Country blues
Country blues, also called folk blues or rural blues, is one of the earliest forms of the blues. It grew up in the rural American South in the early 20th century, mostly as solo singing with acoustic fingerstyle guitar, in contrast to the urban blues of the cities.
- Also called
- Folk blues, rural blues, downhome blues
- Took shape
- Early 20th century, rural Southern US
- Main styles
- Delta blues, Piedmont blues, hill country blues
- Typical sound
- Solo voice with acoustic fingerstyle or slide guitar
The first recordings
In the 1920s record companies looking for the "race records" market began recording rural blues singers. Among the first were Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, Charley Patton from Mississippi and Blind Willie McTell from Georgia. Folklorists followed: in 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Son House and Willie Brown near Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, and the young Muddy Waters at Stovall, Mississippi.
Delta blues
The Delta blues comes from the Mississippi Delta and is usually treated as a regional style of country blues. Guitar and harmonica are its main instruments, and slide guitar is a hallmark. It was first recorded in the late 1920s; key names include Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, whose only sessions took place in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937. When Delta musicians moved north, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter helped create the electric Chicago blues of the early 1950s.
Piedmont blues
The Piedmont or East Coast blues comes from the Piedmont plateau, roughly from Richmond, Virginia, to Atlanta, Georgia. It is above all a guitar style: fingerpicking over a steady, alternating thumb bass, with ragtime-based rhythms that set it apart from the Delta sound. Blind Blake, Josh White, Buddy Moss and Blind Boy Fuller made it popular from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, and Rev. Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry carried it into the folk revival.
The revival
Samuel Charters's 1959 book The Country Blues, and his album of the same name, helped bring the music into the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s, when terms like "folk blues" and "acoustic blues" came into use. Older players were found and recorded again, among them Mississippi John Hurt, who had first recorded in 1928. Younger guitarists including Ry Cooder studied the style, and its fingerpicking influenced players such as Doc Watson.
Songs and connections
Country blues shares songs and roots with white rural music: "John Henry" was sung by Black and white musicians alike, and "House of the Rising Sun" moved between both traditions. The record labels of the 1920s and 1930s marketed the two separately, as "race" and "hillbilly" records.