West African Roots

Although the blues first developed in the Mississippi River Delta of the American South, its roots lie across the ocean in West Africa. This is due to the slave trade that was founded on European settlement and economic change in the western Atlantic region of North America and the Caribbean, beginning about the seventeenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, it is estimated that there were about 800,000 white colonists living in what is now present-day America and Mexico.

At first, the Western European settlers attempted to use the indigenous North American population to fill their labor vacuum, but this failed and from an estimated population of approximately 100 million Native Americans in 1500, within one hundred years this number was reduced to about ten million due to the ravages of war, displacement and disease. Since economic developments in the New World, such as the creation of cotton plantations in the American South, often required large amounts of human labor, the colonists had to look elsewhere. To fill this need the Western Europeans turned to the African slave trade.

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