When we hear a banjo, we can’t help but think of the blues.  It also remind us of Dixieland and country music, but most definitely the blues.  The blues and the banjo go hand in hand.  There are many different types of banjos and though they are the same instrument, their sound is unique.  The banjo itself is a unique and wonderful stringed instrument.

African Americans and Caucasians have shared a love and appreciation for the banjo.  African Americans have been playing it for nearly 300 years, and Caucasians since the turn of the century.  And the banjo sounds different in different regions.  If you hear the banjo sound in the Mississippi Delta, it will sound completely different than in Virginia.

The music and style of the banjo was really shaped in the late 1800s by African Americans.  One of the greatest banjo players during that time was Gus Cannon, or better known as “Banjo Joe”.  During 1927 Banjo Joe cut several recordings for Paramount In which his “frailing techniques”, slide playing, and roll patterns became incredibly famous.

The banjo music played back then had such a fluid sound.  It created a nostalgic feeling of friends gathering for a good ole fashioned jam session.  Today it can sound like just about anything, square dance, swing, bluegrass, and everything in between.  What a wonderful instrument and you just can’t miss the banjo sound.

Boogie-woogie is a popular style of Blues Music.  It is a piano-based style from the early 20^th century.  It has a very strong bass pattern associated with and originally piano players accompanied themselves by playing this strong bass pattern with their left hand.  Then a bass player was added and they would duplicate the piano player’s bass line.  As this style evolved more, the bassist would often play the entire boogie-woogie bass line themselves, and the pianist played entirely different piano parts.

Boogie-woogie became very popular in the 30s and 40s.  It started as solo piano but then grew to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, gospel, and even country and western music.  While the traditional blues usually depicts a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie was mainly associated with dancing.

For the most part boogie-woogie tunes are twelve bar tunes and it’s said to have been created in logging and turpentine camps, and oil boomtowns of Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta circa 1900.  The very first boogie-woogie hit was entitled “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” by Pinetop Smith recorded in 1928 and first released in 1929. This was the first boogie-woogie recording to be a commercial hit, and helped establish boogie-woogie as the name of the style.

Boogie-woogie then gained further attention in 1938 and 1939 thanks to several concerts at Carnegie Hall.  And then it became only natural that swing bands began to implement the boogie-woogie beat into some of their music.  Famous dances known as the jitterbug and the Lindy Hop required the boogie-woogie beat.

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.