Classic blues has revealed a specifically female awareness, especially about love; salacious love, unrequited love, abused love and cheating lovers.  These became central aspects in many female repertoires, replacing the feelings of loneliness, isolation, and desperation, which permeated the blues.

Barbara Morrison is one of the most well known figures in the history of blues.  She is a dynamic singer and her awareness of the classic blues has fueled her growth on the music scene.  Morrison has an incredible stage presence and her passion fills her songs about love with her throbbing multi-octave voice.  She has recorded with some of the finest jazz and blues musicians of her time and has traveled the world performing at festivals and remains a highly respected educator, businessperson, and humanitarian.

Attend one of her performances and you will find the females in her audience shouting in agreement with her lyrics, which are spontaneous, completely genuine, and never ordinary.

To increase awareness of the art form, Morrison teaches Ethnomusicology at UCLA where she has been a professor for over 13 years.  She also hosts her own radio show in Los Angeles where she provides a voice for the blues idiom and promotes its growth and development by offering her services in education, touring, communication, and recording.

On the South Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood called Bronzeville, many different blues styles were played alongside each other during the 40s and 50s.  This neighborhood was home to different races and social classes that developed innovations in blues music. “The Harlem of Chicago: The History of Bronzeville” is an exhibition at the Chicago Blues Museum.  This exhibit explores this neighborhood’s musical heritage through photographs and memorabilia.

Many African Americans had moved from the South to larger cities in the North during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.   Bronzeville was a cultural hub for Chicago’s growing African American population and the blues community.  Nightclubs were opened that entertained with the electrically amplified instruments that had not been available in small southern communities.

The Chicago Blues Museum has collected a large number of artifacts by creating relationships with the families of blues musicians who performed during the 40s and 50s. These families have donated many rare items such as photographs and music. The hope of the museum is to encourage an appreciation for the blues through education programs and performances.  Make sure to visit the museum on your next venture to Chicago.

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 20^th 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.