The Delta Blues
The area known as the Mississippi Delta has produced the largest number of influential and important blues artists. This area in west Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi was never a major center of music business but it is considered the emotional heart for many blues musicians, fans, and historians. It was fertile ground for the roots of the blues.
The Delta was a cruel place for African Americas in the middle of the 20th century. Slavery, oppression, the KKK, Jim Crow laws mixed with Southern heat, illiteracy and poverty was the perfect recipe for an expression of the culture of southern blacks of this time like no other. Blues music is an important documentation of this era.
Early Delta blues songs were simply passed down orally, then in written form. But they were later preserved in recording made by traveling musicologists such as the father and son team of John and Alan Lomax. In the early 40’s this duo would go on field trips to the south to make these recordings and it wasn’t until later that artists would travel around the country to record their music. After their travels, they would return to the Delta to continue playing in the juke joints, and social dances and gatherings
In the 1920s and ‘30s Delta bluesmen Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson influenced the next generation of Mississippi born blues greats like Muddy Waters. Musician such as he took the music north as the mass exodus from the rural south of blacks happened in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Originally the Delta blues was simply one instrument and a vocalist but in Chicago the sound was amplified and electrified to accommodate the new urban tastes of the black population. The growth of this industry once it hit Chicago was huge and soon Chicago eclipsed the Delta as the center of the blues.
Filed under: Blues Music
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