Blues

At its core the blues is a twelve-bar I-IV-V cycle decorated with flatted thirds, fifths and sevenths — the so-called blue notes that give the music its sour-sweet feel. A standard band runs acoustic or electric guitar, harmonica, piano, upright or electric bass and drums, often with the guitarist doubling as singer. Vocals sit close to speech, riding the beat with melismatic moans, growled falsetto and laugh-like phrasing, while guitarists lean on string bends and wide vibrato to make a single note cry. Tempos stretch from drowsy 60-BPM laments to jump-blues shuffles north of 100. Producers historically welcomed grit: amps overloaded, microphones overworked, room noise left in.

The blues crystallized on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when work songs, field hollers and church spirituals fused into a solo singer-with-guitar form for Black laborers living under Jim Crow. In the 1920s vaudeville singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith carried the music onto race-records labels in New York and Chicago, codifying the so-called classic blues. The 1930s produced the legends of the rural style — Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson — captured on Paramount and Vocalion 78s. After the Second World War the Great Migration moved the music to Chicago, where Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter electrified it on Chess Records, setting the template for rock and roll.

Listen for the way singer and band push and drag against the same twelve-bar grid, never landing exactly where the metronome would. A great blues guitarist treats one held note as a paragraph, shaping it with finger vibrato, slide and pick attack. Harmonica players phrase by alternating draw notes (inhale) and blow notes (exhale), bending pitches with the tongue and throat. The aesthetic prizes timing imperfections — late entries, hard accents, a deliberately ragged hand — as proof a human is in the room.

For the prewar root, try Robert Johnson's 'Cross Road Blues' (1936): one voice, one guitar, an entire vocabulary in three minutes. For the postwar Chicago version, Muddy Waters' 'Mannish Boy' rides a single stop-time riff for the whole song. The deluxe modern album to live with is B.B. King's 'Live at the Regal' (1965).

Blue Note Records borrowed its name from the bent pitches of the blues in 1939, not the other way around. Nearly every founding British rock act of the 1960s — the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton — built its early book by copying Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters recordings off imported American 78s.