^[90] performed a successful transition from the early urban blues à la Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr to the jump blues style and dominated the blues-jazz scene at Los Angeles during the 1940s.^[91]

1950s

The transition from country blues to urban blues that began in the 1920s was driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms that led many rural blacks to move to urban areas, in a movement known as the Great Migration. The long boom following World War II induced another massive migration of the African-American population, the Second Great Migration, which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The term race record, initially used by the music industry for African-American music, was replaced by the term rhythm and blues. This rapidly evolving market was mirrored by Billboard magazine’s Rhythm & Blues chart. This marketing strategy reinforced trends in urban blues music such as the use of electric instruments and amplification and the generalization of the blues beat, the blues shuffle, which became ubiquitous in rhythm and blues (R&B). This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music, which, together with jazz and gospel music, became a component of R&B.^[92]

After World War II, new styles of electric blues became popular in cities such as Chicago,^[93] Memphis,^[94] Detroit^[95][96] and St. Louis. Electric blues used electric guitars, double bass (gradually replaced by bass guitar), drums, and harmonica (or “blues harp”) played through a microphone and a PA system or an overdriven guitar amplifier. Chicago became a center for electric blues from 1948 on, when Muddy Waters recorded his first success, “I Can’t Be Satisfied”.^[97] Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by Delta blues, because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region.

Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums.^[98] The saxophonist J. T. Brown played in bands led by Elmore James and by J. B. Lenoir, but the saxophone was used as a backing instrument for rhythmic support more than as a lead instrument.

Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and Sonny Terry are well known harmonica (called “harp” by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, “gravelly” voices.

The bassist and prolific songwriter and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as “Hoochie Coochie Man“, “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (both penned for Muddy Waters), and “Wang Dang Doodle” and “Back Door Man” for Howlin’ Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels. Smaller blues labels of this era included Vee-Jay Records and J.O.B. Records. During the early 1950s, the dominating Chicago labels were challenged by Sam Phillips‘ Sun Records company in Memphis, which recorded B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf before he moved to Chicago in 1960.^[99] After Phillips discovered Elvis Presley in 1954, the Sun label turned to the rapidly expanding white audience and started recording mostly rock ‘n’ roll.^[100]

In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley^[95] and Chuck Berry,^[101] both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana‘s zydeco music,^[102] with Clifton Chenier^[103] using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards.

In England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour in 1958. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience’s tendency towards skiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring the British Invasion of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.^[104]

In the late 1950s, a new blues style emerged on Chicago’s West Side pioneered by Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, and Otis Rush on Cobra Records.^[105] The “West Side sound” had strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King, Magic Slim, and Luther Allison, was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.^[106][107] Expressive guitar solos were a key feature of this music.

Other blues artists, such as John Lee Hooker, had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker’s blues is more “personal”, based on Hooker’s deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie-woogie, his “groovy” style is sometimes called “guitar boogie”. His first hit, “Boogie Chillen“, reached number 1 on the R&B charts in 1949.^[108]

By the late 1950s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Lightnin’ Slim,^[109] Slim Harpo,^[110] Sam Myers and Jerry McCain around the producer J. D. “Jay” Miller and the Excello label. Strongly influenced by Jimmy Reed, swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include “Scratch my Back,” “She’s Tough,” and “I’m a King Bee“. Alan Lomax‘s recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually bring him wider attention on both the blues and folk circuit, with McDowell’s droning style influencing North Mississippi hill country blues musicians.^[111]

1960s and 1970s

By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had brought African-American music to new audiences, within the U.S. and abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy and Willie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe. Dick Waterman and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues legends, and UK blues rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s.^[112]

Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 1971 album Endless Boogie. B. B. King‘s singing and virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title “king of the blues”. King introduced a sophisticated style of guitar soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.^[113] In contrast to the Chicago style, King’s band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby “Blue” Bland, like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and soul musicians (Eric Clapton and Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music.

The music of the civil rights movement^[114] and Free Speech Movement in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African-American music. As well, festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival^[115] brought traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis.^[114] Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the Yazoo Records. J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 1950s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs, originally distributed only in Europe,^[116] commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His album Alabama Blues contained a song with the following lyric:

I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me,
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me.
You know they killed my sister and my brother
and the whole world let them peoples go down there free

White audiences’ interest in the blues during the 1960s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield and singer/songwriter Nick Gravenites, and the British blues movement. The style of British blues developed in the UK, when musicians such as Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner‘s Blues Incorporated, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stones, Animals, the Yardbirds, Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation,^[117] Chicken Shack,^[118] early Jethro Tull, Cream, and the Irish musician Rory Gallagher performed classic blues songs from the Delta or Chicago blues traditions.

1980s to the present

Since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the blues among a certain part of the African-American population, particularly around Jackson, Mississippi, and other deep South regions. Often termed “soul blues” or “Southern soul“, the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based Malaco label:^[123] Z. Z. Hill‘s Down Home Blues (1982) and Little Milton‘s The Blues is Alright (1984). Contemporary African-American performers who work in this style of the blues include Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones, Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, Clarence Carter, Charles Bradley,^[124] Trudy Lynn, Roy C, Barbara Carr, Willie Clayton, and Shirley Brown, among others.

During the 1980s, blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 1986, the album Strong Persuader announced Robert Cray as a major blues artist. The first Stevie Ray Vaughan recording Texas Flood was released in 1983, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage. John Lee Hooker‘s popularity was revived with the album The Healer in 1989. Eric Clapton, known for his performances with the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a comeback in the 1990s with his album Unplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.

However, beginning in the 1990s, digital multi-track recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies, including video clip production, increased costs, challenging the spontaneity and improvisation that are an important component of blues music.^[125] In the 1980s and 1990s, blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue were launched, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and Tedeschi Trucks Band and Gov’t Mule released blues rock albums. Female blues singers such as Bonnie Raitt, Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley, and Shannon Curfman also recorded albums.

In the 1990s, the largely ignored hill country blues gained minor recognition in both blues and alternative rock music circles with northern Mississippi artists R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.^[111] Blues performers explored a range of musical genres, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards (previously named W.C. Handy Awards)^[126] or of the Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary and Traditional Blues Album. The Billboard Blues Album chart provides an overview of current blues hits. Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several blues labels such as Alligator Records, Ruf Records, Severn Records, Chess Records (MCA), Delmark Records, NorthernBlues Music, Fat Possum Records, and Vanguard Records (Artemis Records). Some labels are famous for rediscovering and remastering blues rarities, including Arhoolie Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of Folkways Records), and Yazoo Records (Shanachie Records).

Musical impact

Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music.^[127] Prominent jazz, folk, or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan, have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen‘s “Blues in the Night”, blues ballads like “Since I Fell for You” and “Please Send Me Someone to Love”, and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin‘s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Concerto in F“. Gershwin’s second “Prelude” for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in “A Hard Day’s Night“). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol Fabian Forte‘s hit, “Turn Me Loose”, country music star Jimmie Rodgers‘ music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman‘s hit “Give Me One Reason”.

“Blues singing is about emotion. Its influence on popular singing has been so widespread that, at least among males, singing and emoting have become almost identical—it is a matter of projection rather than hitting the notes.”^[128]

—Robert Christgau, 1972

Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, and Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music.^[129] Gospel music developed in the 1930s, with the Golden Gate Quartet. In the 1950s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 1960s and 1970s, gospel and blues were merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 1970s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B.

R&B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues. Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts‘s hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the “low-down” blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp meetings.

Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a medium for art or self-expression, stating: “As heard from Delta shacks to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the shaping of identity and community.”^[130]

Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear. Usually, jazz had harmonic structures stemming from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the 12-bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 1940s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz. Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker‘s “Now’s the Time”, used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes.

Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing to a “high-art”, less accessible, cerebral “musician’s music”. The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became more defined.^[131][132]

The blues’ 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called “blues with a backbeat“; Carl Perkins called rockabilly “blues with a country beat”. Rockabillies were also said to be 12-bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. “Hound Dog“, with its unmodified 12-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song. Jerry Lee Lewis‘s style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie-woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African-American rock and roll performers).^[133][134]

Many early rock and roll songs are based on blues: “That’s All Right Mama“, “Johnny B. Goode“, “Blue Suede Shoes“, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On“, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll“, and “Long Tall Sally“. The early African-American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music: “Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do” (“Tutti Frutti“, Little Richard) or “See the girl with the red dress on, She can do the Birdland all night long” (“What’d I Say“, Ray Charles). The 12-bar blues structure can be found even in novelty pop songs, such as Bob Dylan‘s “Obviously Five Believers” and Esther and Abi Ofarim‘s “Cinderella Rockefella“.

Early country music was infused with the blues.^[135] Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, and Hank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different, at first glance at least, from the later country-pop of artists like Eddy Arnold. Yet, if one looks back further, Arnold also started out singing bluesy songs like ‘I’ll Hold You in My Heart’. A lot of the 1970s-era “outlaw” country music by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. When Jerry Lee Lewis returned to country music after the decline of 1950s style rock and roll, he sang with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums.

In popular culture

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Like many other genres, blues has been called the “devil‘s music” or “music of the devil”, even of inciting violence and other poor behavior.^[136] In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the 1920s.^[73] The close association with the devil was actually a well-known characteristic of blues lyrics and culture between the 1920s and 1960s. The devil’s connection to the blues has faded from popular memory since then for a number of reasons, other than in the narrow sense of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. A study of the devil’s role in the blues was published in 2017, called Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil & The Blues Tradition.^[137]

During the blues revival of the 1960s and 1970s, acoustic blues artist Taj Mahal and Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the critically acclaimed film Sounder (1972). The film earned Mahal a Grammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and a BAFTA nomination.^{[citation needed]} Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 2001 movie release Songcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of the roots music of Appalachia.

Perhaps the most visible example of the blues style of music in the late 20th century came in 1980, when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi released the film The Blues Brothers. The film drew many of the biggest living influencers of the rhythm and blues genre together, such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker. The band formed also began a successful tour under the Blues Brothers marquee. 1998 brought a sequel, Blues Brothers 2000 that, while not holding as great a critical and financial success, featured a much larger number of blues artists, such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Musselwhite, Blues Traveler, Jimmie Vaughan, and Jeff Baxter.

In 2003, Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors, such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders, to participate in a series of documentary films for PBS called The Blues.^[138] He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalist Keb’ Mo’ performed his blues rendition of “America, the Beautiful” in 2006 to close out the final season of the television series The West Wing.

The blues was highlighted in season 2012, episode 1 of In Performance at the White House, entitled “Red, White and Blues”. Hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama, the show featured performances by B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, Keb Mo, and others.^[139]

The 2025 vampire horror film Sinners explores the blues genre through a supernatural narrative placed in the 1930s Mississippi Delta.^[140]