The birth of blues
Deep roots

Oct 16th 2008
From The Economist print edition


“THE blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll.” So sang Muddy Waters, one of the greatest bluesmen. While true, that is only part of the absorbing story Ted Gioia tells as he traces the blues, a seminal influence on all 20th-century popular music, back to its roots. The delta of his title is a vast tract of land between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, a source of agricultural riches, particularly cotton, and home to a poor black population whose very privation inspired an impassioned musical culture.

Mr Gioia’s authoritative chronicle interweaves the steamy character of the delta with the hard lot of its population. Toiling in conditions not far removed from slavery, at the mercy of plantation and prison farm, the delta’s sharecroppers expressed themselves through the blues, a vocal form derived from Africa, as well as from work songs and spirituals. Although the blues appeared in other places in the American South, the delta was astonishingly prolific in quality, abundance and sheer intensity. As the author puts it, afficionados reckoned there were blues, then deep blues, but delta blues had “the deepest roots of all”.

Mr Gioia’s book is made up of a chronological series of biographies of the region’s musical heroes, who became famous for a style in which singing and guitar playing merged into a single mesmerising sound. Charley Patton, Bukka White and Son House all won local renown, made recordings and then faded away into delta life, in which passion and violence often went hand in hand. Robert Johnson, who was supposed to have sold his soul to the devil in return for his prodigious skills, was poisoned after an ill-advised dalliance with another man’s woman.

Johnson’s recordings brought the delta’s spell to a wider audience, as did the migration of a new generation of musicians northward, particularly to Chicago. From the 1940s, the Windy City became a hub for giants such as Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who added a new dimension to the blues with supercharged amplification. The plangent attack of electric guitar and harmonica gave the delta style greater intensity. Hard-driving bands superseded soloists, but the redoubtable Mississippi-born John Lee Hooker could still galvanise a room all by himself with his stomping “Boogie Chillen”.

With such emotional energy afoot, cocking a snook at well-scrubbed post-war pop, it wasn’t long before the blues burst on to the mass market. Its carefree offspring, rock and roll, went on to become a huge commercial enterprise in which every singer affected a bluesy cry as a testament of personal emotion.

But Mr Gioia is in no doubt that delta blues retains its appeal. He describes the revival movement in which enthusiasts tracked down some of the region’s first stars, who brought the old sound alive. Records still convey the power of their music and of the delta tradition; a fire, Mr Gioia says, that is just waiting to be rekindled.

Websites

Ted Gioia
Book details


Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music
By Ted Gioia

Norton; 448 pages; $27.95 and £16.99

Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

Seems like a great book; thanks for the link.

The blues genre is very complex. Both the blues from the Mississippi Delta and the jump blues from outside Mississippi and the South had as much to do with the creation of rock & roll. I hoped they focused on people like Wynonnie Harris and Roy Brown and Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston, they have much to do with the legacy of the blues as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf does.