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.

In the early 1900s is when the Blues as we know it today took shape in this country.  But if you have studied the Blues you know that it’s roots stem back hundreds of years and many miles across the Atlantic Ocean to both Africa and Europe before taking root in the American South.

It was actually the blending and clashing of African and European music where it all started.  Add to that the spice of the American South and you have the Blues as it is today.

The use of flatted notes (the 3^rd, 5^th, and 7^th) come from the indigenous music of West Africa, therefore the Blues have mostly been influenced by African-American culture.  And interestingly enough the lyrics of Blues stem from the “field hollers” of slaves. The instruments most associated with the Blues are guitar, harmonica, and piano, which are not African in origin but they come from Europe.

Then during the Reconstruction Era in America (post Civil War period), proto-blues music began to develop due to dance halls and bars that were frequented by the rural working class.  These “Juke Joints” began to sprout up all over the South.

The music created and listened to in these joints was made for dancing, and in time a shuffling beat similar to the “ragtime beat” became popular.  This rhythm would soon become well known and associated with the Blues.

As the Reconstruction Era ended, African Americans were faced with much racism and poverty.  They were forced to travel from place to place to find work.  Many of them made an attempt to make a living with their music, and so they traveled with guitar in hand via train.  No wonder trains are such a common symbol in Blues music.  As these musicians traveled, the incredible music and lyrics of the Blues was spread and is now a world wide passion.